24 Oct 2024 Scott Shepard Discusses Boycotts, HRC, WEF, Fascism and More During Pray Vote Stand Summit
“We have had a wonderful year or two,” National Center General Counsel Scott Shepard acknowledges about the freedom movement’s progress to move woke corporations back to neutral. But now is not the time to rest, because “we’ve got a huge fight ahead of us.”
At this month’s Pray Vote Stand Summit, Scott was part of a panel entitled “The Power of the Anti-Woke Right: How Americans Put Radical Companies on the Run.” Scott, a key member of our Free Enterprise Project (FEP) team, appeared alongside former FEP Director Justin Danhof — now at Strive Asset Management — and one of our other favorite allies in the movement, The Political Forum’s Stephen Soukup.
Moderator Suzanne Bowdey of The Washington Stand peppered the panel with questions based both on her own years of boycotting companies and also the recent phenomenon we’ve seen in which companies are retreating from their support of ESG and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI).
We clipped and transcribed some of our favorite Scott soundbites from the panel:
Why boycotts are not enough, and what more can be done to hold corporations accountable:
Boycotts are fine. And I think that’s the right thing to do if they’re sustainable. But it’s not enough. You’ve got to get in the fight.
If you own shares, we put together an app, the Free Enterprise Project did recently: Proxy Navigator. You can go automate your proxy votes so that they’re voted in the way you want, your values and our values. And then that’s very quick process.
But you’ve got to, if you are getting a pension, you’ve got to make sure that pension is following fiduciary duty, not voting according to ESG. And sue them if they are.
If you’ve got some kind of a client relationship with BlackRock or State Street or Vanguard, they’re violating their fiduciary duties every time they speak at this point. They’re the greatest confounders of solemn duty in the history of the business world. It’s astonishing.
So boycott if you wish, but stay in the fight.
Why the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index is so insidious:
The Corporate Quality Index is a survey put out by HRC, the Human Rights Campaign, every year that they pretend is just making sure that nobody is discriminating against anybody. To get a perfect score on this index, you have to affirmatively sign up your corporation for the left-wing position on some of the most toxic and extreme political concerns that trouble us. So it’s an admission by the people who get the 100% score of a breach of fiduciary duty every day and every way. And so we’ve been pushing for years, pointing out that they’re admitting breach.
Robby Starbuck — who’s wonderful — he has jumped into the fray and, with his support online, has gotten the ball from the 10 into the end zone again and again and again.
When I was a little boy, one of my heroes — before a convention quite like this one, as a matter of fact — stood up and he said that the Soviet Union is a locus of evil in the modern world. He was right, of course.
Well, the Soviet Union is gone and I know somebody else has the title of Father of Lies. But if your goal is to fight the Father of Lies here below, we know that he lives in Davos these days. That’s the locus of evil in the modern western world. And that’s the power and the combination of power, the drawing in of power, that we all have to fight.
Why today’s fascism looks like leftist CEOs and politicians colluding to constrain the people:
The original definition of fascism was the top of government and the top of business coming together to rule collectively, be the people with power, and reduce the opportunities and liberties of the people of the country because they’re just not particularly important. They’re there as cannon fodder. They’re there to represent the Volk or whatever, but they as individuals, they are completely meaningless. That’s the same as what these clowns have in mind for us. It’s exactly the same thing.
Consider: They say they’re not partisan, but the whole-of-government initiatives of the Biden administration were (1) equity-based discrimination and (2) decarbonization on political schedules, no matter what it did to all of us.
Those are the twin goals, the primary goals of ESG.
Why the war against Woke Capitalism isn’t over yet:
We have had a wonderful year or two. And I’d say that we’ve started the fight and we’ve won Lexington, maybe even Concord. But this is the very beginning of a battle that – to be successful – will have to go on for year after year after year. Not even Saratoga is glimmering in the distance yet.
We’ve got a huge fight ahead of us, and we’re gonna have to fight, because their goal – control energy, make it unreliable and more expensive; destroy the social fabric of the company by reintroducing racism, sexism, religious discrimination throughout American corporate culture — what they wanna do is destroy everything so that they can constrain our lives (I know this sounds conspiracy nut. It’s absolutely true.), so they can live from Davos as a world noble class controlling our lives.
Watch the entire panel discussion below.