Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is leading the charge against “wokeness” and diversity, this time falsely blaming “DEI” – diversity, equity, and inclusion – as the reason Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on Friday.
“I mean, this bank, they’re so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff. I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission,” DeSantis told Fox Corp.’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, as Florida Politics reports.
The far-right Florida governor, expected to announce a run for president, also took a wrong swing at the Biden administration.
“I also look at it and say we have such a morass of federal regulations. We have a massive federal bureaucracy and yet they never seem to be able to be there when we, we need them to be able to prevent something like this,” DeSantis said.
Donald Trump, as President, stripped away the very regulations that could have stopped Silicon Valley Bank from collapsing. Just hours after DeSantis made his remarks, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced all SVB depositors would be able to access all their funds on Monday, even over and above the FDIC guarantee limit of $250,000, and promised Wall Street, not U.S. taxpayers, would foot the bill.
For her part, Bartiromo falsely suggested DeSantis had solved Florida’s insurance crisis, inappropriately positioning him as an expert in finance.
DeSantis was far from the only right winger blaming Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse on DEI.
U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), posting screenshots from SVB’s website, mocking the bank’s diversity policies along with its environmental, social, and corporate governance polices.
“Well, ESG and DEI certainly didn’t save SVP,” he declared.
Real America’s Voice extremist host Grant Stinchfield, on TikTok, in a Donald Trump tee-shirt, falsely claimed SVB was “at the forefront of this ‘equity, diversity, and inclusion’ nonsense, where they were literally putting ‘woke’ policies ahead of profit.”
That’s false.
As Florida Politics noted, “a more proximate reason for the bank run that led to FDIC receivership could be its heavy investment in 10-year bonds with low-interest rates combined with the need for liquidity from its high-dollar account venture capital clients. When interest rates surged recently, SVB found itself in a cash crush, made worse by an earlier meltdown in the tech sector, causing many capital investors to scale back.”
Republican House Oversight Chairman Jim Comer wrongly blamed SVB’s “woke” policies for its downfall.
Comer, as Mediaite noted, told Bartiromo on Sunday, “we see now coming out they were one of the most woke banks in their quest for the ESG-type policy and investing. This could be a trend and there are consequences for bad Democrat policy.”
The founder of Students for Trump, far-right activist Ryan Fournier, on Twitter declared, “Silicon Valley Bank has been operating for 40 years. 3 years ago they hired their first ‘Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity’ officer. Now they’re defunct. Get woke, go broke!”
Watch DeSantis below or at this link. (Relevant segment starts at the 2:49 mark.)