WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Isaac Willour: The True Victims of Woke Corporations

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Isaac Willour is an analyst at Bowyer Research, America's leading pro-fiduciary proxy consulting firm. He is an award-winning journalist and frequent commentator on ESG, DEI, and the culture war, with work in USA Today, National Review, The Daily Wire, The American Mind, and the Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Grove City College, Mr. Willour has appeared on shows ranging from Fox to the New York Times Opinion, and can be found on X @IsaacWillour.He joins WRFH to discuss his recent essay, The True Victims of Woke Corporations.From 03/05/25.

Hello and welcome. This is WRFH Video Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Malia Tibido, joined today by Isaac Willard, a corporate engagement analyst at Bauer Research and writer for Daily Wire and National Review, who commentates on DEI, ESG investing, and the culture war. He recently wrote the article, The True Victims of Woke Corporations, which you can find and read at The American Spectator. Hi, Isaac. Thanks for being here. Hi, Malia. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you here. So, let's get a very. into it. Who are the true victims of woke corporations? So the piece specifically lays out what starts with a very high profile story from the world of corporate finance, right? So if you're, if you follow the corporate space, or even if you really don't, you've probably heard the term debanking, right? Debanking refers to when a financial institution removes financial services from a client based on the belief that that specific client poses reputational risk to the company.

And so what I write about in the piece is a story about. how Bank of America, one of the largest banks in the country, right, be banked a group called Indigenous Advance. Indigenous Advance is a Memphis-based nonprofit that funnels American philanthropic dollars to on-the-ground organizations in Uganda, schools, churches, those vocational schools, that sort of thing. Several years ago, Indigenous Advance was debanked by Bank of America. Suddenly, without warning, and I did an interview with the founder of Indigenous Advance, a guy named Steve Happ, who's lovely. And he discussed the process of, Bank of America shuttered several of his accounts without explaining why, because under U.S.

law, banks aren't entirely allowed to disclose the exact reasons why they debanked a client. There is a strong suspicion that Indigenous advance was debanked, had its financial services pulled from Bank of America because, quite frankly, it was a religious organization. Bank of America disputes that claim, but there was a religious discrimination complaint filed. Bank of America maintains that it is because the group of Indigenous advance is actually a debt collector, indigenous advance is not. In fact, a debt collector. It's a Christian nonprofit that helps orphans and widows. Go back to the question, who are the true victims of woke corporations, right? If you look at the current debate over DEI, over ESG,

over what corporations should or shouldn't be doing in the political sphere, the refrain that you will often get from people, especially who are more on the left, or more pro-D-EI, is that the only victims of quote-unquote woke corporations, and they would even dispute that term, they would tell you that the only victims of woke corporations are straight white men, or that there are no real victims of woke corporations because corporate wokenness is a fiction. The problem is corporate policies like Bank of Americas that are either, A, biased, or B, so vague that it's impossible to tell whether they're biased or not, those kind of policies hurt the most vulnerable people. Indigenous advance serves many organizations in Uganda, including orphanages in very, very

poor areas of the country. Uganda is not exactly the world's most rich country. And if you're an orphan in Uganda, you are probably among the most vulnerable at risk of being victimized populations in the world. And Bank of America's policies hurt them. They had to, I detail in the piece at American Spectator, but Steve had to, Steve found out about that his organization had been debanked very shortly before going on a trip to Uganda, which meant he was shut off from a great deal, his financial capital. He had to find new workarounds to be able to pay people, including people on the ground in Uganda, right? These are not philanthropists in New York not getting paid. These are people who work on the ground in Kampala not being paid. And providentially, he had made some kind of fail-safe arrangements

beforehand for this kind of situation. If he hadn't, Bank of America's policies would have led to those orphans going hungry. So when we talk about the victims of woke corporations, it's very easy to pretend that this is all an up in the clouds, very high and mighty situation that's just vaguely moving money around that just affects brokers, affects wealthy investors, affects only high networked individuals. And of course, that matters too, right? Capital matters at all levels. But the true victims of woke corporations too often are people like the orphans in Uganda who are, have no voice. They can't speak out against the policies of massive corporations like Bank of America, they have no choice. And I'm proud, you mentioned

my firm employer research that does work on behalf of many of these groups pushing back on companies biased corporate policies to make sure that these kinds of situations with Indigenous advance can't happen. Yeah. You talked about how many people see the arguments of business policy as a very abstract concept. And then you also talked about the real world consequences, is the human stories, the human element of it. Do you think that the human element should be more prevalent in public policy discussions? That's a very good question. I think it should, right?

So when we talk about the free market, right, the term the free market is, or worse, yet, the term capitalism is one of those terms that is not in and of itself bad, does not communicate the human level that defenders of the free market should be arguing at. So the facts about the free market system are undeniable. The free enterprise system lifted billions, would they be billions of people out of absolutely crushing poverty within the past two centuries of our lifetime. There is no real historical debate about that. What half the free market wrought? The free market has brought untold amounts of wealth and with wealth meaningfully, human flourishing to people who for years did not have that option.

So the human side of these things for defenders of the free market should absolutely. be the first thing. When it comes to, we can reference Africa again. I wrote quite a few years ago now for a place called the Acton Institute about how foreign aid towards that's invested in the country of Africa has done a great deal of good. But one of the things that's done even more good is venture capital has gone into entrepreneurial endeavors in Africa that's actually created wealth within the continent and allowed people to take agency of their own financial destiny. inherently, I think one of the best quotes about this actually comes from my friend Jonah Goldberg, who talks about how the free market is one of the best, maybe the best thing when it comes to

raising people out of poverty and giving people a better life. The problem is that it doesn't feel like it. I think that's very true. Capitalism in the way a lot of people who are pro-free markets talk about capitalism does not feel human, does not feel profoundly pro-human. It feels pro-capital and pro-human second. That's not a fundamental problem with the free market worldview. That's a fundamental problem with the way we argue the free market worldview. And it's allowed people who are not pro-free markets, whether that's on the left or the right, it's allowed people who are more given to socialism and this sort of thing to reframe the debate around economics, around markets, and around morality as the evil, greedy Scrooge McDuckish

capitalists versus the empathetic pro-human socialist, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth. The human side is the key. And that's why I think telling stories like Indigenous advances is so important. Indigenous advance is not moving around billions of dollars. It is providing support for people in tremendously impoverished areas in the country, of countries across the world that otherwise would not have those kinds of options available to them. That is the free market in action, right? The UN isn't doing that. The idea is to undergird free enterprise and entrepreneurship and people using their God-given talent, and abilities to create that human flourishing for others.

Those ideas are what's doing that. And I think we miss that far too much. We need to talk about it more. So you would push back against conservative commentators who say things like facts, don't care about your feelings and who argue with the more philosophical portion. This is fun. So Ben's great, right? I would not be in politics without finding out about Ben Shapiro at a young age.

Many people who are in my age in the conservative ecosystem grow up watching Ben. Ben's great. And I know what he means by facts, don't care about your feelings, right? He means at some level, feelings do not decide reality, facts decide reality, which is actually a very pro-human point, right? Because if you can create more capital and more capital creates more human flourishing, you will have a better life. I think, I don't think it's really a Ben problem.

I really don't because I think quite highly of him. I think when it comes to facts may not care about your feelings, but people do. And when it comes to making arguments against people who view capitalism as, I'm sure you've seen the film with Scrooge McDuck where he's like sliding down his pile of gold coins and just like locking himself in his vault to count his money. That for better or for worse, and by that I mean for worse and for worse, is the perception many people have of people who are pro-capitalism, or pro-free markets or pro-free enterprise. That absolutely, that perception 100% is not true. But we are not going to alter that perception for many, many people who

hold it with facts. We have to use stories. Stories are the most powerful weapon in our And one of the great things about people who are pro-free enterprise is that the stories are true. It is unquestionably true that free enterprise makes people's lives better, whether it's a single mom in Detroit or whether it's an orphan in Uganda or whether it's an orphan in India like I was when I was born. These are profound ways in which people's lives are made better. People around the world's lives have been made better by the power of people using their

skills to create things, to create value. you and create wealth and create human flourishing for other people. That's what matters. So I don't disagree with facts, don't care about your feelings. But people do care about feelings. And at the end of the day, right, you can't change minds without changing people. And if you're going to change people's minds, you need stories and you need narratives and you need realistic framings of the world that also pull on the emotions of people to connect with what the intellectual arguments that you're making. So you need both. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Leah Tippetto with Isaac Willer. And An analyst at Bauer Research, Young Voices Contributor, and author of a new article titled

The True Victims of Woke Corporations published in The American Spectator. So to get back to the article, a lot of it is about religious freedom in corporations. So what do you think the Bank of America's actions toward HAP and other ministries like his signal, whether it's true or not, about corporation and their discrimination against Christian nonprofit. Yeah. So one of the other stories we also mentioned, we'll get back to happen a minute. One of the other stories I mentioned is a story about an Adobe employee who was, we'll say, for lack of a better word, we'll say targeted and kind of reprimanded for expressing his religious beliefs on a public employee forum, right? There is a spirit within many modern

American businesses that the purpose of business, purpose of a large corporation is not merely to be a good business, right? The purpose of Costco is not merely to make hot dogs and be able to buy 1,800 paper towels in the same plastic container, right? The goal is to be able to use the power of a corporation to signal socially and politically, to opine on social and political issues that are outside of core business, right? And furthermore, the problem with what we, and we talk about in the piece with Adobe is that you're openly offering employees, you're essentially really creating a space where employees can opine on politics through a work channel. That's really dangerous, right? Not only does that really

politicize the brand. That can be really bad. But it can lead to instances like James that we described in the story of an employee speaks out and their viewpoint, right? James is a religious guy. He's a Mormon, right? His opinion doesn't line up with the line that higher ups in the company might want to be towed. And my point is, companies could avoid all those kinds of problems if they just stayed out of politics, right? The position of my firm boy research is that companies need to be politically neutral, right? It is not the job of a company like John Deere that sells agriculture equipment to sponsor events around social and cultural awareness, right? It's not their job to sponsor pride for AIDS. And in fairness, they said as much earlier, I think it was last year at this point.

Their job is to make tractors, right? Target's job is to make clothes. And it's not to use corporate influence, to use shareholder money, to make social and political stances. Because doing so, as we believe, and has been demonstrated many times. We mentioned Target before. Bud Light's a similar example. When companies use their power and use their prestige and use their brand to champion political and social issues that are outside of their core business, their business suffers. It politicizes their brand.

It can hurt shareholder return. And it creates a perception that this company is not for everybody. And that's the message, for better or for worse, intentionally or otherwise, that Bank of America's actions send. So earlier this year, Trump was at Davos and he called out Bank of America. America specifically. How does it get that bad? How does a bank have to become so political at the Republican President of the United States castigates them at Davos, which is one of the most high-profile cultural outlets in the world? How does it get that bad? Simple. Companies politicize, politicize, politicize, and when instances like Indigenous advance and Steve have come up,

the message being sent is that if you champion a certain political or really, if you happen to hold certain political, forget champion, right? The goal of Indigenous advance is to serve Uganda and widows and orphans, not to champion political causes. It is a Christian nonprofit, though. And so when corporations make these kinds of statements, and we could talk about many different ways in which corporate policy kind of indicates a level of religious animus unconsciously or consciously. When corporations do that, they are saying that if you are an employee of faith, if you are a shareholder of faith, if you are a customer of faith, you're not going to be treated the same way. Now, maybe that's not true with Bank of America. And the bank maintains that that's not

true, but for many, many other brands that have policies on the books that smack of religious animus towards people of faith or towards people of a certain political leaning that happens to be out of vogue with what out of line with what is culturally in vogue right now, that is the message that is being sent, that this corporation is not for everybody. And this corporation is supposed to be for everybody. Its purpose is to make products. Its purpose is to create goods and services and be the best at doing those things, right? I don't need Lockheed Martin to a about pride or about presidential politics. I need Lockheed Martin to make the instruments of war that keep people safe. I need Amazon to be the best online retailer in the world. I don't need them

to opine about which books it will and won't allow. You can ask people like Brian Anderson about that. I don't need companies and shareholders don't want companies to make those kinds of statements. They want companies to stay out of politics, be politically neutral and focus on core business. And when they don't, that in and of itself is a negative signal. Would you say this politicization of business is relatively new? Depends on what you mean by that. So with regards to specific things, I'm thinking specifically of things like DEI, a lot of the upswing and very problematic and discriminatory DEI programs definitely came after

the death of George Floyd in 2020, obviously. But some issues go back much further. So when it comes to things like climate related net zero commitment, that sort of thing, that predates George Floyd, for sure. That goes back to Millennium Declaration. That goes back to a lot of things. We talk about things like companies making commitments by 2050, we will have. have net zero carbon emissions or by 2030, right? Those are rooted in activist demands that have

gone back for several decades, right? There's this, and the thing about corporate activists, especially those who are broadly on the left, broadly pro ESG, pro-D-EI, is that they've been at this for 10 to 20 years. They've been talking to corporate executives for years via processes that exist for exactly this sort of dialogue. And people who are conservative for too long have been asleep at the wheel. That is changing now in my work at Boyer Research is our work is critical in fixing that and getting conservatives and getting people who are advocates of fiduciary duty and want companies to be politically neutral and getting those voices into the boardroom where they need to be. But some of it is fairly new. I think it's also evolving very quickly. Obviously,

the re-election of Donald Trump has given us a major, we call it a vibe shift, right? The vibe shift is very real. Companies are looking at and dialoguing around these issues very differently. There's a ton of developments. This has been going on for a long time. I think now probably a lot of the developments are going to be a lot more positive. But yeah, this has been going on for quite a long time. Yeah. When you gave the example of James Brown and even in the Steve Half one, you talked about how they both went through the legal process. Like James Brown said that he cited a specific state law in his own defense. How important is it for people nowadays to be aware of a specific state and federal laws protecting their freedoms? The analogy that we often use is the Apostle Paul, right? What does Paul do? Paul is a Roman citizen. And when he is seeking to make the appeal, the case for Christianity in the context of the Roman world, he has the influence of being a Roman citizen. What does he say? He says, I appeal to Caesar. And there are many moments when that approach is questioned, including by people within the Roman system, right? There was a moment when I believe it's Festus says Paul could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar. But Paul knew what he was doing. He was using the existing legitimate leverage that he had as a Roman

citizen to be able to truly speak truth into the places where it mattered the most, where it was not being spread and where he absolutely needed to be. That is why using the levers of financial influence, why using the levers of policy, is so important because the battle we're fighting is when people say things like, we have to completely remake the system of politics because nothing we've tried as work. In the corporate space, what do you mean nothing we tried hasn't worked? Conservatives and people who are kind of center-right have been asleep at the wheel on this for years. Only recently are we even understanding and using the tools that have existed for years. Yes, the system, it is a wonderful thing and is a very laudable thing. It's what we need to be doing

is taking stock of the real world influence that we have, whether that's through existing policy pathways to make our voices heard, or whether it's through financial leverage, right? Our our clients at Boyer Research range from normal mom and pop investors to state pension funds, right? There's a tremendous amount of financial leverage that is capable of being exerted. And it's our job to exert that. That's not cheating, right? That's not gaming the system. That is the system.

Right. That's how the system is always supposed to work. And there is nothing dishonorable about people who are conservative, right wing, or Christian, people of faith, using legitimate financial influence and using legitimate financial influence and making a change. That's actually how we make change and lock in goals. There's nothing odd about that. It's how change happens. Yeah. So a peer of mine wrote an article about how McDonald's is walking back.

It's DEI policies. Do you think corporations like that are making legitimate attempts to bring their company's scope back into the business of doing business? Or do you think that's just a veneer? It's an interesting question, right? A difference from company to company. this is a question that we deal with all the time in our day-to-day work, corporate engagement, right? When it comes to a company like, let's take a really good example, right? So recently, PepsiCo put out a statement that their advertising policy is politically neutral.

PepsiCo had made some major missteps in terms of its advertising policy. They joined a group that was very anti-conservative in its advertising policy. And they changed that, right? They put out a statement adopting viewpoint neutrality. That's a real policy win, right? That's a changed policy that we can point to and say, well, This is it. This is a commitment that now exists expressly in writing that didn't exist expressly in writing before. Those kind of commitments, I think, are very good. Those things are really good

statements. When it comes to corporations just putting out public things about committing to axing DEI, for example, right, when company dissolves its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, there's a big range of what that could mean. Does that mean that you're just rebranding your DEI initiatives, right? Like, as we literally, as we're recording, this, this whole, whole question of not in the corporate space, but it's still a valid parallel of what's going on at George Mason University. They're trying to rebrand a diversity department to something different. That's a much different level of sincerity than a company actually being willing to change its policies in response to pressure. So I think some corporations really mean it. We're talking

with corporations right now that are in the middle of making really good commitments that I think are very laudable and I think very genuine. There are other corporations that really are just doing this because that's where the political wind is blowing. And they just want to insulate themselves. They're not interested in actual political neutrality. They just don't want to have to fight with the new Trump administration. There's a real range. And part of our goal and part of our duty, I would argue, is to parse out who the genuine good faith actors are in this space and who's just trying to read the tea leaves and put in some kind of performative screen coverall solution. Because the first is a wonderful thing that we should be encouraging. And the second thing is

completely insincere. And we should be actively opposing it. Well, thank you again for joining today, Isaac. Where can people follow you in your work? So I'm on X, Isaac Willauer, I-S-A-A-A-A-C-W-I-L-O-U-R. And you can check out Young Voices. I think it's Join Young Voices on Twitter as well. We're there, and I would love to connect and talk more. This has been Malia Tippettow on WRFH, Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.