Walmart donates to senator trashing Black Lives Matter — after pledge to fight racism

Walmart’s corporate PAC sent a last-minute contribution to Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler just days before last week’s election, according to her reelection campaign’s financial filings.

Loeffler’s campaign reported last week that it received $2,500 from the Walmart Inc. PAC for Responsible Government on Oct. 31, three days before the special election for her Georgia Senate seat.

Walmart has made public statements in which it claimed it was committed to fighting systemic racism.

But Loeffler would seem to be an unlikely candidate to support if you were actually backing up your claims of anti-racism.

Since being appointed to the vacant Senate seat in December, Loeffler has made her 100% fealty to Donald Trump and her strong opposition to anti-racism movements the centerpieces of her political agenda. She bragged in September of being “more conservative” than Attila the Hun and accused WNBA players of supporting “cancel culture” for endorsing her Democratic opponent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock.

In July, she took aim at the Black Lives Matter movement, labeling anti-racist activists “Communists” in a throwback to the kind of rhetoric used against civil rights activists in the 1960s. “The BLM political organization’s goals — which are rooted in Marxist principles & include defunding the police — do not unite Americans,” she tweeted. “I’m standing up. I’m speaking out. And I won’t be canceled for calling this out.”

As Black Lives Matter supporters around the country and the world demanded an end to police violence in the wake of the killing of the unarmed Black man George Floyd by white Minneapolis police officers in May, Loeffler attacked them as “a radical movement that seeks to destroy American principles.”

In June, Walmart had announced that its goal was to “help replace the structures of systemic racism, and build in their place frameworks of equity and justice that solidify our commitment to the belief that, without question, Black Lives Matter.”

In a post on its website titled “Advancing Our Work on Racial Equality,” Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon wrote to the corporation’s employees: “Black Lives Matter. It is all our responsibilities to embrace that fact in what we say and what we do. There’s no way to live our values if we don’t. So, let/s push ourselves even harder to create an inclusive and equitable culture at Walmart — for each other, for our customers and for our communities. Thank you for doing your part.”

The company’s political action committee had given Loeffler $2,500 in March.

The website Popular Information noted in July that several other corporations that had sought to frame themselves as Black Lives Matter allies were helping to bankroll Loeffler. These included AT&T, Best Buy, Comcast, FedEx, Google, Kroger, Sony, and Target.

Receiving only about 25.9% of the vote, Loeffler came in second in Tuesday’s special election. Because no candidate got a majority, she and Warnock, the top vote-getter, will face off again in a Jan. 5 runoff. Loeffler claimed on Thursday that this second-place finish was a “a clear message” from Georgia voters “that they want us to continue our hard work in Washington.”

Warnock is the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the former pulpit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

If elected, Warnock will be the first Black U.S. senator in Georgia’s history and only the 11th Black person to serve in the Senate.

A Walmart spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.