Opinion: Writer Says the Fight Against ESG Is a Fight Against 'Cultural Marxism' and That the OCC's Debanking Report Shows the Threat Remains
In a Halloween anniversary essay, the author recalls pitching allies in 2019 and says ESG's pushback has worked better than expected. He points to the OCC report on bank policies as proof the risk is not gone.
This is an opinion column from The Daily Signal. The views belong to its author, not to RightNewsRightNow. The Signal's page we could read did not show the author's name clearly, so we do not name one here.
His story. Seven years ago on Halloween 2019, the author says, he sat in a conference room with Justin Danhof, then director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research and now director of policy at the Labor Department's Employee Benefits Security Administration. Danhof pitched think tanks, media and donors on a threat he saw in ESG, or environmental, social and governance investing, and in "stakeholderism."
The thesis. The pitch, he writes, was that the political Left had spent a century moving from encouraging revolution to capturing cultural institutions: religion, education, news media and entertainment. Business was the last holdout, and ESG was the attempt to take it. He says that framing became his book, "The Dictatorship of Woke Capital."
The claim of success. He writes that the fight against ESG has been "far more successful" than he or Danhof expected, but that real damage was done to people and businesses along the way, and that risk "remains elevated."
The debanking evidence. He cites a Daily Signal piece last week by Allen Mendenhall on the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's report on debanking. As he quotes it, the OCC found banks kept policies restricting access for industries including oil and gas, coal, firearms, detention facilities, tobacco and digital assets, and cited pressure from congressional oversight, shareholder resolutions and activists. He says the report also shows PNC declined a credit line for a media company after its ESG group flagged an owner's foundation for funding Christian conservative groups, and that TD Bank judged a faith-based health care sharing ministry risky because its religious requirements appeared to conflict with the bank's diversity values. Banks, he notes, relied on outside sources including the Southern Poverty Law Center.
His closing. "The spear has been blunted, but not broken," he writes.
Note for readers: this is advocacy from a conservative outlet. The quotations from the OCC report are as the author presents them, and we did not review the report. The column names banks and groups that are not given a chance to respond.