Scott Adams's syndicated comic strip Dilbert has been poking fun at the idiosyncrasies of office culture for 33 years.
But earlier this month, Adams made an announcement on his podcast "Real Coffee with Scott Adams" that he was going to make a hard run at taking on the new corporate ESG ratings.
Regarding ESG, Adams says,
"It should start to become known that Dilbert thinks it's ridiculous and then people who also think it's ridiculous will start retweeting it. And then the boss who's in charge of it will start to get these sent to him by email or printed out and slipped under the office door," Adams explained. "Mockey is very powerful and mockery, in theory, could dismantle this."
ESG stands for "Environmental, Social, Governance" and measures just how woke a corporation's policies are.
The comments section on Adams's video about his decision to write about ESG are exactly what you would expect them to be: woke ranting, references to racism, and death threats.
And as new comic strips came out attacking ESG, newspapers started canceling the creator's syndication because of complaints from the readers. Lee Enterprises, which runs 77 newspapers, just canceled their contract.
Given that Lee Enterprises cut other popular comic strips as well, it could be a normal business decision, but Adams says, "Do you think they flipped coins to decide what to keep and what to delete? It wasn't about popularity or cost. (That I know.)"
Dilbert is immensely popular running in 57 countries and 19 languages, so he's probably got a point there.
Let's take a look about why the wokies are calling for Adams's head.
There are three parts to the ESG rating:
They put Environmentalism first, but that's the least important aspect of the rating. Adam pokes fun of how easy it is to get over this part of the rating by focusing on the other two.
In a real life case, Tesla got kicked off the S&P's ESG Index because Elon Musk doesn't want to bow down to the wokies, despite his company doing more to reduce carbon emissions than any other company in the world.
Next up in terms of importance is the Social aspect.
This refers to social justice and equity in the workplace. Adams introduced a black character that messes with the boss by identifying as white, so that he cannot be counted as a "token" black guy boosting the companies' ESG rating.
Finally, we come to governance.
This is the really scary part. A big chunk of the rating is based on having a woke member or two installed on the board of the corporation and employing a DEI officer, much like the Chinese require communist party members be included on corporate boards and in management.
Of course given enough money, you can just bribe your way to a better ESG score.
Put that all together, and Adams's jokes pulling back the corporate curtain and the ESG ratings just made him one of the most dangerous freedom fighters in America.
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