When ALEC was exposed we found out that giant corporate entities and their affliated charitable foundations won’t be seen with conservatives in public. Turns out, no corporation wants to be publicly associated with voter suppression and extraordinary legal protections for irresponsible and/or crazed gun owners, although promoting those things was (apparently) fine as long as no one knew about it.
This very public rejection by the business interests they love was humiliating for the conservative movement, so they lashed out and issued some threats:
“We’re putting the left on notice: you take out a conservative program operating in one area, we’ll kick it up a notch somewhere else,” Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research, said in a statement. “You will not win. We outnumber you and we outthink you, and when you kick up a fuss you inspire us to victory.”
Corporate CEOs who “cower in the face of liberal boycott threats need to understand that the left never gives up,” Ridenour said. “If these corporations do not reverse course and immediately grow enough of a backbone to say no when the left tells them what to do, conservatives may as well consider them part of the organized left. It doesn’t matter if corporate executives have free-market sentiments hidden deep inside them if they continually surrender to the left’s Trotskyite strategy of making relentless demand after demand in public.”
You were on notice, Leftists.
Thought we’d check in and see how the Stand With ALEC campaign is coming:
Two months after it was first announced, the “I Stand With ALEC” website supporting the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has finally gone live — and it is underwhelming.
For the past year, ALEC has been under intense public scrutiny, starting in July 2011 when the Center for Media and Democracy launched ALECexposed.org. Since then, Common Cause has filed complaints with the IRS challenging ALEC’s charitable status, groups like People for the American Way and Progress Now! have helped produce reports about ALEC’s influence in individual states, Color of Change has been privately and publicly urging corporations to leave ALEC because of the ALEC agenda’s negative impact on the African American community, and labor unions and shareholder groups have put increasing pressure on publicly traded companies to drop their ALEC membership. CMD has continued its investigation of ALEC, its operations, and its members through reporting on PRWatch.org, and documented ALEC’s role in ratifying as a “model” bill the Stand Your Ground law cited initially to protect Trayvon Martin’s killer from arrest or prosecution.
In response to growing public pressure, nineteen corporations have distanced themselves from ALEC, including longtime ALEC Board members like Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and Johnson & Johnson. For many, the term “ALEC” has become synonymous with corporate corruption of the democratic process.
With ALEC and its agenda exposed, the group has tried replying with a public relations blitz — by hiring PR megafirm Edelman, purporting to disband the task force responsible for its controversial crime, gun, and voting legislation (which may be just a PR stunt), and trying to re-brand itself with easily rebuttable claims that “elected state legislators fully control[ling] ALEC’s model legislation process.”
In April (as CMD/PRWatch reported), ALEC’s Director of External Relations Caitlyn Korb spoke at a Heritage Foundation “Bloggers Briefing,” where she said ALEC was “getting absolutely killed in social media venues” and pleaded with right-wing bloggers for support. She also referenced the coalition-building and institutional support from Americans for Tax Reform, the group led by right-wing activist Grover Norquist. At the time, Korb announced that ALEC would be launching an “I Stand With ALEC” website in the coming days as part of “a very aggressive campaign to really spread the word about what we do.”
But for months, “IStandWithALEC.com” remained dormant. The site was registered to Matt Braynard of the Braynard Group, which also did the website for Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, and had developed sites for groups like the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. The #IStandWithALEC hashtag appeared on twitter but received little traffic, despite being promoted by right-wing commentator Michelle Malkin (who alsounsuccessfully promoted a boycott of companies that dropped their ALEC membership).
After much anticipation, IStandWithALEC.com recently went live. The months between the site being announced and actually published were apparently not spent on developing content.The two-color website consists of a single page in a simple Times New Roman font, and the content appears to have been written by an individual not particularly versed in English grammar.
Nearly every day we’re pelted with recycled press releases from billionaires threatening to crush us all with unlimited piles of campaign cash. I’ve come around to reading these daily missives as not so much factual statements projecting what the billionaires intend to spend on Republican campaigns, but instead as actual threats: “surrender, peons, or we’ll throw another billion at you!” They’re putting us on notice. So great to hear that this one time, anyway, they failed.