According to Jerry Bowyer, chief economist at Vident Financial, there is now no dispute most major corporations have been taken over by well-organized and vocal Leftists, including by shareholders who represent a “very, very small” minority of far-left voices. But those vocal Leftists showed up, at meeting after meeting, he says, and demanded to be heard.
And they were. And their policies were adopted and now represent core beliefs in many, if not most, corporate boardrooms.
Bowyer, who is also editor of Townhall Finance, was interviewed about “woke” corporations on the “Today’s Issues” program on American Family Radio.
In a related AFN story about shareholders, published April 8, the Free Enterprise Project reported 95% of shareholder activism comes from the Left.
Meanwhile, Bowyer says, conservatives have been mostly asleep while this takeover was taking place. That is because the Right assumed corporate boards are in business to make money and surely those wealthy board members knew they were the sworn and hated enemy of the Marxist, corporation-hating Far Left.
“And, in fact,” Bowyer said, “they were being pulled around and manipulated to the point now where a lot of the really large ones, and the influential ones, are ideologically completed captured.”
The examples of the wokeness are easy to find. Gillette razor owner Procter & Gamble gambled in January 2019 with an over-the-top ad bashing “toxic masculinity” that bashed its own customers, men. After the ad ran, Procter & Gamble bragged that its Gillette sales had not fallen despite criticism.
The mega-sized corporation also said it appeared a plan to appeal to a younger generation was reaching the intended audience of potential customers.
Then came a second “woke” Gillette ad in May. It depicted a father teaching his transgender son – a biological girl, who is apparently taking hormone treatments – how to shave. By the end of summer, in August, the corporation reported a whopping $5.24 billion net loss and an $8 billion devaluation.
The controversial ads, the company insisted, were not tied to the financial losses.
Responding to the billions of lost revenue, Gillette’s CEO insisted the ads had upset “a small minority” in order to convince a majority of people to “fall more deeply in love” with the shaving products.
White 'oppressors' in corporate cubicles
Over the past two years, in the wake of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, woke corporations have introduced mandatory “anti-racism” instruction for their white employees. After years of corporations seeking a color-blind work environment, the white employees are being forced to sit through Marxist-like seminars informing them they are racist.
Unhappy whistleblowers at Coca-Cola, Lowe’s, and Bank of America leaked “training” materials that suggest whites are “oppressors” and describe the United States as a “racialized society” that uses race to “establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression."
In recent weeks, the public has witnessed the woke employees on the payroll at Disney Corp. force their CEO to belatedly denounce a Florida bill, the Parental Rights in Education.
That bill, which is now state law, was pushed as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by Leftists and their allies in the media, but Gov. Ron DeSantis turned the tables when he demanded the Left defend teaching genderfluidity to elementary-age children.
And the Republican governor wasn’t finished. Disney’s shareholders this week witnessed Florida’s state legislators work with DeSantis to yank a special tax-saving privilege for the Orlando-based mega-sized amusement park. That agreement dates back to the 1960s.
According an Associated Press story about the tax measure, Democrats have angrily denounced the tax measure as “clear retaliation” against Disney for opposing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, but the AP story fails to point out it was Disney, and far-left groups, and the national media, that lied and lied for weeks and weeks about the bill in an attempt to harass, intimidate, and bully Florida’s politicians to bow to their demands.
Reacting to the bill's passage, Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce commented that Disney was "egged on by extremists" and a victim of its own fears. There is a lesson to be learned by other corporations, she said, that are caught in a form of left-wing Stockholm Syndrome.
"All corporations pandering to the woke should stop, look up, and refuse to be destroyed," she wrote. "There's still time."
According to Bowyer, the lesson is to not give up on corporations and assume they are a lost cause, when the Right is being “salt and light” to corporations being blinded by Far Left evil.
"If you're an investor in a company, you have a vote,” Bowyer told the radio program. “And not only do you have a vote, you have a voice.”
