A handful of conservative movement heavyweights on Monday launched an advocacy organization designed to push back against what they describe as a rising tide of “cancel culture” and “corporate wokeism.”
The priorities of The Unsilenced Majority will include promoting free expression, fighting “cancel culture pressure campaigns” in the private sector and curbing cancel culture in K-12 education.
The group speaks for an “emboldened majority” of Americans who recognize the “imminent threat” that cancel culture poses to the country, said Mike Davis, its founder and president.
“The rising intolerance of cancel culture is breeding fear and paranoia in our politics, across the corporate world, at our children’s schools and even in our neighborhoods. It must be stopped,” Mr. Davis said.
Conservatives have become increasingly dismayed that speaking out on subjects ranging from the coronavirus to climate change can lead to the public naming and shaming — or “canceling” — of the offending individual.
“We strongly believe that corporate censorship, thought-policing and politically motivated blacklists and boycotts are having a corrosive effect on our country and will ultimately lead to a less free world,” Mr. Davis said. “We also believe that freedom of speech and diversity of thought are fundamental bedrocks of a free society and should always be protected and celebrated.”
Mr. Davis also leads the conservative Article III Project and helped Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh win confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Ian Prior, a past spokesman for the Justice Department who has worked at a number of political groups dedicated to electing Republicans, will serve as the group’s spokesman and senior counsel.
Will Chamberlain, editor-in-chief of the conservative news magazine Human Events, will serve as senior counsel.
Andy Surabian, an adviser to former President Donald Trump and a veteran of the Trump White House, will be a senior adviser to the group.
The Unsilenced Majority said corporate America needs to be held accountable for bowing to “cancel culture pressure campaigns” orchestrated by wealthy individuals.
“Americans must apply equal pressure by hitting them where it hurts so that they pay a price for their corporate wokeism,” the group said. “And patriotic American companies that don’t succumb to the woke mob deserve an army of allies.”
Among other priorities, the group wants to push back against the “cancel culture mob” digging up people’s old comments, even dating back to someone’s teenage years, and using the remarks to pressure companies to fire the offender.
“This vicious, unfair and cruel targeting of private citizens for saying or doing whatever the woke left deems unacceptable is turning neighbor against neighbor in a way that would make Soviet and Chinese Communist Party secret informants blush,” the group said.
The group also warned that intolerance of conservatives on college campuses is now spreading to K-12 schools, where students, teachers and parents are getting “canceled” “for everything from a juvenile remark to opposing the same far-left curricula that has been present in colleges for years.”
