The End of ESG?

BlackRock’s Larry Fink disowns ESG – says he will no longer use the term

Wall Street’s wizard of wokery, Larry Fink, is furiously backpedalling on ESG. On 25 June during the Aspen Ideas Festival the BlackRock CEO said he would no longer use the term ‘ESG’ due to its ‘weaponisation’ by both the ‘far right’ and the ‘far left’.

It’s clear that, in their typical myopia, the blue bloods of the WEF assumed they could trojan-horse Marxism into our lives without any pushback. But push back we have, and all who’ve been working to raise awareness can take a quick victory lap.

I have made special mention of ESG in my writing to date, for it is perhaps the most manifestly observable proof that the wokefication of our societies is not a ragtag grassroots phenomenon, but a formal program of work, driven from the highest levels of the financial system. Indeed, ESG and woke capital are not simply free market reactions to consumer sentiment but, as Larry Fink himself recently said, BlackRock intends to “force behaviours”.

I have discussed this in my most recent essay We Must Stop Saying “The Left”, and in previous pieces – Have a Conversation About ESG, and The Mistake Everyone Makes About Wokeness.

But most pertinent to Fink’s recent declaration was my essay of March 7 this year Get Woke, Go Broke in which I examined Vanguard’s withdrawal from the $59 trillion Net Zero Asset Managers initiative. Tim Buckley, CEO of Vanguard, the world’s second largest asset manager after BlackRock, with over $7 trillion AUM, said late last year that “Our research indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing.”

In Get Woke, Go Broke I put it to Buckley that this little nugget of investing wisdom should have been perfectly obvious to him from the beginning, after all, I could see that ESG was total bunk when I first heard about it back in 2016 at which time I could not even have told you the difference between an ETF and a P/E ratio. I put it to Buckley that he’s not that stupid, and the true reason for his sudden reticence on woke investing is the bad press it’s getting thanks to the many writers and commentators shining a spotlight on the issue. I myself liberated my retirement money from the asset management racket here in Australia in 2022 and encouraged my readers to do the same in my essay Get Your Retirement Money Out of the System.

But investors everywhere are clearly waking up to the woke wonkery as seen in the crushing of Bud Light and Target stock these past few months, with a combined market cap loss of around $30 billion for their embrace of Trans ideology in their marketing and sales strategies.

The Bud Light backlash alone is arguably the most successful boycott not only by conservative leaning folk, but by any group of consumers ever, with the flailing beverage maker, once America’s number one beer, now paying people to buy their product!

Could it be that we are winning?

I think so. It’s clear that the tide is turning in the Culture War and that the out-of-touch patricians at the helm of the globalist takeover have not only misjudged their own deftness at subterfuge and chicanery, but epically underestimated the intelligence of we the common folk. In typical Boomer obtuseness, they have failed to grasp the power of the internet, the decentralisation of information it has enabled, and the monumental decline in public trust of elite institutions in the past decade or two.

We are winning the culture war and the clumsy posturing of the establishment is becoming more comical by the hour. Even as their stock crumbles and the very viability of their enterprise comes into question, they continue to wave their rainbow flags and earnestly insist on their own grand virtuousness, all the while lecturing us on our deplorable bigotry.

It is a sad and pathetic spectacle, and for those of us who’ve been beating the warning drum on ESG these past months, an immensely gratifying sight to behold, and Larry Fink’s public disowning of the acronym is the icing on the layer cake of humiliation that the woke industrial complex has been force-feeding itself since the narrative began seriously unravelling around the time Joe Biden took office.

But we must not get complacent and mistake Fink’s retreat for repentance. Watch out for newly minted euphemisms coming down the line. As we speak, Larry Fink and Klaus Schwab are likely working with their PR consultants to rebrand ESG and give it a sparkly new feel-good personality. I’m almost excited to see what it will be, so absurd are their robotic efforts to bamboozle us.

But bamboozle us they do. Case in point: no sooner had the man in the street woken up to the outrageous inconsistencies of the official Covid-19 story than his credulity was catalysed once more to regurgitate hawkish postulations on the war in Ukraine on behalf of the very same transnational military-industrial interests that brought us the Wuhan lab and the mRNA jab.

Our ability to discern propaganda is erratic at best, and while we may outstrip the fuddy-duddies at the WEF in terms of internet and information savviness, our propensity to ignore past lessons and revert to type is hardly our most commendable feature.

We the great unwashed must adopt a permanent war footing if we are to win the Great War of our time which goes beyond mere culture and imperils our very existence.

To paraphrase a tweet I made last week:

We may win the Culture War and the system may divest from its woke agenda. But this will not solve the problem. The system will simply weave a new cloak of lies for its Great Reset program. These people are shapeshifters.

Herein lies the issue. Too many on our side of the fight believe the Culture War to be the final frontier. What they fail to see is the force against which we struggle is as old as our very species; it reinvents itself constantly; it twists and morphs and changes its colours like a chameleon. Woke investing and ESG are only market-friendly euphemisms for the fulcrum of a nefarious agenda of technocratic one-world government and authoritarian corporate control.

To achieve these ends, The Machine must destroy the middle class, and the tidiest way to do this is to steal our wealth. This they intend to do by fusing ideology with economics, thus controlling how money is spent and eliminating the free market.

ESG has been a useful tool in this regard, but it sounds like it may have outlived its utility. We can expect to hear less and less about Environment Social and Governance in the coming months and years – an absolute headache for the HR departments and corporate affairs teams of the business world who’ve only just finished re-jigging their internal lexicon to include the damned phrase! I shall be watching with amusement as the ripples reach my place of employment, and the new terminology is grandfathered in.

As to what this fresh nomenclature will be, it’s anyone’s guess. But one thing is certain: ESG is not going anywhere, it is simply up for a rebrand.

As with wokeness itself, ESG may have reached the end of its natural lifespan and we of the resistance can cease fire for a spell and smoke ‘em if we got ‘em. But paradoxically, such a victory worries me. As Andrew Tate recently said “I’m scared by the incompetence of my enemy. I’m scared by the fact that they are failing so monumentally.” Tate accurately identifies the inherent danger in temporarily beating back a foe of much greater size and sway. For while we may have the cultural power to hurt these corporations’ stock prices, and leave them with egg on their faces, they still hold most of the cards. The system has all the money and the monopoly on violence, and as we experienced very recently, it has no compunction whatsoever in employing these great levers of coercion to affect dictatorial control over our lives.

They’re running out of rope; the humiliations are becoming too painful; the old tricks aren’t working anymore. This raises the question – what desperate means will they employ next?

In 2024 Donald Trump again vies for ascendancy in a redux attempt at upsetting the globalist applecart. The confluence of this pivotal year with the weakening of the establishment’s grip on economics and culture will likely spur them on to extreme unilateral action.

The next big crisis will soon hit the news cycle – they need something big enough to disrupt the 2024 election in the same way mail-in voting during the ‘pandemic’ enabled sufficient ‘turnout’ to render Joe Biden the most popular president by total votes in US history. It’s possible that they’ll roll out another pandemic, or finally collapse the financial bubble, but my gut is telling me to look eastward, toward Ukraine. It could be that only the imminent prospect of World War 3 will provide the cover they need to enact the final phase of the Great Reset.

But all this is still a year away. In the meantime, watch closely for the new and improved version of ESG, for through our activism we have forced one of the most powerful men in the world to publicly disown one of his darlings. But while we can feel buoyant at this victory, it is but a minor skirmish in a much larger war; a war which cannot be won on cultural lines alone.

The billionaires of Davos are all-in on the Great Reset and it will take more than a PR disaster to stop them. The ends to which ESG was the means will not be abandoned – a broad underclass of social and political eunuchs, jumping at the shadows of racism and transphobia and prostrating themselves before the alter of climate action.

These are the ends they pursue, and it may well be that the ultimate means they employ to achieve them, will make ESG look tame in comparison.

We shall watch this space with great interest, and more than a little trepidation.