Christian shareholder engagement may be the most overlooked front in the culture war — so who is actually voting the shares in your retirement account? In this episode of Refining Rhetoric, host Robert Bortins sits down with Isaac Willour — Classical Conversations graduate, Grove City College alum, and director of corporate engagement at Bowyer Research — to unpack how America’s biggest companies went woke and what investors who share our values can do about it.
Isaac explains how decades of conservatives divesting and boycotting, while left-leaning activists showed up and engaged, left Fortune 500 boardrooms tilted one way. He traces how the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index drifted from non-discrimination to scoring companies on transgender medical coverage for minors, then demystifies proxy statements and shareholder ballots — from Presbyterian Foundation proposals at Lockheed Martin and Palantir to a Home Depot proposal on the risks of covering those procedures. He names policy wins at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Nvidia, Salesforce, Meta and Apple. Then the conversation turns to AI: why Isaac calls it a force multiplier, why unjust laws enforced with AI produce more injustice, why nothing we build can replace the imago Dei, and why data centers need better storytelling (and a better name).
Isaac closes with the advice he wishes he’d heard as an eighteen-year-old CC graduate: treat your time and attention as if they’re worth as much as the tech companies spending billions to capture them think they are. Whether you’re a student, a parent, or an investor who’d rather lean in than check out, this one will sharpen your thinking — share it with someone heading into college or the workforce.
Isaac’s X: https://x.com/IsaacWillour