Neutralizing corporative activism

It’s hard to believe, but for the first time in decades, the left is losing important culture war battles.

It was recently reported that Zeno Group—a subsidiary of Edelman, the largest public relations firm in the world—is advising major corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Starbucks to avoid commenting on abortion in the wake of the leaked draft majority opinion showing that the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. Ironically, Zeno’s memo urging liberal corporate boardrooms to exercise restraint on abortion was itself leaked to Judd Legum, a liberal activist who specializes in whipping up corporate boycotts as a way of pressuring Republican lawmakers.

And last month, Exxon Mobil announced it was banning LGBT pride flags, Black Lives Matter flags, and all other “external position flags” from being flown on company property in an attempt to be perceived as politically neutral.

Seeing corporations display any political neutrality is quite an amazing turn of events. Just two years ago, major companies very publicly gave tens of millions of dollars to the BLM organization in the wake of George Floyd’s tragic death, even though BLM was run by overt Marxists who subsequently embezzled millions of dollars to buy fancy houses.

And last year, two of Georgia’s best-known companies, Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, in addition to major financial firms such as BlackRock and Citigroup, attacked Georgia’s legislature for passing new laws governing voting in the state. Major League Baseball even pulled its All-Star Game from Atlanta.

It didn’t matter that Georgia’s voting laws were still far less restrictive than President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware and several other blue states. For years, corporations were given no reason to think they didn’t have the right to dictate what elected legislators could do.

In 2015, when Indiana passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it finally became obvious that corporations were acting as the enforcement arm of radical social policies Democrats couldn’t get passed through the ballot box.

Indiana’s law was based on similar federal legislation that had been sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. But in the 20 years since, Democrats completely abandoned a commitment to religious freedom when they realized the First Amendment was standing in the way of coercing businesses to participate in same-sex marriage ceremonies.

Still, no one could have predicted that major corporations such as Apple and Salesforce, along with the NCAA, would bully then-Gov. Mike Pence into backtracking on Indiana’s RFRA law. It was especially galling since corporations such as Apple and Salesforce are greedy hypocrites that want to punish small businesses run by Americans who don’t want to be compelled to participate in religious ceremonies but have no problems doing business in countries where homosexuality is criminalized outright.

Similarly, the media and the Democratic Party establishment—apologies for the redundancy—also hypocritically cheered on the advent of “woke capital,” even though they had spent decades pushing for campaign finance reform and other methods to get corporate money out of politics. It turns out they had no issues with corporations undermining the democratic process so long as it produced results they liked.

There was no meaningful opposition until earlier this year when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hit back hard against Disney for threatening political retaliation over a state law forbidding classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades three and under. DeSantis and the state legislature had enough of a spine to threaten billions of dollars’ worth of special legal privileges granted to Disney. It helped that Florida’s law was so popular that a majority of Democrats supported it, which makes Disney’s plan of “adding queerness” to kids’ entertainment all the more suspect.

Of course, religious freedom laws and other conservative social policies—even abortion restrictions—have always been reasonably popular. The problem wasn’t just woke corporations. The problem was also Republicans who, either out of fear over losing their corporate campaign cash or adhering to some misbegotten principles that confused corporate pressure campaigns with the “free market,” did nothing to fight back.

While the battle against woke capital is hardly won—not by a long shot—it’s remarkable to see how much pullback we’ve seen in the short time since Florida bloodied Disney’s nose for sticking it where it didn’t belong. Disney is still on its heels: Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., just introduced legislation to strip the entertainment giant of the egregious copyright protections it’s been specially granted, even as Disney continues to profit off of fairy tales and other works from the public domain.

Yet, there remain forces nominally on the right and among religious communities that are skeptical of wielding political power in defense of traditional values, and there are some good reasons not to put your trust in princes. However, whether you want to fight it or not, a culture war is upon us. And after several years of watching corporations impose a radical cultural agenda without any pushback, the lesson is now obvious: The side that plays to win will always beat the side that doesn’t even try.