WHEREAS: The Company’s policy positions, advocacy, partnerships and charitable giving on significant social policy and political matters should not alienate consumers, decrease sales, or diminish shareholder value.
The Company is apparently a Gold Partner1 of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and has a 100 percent rating on HRC’s “Corporate Equality Index.”2 Earning that score arguably requires spending shareholder assets to embrace highly partisan positions on hot-button issues, such as supporting legislation that eliminates religious liberties and discriminates against girls and women while opposing legislation to protect children from adult materials. In his 2021 book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, Stephen Soukup describes HRC as “influencing businesses by employing a ‘soothsayer’s trick’” that boils down to increasing the radicalization of businesses by way of a strategy to “simply keep moving the goalposts.”3
The Company has been rated a “medium risk” by the 1792 Exchange on its “Spotlight Bias Report,”4 which is published to “shed light on corporate activism”5 and lists the following as potential concerns for Intel: (1) Intel “does not provide its employees with protections against viewpoint discrimination,”6 and (2) “Intel vets vendors according to LGBTQ policies,”7 which may result in discriminating against religious vendors.
The Company has taken public and politically divisive positions over issues of significant social policy concern, including apparently supporting the ill-named Equality Act8 even though “scholars and legal experts [argue] that the law would eviscerate female sports and cancel federal religious freedom protections.”9
The Company has apparently contributed $7,800,000.00 to the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement and related causes since 2020,10 despite the fact that these causes have been accused of squandering assets11 and supporting racism and antisemitism and highly divisive and dangerous programs such as police-defunding and “anti-racist” racial discrimination