The Gun Counter

"The villain in my novel Campusland is the dean of diversity and inclusion at a fictitious university (located in "Havenport, Connecticut"—draw your own conclusions). At some point, I had to decide how many employees to put in her department. After trying and failing to find out how many DEI employees several Ivies had (they pretty much bury the info), I settled on thirty. I figured, hey, this is satire, so I'm allowed to exaggerate.

Almost to the day that Campusland hit the bookstores, I found out Yale's actual number.

150. "

ESG is a political scoring system for investors, with companies like S&P Global issuing ESG scores on corporations. It sounds great, right? In reality, ESG is dictatorship in capitalist clothing. Our banks, investment managers and corporations are all promoting ESG, cleverly lending ESG the veneer of free-market capitalism. But it is not capitalism.


Capitalism is freedom in an economic context. ESG is a system of force. ESG substitutes our pluralistic institutions for conformity to centralized power, one that makes up the rules as it goes. If you don’t believe me, think about the indeterminate nature of ESG. There are two layers of subjectivity: the determination of the ESG factors themselves and the answers to those factors. If you ask people what the factors should be, you will get different answers depending on their shade of leftist politics.