Have “Woke” Corporations Become The Greatest Threat To Our Freedoms?
It’s Not Okay For Corporations To Take Away Our Freedom Just Because They’re Not Government
Many Americans don’t see the erosion of liberties as major threats because they’re coming from corporate, not government.
By Tristan Justice – April 14, 2021
If you want to take over the world, build an American corporate empire to monopolize the public square and ban dissent. Then, form a corporate coalition of like-minded peers who graduated from the same elite universities where wokeism is indoctrinated as a secular religion to strategize on circumventing republican governance. Over the weekend, more than 100 corporate executives met to do just that.
“More than 100 of the nation’s top corporate leaders met virtually on Saturday to discuss ways for companies to continue responding to the passage of more restrictive voting laws across the country,” CBS News reported, in “a signal that the nation’s premier businesses are preparing a far more robust, organized response to the ongoing debate.”
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CONFIRMED: First-of-its-kind call between more than 100 top corporate leaders on Saturday focused on how to respond to proposed changes in state voting laws. Participants included top leaders of airlines, media, law, investment.
Those invited include leaders of @AmericanAir, @United, @AtlantaFalcons, @LeviStraussCo, @Walmart, @ViacomCBS, @ArielInvests, @LinkedIn, @Twitter, @AMCTheatres, among others, people familiar with the meeting tell @cbsnews.
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Representatives from Twitter, the NFL, and airlines, which held thousands of jobs hostage to rake in billions in coronavirus bail-out money masked as “stimulus,” joined the call with dozens of other high-powered businessmen to strategize how to punish states in pursuit of common-sense election reforms after a November contest in which Democrats radically re-wrote rules with last-minute regulations, in many cases regulations that contradicted state laws.
“The gathering was an enthusiastic voluntary statement of defiance against the threats of reprisals for exercising their patriotic voices,” Yale University Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told CBS, who helped organize the meeting. “Threats of reprisals,” however, is pure gaslighting launched by Democrats and perpetuated by a complicit media to lie about Republican reforms considered nationwide to secure election integrity.
At the heart of those reforms is mandating voter ID for ballot access, a requirement often implemented by the same corporations publicly campaigning against it as racist while President Joe Biden ridiculously likens reform to “Jim Crow on steroids.” Anything the left disagrees with must be racist.
One catalyst for the corporate blowback was in Georgia, where Republicans passed reforms characterized by corporate media as racist restrictions passed to deter black people from the ballot box, when in reality the new laws dramatically increased voting access. The lie Georgia Republicans barred voters in line from refreshments at poll locations even cemented itself among those who should have known better. In response, Major League Baseball stripped majority-black Atlanta of its summer all-star game worth $100 million in local revenue and moved it to Denver, where less then 10 percent of its population is black, according to the Census Bureau.
Other corporations began to pile pressure on Georgia lawmakers to reverse course while intimidating politicians in others from pursuing the same reforms. Georgia-based companies Coca-Cola, Aflac Insurance, and Delta Air Lines released statements condemning the new rules lied about in the press as congressional Democrats ram through the largest federal takeover of elections in recent memory.
News of Saturday’s call shows the episode likely to repeat in other states where corporate conglomerates are prepared to launch a campaign against voting integrity.
If this works, the pressure on voting laws will be tomorrow’s pressure on gun laws, and next on immigration laws, abortion laws, and education laws. Corporations, which for decades lobbied merely on issues pertinent to their financial interests, have now begun to capitalize on aggressive wokeism. Soon, woke corporate boardrooms will be weighing in on every facet of American life. That’s the existential threat to American liberty flying under the radar.
Americans think they’re somehow special and immune from tyranny. The United States has a long tradition as a beacon of freedom. The nation was founded on a revolution to overthrow a despot, and the Constitution protects individual rights. The United States, however, isn’t invincible.
The blessings of a free society might also contribute to its downfall. Massive private enterprises have cracked the code on how to compromise free enterprise. Corporate powers are engineering an opposition campaign to states passing needed electoral reforms.
Tech oligarchs ruling from Silicon Valley have suppressed debate on lockdown measures. Cultural currents manipulated by corporate America have shifted the Overton Window to bend the populace into allegiance with the exhaustive wokeism bred on university campuses that produced the executives who demand it.
A large part of the American population has now exposed themselves as sheep willing to do whatever people in power tell them, cloaked in the moral righteousness of saving lives and social justice. Many don’t see the erosion of liberty because it’s coming from corporate boardrooms capitalizing on the culture war, not government as usual. The former is driving the latter.
Yet many Republicans in power appear to have fallen victim to this deception, often citing libertarian philosophy to justify their decisions. This, however, is where libertarianism fails. What good is the absence of a government mask mandate if private businesses implement their own? What good is the absence of a government vaccine passport if private businesses implement their own?
In Tennessee, for example, Republican Gov. Bill Lee opposed a government prohibition on private businesses requiring proof of vaccination for service or entry. In Arkansas, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed legislation to ban genital mutilation in children. In South Dakota, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem spoiled her GOP star-power and caved to corporate interests who demanded the fictionalized extinction of evolutionary differences between men and women in sports. Don’t question the left’s dogma of transgenderism online, because corporate tech giants will shut that down too.
Republicans would be wise to take note of eroding liberties coming at the behest of corporatists pulling the levers to manipulate public opinion and their representatives in turn. In the meantime, Americans are kidding themselves if they think their nation in lockdown ruled by unelected corporatists often with higher loyalty to China is still a truly free country.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
