The question of ‘how America’s biggest brands caved to political activists’ is one with a thousand different answers, from specific turning points like the post-George Floyd DEI-ification of the Fortune 250 to the gradual, institutional, redefinition of business purpose via the term ‘stakeholder capitalism.’ Yet, as companies from Black & Decker to Tractor Supply are saying no to corporate politicization, there are several major actors standing in their way, well-funded and properly entrenched organizations who’ve made destroying fiduciary duty their full-time mission. Perhaps the most effective of these actors? The Human Rights Campaign.
Formed in 1980, the HRC is one of the most prominent LGBTQ activist organizations in the country, and currently serves to advance a partisan, progressive agenda through the corporate policies of America’s most prominent brands. It does so through what’s called the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), a list of criteria that determine how worthy a corporation is of the ever-changing vacuous label of inclusive. What does a company have to do in 2024 to be considered perfectly inclusive? As per a recent HRC criteria list, the truly inclusive company provides employees with features such as:
- Health coverage for ‘medically necessary’ care for hormone replacement therapy, reconstructive gender reassignment surgeries
- Puberty blockers for youth
- Executive performance measures that include LGBTQ+ diversity metrics
- Supplier diversity programs with special emphasis on LGBTQ+ suppliers
You’ll notice all of these have very little to do with confronting any real workplace bias, and even less to do with creating value for businesses and their shareholders, unless you truly believe that any business that doesn’t provide puberty blockers for children is actually transphobic. The increasing radicalism of the Human Rights Campaign’s business-scoring index, combined with the rhetoric of its leaders, increased media scrutiny, and pushback from the pro-shareholder side of the corporate world, led many brands to reevaluate their partnership with the activist organization. As the HRC declared 2023 a “state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people,” it would actually be the year that several big names decided to turn the page on the Index and the organization’s divisive, partisan, and non-business goals.
Fast forward to the present day, and the number of companies that have made public statements denouncing wokeness is only increasing: Tractor Supply, John Deere, Ford, Stanley Black & Decker, Molson Coors, and the list goes on. From a certain POV, this is an absolute conservative win: discriminatory DEI policies gone, a renewed focus on business purpose instead of employee groups based on racial/gendered characteristics, and in many cases a severing of ties with the Human Rights Campaign (Tractor Supply, Ford, and Black & Decker, for example, explicitly said they would no longer partner with the group). Victory lap time?
Not so fast—corporate wokeness didn’t come about overnight, and it’d be naive to assume that it’d go away that quickly. Nor did the Human Rights Campaign take this slight lying down. HRC president Kelley Robinson slammed the decision as “short-sighted,” and the group made a very public show of demoting the Index scores of 7 companies (Ford, Molson Coors, Tractor Supply Co., John Deere, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson and Brown-Forman).
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But then the HRC rolled out their next strategy, setting up anonymous tip lines for employees to document (1) experiences of discrimination and (2) what internal “inclusive” policies still existed at companies who’d ditched their partnership with the HRC. It’s a clever tactic—take inclusive policies behind closed doors, away from the prying eyes and meddlesome hands of shareholders and customers radical enough to believe that providing puberty blockers is not, in fact, an essential business function. But it also accomplishes a second objective that, for those of us combatting corporate bias, is similarly concerning: it allows companies to publicly back away from DEI to appease the anti-woke voices at their front door, whilst smuggling the same policies through the backdoor.
The HRC’s open scolding of companies that ditch wokeism highlights a final tactical lesson in the fight against business politicization: When ESG activists stop getting what they want from businesses, they stop pretending to be pro-business. As I wrote on X several weeks ago, “People who actually care about businesses succeeding don’t solicit anonymous, non-verifiable ‘tips’ on them. But the HRC does – they’re activists… with no incentive to preserve actual business function.”
As someone in the trenches of the fight against ESG, the organizations and people pushing for political neutrality in business are doing it from a pro-business perspective. Of course they are — they’re investors and shareholders, who see the mavericks of the free enterprise system as good things, not convenient stepping stones for achieving radical social goals. The battle for political neutrality, shareholder primacy, and business success is one that extends beyond the election cycle. It behooves us, whether shareholders or investors or customers, to fight that battle with a realistic sense of scope. The activists we’re up against have spent years and countless sums of money to pressure businesses away from their fiduciary goals. We’re not getting rid of them overnight.
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Isaac Willour is a corporate analyst at Bowyer Research, the leading shareholder-first proxy consulting firm. He is an award-winning journalist and political commentator, with work in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, C-SPAN, RealClearMarkets and the Daily Wire. He can be found on X at @IsaacWillour.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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