#Woke CEOs’ foolhardy bid to shape voting laws

More than 120 CEOs and other corporate leaders met on Zoom over the weekend to discuss how to exert pressure to influence legislation around the country. The media would be reporting it as a vast scandal if the agenda were right wing but these are woke executives.

Yale School of Management prof Jeffrey Sonnenfeld organized the gabfest along with the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism and the Leadership Now Project, to plot ways to foil some of the 350-plus voting bills before lawmakers in dozens of states. The attendees reportedly included Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, General Motors CEO Mary Barra, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman and the chief execs of American, Delta and United airlines.

Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier and former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault urged the group to make a public denunciation of legislation that supposedly discriminates and restricts voting access, with some calling laws like the one Georgia just passed “racist.” Several attendees even called their posturing “critical to democracy.”

Afterward, organizers announced: “CEOs who participated . . . indicated they will re-evaluate donations to candidates supporting bills that restrict voting rights and many would reconsider investments in states which act upon such proposals.”

Plainly, they’ve ignored the pile of poop that Major League Baseball and others just stepped in with their anti-Georgia moves. (The new law leaves the Peach State with more-liberal voting laws than New York or Delaware, for starters, as well as Colorado, which somehow won the All-Star Game.)

Worse, they showed no sense of how unseemly the whole thing is — a project to push duly elected officials into catering to woke opinion.

Contra the organizers’ claims, this isn’t moving “to shore up American democracy,” and anyone running a company should have the common sense to see that. Maybe most CEOs were just paying lip service to win political-correctness points, but it surely at least annoys roughly half their customers.

We’re not sure which is worse: if the CEOs simply calculated that they had to posture left to please the current powers that be in Washington or if they’re fools enough to think that making their company take a side in America’s red-blue battles is somehow moral, their duties to their shareholders be damned.