Time is “Optimal” to Bring Woke Companies Back to Neutral

Many of America’s biggest businesses have become “puppets on the strings of the left” and have “swallowed the woke culture hook, line and sinker,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.

On his “Washington Watch” program, Perkins made the case for engaging corporate America  rather than just allowing its declining relationship with average Americans to fester:

Now we can ignore them, and we can boycott them. I recommend all of the above – in some cases. We can disconnect with them.

But we can also do something else that I think is very important at this time.

We need to confront them. And that’s why the left is controlling them – because the left is loud. They’re a minority, but they’re loud.

Companies don’t need to suddenly become conservative advocates, but it would sure be refreshing for them to go back to a neutral stance when it comes to politics. Perkins says our stance toward corporations should echo this idea:

We don’t want you to do our fighting for these public policy issues; we just want you, if you sell widgets, sell widgets… But don’t take our profits and use them to preach this wokeism to us.

To help him make this case, Perkins was joined by Justin Danhof, Esq., the director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP). As the director of the most active – and virtually only – shareholder activist organization in operation on the right, Justin announced the creation of a new coalition to fight this new wokeism in the business world.

FEP has spent more than a decade operating largely alone at corporate investor meetings and in other outreach to the business community.

But, Justin remarked, “I’m happy to say the conservative cause is now with me.”

With the new StopCorporateTyranny.org website, Justin and FEP are helping lead a “large coalition that runs from authors and academics to activists to investors and investment leaders. It’s really a collection of great minds that are coming together to engage with companies.”

But he warned:

[R]ight now,… we are on the defensive… because we’ve ceded this cultural lane to the left because they’ve been, you know, the squeaky wheel for so long. Well, we’re letting companies know that there’s another side out there, that we’re tired of the cancel culture. We’re tired of the sermonizing.

That being said, Justin is optimistic about the prospects of reining in the business community:

The timing is optimal, and it’s optimal because corporate America has just gotten so bad.

In just the last year, major American businesses have been used as political muscle to push the Equality Act, to try to overturn policies such as Georgia’s voter integrity safeguards and to fund radical causes like the Black Lives Matter movement

This is a long-running problem that is now finally being noticed by large numbers of conservatives. A Gallup poll taken earlier in 2021 found genuine skepticism when Americans were asked if they approve of the “size and influence of major corporations.” It was a major drop from 2020.

Quite simply, it’s an illogical relationship. As Perkins pointed out, it’s not in the best interests of these companies to unleash Big Government and the prospects of higher taxes and increased regulation. Justin remarked that there are limits:

I always put it this way… Companies like to get nine-tenths woke, but don’t want to go ten-tenths because then they’ll be out of business.

It’s obvious that the time is coming for a reckoning:

They’re pushing social issues down the throats of conservatives, and cancelling conservatives is really going to come back and bite them in the end.

He added that boards of these companies are not thinking in the long-term, and that woke CEOs who come and go are creating unnecessary and avoidable risks.

And Perkins warned that “conservatives are not going to be there to help” these companies and their leaders when they need it.



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.