On the latest episode of his podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, Ben Shapiro discusses the surge in corporations creating LGBTQ-related advertising campaigns since 2019. He also dives into the financial and bureaucratic incentives guiding those choices.
Shapiro notes a turning point in 2019 when a group called The Business Roundtable, a collection of CEOs representing America’s largest companies adopted a new purpose for what a corporation is. The addition states, “All companies share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders to promote the larger social good.”
He then explained that this vague statement is shrouded in political underpinnings and has led to recent polarization over otherwise noncontroversial corporations. A total of 188 American CEOs signed onto the initiative, including Blackrock State Street, and Vanguard as well as J.P. Morgan and Bank of America.
Following this commitment, the measurement system for this “social good initiative” was instituted with Environmental Social Governance (ESG) scores, which rate companies on their compliance to these initiatives, impacting investment and status.
To iterate his point, Shapiro played a clip of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, “It’s just, you have to force behaviors. And If you don’t force behaviors, whether it’s gender or race, or any way you want to say the composition of your team, you’re going to be impacted. That’s just not recruiting its development.”
Shapiro then analyzed Fink’s statements, “It’s development, it’s recruiting, and it is investment itself. Investing in ESG-positive companies has been the way that all of these major corporations, these major investment firms, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, that is how they control the narrative in the United States of America.”
Shapiro’s rigorous analysis ties the increasing political influence infiltrating the business and advertising landscape to these pivotal changes in 2019, describing the way this shift of incentives changed how news is covered and the way corporations function.