The Rise of the DEI/ESG Commissars

Who remembers the Hunt for Red October? Based on the Tom Clancy novel, Sean Connery plays a Soviet sub captain who plans to defect to the U.S. along with his senior crew.

But before that can happen...

there's this one crew member who could foil the whole thing, and he needs to be dispatched. His position? 

The political officer.

And who is that? He's the one whose entire job is to make sure nothing transpires on the ship that runs afoul of Marxist orthodoxy. 

Often called political commissars, political officers became a common practice in all communist countries. It turns out that nobody much likes living under communism, so rigid control, directed from the top, was critical. Enforcers were needed everywhere to sniff out any potential troublemakers. 

But more than just policing, the commissars are responsible for a unit's political education. Officers and enlisted men were forced to sit through endless dreary lessons on Marxist/Leninist ideology.

Ideological conformity was paramount.

Like a lot of bad ideas, political officers first appeared in France, in this case during the Revolution. They were called commissaires politique. The Soviets adopted the idea shortly after their own revolution, and the Chinese Liberation Army continues the practice to this day.

But...now we do too.

I was talking to a prominent Ivy League professor the other day, one who will go nameless (for obvious reasons—the Ivies don't tolerate thought criminals). He laments that his school is not the same that it once was, calls it ideologically oppressive, and that it's only gotten worse under the Ivies' iron grip of Covid. (Obey!)

But hey, tell us something we don't know. The once great Ivies have become rigid, depressing places (longtime Naked Dollar readers know I've chronicled this many times in the past, particularly where my own alma mater is concerned.)

What I didn't know, and what I learned, was just how pervasive and intrusive the DEI complex has become on campuses. And I'm someone who thought he knew how bad it was.

It's worse.

A quick story is relevant here. 

The villain in my novel Campusland is the dean of diversity and inclusion at a fictitious university (located in "Havenport, Connecticut"—draw your own conclusions). At some point, I had to decide how many employees to put in her department. After trying and failing to find out how many DEI employees several Ivies had (they pretty much bury the info), I settled on thirty. I figured, hey, this is satire, so I'm allowed to exaggerate.

Almost to the day that Campusland hit the bookstores, I found out Yale's actual number.

150. 

If you'd read that number in a satiric novel, would you have bought it? Me neither.

Anyway, back to my professor friend.

He said that his department's DEI "coordinator" had many objections to a book he was getting published, mostly around what was deemed "triggering" terminology and characterizations. Mind you, this was a science-based book. The professor had to fight his own school's DEI bureaucracy over words. 

An Ivy League School

Think about that. Every department at this Ivy has not only a dedicated DEI bureaucrat, but, according to the professor, subcommittees as well.

He added:

"They take up so much of everyone's time, make everyone nervous about saying/teaching/basically thinking the wrong thing. But they feel important, and the faculty encourage them because all are afraid to be the white men who set boundaries."

All of academia lives under the jackboot of DEI commissars. Their power is enormous.

But the professor's story doesn't end there. His outside publisher had something called a "sensitivity reader."

What's that, you ask? Pretty much the same thing as the DEI coordinator. They screen your work for wrongthink, to borrow from Orwell.

I called my publisher and asked about this. It turns out that at major publishers, every book, fiction and non-fiction, is put through this ideological gauntlet. Everything you read now has been scrubbed and sanitized by some nameless, faceless wokester who finds offense in everything. (Campusland, apparently, snuck in under the wire just before this took over the industry.)

The sensitivity reader in the professor's case had fifteen pages of comments. Fifteen! I read them myself, and they are as particulate and ridiculous as you might imagine.

The apparatchiks are everywhere now. (Conform!)

Which brings us to the financial industry and something called "ESG."

If you're not familiar with this, ESG stands for "Environmental, Social, and Governance." (It is part and parcel of something called "stakeholder capitalism.")

ESG investing means putting your money where your values are. There's nothing ostensibly wrong with that—it's your money, you can invest it as badly as you like. But the system has been hijacked by the money managers, most notably Blackrock and its CEO, the odious Larry Fink. Rarely has someone gotten so wildly rich off the very system he seeks to destroy.

Larry Fink

At $9 trillion of AUM, Blackrock is easily the largest money manager in the world. They take those trillions and invest practically everywhere.

Why does this matter?

Because Larry Fink is irredeemably woke, and he has made Blackrock into an activist investor. 

Want them to invest in your compoany? Better be ESG compliant. 

But what is ESG compliant?

Increasingly, investors rely on ESG "scores," actual grades for each of the three category. These can be very subjective. For instance, should Exxon get a high score or a low score? On one hand, they are an oil company, and we all know they're evil. On the other hand, they're really trying to do something about it. (Correct answer: low score. Because oil.)

A lot of power is in the hands of the people creating these scores, most notably Morgan Stanley. Think these committees are run by conservatives who value, say, cost-benefit analyses? If you do, I've got a solar array in Seattle I'd like to sell you.

(Also, what about the conflict? Will Exxon's ESG score magically change when Morgan Stanley's banking department is trying to raise capital for them?)

This is all a bit like social media companies hiring left-wing-grifters-dressed-up-as-do-gooders like the Southern Poverty Law Center to decide who should be de-platformed. Or worse, it's an eerie echo of China's social credit system (now seemingly being adopted by Canada).

ESG investing is all about subverting free market capitalism to the will of the woke progressive agenda. 

The real fun starts after ESG investors invest, when they start laying shareholders resolutions on your company, forcing adherence to ESG doctrine. That's when they really start throwing their muscle around and voting all those shares—money that isn't actually theirs! That money belongs mostly to small investors via pension funds, investors who likely know little of what's being done in their name.

ESG adherents claim they are "doing well by doing good." But there's no evidence they're doing either. In fact, by forcing companies out of profitable businesses, like say, fracking (the "E"), by compelling companies to pursue (always progressive) social causes that have no link to shareholder profits (the "S"), or by forcing appointments of possibly less-than-qualified board members in the name of diversity (the "G"), it does nothing but undermine profitability. 

But let's say you run an investment company, and you just want to keep running money like you used to and not have to filter everything through the lens of social justice.

No problem, right?

Wrong.

The Long March has captured regulators, the accrediting institutions, the consultants, and the pension allocators. The auditors will be next, according to one source. RFPs ("requests for proposal") are now littered with questions about your firm's commitment to the various tenets of wokism. According to one invesment company CEO I spoke to, "Best practices now encompass ideology. No debate, no appeal."

If you want your firm to succeed, you must bend the knee.

He added the following:

"Pension allocators are the sneakiest. They are effectively creating law, public policy, and enforcing it without voter input, debate, or even knowledge. Given their size, their standards run downstream, changing everything..."

And now, if your firm is of a certain size, you are all-but-required to have full-time ESG staff. They are your embedded commissars, and their power increases by the day. You may have graduated, but you are still on campus.

I've singled out education and finance in this piece, but DEI bullies, sensitivity readers, and ESG monitors are spreading everywhere, in every manner of organization. They are a cancer, a modern Red Guard, and will ruin your career and your company if you step out of line.

So, comrades, you know what to do.

Obey.