White Supremacist Website Supports New Balance
Over the weekend, the white supremacist website the Daily Stormer declared New Balance the “Official Shoes of White People” after New Balance’s Vice President of Public Affairs Matt LeBretton told the Wall Street Journal that the election of Trump was a “move in the right direction.”
In response to LeBretton’s statement, some once-loyal New Balance customers threw away, burned, or impaled their sneakers on large knives. The company was added to the official #GrabYourWallet boycott list of companies that do business with or back the Trump family.
- ancient krab man🦀 (@SquidDad) November 10, 2016
On Monday, New Balance tried to undo some of the damage by telling the Associated Press that it "does not tolerate bigotry or hate in any form. One of our officials was recently asked to comment on a trade policy that was taken out of context. As a 110-year-old company with five factories in the U.S. and thousands of employees worldwide from all races, genders, cultures, and sexual orientations, New Balance is a values-driven organization and culture that believes in humanity, integrity, community, and mutual respect for people around the world. We have been and always will be committed to manufacturing in the United States.”
The company also posted the statement on their social media channels.
The Daily Stormer’s founder, Andrew Anglin, told ABC News that he believes New Balance’s support of Trump could be a marketing scheme, but that he and his website will support the company and encouraged others to do the same.
Anglin did not comment to ABC News on New Balance’s statement opposing bigotry and hate, but a new post on the Daily Stormer’s website this morning denounced the statement as a hack by Jews (the direct quote uses a slur that I will not repeat here). Yep. I kid you not.
Obviously, the Daily Stormer does not speak for New Balance, and it would be irresponsible and downright immoral to imply otherwise. However, there is no escaping the fact that supporting Donald Trump means finding yourself on the same side of a national political discourse as anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist bigots like Anglin.
Throughout his campaign, Trump never took any action to distance himself from the views and endorsements of the "alt-right." "Alt-right" being a euphemism designed to normalize the hateful, bigoted opinions of its followers. Trump even hired one of the "alt-right's" most prominent members, Breitbart's executive chairman Stephen Bannon, to be his campaign's CEO and, now, his chief strategist. Bannon's site is famous for hateful and bigoted headlines like “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” “Trannies 49 Xs Higher HIV Rate,” and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”
A company and, indeed, a person, cannot support Trump without also implicitly supporting the views and actions of the people he has chosen to surround himself with. It's just not possible. You can say you're not a bigot, that you supported Trump for other reasons, but, at the end of the day, you're still throwing your support behind a man who counts unapologetically racist, misogynist, white nationalists among his closest and most trusted advisers. And until the day that Trump purges his Cabinet of such vile humans and publicly denounces them and their views, that's just the way it is. Sorry, New Balance.
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