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2021-05-05 -Great Cultural Revolution
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Is Coke Rethinking Woke?
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 [NATIONALREVIEW] Coca-Cola grabbed headlines in February of this year for the company’s "diversity" initiatives. Most notoriously, leaked slides from a training program commanded Coca-Cola employees to "try to be less white." Then, the company issued strict requirements to its outside counsel to mandate the selection of lawyers on the basis of race:
Try to be less prosperous.
Coca-Cola’s new general counsel Bradley Gayton recently announced a new set of diversity guidelines for outside counsel. Under these guidelines, outside counsel will commit that for any new matter "at least 30% of each of billed associate and partner time will be from diverse attorneys, and of such amounts at least half will be from Black attorneys." If outside counsel fails to meet the commitment over two quarters, it will incur "a non-refundable 30% reduction in the fees payable for such New Matter going forward until the commitment is met."
At the time, NR contributor Ed Whelan walked through some of the legal and practical problems with this heavy-handed approach.
Continued from Page 4
When the Georgia elections law passed in late March, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey blasted it as "unacceptable," and appeared to be under pressure from left-wing activists to go further: "In recent weeks, activists staged a ’die-in’ at Coca-Cola’s museum in Atlanta. Bishop Reginald Jackson, an influential Atlanta pastor, used a bullhorn on the street to call for a boycott of Coca-Cola."
Republicans noticed, and began to push back. On April 6, Rand Paul and Donald Trump
...The man who was so stupid he beat fourteen professional politicians, a former tech CEO, and a brain surgeon for the Republican nomination in 2016, then beat The Smartest Woman in the World in the general election...
called for boycotts of Coke (although Trump was subsequently spotted with a Diet Coke on his desk). Several politicians in Coca-Cola’s home state of Georgia pulled Coke products from their offices, and Ted Cruz;
 ...US Senator from Texas. Republican contender for president in 2016, his stiff and abrasive manner earned him the title most hated man in the Senate. After a close win over Beto O'Rourke , who tried to out-Lastino him, he grew a beard and let his biting wit shine through. Cruz's comments have been known to leave life-threatening wounds at better than forty feet...
asked on Twitter, "I wonder who the largest institutional purchasers of @CocaCola are? Do they all agree with #WokeCoke radical politics?"
Then, a funny thing happened. On April 10, dozens of corporate chieftains met to consider sanctions against Georgia. Instead, they ended up issuing a vaguely worded statement about voting rights that did not even mention the state. And Coca-Cola, along with fellow Georgian behemoth Delta Air Lines, was conspicuously absent from the list of signatories. Instead, on April 14, the company issued a decidedly conciliatory statement:
We believe the best way to make progress now is for everyone to come together to listen, respectfully share concerns and collaborate on a path forward. We remain open to productive conversations with advocacy groups and politicians who may have differing views. It’s time to find common ground. In the end, we all want the same thing — free and fair elections, the cornerstone of our democracy.
Then, on April 21, the next shoe dropped: Gayton, the general counsel, abruptly left after just eight months on the job, taking "a $4 million sign-on payment and a monthly consulting fee of $666,666" to transition into a "strategic consultant role." That’s a rather expensive way to rid yourself of a senior corporate officer who has spent less than a year with the company.
On April 27, Law.com’s Corporate Counsel reported that Monica Howard Douglas, Gayton’s replacement and a 17-year veteran of Coca-Cola’s legal department, refused to discuss Gayton’s resignation, but told the company’s legal department that Gayton’s departure meant a "pause" on the company’s controversial diversity initiatives:
Douglas reportedly offered a few hints about the fate of Gayton’s diversity plan, though concrete details remain elusive...When asked about Gayton’s diversity initiative, Douglas indicated that Coca-Cola was "taking a pause for now" but would likely salvage some parts of the plan, the source said. Douglas didn’t provide any additional details about what would remain and what would be scrapped, according to the source. "She said she ... plans to use some of it, but everything is being evaluated. They plan to adopt some of his strategies and passions. Everything was, ’More to come,’" the source added.
Neither Douglas, nor Gayton, nor Coca-Cola is talking to the media about any of this right now, but read the tea leaves: Within a span of three weeks, the company came under public fire from prominent Republicans, swiftly de-escalated its rhetoric on the Georgia law, saw its general counsel hastily resign, and saw his replacement declare a "pause" on his most heavily criticized efforts. It certainly looks as if Coca-Cola has reached a corporate decision to pull back from a partisan and ideological posture that actively antagonized half the country, including the state government of where Coca-Cola is headquartered.
Most big companies do not insert themselves into so many hot-button political debates in such a short span, and not every large company has equally large direct competitors, as Coca-Cola does. But there should be a lesson here for conservatives. Companies may drift into wokeness in order to avoid conflict with the squeaky wheels on Twitter and in the world of left-activism, but they are fundamentally risk-averse. The people pushing Coca-Cola to the left are extremely loud, but there are not really that many of them. If conservatives fight back, we can convince more companies to stay out of culture-war politics and partisanship. 
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Posted by Fred 2021-05-05 00:00||
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02:05 Grom the Affective
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[NATIONALREVIEW] Coca-Cola grabbed headlines in February of this year for the company’s "diversity" initiatives. Most notoriously, leaked slides from a training program commanded Coca-Cola employees to "try to be less white." Then, the company issued strict requirements to its outside counsel to mandate the selection of lawyers on the basis of race: