These numbers tell a clear story: people prefer their beer, their stores, their banks, and their movies woke-free. When companies refuse to acknowledge that fact, they learn the hard way that their customers have far more power than corporate boardrooms would like to believe.
shareholder profits, ESG investors choose what companies to put money in based on how committed they are to advancing an invariably left- wing political agenda. Perhaps the clearest example of ESG investing in action is major investment banks like Vanguard and Blackrock divesting from oil and gas companies — which continue to return record profits — and pouring money into “renew- able” energy companies that either routinely lose money or turn a far smaller profit. As many conservatives have pointed out, this investment “strategy” may be a fundamental violation of an investment bank’s fiduciary duty to its clients — including many state pension funds. In response, several Republican states have begun pulling money out of institutions like Vanguard and Blackrock. Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, Texas, Missouri, South Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, and West Virginia have divested a combined total of $4.8 billion from Blackrock. Several other states are likely to follow.
Admittedly, this sum is a pittance compared to the trillions in assets managed by these firms. But there are some signs that executives at top investment banks are getting the message. Late last year, Vanguard announced it was pulling out of a liberal “Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative.” And in June, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink said he was “ashamed” to be part of the political debate over ESG.
Along with its box office flops, Disney, which has become the poster child for the entertainment industry’s embrace of far-left social politics over good storytelling, lost more than four million subscribers to its Disney+ plat- form in the second quarter of 2023 alone. The company laid off 7,000 workers earlier this year and has canceled $1 billion in planned invest- ments. Its stock price, meanwhile, has plunged almost 25 percent from a 2023 high of $118 in February to $89 by August 1. These numbers tell a clear story: people prefer their beer, their stores, their banks, and their movies woke- free. When companies refuse to acknowledge that fact, they learn the hard way that their customers have far more power than corporate boardrooms would like to believe. Andrew Abbott Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersec- tion of politics and culture.
Hollywood
The vast majority of big-budget productions in recent years have become consumed by wokeness, and it’s showing at the box office. The most recent Indiana Jones sequel, which sees our hero Indy reduced to a sad, emasculated, lonely old man overshadowed by an under- developed “girlboss” sidekick char- acter, barely topped its $295 million production budget at the box office and is still deep in the red due to a huge marketing push. Then there is Disney’s creepy live-action remake of The Little Mermaid , widely mocked as a “woke-a-thon,” which lost around $20 million for Disney.
20 • AMAC Magazine
Powered by FlippingBook