Sen. Ted Cruz Turns Up Heat on BLM-Backing Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola was one of many firms to promote Black Lives Matter after George Floyd’s death in 2020. After BLM expressed support for Hamas’s invasion, they’ve begun to walk back those sentiments. Sen. Ted Cruz is demanding an explanation:

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has sent a letter to Coca-Cola’s CEO demanding answers to his company’s past support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

More specifically, Cruz wants CEO James Quincey to explain why the company recently scrubbed its website of any mention of a $500,000 Sprite [owned by Coca-Cola] donation to Black Lives Matter in 2020 after social media pages affiliated with the group recently expressed support for Hamas following the barbaric Oct. 7 terror attacks against Israel.

 

Four weeks ago, Hamas militants carried out an invasion into Israeli territory. More than 1,400 civilians died in the attacks.

 

Others were taken as hostages.

 

In a now-deleted post online, BLM Chicago shared a graphic of a Hamas militant presumably parachuting to murder Jewish civilians. The image was captioned “I STAND WITH PALESTINE” and the group wrote, “That is all that it is!”

Senator Cruz has previously criticized companies for supporting BLM on his podcast.

“For every corporate donor who sent millions to BLM—including Amazon, Apple, BlackRock & Bank of America—do you regret supporting such a virulently antisemitic organization?” Cruz said on his podcast.

 

“Do you support Black Lives Matters’ Marxist agenda supporting Hamas? Are you anti-Semites? Do you support that we need to end Israel?” he added.

Last week, National Legal and Policy Center reported that Cruz originally pointed out that Coca-Cola scrubbed any mention of the $500,000 donation to BLM it was once proud of. However, the company is only willing to go so far. While corporations like Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Delta, and UPS were quick to virtue signal to the progressive left during the woke revolution in Summer 2020, they’ve remained silent on the atrocities committed by Hamas over the last few weeks:

National Legal and Policy Center owns stock in Coca-Cola, Home Depot and Delta, and sponsored shareholder proposals at the last two annual meetings for the soft drink maker and the big box retailer. We called out the leadership over their inappropriate, and even destructive, involvement of their respective companies in divisive political issues. We plan to weigh in once again at their shareholder meetings next spring.

Grassroots activists, public interest groups and political leaders must continue to work together to drive Corporate America to neutrality when it comes to activism on divisive issues. Woke corporations like Coca-Cola are on their heels.