The protracted asymmetry in American corporate governance—wherein activist shareholders on the left have hectored management with impunity while conservatives passively observed—may finally be approaching its denouement.

Many firms have found themselves targeted by left-leaning shareholder activists or reputation-risk campaigns, often without facing equivalent pressure from other camps. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) list-and-label approach, particularly its “hate” map, has become a factor in some companies’ reputational-risk frameworks.

Reliance upon it, however, often lacks transparency and may create unintended liabilities. Corporations that have uncritically embraced the SPLC’s increasingly dubious metrics, including its grotesque targeting of the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, may soon realize that their shareholders have, alas, discovered the rules of engagement.

As Tyler O’Neil astutely observed, conservative investors are belatedly employing the very mechanisms that progressive activists have wielded for decades. The irony is rich; the implications, profound.

Consider the mechanics of this shareholder democracy: When investors own sufficient shares in a publicly traded company, they may submit a shareholder proposal for inclusion in the company’s proxy statement. (Under SEC Rule 14a-8, an investor holding at least $2,000 of the company’s shares—or 1% of votes—for at least one year may submit a proposal for inclusion in the company’s proxy materials.)

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This document, distributed annually to all shareholders before the company’s meeting, contains management’s recommendations alongside shareholder-submitted resolutions. Shareholders then vote. While most such proposals are non-binding (i.e., they are precatory), they compel management attention and, when supported by substantial minorities, often catalyze policy changes. This is procedural democracy applied to capitalism: tedious, technical, and remarkably effective.

My own employer, the Heritage Foundation, possesses a portfolio of sufficient magnitude to merit corporate attention. Heritage has just filed shareholder proposals at PayPal, Alphabet, Mastercard, Amazon, Meta, Salesforce and Starbucks. The common thread? Each has exhibited an unseemly reliance upon SPLC designations whose credibility has eroded like a sandstone cliff face.

The proposals are models of reasonableness, a quality that should discomfit those accustomed to inflammatory rhetoric. They request simply that each company issue a report within one year, at reasonable expense, analyzing the benefits, costs, and legal, reputational, competitive, and other relevant risks of using the SPLC’s diagnostic tools.

These requests aim to make companies more effective and resilient by prompting them to act according to sound business judgment, rather than appeasing activist campaigns that often push them in directions contrary to their own best interests. We want corporations to regain the freedom to do what they do best: build value, serve customers, and enhance their reputation on their own terms.

What shareholder would not wish to know whether his company’s reputational risk management depends upon an organization whose tendency to “cry wolf” has become its defining characteristic? The SPLC’s promiscuous deployment of the “hate group” designation—applied with equal enthusiasm to violent extremists and mainstream conservative organizations—has transformed it from watchdog to parody. Reasonable observers no longer credit its hysterics; they recognize institutional discreditation when they witness it.

For Alabamians, the SPLC’s duplicity is not abstract. The organization’s nefariousness unfolds before our eyes, here where it maintains its headquarters and its pretensions. We have particular cause and particular standing to demand accountability.

The proper response is not divestment, that blunt instrument favored by those who mistake withdrawal for engagement. The appropriate course is direct engagement with corporations, using established legal frameworks and procedural rules. This is capitalism’s genius: it provides mechanisms for correction that require neither legislative intervention nor judicial remedy.

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For corporate boards and management, the lesson is clear: don’t reflexively adopt external designations or activist-driven frameworks. Instead, engage in disciplined governance: plot your stakeholder landscape, quantify the cost or benefit of any reputational initiative, and maintain your long-term strategic focus.

Conservatives have long lamented the left’s “long march through the institutions.” Perhaps we should have been studying their itinerary. They understood that corporate boardrooms, like university curricula and philanthropic foundations, respond to sustained, informed pressure. They learned that proxy statements and shareholder resolutions, however prosaic, constitute genuine levers of influence.

The question is whether conservatives possess sufficient patience for this methodical work—whether we can match the left’s multi-decade commitment to shareholder activism. The encouraging development is that institutions like Heritage, commanding substantial investment portfolios across industries, have finally recognized their latent power.

The SPLC has, in my view, spent decades inflicting harm upon this country, weaponizing the language of civil rights to silence legitimate dissent and stigmatize conventional conservatism. That injury will not be quickly undone. But shareholders—those unglamorous custodians of capital—may yet accomplish what editorials and exposés have not: forcing corporations to reckon with the reputational and legal risks of embracing a compromised arbiter.

No political spectacle here. Just the steady, procedural work of achieving real reform: a reminder of what conservatism properly understood looks like—not evasion, but thoughtful engagement in public life.