The Left’s Engagement With US Corporations Led to ‘Woke Capitalism,’ Says Justin Danhof

Justin Danhof, executive vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, on NTD’s "Capitol Report," on Jan. 3, 2022. Screenshot/NTD

Executive Vice President of the National Center for Public Policy Research, Justin Danhof, called corporations’ catering to the left’s progressive agenda “woke capitalism.” He told NTD’s “Capitol Report” this has been a deliberate effort by the left through engaging companies and pushing a political and social agenda.

“The left decided to engage with business, the right has ignored business to our peril. I like to say that big business divorced the right about a decade ago, but we just found the papers in a drawer last week,” said Danhof.

Two key progressive measures that corporations have gotten behind in the last year are legislation to federalize elections and another called the “Equality Act.”

“So in Georgia this spring, we saw as hundreds of leading companies like Coca Cola, Delta Airlines, Bank of America all came out and decried what were common-sense voter integrity measures that are, by the way, perfectly constitutional,” said Danhof.

Danhof was referring to Democrats’ campaign against Georgia’s voting integrity law. Democrats have promoted misleading information about the Georgia law and other election reform proposals. The Georgia law implemented reforms such as limiting the number of drop boxes in a county and requiring that they be placed inside buildings and continually monitored. The bill makes no changes to Election Day hours.

Major League Baseball (MLB) moved the All-Star Game out of Georgia because of Georgia’s election integrity law, which was described by supporters as a way to bolster election security and by critics as racist and restrictive.

The move affected scores of small businesses in Atlanta, including many owned by minorities.

After officials announced on April 2 that they were shifting the game to Colorado, more than 8,000 hotel reservations were canceled in the Atlanta area and Cobb County officials estimated the move would cost the local economy some $100 million. Past MLB All-Star events have brought in between $37 million and $190 million for the communities that host them.

Danhof said that over 400 leading U.S. businesses are working with the Human Rights Campaign to support the Equality Act, which opponents say is a progressive measure, pushed by the left, that would hurt women and people with religious beliefs.

“But beyond that, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fully endorses it. The Business Roundtable, same thing, the National Association of Manufacturers, same thing,” Danhof said about the support for the Equality Act.

The Human Rights Campaign is the largest LGBTQ political lobbying organization and advocacy group in the United States.

“On all these woke issues, the left has been constantly, vigorously engaged with big businesses on all of these issues, where the right has tended to ignore them,” Danhof said.

He said the effort to mobilize large corporations to push a liberal agenda is deliberate, as was the left’s takeover of institutions of higher learning in the 1960s.

“Look at the boards of the Fortune 500 companies these days, there has been a dramatic shift to the political left of the board members; that’s been intentional. The search agencies, for example, that the companies use, got super woke. So they’re placing people on boards for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with the performance of companies,” said Danhof.

Danhof suggested that instead of ignoring or boycotting these companies, conservatives should engage these businesses, perhaps influencing them to return to a neutral position.

“So we can approximate what the left’s done to try and achieve some sort of neutrality within the business community,” he said.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.