LTP News Sharing:
Yesterday news broke that home improvement giant Lowe’s has become the latest company to back away from some of its woke virtual signaling under pressure from conservative groups. Executives announced to employees that Lowe’s will no longer participate in Human Rights Campaign (HRC) surveys or sponsor Pride parades. It will also make changes to how it organizes company resource groups for minority employees.
Lowe’s is the latest in a slew of big-name companies — including Harley Davidson, Tractor Supply, John Deere and Best Buy — to reverse course under pressure from right-leaning activists and groups, including the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project.
Scott Shepard
Yesterday on the Newsmax website, Financial Editor Lee Barney wrote an excellent overview of this trend and was kind enough to quote us:
Conservative activists say they will continue pressuring and suing Fortune 500 companies for what they claim are radical workplace, marketing, and corporate policies that have lowered profits and market capitalization by as much as 12% — not to mention stifled job opportunities for many and reduced standards of living….
“DEI is systemic discrimination based on race, sex and orientation being pushed by monstrous people who will agree that discrimination against minorities on those grounds was wrong — but as long as you change the parties being discriminated against, it’s OK,” says Scott Shepard, general counsel of the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, referring to the phrase that has become synonymous with “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
…Shepard and Rucker argue that DEI and ESG policies — and within those umbrellas, which promote LGBT, pro-abortion laws, critical race theory, the 1619 Project, etc. — undermine quality output in a capitalist economy, cost jobs, and lower standards of living….
Shepard firmly believes that forcing market policies on U.S. companies, like the net-zero schedules of the Biden administration, is antithetical to the United States’ democratic, free-market economy.
“These are not socially conscious ideas but just about the most contemptible policy preferences that anyone has espoused,” Shepard says. “The true believers, like Disney CEO Bob Iger, are destroying their companies at light speed.”
Read the entire article here.
Author: The National Center
