A week after Donald Trump’s election, the comments by Pepsi’s CEO have been tough for a lot of voters to swallow. Like Grubhub founder Matt Maloney, who’s on the hot seat after an employee email showing Trump supporters the door, Indri Noovi must not have been thinking about her bottom line when the soft drink mogul bashed the new president-elect. Well, she’s certainly thinking about it now that #BoycottPepsi is picking up steam.

At a New York Times event last Tuesday, Noovi’s emotions were obviously raw from the defeat of Pepsi’s choice for the next generation: Hillary Clinton. In a sit-down with the paper’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, she was asked how she was feeling about the results. “Is there a box of tissues here?” she said. To anyone who thinks like Trump, she insisted, “Forget about the Pepsi brand. How dare you talk about women that way?” she fumed. “If we don’t nip this in the bud it is going to be a lethal force in society.”

Sorkin, who was sympathetic to Noovi’s frustration, went on to ask how others were coping. “I had to answer a lot of questions from my daughters, from our employees. They were all in mourning.” In what was no doubt an exaggeration, she claimed, “Our employees were all crying.” While the executive staff may have been distraught, I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t a single Trump supporter in a company of 263,000. Nevertheless, she went on, “And the question that they’re asking, especially those who are not white, ‘Are we safe?’ Women are asking, ‘Are we safe?’ LGBT people are asking, ‘Are we safe?’ I never thought I would have to answer those questions.” Noovi’s message to the country was simple: “We should mourn.” Next, she insisted, “We have to … assure everyone living in the United States that they are safe.”

Well, one thing that may not be safe is Pepsi’s stock. If Grubhub’s experience is any indication, Pepsi is in for a bumpy ride with Wall Street. Maloney’s stock dropped four points overnight after his epic “these views have no place at Grubhub” missive. As of [Monday] his shares were in a freefall — nine percent down and counting. What part of “partisan political backlash” don’t these businesses understand? Have they learned nothing from Target, Lands’ End, J.C. Penney, and Angie’s List? This kind of liberal elitism may fly in the board rooms of America, but not in its family rooms. And as last week’s election should have demonstrated, there’s a strong and powerful movement in this nation that is tired of being harassed, marginalized and threatened for what are clearly mainstream values. (Natural marriage, after all, still has the majority’s support in this country!) After Trump’s election, this is an emboldened group of “deplorables,” and companies who are trading in intolerance do so at their peril.

Steve Tobak, one of the many who could only shake his head at Maloney’s prejudice, thinks corporate America is at a crossroads for liberal activism. “It’s shockingly myopic, if not downright incompetent, for the CEO of a consumer-facing company to risk insulting half his stakeholders that way… I think the board has some work to do. And given this overheated post-election climate, I’ll reiterate something I say often, but apparently not often enough: If your business isn’t politics, keep politics out of your business.” Indri Noovi would be wise to listen.

Pepsi — and its Tostitos, Lays, Doritos, Gatorade, and Lipton brands — were already at odds with pro-lifers over its support of Planned Parenthood. Apart from the more than half-billion dollar haul from U.S. taxpayers, Cecile Richards’s group is enjoying hefty financial backing from Pepsi (and these 37 other companies). When you’re buying Pepsi, a portion of those dollars is already being wired to the bank account of the largest abortion provider in America. Now, we can add anti-American, anti-conservative rhetoric to the list. Unless Noovi and company see the light, maybe it’s time to take the real Pepsi challenge and start drinking something new.

Originally published here.

The New POTUS on SCOTUS

Donald Trump wasn’t the only winner last Tuesday — so was every American who cares about the Constitution! By the final days of the race, it was clear to everyone — including pollsters — that the election of the GOP nominee wasn’t just about who would be working out of the White House but who would be filling the bench of the Supreme Court too. The voters who ranked SCOTUS as the number one priority in this election (and there were a lot of them) can breathe a collective sigh of relief next year when Donald Trump has a chance to fulfill one of his biggest promises to America: filling Antonin Scalia’s seat with a bonafide originalist.

As the first GOP nominee in history to say that he would only appoint pro-life justices to the bench, Trump won over plenty of skeptics by releasing his list of solid and impartial jurists in advance of the election. During the last debate, he was clear:

“I feel that the justices that I am going to appoint — and I’ve named 20 of them … will be pro-life. They will have a conservative bent. They will be protecting the Second Amendment. They are great scholars in all cases, and they’re people of tremendous respect. They will interpret the Constitution the way the founders wanted it interpreted. And I believe that’s very, very important. I don’t think we should have justices appointed that decide what they want to hear. It’s all about [interpreting] the … Constitution the way it was meant to be.”

Now that he’s the president-elect, Trump hasn’t wavered from that pledge. Over the weekend, he reiterated to “60 Minutes’s” Leslie Stahl, “I’m pro-life. The judges will be pro-life.” What happens to women if Roe v. Wade is overturned, she went on? “They’ll perhaps have to go … to another state,” Trump replied matter-of-factly. House and Senate Republicans, who were also vindicated for leaving Scalia’s seat open for the new president, know how crucial the next confirmation will be. “It was a central election issue,” said analyst Shannen Coffin. “If [Trump] were to turn on that, it’d be a huge betrayal of the expectations he set.”

In [yesterday’s] New York Times, the paper breaks down Trump’s list in more detail, highlighting the fact that potential justices from the Ivy League are out. “Heartland? In.” “You had an awful lot of conservatives during the campaign who were incredibly skeptical, to put it mildly, about Donald Trump,” the Heritage’s John Malcom pointed out. “But they certainly cared a lot about the Scalia vacancy and the direction of the Court. And that list was a very, very sober list, and it was greatly reassuring.”

Originally published here.

Trump CAIR-Free on New Staff

For the far-Left, the depression over Donald Trump’s come-from-behind win is only part of the story. The rest is unfolding now, as the incoming administration starts filling key posts. Reince Priebus’s appointment as chief of staff was one, but liberals are having a tough time accepting Trump’s other top strategist: Steve Bannon. As executive director of Breitbart News, Bannon’s appointment sent shudders through the liberal camp.

Calling him a symbol of the “ugly direction” Trump intends to take this country, radical groups from the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to George Soros’s People for the American Way are calling on the president-elect to rescind the job offer. “It is a disaster,” bemoaned Mark Potok of SPLC, one of the many extremists wringing their hands over the thought of Bannon on the White House staff. The coalition of detractors is a who’s who of the liberal fringe, including everyone from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to the Anti-Defamation League. Anyone who draws the ire of those organizations must be a true conservative!

Either way, the Trump transition team couldn’t care less about the accusations. “[Bannon]‘s got a Harvard business degree. He’s a Naval officer. He has success in entertainment. I don’t know if you’re aware of that. And he certainly was a Goldman Sachs managing partner,” Kellyanne Conway said to the false accusations that Bannon is prejudiced or racist. “I’m personally offended that you think I would manage a campaign where that would be one of the going philosophies,” Conway fired back to critics. “It was not.” In the meantime, if congressional Democrats or liberal bullies thought they could scare Trump off of his choices, they apparently don’t know Donald!

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.