Hello everybody, it's James Lindsay, you're listening to New Discourses Bullets where I

give a bullet point type summary of a single topic from Oak Marxism that we need to understand

so we can defeat it.

And I want to talk about the real threat of ESG today.

Now we're getting familiar with ESG, I'll give you a little primer on this and I'll talk

about the real threat, it's not that complicated.

But ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance Scoring.

The history of this, it originated at the United Nations as an experiment to figure out how

to leverage passive investment money, your pension funds, long-term investments, 401Ks and

so on into doing what's called impact investing.

Impact investing is doing activism with that money, it's investing in companies that are

doing environmental activism, social activism, and so on as opposed to investing based on

what the best rate of return is.

The agenda was always to be able to do impact investing with these reservoirs of trillions

of dollars.

So very large reservoirs of money.

The pretext they invented to justify ESG was that, well, we're managing long-term investments

and so since they're long-term investments we have to think about what makes a company

successful in the long-term, not the short-term, and if they have bad environmental policy

it's only matter of time until that comes back on them, or if they have bad corporate

social responsibility, it's only matter of time until people get angry and throw down

on them, ruin their corporation, and if they have bad corporate governance models, they're

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