Horowitz: DeSantis’ state compact against ESG is the blueprint to fighting federal-corporate fascism

While we all slept for a number of years past, the federal government has worked with global governments and corporations to remake our society, economy, culture, laws, and policy. More recently, these governments and corporations have built an enforcement mechanism against anyone on the wrong side of “total state” values. It’s a trap of human life, liberty, and property that is seemingly incorrigible save one escape hatch that still remains in Madison’s original design. Now Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is utilizing that escape hatch and plowing a path for using it on every other important issue of our time.

In announcing a 19-state alliance against the environmental, social, and corporate governance jihad on American values and liberties, DeSantis has actually done something more significant and impactful than potentially running for president. Many of us believe the federal government is irremediably broken. But what do you do when your own government turns on you and violates the essence of the social compact on every issue that matters pertaining to the core tenets of establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty?

You push back using the doctrine of the lowest magistrate through a coalition of state governments. On Thursday, DeSantis announced that he had formed an alliance with the governors of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming to take a number of actions to interpose against Biden’s ESG agenda. Florida’s legislation, which presumably would be echoed in other states, per the joint letter with the other 18 governors, includes the following objectives detailed in the governor’s one-pager:

• Prohibiting big banks, trusts, and other financial institutions from discriminating against customers for their religious, political, or social beliefs — including their support for securing the border, owning a firearm, and increasing our energy independence.
• Prohibiting the financial sector from considering so-called “social credit scores” in banking and lending practices that aim to prevent Floridians from obtaining loans, lines of credit, and bank accounts.
• Prohibiting banks that engage in corporate activism from holding government funds as a qualified public depository.
• Prohibiting the use of ESG in all investment decisions at the state and local levels, ensuring that fund managers only consider financial factors that maximize the highest rate of return.
• Prohibiting all state and local entities, including direct support organizations, from considering, giving preference to, or requesting information about ESG as part of the procurement and contracting process.
• Prohibiting the use of ESG factors by state and local governments when issuing bonds, including a contract prohibition on rating agencies whose ESG ratings negatively impact the issuer’s bond ratings.
• Directing the attorney general and commissioner of financial regulation to enforce these provisions to the fullest extent of the law.

Taken together, these measures would effectively create a constitutional sanctuary for human rights and the First Amendment in a large swath of the country. But more importantly, this cross-state cooperation to interpose against federal-corporate tyranny is the blueprint for freedom on many other issues.

For example, states should work together to push back against the biomedical tyranny by agreeing to prohibit mandates, contact tracing, sharing immunization status, and helping or promoting in any way a dangerous therapeutic the FDA champions in the future. Indeed, DeSantis has created his own medical committee to shadow-box the CDC and has called on other states to join.

As it relates to global warming and the assault on our fuel, food, cars, and so many vital products, states should create a compact to disregard the “climate security state” and invite people to produce and utilize God’s given resources. Instead, unfortunately, red-state governors are embracing the global warming agenda even more than blue states, at least in terms of utilization of “green” energy.

On immigration, DeSantis has previously called for cross-state cooperation to repatriate illegal aliens back to Mexico. Any takers among the governors?

Undoubtedly, as a student of “The Federalist Papers,” DeSantis is familiar with Madison’s prescription against federal tyranny, articulated in Federalist #46. So, what did he expect to happen in the nightmare scenario when the federal government became a replica of King George … and then some?

The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps, refusal to co-operate with the officers of the Union; the frowns of the executive magistracy of the State; the embarrassments created by legislative devices, which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose, in any State, difficulties not to be despised; would form, in a large State, very serious impediments; and where the sentiments of several adjoining States happened to be in unison, would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter.

In other words, public outrage, state and local officials refusing to enforce, and correspondence with counterparts in other states together in unison would prevail over federal tyranny. It was quite evident to the founders that the more states there were united in opposition, the harder it would be for the federal government to succeed in controlling the people.

On ESG and many other issues (such as vaccine mandates), this era of tyranny involves co-opting the corporate world to impose the restrictions on life and liberty that the government often shies away from imposing directly. By creating a permanent state alliance against ESG and its malignant offshoots, states will even up the political market, so to speak, and force companies to think twice about where the political winds are blowing. It will create a counter-force and deterrent against their foray into politics and, worse, human rights abuses. Absent a strong and united reaction from the states, these companies have no incentive to buck the federal overtures to them that prompt them to defy market values, by pushing either terrible products, policies, or mandates on the people.

Inaction on the part of GOP governors is not an option. Absent a strong force to utilize the levers of power we have to interpose against the tyranny, the federal government, working with global governments, will seed its values and eventually fascistic control over our lives, through the so-called private sector, in all 50 states. COVID was a painful lesson in this new “public-private partnership.” Human rights violations and unconstitutional power-grabs that the federal government encourages must be met with equal and opposing force from red-state governments.

Even with strong anticipation that he will enter the presidential race, DeSantis highlighted the fact that a good president alone will not save us, nor do we have to wait until 2025 to live freely. “It’s not all just about who ends up running for president,” said DeSantis in a recent interview with Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade. “That’s important, because I think nationally, we need a change in direction, but I think our individual states do have the capacity to drive the national agenda. You know Florida drove the national agenda on so many things – on having kids in school during COVID, on opposing the employer vax mandates … we’ve led the way. I’d like to see a competition amongst all the red states, about, you know, who can kind of outdo each other. So I do think it’s a blueprint for other states. I do think it can be applied nationally, but it’s less about me than about, I think, the underlying principles that we need to restore our country.”

He's absolutely right. This is not about him and the presidency, just like it shouldn’t be about other candidates aspiring to that office or even the office itself. If conservative voters and talkers would only pressure the elected officials in areas they control to utilize the levers of power they wield today and indefinitely into the future in deep red states, much of the debate over 2024 would become moot.