#How corporations conspire with Democrats to hoard power at the public’s expense

Georgians adopted voter-integrity measures supported by a large majority of Americans, that are in the mainstream of state regulation and in fact are less stringent than the rules in Delaware, President Joe Biden’s home state, and New York. By more than a 2-1 margin, Americans think such rules are not unfair or discriminatory.

Nonetheless, these measures have produced an unprecedented effort by large corporations to interfere in the workings of a democratic government. Major League Baseball moved its All-Star Game out of (majority-black) Atlanta to (majority-white) Denver in protest. Coca-Cola’s president weighed in against the changes. And in a statement organized by Kenneth Chenault, former chief executive of American Express, and Kenneth Frazier, the chief executive of Merck, hundreds of CEOs voiced opposition. Why?

A cynic would say Georgia is a crucial red state the Democrats managed — barely — to flip blue in 2020 by adopting unorthodox voting measures and the mega-corporations who’ve thrown their lot in with the Democratic Party want to make sure Democrats hold it in 2024. They’d like to ensure similar measures apply across America because they make it easier for Democratic voters — living and dead — to cast votes without identification and without even showing up at the polls, producing a structural advantage for Democrats.

As always, this is defended in the name of racial equality. But as usual, that’s just a smokescreen for power.

Don’t ask me, listen to what lefty independent journalist Glenn Greenwald has to say: Big corporations, he writes, are “now deploying woke ideology the way intelligence agencies do: as a disguise.” They run sweatshops and depend on slave labor abroad — many playing footsie with the Chinese government, which is committing genocide against its Uighur population even as many are subjected to forced labor — but they talk “social justice” at home because it helps distract people.

And their interference with politics is dangerous, Greenwald notes: “When giant corporations use their unparalleled economic power to override that process — by forcing state and local governments to rescind or reject laws they would otherwise support due to fear of corporate punishment — then the system, by definition, far more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy.”

Well, oligarchy’s their goal, pretty much. And the tech media are their handmaidens, censoring (truthful) stories from this paper on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the possible lab origins of the Wuhan coronavirus and, most recently, the multiple mansion purchases by Black Lives Matter co-founder (and avowed Marxist) Patrisse Khan-Cullors, which Facebook blocked on spurious “privacy” grounds.

With the news media having become a leftist monoculture and with tech companies censoring “hate speech” — i.e., speech that cuts against their preferred narrative — the voting booth is one of the few outlets the public has to advance its interests and beliefs. The goal of the Democratic Party, and its allied corporations, is to dilute the power of the voting booth so that it no longer poses a threat to their ambitions.

They do this, as always, by pretending the general population forms a reservoir of bigotry that must be controlled and suppressed. Thus, anything that advances their goals of suppressing the opposition is described as some form of “anti-racism.”

Yet as polls show, American voters don’t think voter ID is wrong or discriminatory. The goal of these CEOs is to make sure that what American voters think doesn’t matter.

This is not a civil-rights movement in the traditional sense. It is a case of the party in power directing a corporate conspiracy against its political opposition.

So how to respond? Boycotts are fine, but the people running these corporations care more about the opinion of their social peers than about the fortunes of their companies. But they do care about their own quality of life.

The left would make it personal: Go after them repeatedly by name. Picket their homes, their offices, their country clubs. Show up at shareholder meetings and make a scene. Get friendly legislators to investigate their companies’ actions. The tiniest bit of personal discomfort affects these people more than millions of dollars taken from their companies’ bottom lines.

Leftists have known this for years. Will the right take a lesson from them?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the ­InstaPundit.com blog.