When DEI Destroyed a Local Business

The story of Big City Coffee is one of diversity and inclusion being weaponized against a small business, of a taxpayer funded bureaucracy completely out of control, and of an angry crowd cheering as Goliath pummels David. It’s the story of the reductio ad absurdum of political correctness and of how blasphemy against America’s new civic religion of DEI will not be tolerated.

The first thing I learned about Sarah Fendley when I sat down to talk with her a few weeks ago is that she doesn’t drink coffee. I had my usual cup of Earl Grey tea while she had a can of Diet Coke. She stumbled into this business 24 years ago when she opened a coffee shop with a friend, later buying out his share. She moved to the Linen District of downtown Boise in 2006, serving coffee and pastries for ten years before any trouble began.

Fendley has always strongly supported law enforcement and first responders. Growing up in an abusive home made it understandably difficult to trust others, but she gained an appreciation for the officers in Garden City and Boise who not only patronized her coffee shop but made her — a single woman running a small business in the city — feel safe.

In July of 2016, a Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist took the movement’s anti-police rhetoric to its logical conclusion, ambushing and murdering five officers in Dallas. Sarah Fendley was horrified, and like many small businesses throughout the nation, displayed the Blue Line Flag in support. She said it was not about disparaging BLM, rather it was about supporting a law enforcement community that was under attack.

BLM activists in Boise were outraged. According to Fendley, she received a letter signed by “Anti-racists of Idaho” demanding the flags be removed. The apparent author of the letter worked for the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence, which had recently moved into an office on the same block as Big City Coffee. Fendley set up a meeting, sharing her own story as a victim of childhood domestic violence, but the activist was unsympathetic.

Fendley explained that while she was away supporting a veterans recovery ministry, her phone started blowing up with notifications. People were engaging in mass check-ins and review bombing of Big City Coffee — the protest had begun. Fendley said that an activist named Jeremy Harper had posted a call for protests on a Boise Black Lives Matter page, which has since been deleted. At the time, Harper was a resident advisor at Boise State University (BSU), and is now listed as an “instructional consultant for inclusive teaching.” According to his university bio, “Jeremy is a queer, multiracial Black educator with a background in teaching, violence prevention, and community organizing.”

What Sarah Fendley didn’t realize at the time is that the movement that opposed her in 2016 (and would again in 2020) is not something that can be reasoned with or bargained with. There are no good faith discussions to be had with the Marxist revolution. If they decide you are not compliant with their aims, they will attempt to destroy you. The purpose of the protests was to intimidate Fendley into removing the Blue Line Flags, or even to force her to put up Black Lives Matter banners in their place. This is no different than an invading army that plants its flag in conquered territory.

Some businesses put up pride flags or BLM banners because they honestly support those movements. While conservatives might choose to boycott such businesses, they rarely get violently angry about their presence. Other businesses only put up such symbols in the hope that, like the Angel of Death in the Book of Exodus, the angry mobs might pass them by during their rampage. Nevertheless, no amount of compliance can protect a business from the mobs that are habitually unleashed in the name of anti-racism and Black Lives Matter, as this image of a church in Kenosha, Wisconsin demonstrated:

Following a community meeting at the Idaho Black History Museum, in which angry activists demanded Fendley either remove the Blue Line Flags or at least hang Black Lives Matter flags beside them, she decided instead to give free coffee to first responders, perhaps hoping that their presence might deter further protests. It was the very next day, November 11, 2016, that Boise police officers were involved in a shooting with a gang member that left Kevin Holtry paralyzed and also resulted in him losing a leg. Kevin and Sarah later began a relationship, becoming engaged by 2020.

2020, of course, was the year governments shut down many small businesses in the name of fighting Covid-19. Sarah Fendley’s workforce dropped from 40 employees to 5, and she resorted to weekend bake sales to maintain revenue. When Boise State University approached her to fill a vacant space at the library, it seemed like providence. Fendley said university staff told her that students were enthusiastic about bringing Big City Coffee to BSU.

Fendley said that she signed the contract on August 17, 2020, but was diagnosed with a stomach tumor two days later that required immediate surgery. She did her best to hire enough people, mostly BSU students, in order to open on time while dealing with her ailment. Big City Coffee opened at the Albertsons Library on September 4 with no issues.

Yet the issues soon began. The first was something seemingly small — the library changed its hours, so Fendley emailed university administrators to ask about closing Sundays when there would be very little business. The university would later point to this as evidence that she was trying to get out of her contract.

A few weeks into the school year, a student took a picture of Big City Coffee’s signboard and sent it to people via Snapchat:

Someone screenshotted the message and sent it to Fendley, who posted it on Big City Coffee’s Facebook page alongside a picture of her fiance’s Boise PD Medal of Honor ceremony. She explained why she supported law enforcement and first responders, pointing out that Holtry was a BSU graduate.

She did not realize that this post would seal Big City Coffee’s fate. Despite an outpouring of support on the post, a handful of angry student activists decided they could not tolerate her presence on campus any longer.

The BSU Inclusive Excellence Student Council (IESC) is a subgroup of the Associated Students of BSU (ASBSU), which is the official student government of the university. IESC is dedicated to advancing the new civic religion of DEI. According to its website, “We acknowledge that frontline communities have been historically underrepresented in academic institutions, but we are passionately working to meet your needs through structural and community initiatives in order to truly create long-term-transformative change.”

IESC was already protesting BSU’s contract with the Boise Police Department for campus security, and they had been lobbying the school to reject Big City Coffee even before it opened. Sarah Fendley was unaware that IESC was plotting her demise before she even set foot on BSU’s campus. She told me that had she known there was preexisting hostility to her presence, she never would have signed the contract. During negotiations, she brought up the 2016 incident with BLM, but was told it wouldn’t be an issue.

Fendley said it was never her intention to dox or shame the student who posted the initial message; she even made sure to crop the student’s username off the picture she posted to Facebook. Nevertheless, by simply responding, student activists suggested Fendley was making them “unsafe” on campus.

Fendley was called to a meeting with BSU leadership. Kevin Holtry joined her, wheeling himself into a small room with Alicia Estey, BSU Chief Operating Officer, Brian Holzworth of Aramark, which handled foot services at BSU, and Leslie Webb, Vice President of Student Affairs. Fendley said that Webb led the meeting, accusing her of trying to silence BSU students, and eventually Estey suggested that it was time to part ways. Holtry said he was disgusted by what BSU had become.

Holtry’s role in the affair apparently caused some consternation with the Boise Police Department. According to Fendley, BSU president Marlene Tromp made a phone call to Boise mayor Lauren McLean, who asked Boise Police Chief Ryan Lee to tell Holtry to stay off social media. Holtry would go on to retire from Boise PD in May 2021.

Searching for answers, Fendley found minutes from IESC and ASBSU meetings in which students denounced her and Big City Coffee for racism and making the campus unsafe.

This was not the first rodeo for student activists. Tanisha Jae Newton is emblematic of the sort of radical student activist that drove Big City Coffee out of BSU. She was in the middle of the protest against BSU’s contract with Boise Police for campus security, and her LinkedIn shows that she was a former board member of the Idaho Black History Museum, youth coordinator at the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, a campaign organizer for the ACLU of Idaho, and a teacher at Borah High School. Her pronouns are “they/them”.

Newton gained infamy in 2020 for buying a billboard in downtown Boise that showed a police car on fire:

Sarah Fendley shut down Big City Coffee at BSU, moving out less than two months after opening. BSU claimed in its statement that it was her decision to leave, but Fendley said that she was pressured multiple times to sign a statement saying she left of her own volition, but refused.

Leslie Webb later published an editorial which, without naming Big City Coffee specifically, defended student activism and the university’s role in allowing it to cancel a local small business. She later left BSU under conflicting circumstances.

One of the first outlets to pick up on the story was the Idaho Freedom Foundation, leading to allegations that IFF was bankrolling her tort claim against the university. Fendley denied that as well.

The IFF article cited the minutes of September 9 meeting of ASBSU, less than a week after Big City Coffee opened, in which student activists agitated for the shop’s ouster. BSU later deleted those minutes, leaving a 404 error page in their wake.

Sarah Fendley filed a $10 million tort claim against BSU, claiming the university forced her off campus and out of her contract because she supported the police. The university disagrees, claiming that she left of her own volition. After nearly four years of depositions, motions, and attempts at mediation, jury selection for the trial finally began last week. BSU has already spent at least a million dollars of taxpayer money fighting this claim, while Fendley has spent nearly that much as well.

According to Fendley, BSU has requested numerous restrictive motions, making it potentially more difficult to explain to a jury the timeline of events that led to her ouster and the people involved. It sounded to me like the case will be presented as a simple business dispute rather than a conflagration of the militant social justice movement that has long festered on our college campuses.

One of the witnesses that Fendley’s lawyer plans to call in the trial over the tort claim is Angel Cantu, the impeached former president of ASBSU, allegedly driven out for refusing to join the chorus calling for metaphorical blood in the fall of 2020. Cantu is currently serving in the US Army and will be traveling back to Boise to testify.

As our Legislature considers how to handle the scourge of DEI that our tax dollars are subsidizing, we must understand the scope of the problem. Consider the resume of Jeremy Harper, a person who claims plural pronouns, who received a degree in gender studies, who is paid by BSU to agitate against civilized society. Consider the resume of Tanisha Newton, who has jumped from one advocacy organization to the next and faced no repercussions for creating a billboard that depicted a police car on fire. Consider that there are thousands, tens of thousands of Jeremys and Tanishas being recruited and trained in our public schools and universities, whose lives are dedicated to tearing down Western Civilization and anyone who stands in their way.

Sarah Fendley and Big City Coffee stood in their way, merely because she supported law enforcement and first responders. The students, administrators, and activists who ousted her from campus and trashed her name feel no remorse, because there is no amount of collateral damage that they believe goes too far for their revolution. Sarah lost her business, her fiancé, and has seen her name dragged through the mud. Why?

This movement, this secular religion against which Sarah Fendley unknowingly blasphemed, has been called by some on the right “gay race communism”. Racial differences and LGBTQ+ issues are used as a conduit for attacking traditional American values and the people who hold them. Supporting law enforcement and first responders was uncontroversial until some activists with too much time and not enough wisdom decided police were to blame for the violence and crime of minority communities.

Consider that many of the same people who want to defund police support locking up anyone who refused a Covid-19 vaccine or peacefully protested on the Capitol steps on January 6, 2021.

Our public schools and universities are being used as recruitment centers for this woke revolution. Student activists, indoctrinated using taxpayer dollars, move on to paid gigs at activism centers, spending their entire lives agitating against civilization without ever contributing to it. Many times these activist organizations benefit from federal grants — the entire woke revolution depends on extracting tax dollars from productive citizens.

I don’t remember voting for this. Do you?

During the 2021 legislative session, shortly after Big City Coffee was ejected from BSU, then-Reps. Ron Nate and Priscilla Giddings attempted to slash $17 million from BSU’s budget, money they said supported a social justice agenda. The Legislature instead chose to support then-Sen. Carl Crabtree’s more modest cut of just over $400,000.

According to Idaho Ed News, BSU president Marlene Tromp denied that the university was spending tax dollars on social justice:

“We’re listening,” Tromp told Idaho Education News. “We’re listening to our legislators. We’re listening to Idaho. We want to be collaborative partners.”

But, she said, considerable misinformation surrounds the debate — including the claim that Boise State is spending $17 million on social-justice programs. The bulk of the university’s budget goes into staff salaries and benefits. “We certainly aren’t spending recklessly on any kind of programming.”

Do you believe her?

Our Legislature can do something about this next year. There is no reason that our tax dollars should be used to pay for university employees whose entire portfolio is agitating against American values. There is no reason that our tax dollars should be used to pay for organizations that fire up the mob to attack local businesses. There is no reason that our tax dollars should be used to support a system that is designed to tear down our civilization.

Call your legislators today. Email them. Urge them to support a strong bill to eliminate DEI and other woke nonsense from our public schools and universities. If we don’t stop this now, then Big City Coffee won’t be the last casualty of this Marxist war against civilization.

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