By: Lathan Watts – nationalreview.com – May 27, 2025

This burgeoning cultural shift is real. Will it last?

While President Trump is still less than six months into his second term, it is undeniable that his administration’s aggressive pace and posture are making an impact on the American economy and culture. Whether it is DOGE’s attempt to bring fiscal sanity to the administrative state leviathan or the efforts to root out DEI policies from the federal government and higher education, the “vibe shift” has received ample media attention. However, the tone set by the administration seems to be ringing clearly in the C-suites of corporate America to much less acclaim. Recent developments at IBM are a prime example.

In response to successful engagement by shareholders and attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom through the ballot resolution process, in which shareholders can introduce resolutions to be voted on by their fellow shareholders at the annual meeting, IBM has adopted a new stance of viewpoint neutrality in its advertising policies. The move is intended to distance the corporate giant from the censorship activities of the now-defunct Global Alliance for Responsible Media.

IBM and many other household brands had joined GARM, which promised to promote “digital safety” and protect brand value. But in practice, GARM worked to censor mainstream conservative and religious speakers, including Joe Rogan, the Daily Wire, and Elon Musk, under the guise of battling “misinformation” and “hate speech.” The reforms will guard against future instances of viewpoint-discriminatory advertising decisions by the $228 billion company.

The win is one of 21 policy and behavior changes at major corporations as a result of the actions taken by ADF’s coalition of like-minded shareholder advocates so far this year. Earlier this year, PepsiCo, Mastercard, and Johnson & Johnson made similar changes to their advertising policies after cutting ties with GARM. Comcast also made major changes to its ad-selling policies that will protect religious and political views in advertisements at NBC Universal and Peacock, which are worth over $100 billion together. JPMorgan Chase recently enacted a major policy change to prevent future discriminatory de-banking, while the ADF-supported shareholder coalition has made substantive progress at other companies including Walmart, Verizon, and Morgan Stanley. 

Big Banks Are Not Bakers

The above engagement with IBM was done alongside Bowyer Research and the Heritage Foundation, which filed a shareholder resolution at IBM. The proposal was slated to appear on the proxy ballot at IBM’s annual meeting after IBM lost its appeal at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to exclude the proposal from the ballot. Attorneys from ADF countered the appeal on behalf of the Heritage Foundation. After the SEC denied the appeal, IBM agreed to change its advertising policy in exchange for Heritage’s agreement to withdraw the proposal from the ballot. The company’s new policy states that “IBM’s media-buying and content policies are . . . viewpoint neutral with respect to political or religious status or views.”

Overall, ADF’s coalition has filed 73 shareholder proposals at major corporations, resulting in more than 70 policy-related meetings with representatives of 45 companies.

Publicly traded companies such as IBM belong to their shareholders. It is telling that IBM was willing to make substantial policy changes in order to prevent shareholders from ever seeing a resolution critical of its policies. Yet, giving credit where it is due, protecting religious and political views is a promising step toward free speech and religious freedom, and back to the telos of business — providing quality goods and services to consumers and a healthy return on investment to shareholders.

Time will tell whether the burgeoning cultural shift in corporate America is truly a principled return to the values that propelled our free-market economy and human flourishing to become the envy of the world, or a fleeting response to a dedicated, merry band of insurgents, or some combination of the two. Americans should welcome the change, nonetheless.

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Source: Corporate America’s Retreat from Wokeness Welcome | National Review