Jerry Bowyer | On December 1, 2020

(Photo courtesy of joethegoatfarmer) (CC BY) (Resized/Cropped)

With contributions by Charles Bowyer.

I recently sat down for a second interview with Justin Danhof, director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research. You can listen to, and read about, our first conversation here. In this new cultural regime that has seen nearly every major corporation in our country drift ever further to the left, Danhof has been a one-man army fighting woke capital.

The conversation, recorded before the election, was wide-ranging: covering the state of woke capital and the fight against it as it stands today, the moral imperative of conservative Christians to engage with corporations, and much more. Danhof explained to me that there’s a new website employed by the Free Enterprise Project, called FreeRoots.com, which makes corporate engagement easier than ever before. With FreeRoots.com, you can directly engage with corporations for free, including the board of directors for companies such as Netflix, in literally a matter of minutes. Rather than talking into the void, you can go straight to the offending party, whether it’s Twitter or Netflix or Amazon, and let them know that what they’re doing is offensive to a substantial portion of the country.

Core to our discussion was explaining just how much power the average person has to influence publicly traded corporations. Many of those who would have an interest in engagement also have the capacity for engagement. The conservative movement has failed to articulate this – we sometimes tend to see ourselves as passive victims who lack the ability to meaningfully change the business world, when the reality is that the left has had so much success in remaking corporations using the exact same tools that are available to us. We simply do not show up when we easily could.

The corporate philosophy Danhof provides us is in many ways the opposite of what we as Christians and conservatives have been taught – while our instinct is always to pull-away and boycott, Danhof pulls us back, reminds us that we have not just the power but the responsibility to pull corporations back from the woke brink. If you’re troubled by the immense swing to the cultural left of our institutions and want to actually do something about it, this interview is for you.

You can listen to the full interview here. Below are timestamps for the different topics of conversation.

0:00 – Introduction

1:28 – How the Free Enterprise Project fights back against woke capitalism, and the uphill battle for conservative investors.

5:51 – Exactly how regular shareholders can engage with corporations.

13:06 – Danhof: “You’re voting against your belief system” when you rely on the proxy service monopoly.

17:58 –Netflix and the moral consequences of the conservative retreat from corporate life.

19:43 – How to use The Free Enterprise Projects’ corporate engagement tool “FreeRoots.com”

29:30 – Why conservatives need to show up at the boardroom and break the ideological echo-chamber.

Jerry Bowyer

Jerry Bowyer is a Forbes contributor, contributing editor of AffluentInvestor.com, and Senior Fellow in Business Economics at The Center for Cultural Leadership.

Jerry has compiled an impressive record as a leading thinker in finance and economics. He worked as an auditor and a tax consultant with Arthur Anderson, as Vice President of the Beechwood Company which is the family office associated with Federated Investors, and has consulted in various privatization efforts for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. He founded the influential economic think tank, the Allegheny Institute, and has lectured extensively at universities, businesses and civic groups.

Jerry has been a member of three investment committees, among which is Benchmark Financial, Pittsburgh’s largest financial services firm. Jerry had been a regular commentator on Fox Business News and Fox News. He was formerly a CNBC Contributor, has guest-hosted “The Kudlow Report”, and has written for CNBC.com, National Review Online, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as many other publications. He is the author of The Bush Boom and more recently The Free Market Capitalist’s Survival Guide, published by HarperCollins. Jerry is the President of Bowyer Research.

Jerry consulted extensively with the Bush White House on matters pertaining to the recent economic crisis. He has been quoted in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, The International Herald Tribune and various local newspapers. He has been a contributing editor of National Review Online, The New York Sun and Townhall Magazine. Jerry has hosted daily radio and TV programs and was one of the founding members of WQED’s On-Q Friday Roundtable. He has guest-hosted the Bill Bennett radio program as well as radio programs in Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.

Jerry is the former host of WorldView, a nationally syndicated Sunday-morning political talk show created on the model of Meet The Press. On WorldView, Jerry interviewed distinguished guests including the Vice President, Treasury Secretary, HUD Secretary, former Secretary of Sate Condoleezza Rice, former Presidential Advisor Carl Rove, former Attorney General Edwin Meese and publisher Steve Forbes.

Jerry has taught social ethics at Ottawa Theological Hall, public policy at Saint Vincent’s College, and guest lectured at Carnegie Mellon’s graduate Heinz School of Public Policy. In 1997 Jerry gave the commencement address at his alma mater, Robert Morris University. He was the youngest speaker in the history of the school, and the school received more requests for transcripts of Jerry’s speech than at any other time in its 120-year history.

Jerry lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan, and the youngest three of their seven children.