David Sacks: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) And Glass Lewis Are To Blame For Woke Corporate America

RealClear Politics ^ | October 30, 2025 | Tim Hains

[E. Pluribus Unum]

"All-In Podcast" host David Sacks asks someone to look into Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, the two largest proxy advisory firms that tell institutional investors how to vote their shares of public companies.

DAVID SACKS: I think for years people have been wondering why did corporate America go so woke? Especially in the early 2020s, where they created all these DEI departments. You know, they didn't have to do that. And a big part of the reason is that those initiatives came from [the two largest proxy advisory firms] Glass Lewis and ISS.

I think Elon's jokingly called ISS "ISIS." But basically, what happens is they make recommendations for how shareholders should vote resolutions, and the index funds basically just defer to them for whatever they should do. So they effectively control or almost control the voting for all these board-level resolutions that every public company has to make.

So they've been the ones who have been imposing all these DEI requirements, all these ESG requirements. If you're wondering where those things came from, because just these two companies, which no one's ever heard of, they were captured a long time ago -- by the woke crowd years ago.

So this has really been the root of why corporate America has gone woke for a long time. Look, there's also pressure from the outside from boycotts or, you know, there is some pressure sometimes for employees and that kind of thing.

But a lot of it came from these two companies that no one ever heard of. I think it would be a good idea if someone would take a look at this to figure out what happened. Maybe someone...

[BobL]

It’s EXACTLY what they did with Private Schools, and it shows just how BRILLIANT the Leftists are...and likewise how PATHETIC our side is.

In the case of private schools, they did NOT waste their time going school-to-school - instead they took a different, much more efficient route, which was to take control of the accreditation boards - meaning that if graduates from those schools wanted to go to pretty much any US (and probably non-US) university, their school would need to be accredited. So, to maintain accreditation, the schools had no choice but to get woke.