Corporate America’s ‘big lie’

Corporate chieftains last year criticized Donald Trump for denying his re-election defeat. So it’s quite a spectacle to see them actively spreading the left’s own big lie about elections.

According to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, there is only one reason Georgia passed a voting reform: to suppress the votes of black Americans and other minorities. Georgia’s Republican Legislature used the “excuse” of voter fraud to “make it harder for many underrepresented voters” to “exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives,” Mr. Bastian wrote this week in a memo to employees.

Mr. Bastian has plenty of company in the C-suites. Some 72 black executives, including the CEO of Merck and a former CEO of American Express, signed an open letter calling on corporate colleagues to fight “undemocratic” and “un-American” GOP efforts across the states to “assault” the “fundamental tenets of our democracy.” Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Apple chimed in, and dozens more are readying outraged press releases.

Nancy Pelosi couldn’t be more thrilled. Democrats and the activist left have long honed their techniques for intimidating corporations. They successfully pressured companies into withdrawing contributions from free-market groups, into embracing a climate-change agenda, into refraining from political contributions, into adopting new “social” investment criteria.

Enlisting corporate America to help peddle a patently false narrative is their biggest success by far. The left spent last year using litigation and political pressure to alter and weaken election standards across the country. Democratic lawmakers and the Biden administration moved swiftly to cement this effort with a federal takeover of state election law, the bill known as H.R.1.