New Anti-cancel Culture Group “Unsilenced Majority” Launches
May 17, 2021
Conservative Grassroots Advocacy Group “Unsilenced Majority” Launches to Organize Popular Opposition to Cancel Culture
WASHINGTON – Today, a new grassroots conservative advocacy organization launched to oppose cancel culture and fight back against the woke mob and their enablers. The Unsilenced Majority will speak for an emboldened majority of Americans who recognize the imminent threat that cancel culture poses to the United States. The Unsilenced Majority’s key issue areas include promoting free expression without fear of retribution, defending American workers from the woke mob, fighting cancel culture in education and opposing corporate wokeism. The Unsilenced Majority will serve as a grassroots organizing platform to fight back against the rising tide of left-wing intolerance. Its leaders include Mike Davis as Founder and President, Ian Prior as Spokesman and Senior Counsel, Will Chamberlain as Senior Counsel and Andrew Surabian as Senior Advisor. Leadership biographies and a description of the Unsilenced Majority’s key issues can be found below. “We strongly believe that corporate censorship, thought-policing and politically motivated blacklists and boycotts are having a corrosive effect on our country and will ultimately lead to a less free world. We also believe that freedom of speech and diversity of thought are fundamental bedrocks of a free society and should always be protected and celebrated,” Davis said. “The Unsilenced Majority speaks for an emboldened majority of Americans who recognize the imminent threat that cancel culture poses to our nation. The rising intolerance of cancel culture is breeding fear and paranoia in our politics, across the corporate world, at our children’s schools and even in our neighborhoods. It must be stopped. The Unsilenced Majority aims to harness grassroots opposition to fight back against cancel culture before it’s too late.” To contact Unsilenced Majority, please email info@unsilencedmajority.org. Unsilenced Majority can also be found on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Patriotic Americans can join the movement by signing up and donating at UnsilencedMajority.org.
Key Issues
PROMOTING FREE EXPRESSION WITHOUT FEAR OF RETRIBUTION
Fundamentally, cancel culture is just another term for intolerance and suffocating dissent. The left’s modern political project isn’t about winning the argument. It’s about silencing their political enemies through intimidation, financial ruin and outright censorship.
Cancel culture is one of the most un-American forces in our nation’s history, and the worst part is that the woke mob is winning. The First Amendment to the Constitution outlines the core of American values: free speech, free exercise of religion, the freedom to peaceable protest, the free press and the freedom to express disagreement with the government.
Today’s left-wing fascism does not believe in free speech, nor freedom of religion, nor peaceful protest, nor free press, nor a freedom to disagree with government. This system of intolerance is creating a political atmosphere that isn’t based in engaging differing ideas but in shutting down the debate entirely. Cancel culture has become so pervasive that many Americans often find themselves self-censoring for fear of what might happen to them if they express an unpopular opinion or even express skepticism of a woke truism. If the American citizenry cannot freely express itself without fear of retribution, the premise of our American democratic republic begins to crumble.
What differentiates the United States of America from the rest of the world – and what has been key to our peace and prosperity – is the stabilizing force of freedom. If we’re no longer free to congregate, to speak, to worship or to choose what news we read or watch, we’ve lost our freedom and all the benefits that come with it. The Unsilenced Majority promotes peaceful, free and open expression so that left-wing hate and intolerance does not destroy our nation. Cancel culture is perhaps the biggest threat from within that we face as a country. A tolerant, truly free political dialogue is the key to securing American society from irreversible decline.
Over the past several years, we have seen a major rise in people losing their jobs for political activity and publicly shared opinions. Major corporations, universities, and schools have become so hostile to their employees’ inalienable rights that people are afraid to speak for fear of losing their job and ability to make a living. Cancel culture is turning this age-old system of personal progress on its head, poisoning our society, widening our divisions and destroying lives and livelihoods. With the advent of social media and smart phones, every American is one vocalized opinion away from being fired, their life ruined and their reputation left in tatters. Making matters worse, the cancel culture mob is digging up age-old comments, even from people’s teenage years, and weaponizing it to pressure employers’ into firing private citizens.
This vicious, unfair and cruel targeting of private citizens for saying or doing whatever the woke left deems unacceptable is turning neighbor against neighbor in a way that would make Soviet and Chinese Communist Party secret informants blush. America’s veterans, young professionals, and hard workers of every age shouldn’t have their lives turned upside down by the woke mob. And just as importantly, employers shouldn’t succumb to the woke mob’s pressure. It’s time to dial down the temperature and not punish everyday Americans based on whatever newly contrived standard the woke left feels like inventing. The American worker needs a fighter to defend their integrity and reputation from the woke mob’s cancel culture.
Conservatives have warned for decades of the perils of left-wing fascism on campus. From campus speech codes to student mobs blocking conservative guest speakers to curricula more focused on woke indoctrination than actual learning, campuses across the country are out of control, abandoning their core missions and brainwashing the next generation of leaders. Campuses that foster fragile minds incapable of free thought or open dialogue result in a weaker country incapable of addressing problems logically and in accordance with our founding values.
Conservatives’ concerns about what was happening on campuses across the country were dismissed for years by the mainstream media—and many on the intellectual right who failed to recognize the dangers in letting anti-Americanism fester unanswered. We’re now seeing the result of that failure to act. And it’s not just more student book burnings—it’s Big Tech CEOs silencing their political opponents and censoring speech of which they disprove. Those same left-wing extremists who silenced their peers on campus through intimidation now control the levers of corporate power in America.
The virulent intolerance has now been passed down to our K-12 education system, where students, teachers, and parents are being canceled in their communities for everything from a juvenile remark to opposing the same far-left curricula that has been present in colleges for years. If conservatism—and by extension America—is to survive, we must fight back against campus cancel culture.
There’s no doubt that those on the far left are masters of grassroots organizing. Barack Obama graduated college and became a community organizer. Donald Trump graduated business school and went into real estate development. Left-wing activists take to the street in protest, the rest of America goes to work. This dynamic has left conservatives and even traditional liberals woefully unprepared to fight back against the woke mob on behalf of the majority of Americans who are peacefully living their lives.
The truth is that behind the woke mob is a highly organized, sophisticated network of wealthy individuals who create cancel culture pressure campaigns to influence the largest of American private sector institutions. The result is that corporate America—and all the power and money at its disposal—has functionally become a wing of the radical left and its new prisoner, the Democrat Party. This is devastating to the cause of freedom, liberty and American values. Big Tech, Big Business, Big Media and Big Government are teaming up to tear down this country and rebuild it in the radical left’s image.
It’s time to hold these companies accountable in the only way they understand: their bottom line. Americans must apply equal pressure by hitting them where it hurts so that they pay a price for their corporate wokeism. And patriotic American companies that don’t succumb to the woke mob deserve an army of allies. Conservatives, traditional liberals, and all commonsense Americans deserve to know that their hard-earned money isn’t going to woke corporate causes. Only by eliminating the financial incentive for corporate America to give into cancel culture will we rebalance our democracy in favor of citizens.
Headshots and individual social media information can be found here.
MIKE DAVIS
Founder and President
Mike Davis is the founder and president of The Unsilenced Majority, an organization dedicated to opposing Cancel Culture and fighting back against the woke mob and their enablers. As the former Chief Counsel for Nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, Davis also leads the Article III Project (A3P), established to defend constitutionalist judges and the rule of law, and the Internet Accountability Project (IAP), an advocacy organization fighting to rein in Big Tech.
As Chief Counsel for Nominations, Davis advised Chairman Grassley and other senators on the confirmation of federal judges and senior Executive Branch appointees, serving as staff lead for 30 hearings and 41 markup meetings. He oversaw the floor votes for 278 nominees, including the confirmations of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the record number of circuit judges confirmed during President Trump’s first two years in office.
Davis has served in all three branches of the federal government, including for President George W. Bush, the Justice Department, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and current Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Davis also led the outside support team for Justice Gorsuch’s successful confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Before returning to public service in 2017, Davis spent nearly ten years as a civil litigator in Denver, working at one of the largest law firms in the world and one of the top-ranked law firms in Colorado before running his own law practice for more than five years.
Davis is from Des Moines, Iowa. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 2000 and Juris Doctor in 2004, both from the University of Iowa. In 2017, Davis received Iowa Law’s “Emerging Leader Award.” Davis also serves on the University of Iowa Political Science Advisory Board.
IAN PRIOR
Spokesman and Senior Counsel
Ian Prior is a co-founder of the Daily Malarkey, Executive Director of FightforSchools.com, and CEO of Headwaters Media. A communications and litigation expert, he has spent the past decade utilizing his experience at the crossroads of politics and media to successfully navigate some of the most challenging media environments in politics, government, and corporate America. Most recently, Ian served as Vice President at Mercury Public Affairs, where he worked for several Fortune 500 companies, multi-million-dollar trade groups, and high-level political campaigns.
Previously he was Principal Deputy Director of Public Affairs for the Department of Justice. Appointed to that role in March 2017, he served through July 2018. At DOJ, he helped provide strategic public affairs guidance to the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General and Associate Attorney General. Ian also served as the primary spokesman and media strategist for the Department’s National Security Division and Antitrust Division. In addition, he managed the Department’s public affairs strategies to combat the deadly opioid crisis and enhance the nation’s cybersecurity. Before serving at the Department of Justice, Ian served as the Communications Director for American Crossroads and Senate Leadership Fund in the 2016 cycle.
In the 2014 cycle, he was the Northeast Regional Press Secretary at the National Republican Congressional Committee and waspromoted to National Press Secretary and Deputy Communications Director following the 2014 election. He also managed the congressional campaign for former Rhode Island State Police Superintendent Brendan Doherty in 2012. Ian hails from Rhode Island and earned a B.A. from Boston University and a J.D. and L.L.M in Banking and Financial Law from Boston University School of Law. Following law school and before transitioning to public relations and communications, he clerked for Chief Justice Frank Williams of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and worked as a lawyer at Edwards and Angell, Brown Rudnick, and the City of Boston Corporation Counsel’s office. Ian is also a frequent guest commentator of Fox News where he discusses issues related to the Department of Justice, FBI, the Trump Administration, and political campaigns.
WILL CHAMBERLAIN
Senior Counsel
Will Chamberlain is the owner and editor-in-chief of Human Events. Prior to relaunching Human Events, Will worked as an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, focusing on class action litigation. Before that, he was an associate at Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan LLP in Los Angeles, where he practiced complex commercial litigation. Will graduated from University of the Pacific in 2010 with a B.A. in Economics, and received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center in 2015. Will is an active member of the State Bar of California and the District of Columbia Bar.
ANDY SURABIAN
Senior Advisor
Andy Surabian is a Republican strategist and serves as Senior Adviser to Unsilenced Majority. He also currently serves as spokesman and chief political adviser to Donald Trump Jr. and advises numerous candidates for Federal office. He has not only advised a litany of political candidates, campaigns and outside groups, he has also provided public relations, strategic messaging and crisis management strategy to various fortune 500 companies and well-known trade associations.
Surabian previously served in the White House as a Special Assistant to President Trump and Deputy White House Strategist. He is a veteran of the 2016 Trump campaign where he was charged with managing the campaign’s War Room operation as War Room Director and also served as a Senior Adviser on the former President’s 2020 reelection campaign.
He is a well known political commentator and is regularly quoted in various news outlets including, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Axios, The Hill, Fox News, USA Today, Bloomberg and many others. In December of 2017, Politico named Surabian to their “18 for 18 Power List” of the most influential up and coming political operatives in the country.
###