Florida ‘Anti-Woke’ Campaign Turned Responsible Investing Into a Political Enemy

Florida is where woke goes to die. Governor Ron DeSantis said it more than once, and he said it with relish, borrowing the cadence of Winston Churchill’s defiance against the Nazis to announce a fight against, of all things, pension fund managers who weigh climate risk. We will fight the woke in the businesses, he declared, and in government agencies, and in the schools. The enemy, in this telling, was a spreadsheet.

That spreadsheet has a name: ESG, shorthand for environmental, social, and governance factors. Over the past two decades it crept from the fringes of ethical finance into the mainstream, until something like US$30.3 trillion now sits in funds that screen investments against those criteria.

Erin O’Brien, an associate professor at Griffith University in Australia, spent months reading the other side of that story: the press releases, the speeches, the one-page graphic “flyers” the Florida government produced to explain why it was banning state pension and investment funds from considering ESG risk at all. Her question was deceptively simple. When a politician decides to wage war on a category of financial analysis, what exactly are they claiming the problem is? And who, in their telling, gets cast as the villain?

The answer turned out to have very little to do with money.

How a Risk Metric Became a Mob

O’Brien’s study, published in the journal Business and Politics, treats the Florida campaign as a case study in something political scientists call discursive power: the ability to shape how a problem is understood before anyone gets around to solving it. She borrowed a method built for exactly this, asking of each document what the proposed ban was supposedly fixing, who was harmed, and who was to blame. The documents answered loudly.

One government flyer listed the “Victims of ESG” outright. Americans who fill up their gas tanks. Second Amendment supporters. Soon-to-be retirees. People with strongly held religious beliefs. The framing did something clever, drawing a line between ordinary people on one side and, on the other, a shadowy class that Florida’s then-Speaker of the House Paul Renner liked to call “martini millionaires.” Responsible investment, in this account, wasn’t a hedge against long-term risk. It was an ideology being smuggled past the ballot box by people who drink the wrong cocktails.

“The research revealed the fight over ‘woke capitalism’ was less about investment strategy and more about who holds the power to shape the values and future direction of capitalist markets,” O’Brien said.

What makes the rhetoric so slippery is that “woke capitalism” gets used to condemn corporations for two opposite sins at once. The term originally needled companies for empty virtue-signalling, the CEO who tweets about justice while fighting his own warehouse workers. But DeSantis and his allies stretched it to cover the reverse problem too: companies that stopped merely gesturing and actually started embedding environmental and social considerations into how they make decisions. Damned for posturing, damned for meaning it. O’Brien argues this is the tell. The backlash didn’t really ignite over hypocrisy. It ignited when the change became real.

“Backlash to so-called ‘woke capitalism’ intensified when businesses began embedding ESG principles into core decision-making, and began to enact tangible social change,” she said.

Who Drafted the War

There’s a quieter actor behind the loud speeches, and O’Brien doesn’t let it stay quiet. The model legislation that spread anti-ESG rules across nearly half the United States, eighteen states between 2022 and 2025, didn’t materialise spontaneously in eighteen separate statehouses. Much of it traces back to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative network that drafts template bills for legislators to adopt more or less off the shelf.

“The American Legislative Exchange Council, backed by powerful fossil fuel companies, drafted and disseminated anti-ESG laws across the USA,” O’Brien said.

This is where the irony she identifies sharpens to a point. DeSantis condemned ESG as extreme political ideology corrupting the neutral business of making money, an agenda imposed by elites who couldn’t win at the ballot box. Yet his own remedy was to reach into state pension funds and steer them, by law, away from one set of values and toward another. He framed the leveraging of corporate power for social ends as illegitimate, then proposed leveraging the same power to reverse it. “On one hand, DeSantis criticised ESG investment as extreme political ideology, while simultaneously using state power to impose their own ideological preferences on markets,” O’Brien said. The claim to neutrality was itself the position.

None of this means ESG investing is above scrutiny, and O’Brien’s paper is careful not to make that claim; plenty of corporate sustainability talk really is greenwash, and some executives were no doubt relieved to be freed from the reporting. The argument is narrower and, perhaps, more unsettling. It’s about the machinery of persuasion, the way an obscure question of financial risk assessment, hardly the sexiest topic on earth, was deliberately inflated into a high-salience culture war so that the state could justify stepping in.

The stakes don’t stop at Florida’s border, and this is the part that lingers. By making it politically respectable to abandon environmental commitments, O’Brien suggests, the campaign built a permission structure that other actors, in other countries, can now use. She points to the mining giant BHP scrapping plans to scale back its highest-emitting projects. The war rhetoric was local; the licence it grants travels. What started as a slogan about where woke goes to die may end up describing where a good deal of corporate climate ambition goes too.

Whether the campaign actually changed how money gets invested, as opposed to how it gets talked about, is the question O’Brien leaves open. The discourse worked. The portfolios are still being counted.

DOI / Source: 10.1017/bap.2026.10022

Frequently Asked Questions

What does ESG investing actually mean?

ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance: a set of non-financial factors that investors weigh alongside expected returns. In practice it often means screening out or divesting from industries seen as harmful, such as heavy polluters, and favouring companies with stronger environmental or labour records. Roughly US$30.3 trillion sits in funds worldwide that apply some version of these criteria.

Why would a politician oppose a financial risk metric?

According to O’Brien’s analysis, the opposition was rarely framed as financial at all. Florida’s leaders cast responsible investment as a political ideology being imposed on ordinary people by unelected “corporate elites,” which raised the issue’s public profile and justified government intervention. Reframing a dull technical question as a culture-war battle is itself the exercise of power the study examines.

Is it true the anti-ESG laws were coordinated rather than spontaneous?

The study points to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative policy network backed by fossil fuel interests, as the source of model bills that spread across eighteen states between 2022 and 2025. That common origin helps explain why the legislation appeared so similar in so many places at once. It also complicates the claim that the movement was a grassroots revolt by everyday Americans.

Why does a US state’s campaign matter for the rest of the world?

O’Brien argues the rhetoric created a “legitimising environment” that makes it easier for corporations anywhere to roll back environmental and social commitments without much reputational cost. She cites mining giant BHP’s decision to drop plans for cutting emissions from its dirtiest projects as one example. The slogans stay in Florida, but the permission to retreat does not.