As corporations increasingly take up progressive political causes like racial equity and climate change, some watch with despair or disdain. Conservative entrepreneurs see a business opportunity.
“There’s a huge market for them,” Mark Meckler, president of Convention of States Action (COSA), told The Epoch Times. As a former CEO of Parler, he knows how brutal it can be to go up against dominant, established competitors. Success is not guaranteed.
But citing conservative companies like Black Rifle Coffee and Patriot Mobile, Meckler said, “if you think about it, you’re talking half the country” as a potential market. “Of the voting age public, you’re probably talking 75–80 million people that would like to partake in these kinds of products.”
“If I were not doing politics right now, that’s the space I would be in,” he said. “I would be looking at every market segment that I could and I would be starting every kind of conservative company that I could.”
Connor Boyack, president of Libertas Institute and writer and publisher of the “Tuttle Twins” children’s books, concurs.
“I believe we need way more entrepreneurs in this space,” Boyack told The Epoch Times, “providing products and services for families to learn about and act upon the ideas of a free society.”
Breaking Into Publishing
Like many well-known children’s authors, he wrote his first book in the “Tuttle Twins” series for his own kids. And like many well-known children’s authors, he took his books to the established publishing houses, who were not interested.
“So we just decided to launch the ‘Tuttle Twins’ as an independent project, published directly by our company,” he said. “In retrospect, that was exactly the right move for us because it afforded us creative control. We’re not at the mercy of anyone who can cancel us or undermine what we’re trying to do.”
While many schools are teaching kids about socialism and racial ideology, Boyack’s books touch on ideas like preserving liberty, the Golden Rule, and how free markets work, topics that “help children develop critical thinking skills about real-world concepts.” Between 2014 and 2019, they sold 750,000 books. In 2020, they sold 1.3 million, and in 2021 they sold 1.7 million.
