Five days after the mob stormed the Capitol on January 6^th in 2021—while the broken glass was still being swept up and the flags were still being folded—we posted Funding the Insurrection.

Our question then was blunt and unavoidable:  Would corporate America keep funding the politicians who tried to overturn a presidential election?

Back then, the answer was still forming, the Capitol was still smoldering. Corporate America, startled like golfers who’d just stepped on a rattlesnake, rushed out statements condemning the January 6 insurrection. PACs were paused. Donations were “under review.” Democracy, we were assured, was sacred.

We wrote then: Money in politics is a very powerful force. So is withholding it.

Five years later, the Agitator can finally answer the question posed when the smoke hadn’t yet cleared.

The Five-Year Report Card

Fast-forward just one year after the mob attack and we noted that the rattlesnake had wandered off, the golfers were back to their swings; and the checks had started to flow.

In our 2022 post, Corporate Political Giving: A Threat to Democracy or Just a Study in Hypocrisy? the early verdict wasn’t encouraging. Hundreds of corporations had already resumed giving to what Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) aptly labeled the “Sedition Caucus.” Performative outrage had expired. Business, as always, resumed.

Why?  Because outrage, as we noted then, is often temporary.  Money is patient.
And hypocrisy—well, hypocrisy is forever

Now, in 2026, Popular Information has done the long, patient work of tracking who actually meant what they said—and who treated January 6 like a PR inconvenience that would pass with the news cycle.   Spoiler alert: outrage was temporary. Money was patient. Hypocrisy proved immortal.

Five winters after January 6, most corporate vows melted away.  Many companies that swore never again quietly returned to funding the very lawmakers who tried to erase a democratic vote.

But ten did not blink.

In a landscape of broken promises, they remain rare proof that memory can last longer than outrage—and that restraint, though unfashionable, is still possible.

The Ones Who Meant It

Let’s start with the exceptions—the corporations that didn’t flinch, didn’t lawyer their way out, didn’t quietly drift back to their lobbyists offices on K Street once the coast was clear.

These companies have not funded election deniers in the five years since January 6:

• Farmers Insurance
• Airbnb
• Expedia Group
• Nike
• Clorox
• Eversource Energy
• Holland & Hart
• Qurate Retail (now QVC Group)
• Lyft
• Whirlpool

In a landscape of broken promises, they remain rare proof that memory can last longer than outrage.

  And they did it absent victory laps and without ads about courage. Just restraint—an endangered corporate behavior.

The Blinkers

Then there’s the rest.

These companies pledged to stop funding lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 election—and later resumed giving anyway, often with exquisite explanations about “peaceful transitions,” “committee structures,” or “revised criteria”:

• Cigna
• Comcast
• General Mills
• Blue Cross Blue Shield
• Allstate
• Marriott International
• Hilton Worldwide
• Ecolab
• NRG Energy
• Cozen O’Connor
• Amazon
• Walmart

Some came back quickly.  Some waited a respectable interval.  None announced their return with the same moral clarity they used when they left.   This is not inconsistency. It’s choreography.

What Five Years Tells Us

In January 2021, corporations were afraid of being photographed too close to the crime scene.  In 2022, they were betting the public had moved on.   In 2026, we know the answer: most were right.

Corporate America didn’t radicalize. It recalibrated. It learned that democracy outrage has a shelf life, while access never spoils.

Which brings us back to that line we wrote five days after the January 6^th insurrection—still doing the heavy lifting five years later:  Money in politics is a very powerful force. So is withholding it.

The problem, as it turns out, is not that corporations didn’t understand that truth.  It’s that most of them never intended to live by it.

Roger