Broad Coalition Calls on Corporations to Drop Funding for ALEC Over Horowitz Speeches

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has joined a coalition of 78 government reform, civil rights, labor, environmental, and advocacy organizations urging 20 of the largest corporate funders of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to cut ties with the corporate bill mill.

CMD published an August 13 report from Wisconsin Representative Chris Taylor that ALEC had given hatemonger David Horowitz a platform at its annual meeting earlier this month to give two incendiary speeches. Horowitz’s Freedom Center has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a group “giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation.”

For this reason, the letter’s signees ask the corporations to clarify that they “will not stand for the sort of toxic, inflammatory claims that ALEC has embraced” and “to stop funding and leave ALEC.”

The corporations that received the letter are: Altria, Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Charter Communications, Chevron, Comcast, Cox Communications, Diageo, Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly, FedEx, Honeywell, Marathon Oil, Pfizer, State Farm Insurance, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, UPS, and Verizon.

Horowitz was invited to speak at ALEC’s annual meeting in order to garner support for the right-wing’s dangerous plan to call a constitutional convention to dramatically rewrite the U.S. Constitution.

Read the full letter below.

UPDATE 9-13-2018 : After the publication of Rep. Chris Taylor’s piece “ALEC in Disarray,” David Horowitz threatened to sue Rep. Taylor and the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Our lawyer’s response to his frivolous complaint is here. About the same time, 78 good government and civil rights groups called upon ALEC companies to reject Horowitz’s inflammatory remarks and stop funding ALEC. Under pressure, ALEC issued a statement distancing themselves from Horowitz and announcing they would be taking down the video of one of his speeches at the 2018 ALEC Conference in New Orleans. To preserve the historical record, CMD has captured this speech and it can be accessed here.