SLC Times

The founder of a Salt Lake City-based coffee company said Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for reparations shows Harris is “the new poster child for socialism.”

“Kamala’s support for reparations is further proof that she is the new poster child for socialism in our country,” Jon Harvey, president and founder of Iron Sight Coffee Brewing Co., told American Greatness. “A big reason we have division in this country is due to the Democrats’ rhetoric of racism, homophobia, transphobia, all of which creates fear in our society.”

“If reparations should be paid out to anyone, it should be those whites that fought in the Civil War and those 30,000 blacks that fought beside them,” said Harvey.

Harvey, who founded Iron Sight in 2023, is a longtime political activist in Utah and host of The Modern Conservative Podcast.

Based in Salt Lake City, Iron Sight has customers across the U.S., and donates a portion of all proceeds to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, a non-profit that provides mortgage-free homes to Gold Star families and fallen first responder families with young children.

While running for U.S. President in 2019, then-U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said she supported reparations for black Americans.

“I think there has to be some form of reparations,” said Harris in an interview with black online news site, The Root.

When the interviewer asked Harris if, as president, she “would be willing to lead a conversation on what reparations for Black people would look like,” Harris replied, “yeah.”

This was just one of numerous times Harris has backed reparations for black people.

“I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities,” she told the New York Times in February of 2019.

During her time as a U.S. Sen. for California, Harris co-sponsored a bill with New Jersey Senator Cory Booker introduced in April 2019. This legislation aimed to create a commission to study impacts of slavery and “ongoing discrimination against African-Americans,” as well as make “recommendations on reparation proposals for the descendants of slaves.”

A potential goal outlined in the bill was to create a “national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery and its continuing racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans.”

Harris also told the Des Moines Register in 2019 that reparations would not be as simple as “writing a check,” and that research needed to be done in order to come up with solutions to address “the systemic issues that are present and will continue to exist.”