Malkin: Conservative consumers, stand your ground!

Conservative columnist and author Michelle Malkin is fed up with progressive bullies using social media to pressure companies into withdrawing financial support from groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and is calling on conservative consumers to stand their ground.

As we've reported here, Van Jones' Color of Change is leading the progressive mob in boycotting corporations backing the non-partisan group, claiming ALEC's support for state voter ID laws amounts to suppression of minority voters.  So far, large corporate donors -- including Coca Cola, Kraft, Bill Gates and McDonalds -- have all announced an end to their support for ALEC.  Progressives are declaring "victory," but Malkin asserts in her column this week that it's time for conservatives to start fighting back:

Conservative consumers need to get informed, get active and stand their ground against free speech-squelching progressive activists who have demonized the American Legislative Exchange Council. This isn’t just a battle over ALEC. It’s a war against the left’s shakedown artists taking aim at our freedoms of speech and association.

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It’s not enough for conservative consumers to avoid cowardly businesses that cave to Van Jones and company. Beating back the anti-ALEC mob means getting ahead of them. Color of Change and its “hundreds” of callers are now pressuring State Farm (tweet them here) and Johnson and Johnson (tweet them here) to join the spineless herd and cut ties to ALEC.

I’ll say it again: Silence is complicity. Speak now or surrender your ground.

Malkin's column is a must-read, full of background information on the key players leading the progressive boycott efforts, including Soros-backed Progress Now and a MoveOn.org/Big Labor political action committee, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC).  "While they claim to oppose black “voter suppression” by working to undermine anti-voter fraud bills backed by ALEC, Color of Change’s true agenda is to chill and suppress pro-capitalist, pro-Second Amendment, pro-low taxes and pro-law enforcement lobbying and legislating in the political marketplace," she writes.

Leading the effort for Color of Change is Rashad Robinson, a radical activist who has previously lobbied for voting rights for felons and worked directly with the Obama administration during his tenure as media director at gay rights group GLAAD.

In her search for answers as to why successful corporations would abandon a free-market supporter such as ALEC, Malkin personally reached out to several of the "cowardly businesses" and includes the details on what she found.

"[C]lick on all the links, get educated, educate others, and use this information to help fight back," Malkin writes.  "The conservative movement needs all hands on deck."

To read Michelle Malkin's full column, click here.