Some years ago, a contract lobbyist came to my State Senate office. Contract lobbyists are interesting. Unlike a governmental affairs person, who works directly for one company, contract lobbyists work for whomever retains their services. Which also means they can decline to work for someone if that individual or organization doesn’t fit their personal or professional beliefs.
This lobbyist was under contract to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and brought in an Apple representative. They were corporately pushing for a bill giving preferential hiring treatment to LGBTQ applicants. Needless to say, I didn’t support their bill, and I gave the lobbyist some good-natured grief for representing the HRC.
That was six years ago, and since then, the HRC has become what some refer to as the LGBTQ mafia. If you want to know who is pushing the overwhelmingly rabid transgender agenda, look no further than the Human Rights Campaign.
A major face in the transgender agenda is Dylan Mulvaney. He is everywhere now, and yes, I called him “he.” With over-the-top antics, Mulvaney has become famous for chronicling his “transition” to a transgender woman during “365 Days of Girlhood” on social media. While he once was that feminine guy skipping across rooms, giggling that he is a woman, he was nonetheless confined to TikTok or Instagram then.
Not anymore. For unfathomable reasons, major corporate brands like Budweiser, Nike and Kate Spade have made him one of their national spokespersons.
Why would major corporations long associated with the beer of the average Joe, the gear of major athletes, and the high fashion sense of actual women, feel the sudden need to have a guy with a serious level of immaturity and obvious attention seeking disorder as their national spokesperson?
Three words: Human. Rights. Campaign.
Welcome to the modern world of corporate extortion. The unofficial, yet official, version of pay-to-play.
As environmental, social, governance (ESG) scores are continually forced on corporations, the goal of making a profit for shareholders has shifted. Companies now look beyond their corporate charters, proving their worth through ESG scoring. A part of that ESG score — the “S” — is partially based on something called the Corporate Equality Index (CPE).
Who promotes the Corporate Equality Index? You guessed it: the Human Rights Campaign.
Criteria such as whether a specific company has a public stance on LGBTQ rights, provides LGBTQ benefits, promotes gender fluidity in the workplace, and more, form the CPE. The goal of the HRC is to force companies to obtain a perfect score of 100, or risk having their CPE score decline, which in turn brings down the company’s overall ESG scoring.
“Well, we can’t have that! We’ve got to get more of that woke in here! Trot out some dude pretending to be a chick and let’s see if that will up our score! Let’s call it inclusivity!”
Thus, a company that once had heroes like Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan promoting its brands suddenly has a skinny dude dancing around in Nike sports bras.
If you think this makes no sense, you would be right. If you think this defies their corporate image, you would also be right. Yet companies continue to do it, and according to the HRC, there are 379 Fortune 500 companies participating in the Corporate Equality Index, and 258 of them have achieved the coveted score of 100.
It's likely some of those 379 companies actually believe in the things HRC stands for. They may in fact believe that a biological male can wake up one day identifying as a woman, that children should be subject to mutilating surgeries redesigning their anatomies, or that drag queens should be allowed to prance provocatively in front of elementary school children.
But I theorize that many of them do not. It is more likely that many of the companies scoring well on the HRC’s CPE are just corporate cowards living in fear, and so they pander into subservience, never knowing that the wokists will never be satisfied. Wokists will always demand more, and if you fail them, they will lower your score and bring the fires of ESG down upon the corporation’s bottom line.
But history shows that companies which stand up and say “no” do pretty well. Rather than scoring 100 on HRC’s made-up index, we need more companies to shoot for a golf-like, “low score wins” approach.
Goya Foods is the largest Hispanic-owned food distribution company in the U.S. After Goya took conservative stances, progressive cancel culture called for massive boycotts, yet their net sales rocketed up 22%. People who had never eaten black beans in their life rushed to the stores to buy Goya Foods products.
Chick-fil-A faced constant backlash from liberals for promoting biblical marriage between a man and a woman. The boycotts failed every time, and Chick-fil-A is one of the highest grossing restaurant chains in the world, with sales in the billions.
HRC and liberal wokists will never be satisfied. They are bullies. But those companies who dare to push back will find that good old red-blooded Americans will rush to their support and thank them for their courage.
In this case, the low score wins.
To contact Phil or request him for a speaking engagement, go to www.rightsideradio.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819News.com.
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