Corporations made ‘huge miscalculation’ backing BLM, Trump’s former diversity leader says
FOX BUSINESS | By Timothy Nerozzi | April 23, 2022
Bruce LeVell accuses Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation of intentionally sowing disharmony and racial tension for profit
Bruce LeVell, a former diversity leader under the Donald Trump administration, published an op-ed condemning Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and corporations helping to fund the group.
LeVell, a black businessman from Georgia who served as an advisor in the Trump administration, wrote the op-ed to urge corporations away from BLMGNF as the nonprofit heavyweight comes under the microscope for alleged financial misconduct. LeVell accused the group of intentionally sowing disharmony and racial tension for profit.
“Black lives do matter. I say that as a Black man myself, but the concept isn’t really in dispute among ordinary, right-thinking Americans of any race or ethnicity,” LeVell wrote in the Tennessee Star. “The BLMGNF does everything it can to cultivate the opposite impression because it profits off grievance politics – but its narrative couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“Unfortunately, BLMGNF has intimidated the leaders of some of America’s largest corporations into paying fealty to its harmful and deceptive narrative,” LeVell wrote. “Rather than challenging the Marxist provocateurs at BLMGNF, corporate leaders have prostrated themselves and even donated shareholder resources to a cause that is intrinsically opposed to free markets, individual liberties, law and order, and everything else that allows American businesses to thrive.”
The op-ed also served as a springboard for LeVell to announce his latest venture with Concerned Comminities of America, where he is on the board of directors. CCA aims to push corporations to disavow BLMGNF’s platform.
“Corporations such as Papa John’s and Coca-Cola want to be on ‘the right side of history’ – but their leaders made a huge miscalculation by throwing their lot in with a radical, anti-American organization,” LeVell wrote. “CCA is offering them a way out – and a way to put themselves and their companies back on the side of their customers and the majority of the American public.”
BLMGNF and the wider movement named after the group became a political hot potato after financial leaks showed founders misusing funds to purchase multiple mansions, overpaying friends for services, and more. Additionally, the group’s call to defund police departments across the country correlates with a spike in violence in black communities.
Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, speaks at the NILC Courageous Luminaires Awards Honoring 21 Savage on Oct. 3, 2019 in Los Angeles. (Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for NILC)
Fox News Digital reached out to the Black Lives Matter press team on April 14 inquiring if they had comment on FBI data showing there was a 32% increase in Black murders in 2020 compared to 2019, as well as a comment regarding experts such as the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald arguing the BLM and defund the police movements contributed to the murder spike, not the coronavirus.
Fox News Digital also detailed the yearly numbers of Black murders from 2010 to 2020 within the inquiry but did not receive a response from the organization as of Tuesday morning.
