Boycotts Reveal ‘Racketeering Scam’ Behind Corporations That Go Woke: James Lindsay

Bud Light beer cans at City Tap House in Philadelphia on Feb. 12, 2023. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)

The boycott against corporations that tried to push left-wing sex and gender ideology on their customers opens the opportunities to expose what’s behind their embrace of “woke” agenda, according to author and commentator James Lindsay.

Speaking on EpochTV’s “Crossroads,” Lindsay said the boycotts “must definitely have an impact,” as Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch scrambled to downplay its now-notorious partnership with transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney.

“This boycott damaged them enough to where they scrambled, they made some kind of a crazy statement. The statement just didn’t satisfy anybody. So the boycott stays on, the pressure stays on,” he told host Joshua Philipp.

Woke Corp’s Priorities

On May 9, a month after the initial Mulvaney backlash, Anheuser-Busch lost its perfect Corporate Equality Index (CEI) score, which is overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT advocacy group.

The CEI measures how well a company’s policies adhere to a set of criteria concerning “LGBTQ equality” in the workplace. Businesses with the highest possible 100 CEI points are given the title “Best Place To Work For LGBTQ Equality.” More than 800 American businesses met all the criteria to earn a percent rating and the designation last year, according to the Campaign’s latest report.

In response to the loss of a perfect CEI score—and in spite of the customer backlash, Anheuser-Busch pledged last week to donate $200,000 to support “LGBTQ+ business owners of color.”

The fact that a company would rather further upset customers than get a lower social credit rating, Lindsay said, shows “how this extortion racket works and how serious the extortion racket is.”

“We see which thing they’re choosing to do,” Lindsay explained. “Whether it’s Corporate Equality Index score, whether it’s a broader ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] score, they’re choosing to serve the same agenda.”

“This reveals a lot of things that are very useful,” he continued. “We can have hearings. We could have the House Oversight Committee talking about this: ‘Why are you doing this? How important is that number? Why is it number so important? How did this number come to mean so much to your company? Who made the deals? What are the costs?’”

“These kinds of things need to be dragged out into the public under oath, and in a high place.”

Fighting Woke Corps in Court

“We now have very good reason to believe that shareholders have excellent lawsuits in potentia for the violations of fiduciary responsibility,” Lindsay told Philipp.

In fact, conservative legal group America First Legal is preparing to sue Anheuser-Busch, as well as several other big-name brands, for allegedly tanking their shareholder value through their Pride Month promotions that triggered outrage and boycotts.

On Tuesday, America First Legal called on anyone whose shares in LGBT product-promoting companies lost value to reach out to them to join a class action lawsuit they are working to file against those companies.

“ATTENTION: Are you a shareholder of [Target], [Kohls], [Anheuser-Busch], or other companies that are promoting transgender, LGBTQ and PRIDE products and diminishing shareholder value?” the organization wrote on Twitter with a link to its email address. “We want to hear from you.”

Target has been the subject of a conservative-led boycott over merchandise celebrating Pride Month, including a onesie for infants that states “Bien Proud;” a children’s book with the title, “Twas the Night Before Pride;” a book that tells children how to use transgender pronouns; and a handful of T-shirts with similar slogans. The company also drew backlash for “tuck-friendly” swimwear. A Target spokesperson has since said the swimwear wasn’t made for children.

Similarly, Kohls drew boycott calls from customers after it was found promoting Pride Month-themed merchandise, particularly clothing items for toddlers.

While Lindsay said he expects more lawsuits like this to come, they won’t be so effective until large investors get involved.

“This thing actually operates like a racketeering scam,” Lindsay explained. “The largest investors—huge institutional investors—are all pledged to participate in the program, so there’s this very incestuous thing that’s keeping the whole thing locked up.”

“Some small investors who have a few 100 shares are probably not going to be able to make a lawsuit that does something tremendous. Even a class action may not be able to do that across the shareholders,” he continued. “But if we can get some of these institutional investors to feel like that their better option is, in fact, to get out of this thing before it crashes down on them by increasing this pressure and creating these pathways to legal action ... then you start busting up a racketeering cartel.”

‘Keep the Pressure On’

For Americans who choose to shop elsewhere, Lindsay said they should keep up with their “extremely important endeavor,” although sooner or later they may get demoralized due to the sheer number of companies jumping on the woke bandwagon.

“I’m glad that they are realizing that they do have this muscle to flex, that they have this weapon that they’ve been able to wield, but we have to make sure that it gets wielded intelligently,” he replied when asked what would he tell boycotters.

“Sooner or later, you might end up getting demoralized or you might not know what to do,” Lindsay added. “I would say that these focused boycotts, whichever one you pick first, that’s the horse you ride. It doesn’t have to make sense, but you have to keep the pressure on somewhere, so that we can take this and scoop it up and do something useful.”

Without this pressure, Lindsay warned, what awaits Americans could be a personal ESG rating system, like communist China’s social credit score, that restricts their and their children’s liberty and life.

“What you'll find is that, if you want to go to the store, maybe you’re not allowed to enter the store without having a good enough ESG score,” he said. “Maybe you can’t go into the meat department. Maybe you can’t go into the beer department. Maybe you’re limited in how much you can buy. Maybe you can’t buy a plane ticket. Maybe you can’t order an Uber. Maybe you can’t buy more than 10 gallons of gas in a month. ”

“They already do this kind of stuff in China. And we can expect the same thing to come down this way—surprisingly enough, even here in America—if we don’t fight back against this.”

Interview by Joshua Philipp