For the longest time, people have looked at the GOP as “The Party of Big Business”. If you were a multi-million dollar corporation or a bank in the 90s and 2000s, you would contact a GOP Legislator when you needed laws passed that made it easier to conduct your business or to stop regulations that would harm it. It was an integral part of our party’s fabric, an idea that took root in the late 1800s when a weakened Republican Party had briefly given up on civil rights for fear of a second Civil War with the Democrats. And it wasn’t an entirely bad thing. In fact, much of their policy trickled down and benefitted small businesses as well, driving our country forward as an economic power. Honestly, it was more appropriate to call us “The Party of Business”. Of course, by the mid-20th century, we had our detractors.
Democrats had been working for decades since the 1930s to solidify themselves as “The Workers Party” after being “The Party of The White Man” since the Civil War. So their natural choice of political messaging was to attack the benefactors of their opponents. Opposition to raising Minimum Wages became “Anti-Worker Sentiment” as opposed to being out of concern for the rise in costs of goods and services to offset the higher wages. Corporations became selfish, evil, inhuman, and so were their supporters. The Democrats were the hero of the working man, or so they would have you think.
It was only natural then that businesses would side with the GOP, and this remained true up until the late 2000s. And then something odd happened in 2008, a new type of industry sprouted out of the ether. It was not exactly anything new though, there were plenty of online businesses that took root in the 90s and computers had been a growing industry since the 1970s. Social Media was not entirely new either, we already had Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, and other smaller chat sites. But one invention by Apple bound all these things together into a new corporate industry. It was the iPhone that proved to be the magic bullet that brought these things together and formed the industry we know today as Big Tech. And the odd thing about this new industry is that Democrats didn’t immediately attack it or talk about how to regulate it.
Why this sudden change of heart you ask? Why would “The Workers Party” not attack the corporate oppressors of Silicon Valley? Upon reflection, they hardly went after these tech oppressors all through the 2010s even though they were attacking Big Oil and Fast Food chains. Was it because they weren’t really a huge influence until then? But why not attack them as soon as they began to gain momentum? Why not fight the oppressors like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and that young nerd Mark Zuckerberg? The answer is obvious really, it’s because they knew these businesses were in their corner from the start.
Of course, that shouldn’t have meant much in the grand scheme of things. Not to say these businesses were inconsequential, on the contrary, they were a large part of the American Economy. But it shouldn’t have affected the larger landscape of business in America or the corporate culture that didn’t discriminate. The problem is at the time almost nobody realized two very important things. The first is that these Big Tech CEOs were radical leftists who would use their platforms for activism as much as for profit and that they would eventually do what was unthinkable for an American Business after the passage of the Civil Rights Act by almost openly attacking the Constitutional Rights of Americans they didn’t like. The second and possibly most important thing was that Big Tech wasn’t just good for marketing technology and communication, their products could also be used to control what information we were allowed to see or hear on those platforms. In this way, they were able to achieve a major shift in America’s corporate culture by controlling not only how other corporations were perceived by the general public, but also by pushing a woke worldview that eventually became imprinted on youth who would become the next generation of CEOs and employees in many other industries.
In less than a decade, companies became increasingly woke. If it wasn’t because they hired some Yale Graduate with a degree in the social sciences for some top position, it was because they were afraid of online cancellation by a very small but very loud crowd of online radicals from the left. Corporate Culture became less about making a profit and providing an appealing good or service and more about saying and doing anything to appease the online mob as well as the social media and tech companies that could ban them from their platforms. And I mean they will do ANYTHING to keep on the good side of Silicon Valley and their handlers on the left. Anything including taking on the fascist values of these California Communists, which meant attacking the GOP and the American Values that made these companies great as well as punishing those who don’t join in.
The most dangerous trend in this vein of thinking is the tendency of banks and companies that handle finances to refuse service to or end agreements with individuals or groups that suddenly find themselves out of favor. It started with online payment services like Paypal, which not only banned conservative activist Laura Loomer, but in 2021 also admitted they were working with the highly discredited Southern Poverty Law Center to ban accounts of individuals and groups they considered “extremist”. This behavior has expanded to actual banks now, financial institutions which are legally not supposed to discriminate against clients. But they have found a loophole, no court has ruled yet that discrimination based on political viewpoint is illegal. As a result, banks have been canceling the accounts of conservative congressional candidates, former cabinet officials, and conservative groups who wanted to host Donald Trump Jr.
In the case of the last one, JP Morgan eventually backtracked on this, but that is only because conservatives got very vocal the way leftists have been for the last decade. And it is still terribly reminiscent of the Louis Lerner scandal when conservative groups were targeted by the IRS and denied Tax-Exempt Status by an Obama Official. Of course, a lot of these corporate bans smell of conspiracy (I mean the legal term) much of the time. When PayPal decided to ban Laura Loomer, it was within days of her bans from all social media as well as services like Uber. Something similar happened with President Trump when he was banned from Twitter, he was also banned from Facebook and other social media services within days, although there are no reports of him being banned by financial institutions. In both cases though, the bannings were in such rapid succession, it appears like it was a planned and coordinated effort on the part of these supposedly independent companies.
Now one form of cancellation on its own is bad enough, either denial of financial services or banning from social media or boycotts, but 3 at once is like an execution, and it is happening to Mike Lindell who you will more easily remember as the owner of MyPillow. Beginning on January 18th, 2021, retailers began banning Mike Lindell’s MyPillow and associated products from their stores because he supported President Trump. In the following weeks and months, more retailers would join this ideological boycott. On the 26th of January, Twitter then banned Lindell’s personal account as well as the account for his brand from their platform. While these cancellations did slightly hurt Lindell’s business, they didn’t totally kill it and his brand became even more popular with conservative consumers who bought directly from Lindell’s company. On January 14th, 2022 however, The Minnesota Bank and Trust informed Lindell that he had to close all his accounts in 30 days. Barring intervention from the courts to stop this, the closure of these accounts may effectively achieve what the previous efforts to cancel him did not.
Now is as good a time as any to segue into the main premise of my article though. You see, aside from supporting President Trump, Lindell’s other crime is being outspoken about massive fraud during the 2020 election which very likely swayed the results in Biden’s favor, a fact most Americans now accept. Essentially, Lindell’s crime is speaking out against the Biden government. But since he is breaking no laws and the Biden government can take no legitimate action against him as he is doing nothing which is against the law, a group of private corporations and the banks are retaliating against him instead. It’s a case of corporate governance at its finest, when the government (with a Democrat in charge) can’t act in retaliation against their detractors, so their corporate goons do it instead. In this case, there wasn’t any apparent effort by the Biden government to encourage this, but also no attempts to discourage it either. That said, there are times in this past year where Biden and his officials have, openly or behind closed doors, looked into using corporations to circumvent the constitutional rights of Americans, or even openly asked them to defy the rulings of the Federal Judiciary when they were not favorable to his agenda.
The first thing I alluded to about the Biden government working with private firms to violate the rights of Americans comes from a piece of news that began circulating last May. Apparently, the Biden government was looking into hiring outside firms to circumvent the 4th Amendment protections of targets they wanted to monitor for “extremist activity”. Essentially, if you say something the Biden government doesn’t like, they want to be able to label you as an extremist and spy on you without getting a warrant or being subject to any judicial review. Even the Patriot Act still required National Intelligence Agencies to seek the approval of a judge for surveillance warrants. But the Biden government either doesn’t want to spend the time meeting the burden of proof for a warrant on the people they want to monitor, or rather, they likely cannot meet that burden of proof.
Aside from using corporations to circumvent the law, Biden has also OPENLY asked that corporations ignore the court’s rulings on his illegal vaccine mandate, not once but twice. The first time was last November when the 5th District Court of appeals issued a legal injunction halting Biden’s illegal Vaccine Mandate. Two days after the court handed down its injunction, the Biden government held a press conference where they instructed employers to disregard the court’s decision and go ahead with the mandate anyway. Then this past Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down most of the mandate in a 6-3 decision. However hours after the decision, the Biden Government once again called on employers to disregard the decision of the courts and enact his now illegal mandate even though he had no power to enforce it. During the press conference, Biden also claimed 1/3rd of Fortune 100 companies were already enacting vaccine mandates independent of his administration. This, of course, doesn’t surprise me at all, nor do I believe it was truly “independent”, as corporations have cozied up to the party that once persecute them. They found after the Big Tech Boom that rather than fighting their former persecutors’ big government aspirations, it was easier and more profitable to get in bed with them.
See, when big businesses were aligned with Republicans, the policies passed by the GOP were not just beneficial to them but also their small business competition as well and we never asked them to go after our political opponents. But now that they align with the Democrats and their lockdown/mandate policies, acting as their enforcers and going after all who dissent, only the largest most influential corporations benefit while their small business competition is crushed and forced into bankruptcy. This has woken up some Republicans to the woeful mistake we have made, but not all of them have given up their boot-licking ways. Many Republicans haven’t quite gotten past the days when they were all for cheap-labor immigration which allowed employers to artificially suppress workers’ wages by making them accept lower wages or be replaced by cheaper foreign labor which is often subsidized by the government. They either forget or don’t care that it is American Workers that handed them victory in 2016 after suffering 8 years of the Obama recession drawn out by the Democrats and their policies.
Much like the victims of America’s Opioid Crisis, GOP Politicians can’t kick that old Corporate Boot-Licking addiction. The problem is though that now more than ever, the interests of big corporations don’t align with American interests. Their interests are about killing their smaller businesses that compete with them, doing the bidding of the Democrats to get themselves more favorable treatment from the government, and attacking those who once protected their ability to do business in America. Many Democrats are now saying “the Democratic Party left me behind.” When will Republican Politicians say “Big corporations have left us behind”?
I am not saying we need to turn around and become the Democrats of the past 70 years who attacked big corporations. Instead, we need to rethink how we approach the idea of “Business”. As I said earlier, for the longest time we were “The Party of Business”, that our larger policies helped small businesses as well as the larger corporations. Maybe it is time we focus specifically on small businesses, how to make it easier to conduct business for them and for them to grow larger and prosper. Now is a good a time as any to refocus our energy on Mainstreet rather than just wall street.
Another thing we need to consider is becoming “The Workers Party” ourselves, or better yet we could just become “The American Party”. As I said, it’s the workers of America that handed us victory in 2016. Keeping that in mind, the Republican Party going forward should consider pursuing policies that benefit workers while maintaining an environment that allows businesses to operate with ease. Mind you, this is a complicated puzzle. Things like minimum wages might help American workers but they hurt businesses. And things the GOP has quietly like supporting like increased immigrant labor help businesses but hurt American workers. The next great journey of the Republican Party could and should be a journey of navigating this complex maze, and find a path that bridges the interests of American Businesses and American Workers, and finding a set of policies that benefits both without hurting either side.
Of course, there is one final and unpleasant task we must do as we accept the new realities of being “The American Party” instead of “The Party of Big Business”. We need to put a leash on these large corporations, not on their ability to conduct business, but on their ability to act as cronies of the Democratic Party and their ability to deprive any American of their rights. This means regulation on banks, communications platforms, and other things essential to daily life to prevent them from discriminating based on a consumer’s viewpoint. But it should probably go further than that, it may be time for Congress to amend the Civil Rights Act to include political or ideological affiliation as a protected class in all things, so that no business or group can discriminate against someone based on ideological or political affiliation. We also need to pass regulations that heavily penalize corporations that try outsourcing jobs from the United States or importing cheap labor. And we need to get serious about pursuing Antitrust Investigations and legal action against companies that form monopolies. And there is a lot we can do to reform trading regulations in the US so that bankers cannot profit from actively harming other people’s businesses.
Of course, “Traditional” Republicans will balk at this. They will say, “What about the Free Market?” Here is some news for you, right now the free market is dead. Those larger corporations who used to be our allies joined together with the Democrats to kill it, and as soon as they did our system of Capitalism was replaced with Crony Capitalism. And sadly, there is very little we can do to fix it without scorched earth measures. None of those measures would limit the ability to legitimately conduct business though, only stop anti-competitive practices or any action meant to limit the rights of Americans on behalf of any faction foreign or domestic. And to me, that sounds reasonable.
As you can see, our country and even our markets are in peril. This is a new and uncomfortable situation for the GOP as well, as in order to end this crisis we need to accept that our former allies are now enemies of our party and the values of our country. It can be hard to lose your sense of direction, even harder when you are a political party. But this isn’t really losing our direction. It’s more like we are returning our roots. I am glad to let the Big Business Republican Party die. It’s time to give birth to the American Party.
A short note before I close this out. As of this week, I will only be publishing a piece once every 2 weeks. This is due to an increased workload. My next article will be published on February 2nd, 2022, February 9th if you are reading on Medium. Thanks for enjoying my articles, and I hope you will continue to enjoy them in the future.
William Hellmann 