Rightside Way Low Score Wins

by Phil Williams

Some years ago a contract lobbyist came to my state Senate office. Contract lobbyists are interesting. Unlike a governmental affairs person who works directly for one company, contract lobbyists work for whomever retains their services. Which also means that they can decline to work for someone if they don’t fit their personal or professional beliefs.

This particular lobbyist brought in a representative of Apple. They were corporately pushing for a bill designed to give preferential hiring treatment for LGBTQ applicants, and the lobbyist was under contract to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Needless to say, I didn’t support their bill, and I gave him some good-natured grief over his representation of the HRC.

That was six years ago, and since then, the HRC has grown to become what some refer to as the LGBTQ mafia. If you want to know who is pushing the overwhelmingly rabid transgender agenda look no further than the Human Rights Campaign.

The ubiquitous Dylan Mulvaney is everywhere now, and yes, I called him “he.” With over-the-top antics, he has become famous for chronicling his “transition” to being a transgender woman during his “365 days of girl- hood” on social media. Where he used to be that feminine guy skipping across rooms, giggling that he is a woman, he was nonetheless confined to TikTok or Instagram. But not anymore. For reasons many cannot fathom, major corporate brands like Budweiser, Nike, and Kate Spade have made him one of their national spokespersons.

Why would major corporations long associated with the beer of the average Joe, the gear of major athletes, and the high fashion sense of actual women, feel the sudden need to have a guy with a serious level of immaturity and obvious attention seeking disorder as their national spokesperson?

I’ll tell you why in just three words: Human. Rights. Campaign.

Welcome to the modern world of corporate extortion. The unofficial, yet official, version of pay-to-play.

As the continued push for Environmental-Social-Governance (ESG) scores is forced on corporations, the goal of making a profit for shareholders has shifted to companies proving their worth beyond their corporate charters, resulting in ESG scoring.

As a part of that ESG score, the “S” is based in part on something called the Corporate Equality Index (CPE).

Who promotes the Cor- porate Equality Index? You guessed it: the Human Rights Campaign. Does the company have a public stance on LGBTQ rights, provide LGBTQ benefits, or promote gender fluidity in the workplace? These criteria and more form the CPE, with the goal of HRC being to force companies to obtain a perfect score of 100 or risk having their CPE score go down, which in turn would bring down the company’s overall ESG scoring.

“Well, we can’t have that! We’ve got to get some more of that woke in here! Trot out some dude that pretends to be a chick and let’s see if that will up our score! Let’s call it inclusivity!”

Thus a company that once had heroes like Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan promoting its brands suddenly has a skinny dude dancing around in Nike sports bras. If you think that it makes no sense, then you would be right. If you think that it defies their corporate image, then you would also be right. Yet they do it, and according to the HRC there are 379 Fortune 500 companies who participate in the HRC Corporate Equality Index, and 258 of them have achieved the coveted score of 100.

I suppose it is likely that some of those 379 actually believe in the things that HRC stands for. They may, in fact, believe that a biologi- cal male can wake up one day and identify as a woman, that children should be subject to mutilating surgeries that redesign their anatomies, or that drag queens should be allowed to prance provocatively in front of elementary age children.

But I theorize that many of them do not. It is more likely that many of the companies scoring well on the HRC’s CPE are really just corporate cowards who live in fear, and so they pander into subservience not knowing that the wokeists will never be satisfied. Wokeists will always demand more, and if you fail them, they will lower your score and bring the fires of ESG down upon the corporation’s bottom line.

However, history tells us that companies that stand up and say “no” actually do pretty well. Rather than scoring 100 on HRC’s madeup index, we need more companies to shoot for a golf-like “low score wins” approach.

The largest Hispanicowned food distribution company in the U.S. is Goya Foods. After Goya took conservative stances, progressive cancel culture called for massive boycotts, yet their net sales rocketed up by 22%. People who had never eaten black beans in their life rushed to the stores to buy Goya Foods products.

Chick-Fil-A faced con- stant backlash from liberals for promoting Biblical marriage between a man and a woman. The boycotts failed every time and Chick-Fil-A is one of the highest grossing restaurant chains in the world with sales in the billions.

HRC and liberal wokeists will never be satisfied. They are bullies. Those companies who dare to push back will find that good old red-blooded Americans will rush to their support and thank them for their courage.

In this case, the low score wins.

Phil Williams is a former state senator, retired Army colonel and combat veteran, and a practicing attorney. He has served with the leadership of the Alabama Policy Institute and currently hosts the conservative news/talkshow Rightside Radio M-F 2-5 p.m. on multiple channels throughout north Alabama. (WVNN 92.5FM/770AM-Huntsville/ Athens; WXJC 101.FM and WYDE 850AM – Birmingham/ Cullman) His column appears every Monday in 1819 News. To contact Phil or request him for a speaking engagement go to www.rightsideradio.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819News.com.

Seeing is believing. I had this conversation recently with an individual about how sometimes we have to see things before we believe them. Nothing’s wrong with this approach because, honestly, we live in the world of outrageous claims leaving most people saying, “Yeah, right!” I am from the “Show Me State” of Missouri; so, I understand a thing or two when it comes to not always believing something right away.

This got me thinking and wondering how many times we go about with the improper thought process and say a half-hearted prayer to God about something we do not even mean. And furthermore, we do not expect God’s blessing to happen. Our thinking needs to be that we do expect the right things to happen. Our thinking needs to be in such that we expect the desired outcome. However, many times we do not properly believe the way we should because we do not think it will happen anyway.

I want you to think about a time in your life when you knew something was going to happen. This occurrence is something that you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was going to come to fruition. I played collegiate baseball, and there were times I knew