1792 Insights
The 1792 Exchange is committed to delivering sharp, data-driven analysis of corporate America’s political entanglements. Discover what investors, executives, and concerned citizens should know regarding why businesses should return to neutral, mission-focused operations.
Corporate Consistency Across Markets: New Arabic Ratings
This is a joint letter from 1792 Exchange and the Observatoire du Wokisme. 1792 Exchange is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing corporate neutrality and free enterprise. We examine the publicly available records of companies’ policies and practices and publish those findings. The Observatoire du Wokisme publishes the Index du Wokisme en Entreprise in association with 1792 Exchange. We write because your company appears with a RED / High Risk rating in our U.S. Corporate Bias Ratings database which is also now available in both French and Arabic. 1792 Exchange’s Corporate Bias Ratings database currently features more than 4,500 company profiles. As a company’s reach grows far beyond their U.S. headquarters, we have translated their profile into languages reflecting their presence in foreign markets: first in French through the Index du Wokisme en Entreprise, and now in Arabic. The Arabic site, https://ar.1792exchange.com, launching this month, highlights more than 300 companies, including yours. Using a proprietary ratings system, companies are categorized by the degree to which their publicly documented policies, practices, and affiliations indicate support for politicized initiatives and radical ideological commitments. When a company receives a RED rating in the database, it indicates that the company almost certainly engages in …
Allen Mendenhall raises an important question this week: Whose interest is the RSA voting?
Mendenhall argues that the Retirement Systems of Alabama should commission an independent audit of its proxy votes to confirm they serve beneficiaries’ financial interests. He notes that public pensions often delegate voting to asset managers and proxy advisers such as ISS and Glass Lewis with little public verification of how shares are actually cast. The question is especially timely in Alabama, home to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was recently indicted by a federal grand jury in the state. Mendenhall asks whether RSA opposed shareholder proposals urging companies to stop using the SPLC’s discredited “hate map” in charitable-matching programs that discriminates against mainstream advocacy organizations, including Focus on the Family and Moms for Liberty. Alabamians have a right to know how their retirement funds voted on those and similar resolutions. RSA is uniquely opaque. It does not publish proxy records, does not use outside investment managers to vote its shares, and, in response to a public-records request, said it does not possess proxy voting data, past or present. 1792 Exchange has identified Alabama as the only state that discloses none of this information. This is not the first time RSA’s voting has drawn scrutiny. In 2023, a 1792 Exchange review of 2022 shareholder resolutions raised questions about how Alabama pension capital was being voted …
High Risk Government Contractors
Companies rated High Risk in the 1792 Exchange Government Contractors database, with total federal dollars committed to each. What “High Risk” means: 1792 Exchange rates a company High Risk when it finds the company yields to DEI activism and/or ESG when shaping its corporate governance, in ways that potentially alienate consumers, divide employees, and harm shareholders. 31 High Risk Companies $186,649,108,331.53 Total Dollars Committed to Them # Company Sector Dollars Committed 1 RTX Defense $25,433,238,417.40 2 Boeing Defense $24,758,962,470.98 3 Northrop Grumman Defense $19,669,506,853.35 4 UnitedHealth Group Healthcare $18,783,399,941.99 5 Leidos Defense $11,789,258,066.34 6 McKesson Healthcare $9,050,183,507.18 7 Booz Allen Hamilton Consulting $8,547,722,731.23 8 BAE Systems Defense $8,333,110,321.96 9 Honeywell International Industrial $7,633,213,844.45 10 Cencora Healthcare $6,091,697,826.62 11 SAIC Defense $5,445,175,403.27 12 Battelle Memorial Institute DBA Battelle Research $4,304,630,074.74 13 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) Consulting $3,983,960,278.41 14 Dell Technologies Technology $3,428,343,073.05 15 Optum Healthcare $3,309,894,581.24 16 General Electric Industrial $2,997,604,742.81 17 Merck Pharma $2,893,140,940.16 18 Jacobs Solutions Engineering $2,592,607,376.35 19 Parsons Engineering $2,533,637,222.80 20 Sanofi Pharma $1,635,380,052.05 21 United Launch Alliance Aerospace $1,629,701,239.01 22 FedEx Logistics $1,548,586,594.63 23 Oshkosh Corporation Defense $1,467,782,961.82 24 Pfizer Pharma $1,345,771,301.30 25 CGI Technology $1,220,705,109.58 26 GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Pharma $1,165,068,791.97 27 AECOM Engineering $1,114,301,261.95 …
As You Sow Misleads Readers about Anti-DEI Proposals
Earlier this summer, as the 2025-2026 proxy season came to a close, leading progressive shareholder group As You Sow intentionally misled readers about the success of anti-DEI proposals. As You Sow suggested that voting results on anti-DEI shareholder proposals at 43 companies this season, including Disney, Costco, Visa, and Apple, proved that 99% of investors are opposed to anti-DEI measures. As You Sow claimed that the universal failure of these proposals sends an “unmistakable message” to corporate boards that DEI is a “financial asset” that directors need to prioritize for the needs of the company, labelling anti-DEI efforts as a “political threat.” A 0-43 record for anti-DEI proposals does appear striking at first. However, no ESG proposals won majority support in the 2025-2026 proxy season, which includes pro-DEI proposals at 0-10 with an average support around 13%. According to Broadridge’s 2025 ProxyPulse report, voting by retail investors “declined to 28% of their shares owned in 2025,” which is the lowest level of participation in 9 years. Low retail investor participation is the historical norm, as proxy votes are disproportionately cast by large institutions on their behalf, not by individual investors. As You Sow knows this. Furthermore, for As You Sow to suggest that “[d]iversity is not a liability to be managed, it is a dividend to be captured” when companies like IBM and Nike have recently faced intense scrutiny for their DEI practices is absurd. To learn more about the Myth of Shareholder Democracy, consider reading Stefan Padfield’s piece titled: Proxy Voting and the Myth About Shareholder Democracy.
The Course of ESG Investing
As ESG-related practices have come under increasing scrutiny in the United States and abroad, newly released data paints a clearer picture of the current state of ESG investing. Two realities stand out: Perhaps the clearest example of the ESG exodus lies in the investor movement away from ESG mutual funds. These funds have bled $65.7 billion since 2022, roughly 20% of their average assets. Additionally, new fund launches have collapsed from 116 in 2021 to just nine last year, and BlackRock has slashed its support for ESG shareholder proposals from 40% in 2021 to less than 2% (7/358) in 2025. Even the 2026 proxy season backs this up: no ESG proposal won majority support. But this does not mean ESG will disappear. Many of its most committed proponents are doubling down, pursuing ESG through less visible channels, or lying low until a more favorable political and regulatory environment emerges. For example, CalPERS has all but dropped the word “ESG,” now calling it “sustainability integration,” while still on track to nearly double its climate-related holdings to $100 billion by 2030. BlackRock’s Larry Fink stopped using the term too, calling it “weaponized.” The rhetoric has cooled, but the strategy has not. Investors have …
ESG Rating Inconsistencies and Their Ideological Ends
Allen Mendenhall’s recent piece on MSCI ranking SpaceX in the same ESG tier as Russia asks a fair question: how does a rocket company advancing American innovation get scored the same as a state waging war? Unbeknownst to many, inconsistencies are common when it comes to ESG portfolios and ratings. In 2022, S&P dropped Tesla from its S&P 500 ESG Index while ExxonMobil landed in the top ten. The EV maker scored worse on an “Environmental, Social, Governance” rating than a major oil company. In fact, according to MIT Sloan’s Aggregate Confusion Project, ESG ratings from major agencies correlate at only about 0.61. Compare that to credit ratings from Moody’s and S&P, which agree 99% of the time. Companies often receive vastly different ESG rating scores from ratings providers, even ones that share a pro-ESG bias. These are the kinds of inconsistencies that led Elon Musk, CEO of the second-largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the world, to declare that ESG is a scam. Mendenhall concludes himself: the SpaceX rating shows ESG functioning less as “socially conscious investing” and more as “a mechanism for advancing ideological ends.”