One hundred of America’s most powerful corporate executives are conspiring to exact political punishment on conservatives. Our thought crime this time? Having had the audacity to ensure the integrity of our elections after an epically bungled election that involved the most important job in the world.
The unprecedented hubris of these authoritarians—and their outrageous cowardice in the face of their young and woke employees—should be a wake-up call to every American to the right politically of the New York Times editorial board. Despite being citizens, we are slaves to oligarchs whose influence and worldview are an existential threat to our republic.
The entire American conservative movement, and every patriot of goodwill, must say enough is enough. We must break the chains of corporate slavery, and redirect power into an agenda that curtails their power for generations.
For the past half-century, the Right looked abroad to threats like the Soviet Union and Islamic terrorism, and crafted an agenda designed to defeat them. We leaned on free-market absolutism and the military-industrial complex to triumph, although without thinking critically about who or what we were empowering.
While enabling corporate behemoths, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, we engaged in an insipid theatrical skirmish on college campuses. It wasn’t serious. It was, more than anything, because conservatives supposed we needed to have a nominal presence. We figured, or rather hoped, that everyone would vote Republican once they received their first paycheck.
“Conservatives” were on TV spouting acceptable talking points out of one side of their mouths while appointing weak-kneed people to lead our institutions of higher education who had no concept of the civilizational time bombs over which they were presiding. The warm bubble bath of prestige and money was too comfortable for making waves within the tub.
As a result, we failed to appreciate that entire generations of anti-American and anti-civilization radicals were being formed—radicals who threaten the bedrock of what it means to be a country, and what it means to be a society at all.
Armed with nothing resembling an education, nothing resembling tangible skills—save the ability to bend already enfeebled institutions to their wills—radicals used their esteemed credentials to infiltrate America’s largest corporations. Technology, finance, healthcare, entertainment, media, and retail were slowly but methodically co-opted by people serious about transforming American society.
Meanwhile, the Right dithered and doddered. We peddled bromides in defense of free markets and limited government, and even then only tinkered around the edges of an agenda. We passed a series of tax cuts for the wealthy and repealed some meaningless regulations, calling that victory. At the same time, the Left’s allies in government threatened corporations that didn’t march to their progressive tune.
Even more egregious, some of the corporate Right’s ardent champions stigmatize meeting the threat of oligarchic power as somehow a violation of the First Amendment.
David French is fine with submitting to our oligarchy or complaining about it. But what must always be avoided is *action.*
God forbid we do something. https://t.co/eocppN4Fva
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) April 13, 2021
Only decades of intellectual sophistry underwritten by Shell, Facebook, and Raytheon could lead erstwhile conservatives to shrug their shoulders at mass de-platforming and censorship while furrowing their brows and wagging their fingers at any break from the Right’s tired consensus of corporate solicitude.
The status quo of the last 50 years was stunningly straightforward. If you were a representative of a large company, you feared the Left—because it controlled the commanding heights of American culture and, thus, the Narrative. You feared it also because you knew what it would do with state power if you did not fall in line. On the other hand, you certainly did not fear the Right. That’s because a few PAC contributions and a libertarian lecture series or two on Hayek were enough to ensure they sat grinning dumbly.
And so here we stand. Our Big Tech cartel has un-personed a president of the United States, effectively erasing his ability to communicate directly with the American citizenry. Massive corporations threaten the livelihoods of those in red states for daring to press pause on bioterrorism against minors in the form of chemical castration. And now an uber-conglomerate is scheming to help the Left solidify political power by facilitating the withering away and death of the rule of law in elections—and elsewhere.
If the Right is to defend anything, to conserve anything, it must draw a line. If the domains of power in America are culture, capital, and government, we must admit that we have effectively lost all three. Our only choice now is forthrightly and responsibly to defend the interests of the great middle of this country by responsibly wielding power in government when we do win it again to rebalance the scales. This will require breaking old orthodoxies, rethinking longstanding alliances, and politely retiring the leaders who have failed us.