The people have spoken with their dollars, and companies are now less likely to go woke. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) pushes the CEI (Corporate Equality Index), a company’s social woke credit score. The Open Society Foundation, operated by the Soros family, funds the HRC. The ESG promotes a company’s green social credit score, promoted by BlackRock and the World Economic Forum. Companies were 31% less likely to mention these absurd social scores during earnings calls this quarter, marking the steepest annual drop and the fifth consecutive quarter of declines.
Financial research platform AlphaSense polled companies from April 1 to June 5 to see where they stood. “The easiest thing to do is just to stay out of the conversation and emphasize other facets of business that are going to be perceived as less controversial and more core to the traditional metrics of the business,” said Jason Jay, senior lecturer of sustainability at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is the approach Berkshire Hathaway has taken under the lead of Warren Buffett, who refuses to answer these asinine surveys.
The National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative thinktank, states that companies are discarding their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders by taking up social issues. They also claim that these companies are discriminating against those who do not share these far-left beliefs.
I reported that the criteria in the 2023 Corporate Equality Index toolkit required companies to promote really went to the extreme, such as providing employees’ children with gender-affirming care like castration. The CEI makes it impossible for religious or conservative organizations to adhere to their standards.
While companies are less likely to mention these social credit scores, the ESG will be harder to dismiss as there has not been such a dramatic backlash. In comparison, woke companies such as Target experienced their longest losing streak in half a decade and lost $10 billion in a matter of 10 days. Anheuser-Busch was valued at $134.55 billion before its trans scandal. At the time of this writing, the company is now worth $107.44 million, and BudLight is no longer America’s leading beer. The “go woke, go broke” slogan holds weight. If you bring politics or religion into the boardroom, you’re bound to offend at least half of the people and lose half of your customers.
