For decades, conservatives have correctly identified Big Government as a threat to our culture and families, but there is a new and more omnipresent threat. Left-wing activists have captured corporate boardrooms across the nation and are using big business to advance their extreme ideology like never before. These woke corporations wield immense power over our lives, much like the government, but they are even less accountable to the American people.
Conservatives are surrounded by reminders that corporations are not on our side — and in many cases are actively hostile to family, faith, and freedom itself.
Massive companies, from Disney to Lockheed Martin, force their workers into H.R. lectures about Critical Race Theory. Stores plaster “Black Lives Matter” posters in their windows before being looted by BLM mobs. America’s liberal tech titans censor, silence, de-platform, shadow ban, and oppress anyone who resists being assimilated into their ideological cult — especially social conservatives.
Earlier this year, Amazon removed When Harry Became Sally, a popular book that argued against the left’s radical transgender ideology, from its website on the grounds that opposing that ideology was supposedly “hate speech.”
My office asked Amazon to send us the exact passages from the book that it deemed so hateful they couldn’t sell it. Of course, the company never got back to us. Yet still today, you can go online to Amazon and order actually hateful books like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, or the left-wing treatise How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Apparently race-hatred, class-hatred, and terrorism are OK, but biological reality is unacceptable.
Amazon’s decision was never about “hate.” It was about sending a conservative book that it hated down the memory hole, never to be seen again. It was about putting social conservatives in our place.
Increasingly, the corporations that control our lives and livelihoods aren’t even American. Once-great American companies have moved their headquarters, jobs, and factories overseas to save a buck. Many nominally American companies are beholden to foreign interests like the Chinese Communist Party. That’s why once-great companies like Nike and Coca-Cola lobbied against a bill to crack down on Chinese slave labor earlier this Congress. The leaders of these woke corporations are not only wrong, but monstrous hypocrites, as well.
In one important respect, woke corporations are an even bigger threat to America than the government. The Founders built safeguards into the Constitution to give the people power over our government. We vote out bad politicians in frequent elections. The branches of government check and balance the ambitions of all the other branches.
Comparatively few safeguards exist to curb the abuses of corporate power. But that doesn’t mean we are helpless. We can still rein in out-of-control woke corporations using institutions that are accountable to the people, like Congress and state legislatures. Just this year, I introduced bills to rein in Big Tech and prevent federal contractors like Lockheed from teaching Critical Race Theory. We can and must pass those bills.
The American people elect Republicans and conservatives not merely to limit government power but to preserve their way of life from tyranny, wherever it arises. Whether it is a meddlesome bureaucrat like Tony Fauci or a corporate oligarch like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, we must fight bullies and petty tyrants, whether they sit in government agencies or corporate boardrooms.
No parent wants to raise children in a masochistic nation that hates itself and divides its citizens by race, sex, and faction. Parents want their children to grow up in a united, proud, and prosperous nation. Republicans should make that nation a reality. The GOP must not be the party of Big Business or Big Government, but of big families.
