In the wake of President Donald Trump's re-election, a wide variety of institutions, from businesses to universities to law firms, scrambled to get on his good side, letting him dictate a wide range of hiring policies and business decisions.
But the massive backlash to Disney suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel from ABC over objections to his comments on slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, and the subsequent reversal of that decision, shows there is a path to stopping Trump from capturing all the economic and cultural levers of power, Bernie Sander adviser Faiz Shakir told MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Tuesday.
"In so many of these cases — I think the universities is a good example," said Hayes. "You know, this is not to sort of excuse the decisions that those university presidents have made, but you've got this sort of unilateral pressure, right? So they're getting pressure from one side.
"And unless, you know, donors and board of trustees organize and say, we're not going to raise money for you, and professors organized, unless there's pressure on the other side, that decision becomes too easy to make. In some ways, you've got to have something pushing on the other side."
"Absolutely," said Shakir. "And I appreciate how you're focusing on this, the power of association. It happens to be a First Amendment right to freedom of association. Too often we are forgetting how to know your power as a consumer, as a laborer, in a workplace, as a nurse, as a doctor, as a tenant."
"You, together with your colleagues, with your allied supporters, can exert influence to change your economic conditions and to change upstream business decisions," said Shakir. "That's point number one. And point number two, I think as a lesson, learning for the left of center is too often we have been beat by the right of center, who has been focused on being more comfortable, challenging business models, whether it's Bud Light or Cracker Barrel or Disney — by the way, remember Ron DeSantis and the efforts to tackle Disney, then the left of center?
"I would want to be more engaged in saying to businesses when the model doesn't work to serve the values of American society, you will hear from us," Shakir added. "And I think the right has done that more often than we have. And I think we're, we're starting to wake up and voice our concerns more."
Hayes concurred, noting that this year has seen a huge and impactful grassroots campaign to boycott Target over its rollback of diversity policies.
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