Florida divests billions from investment firm over QAnon-linked conspiracy theory

On Monday, Mother Jones detailed the QAnon-linked conspiracy theory at the heart of why Florida's chief financial officer just divested billions of dollars from the investment firm BlackRock.

"The firm, Florida chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis alleged, didn’t have its investors’ best interests in mind," reported Kiera Butler. "'Florida’s Treasury Division is divesting from BlackRock because they have openly stated they’ve got other goals than producing returns,' he told Reuters. He was referring to the company’s commitment to environmental, social, and governance principles, a collection of socially responsible investing values widely known by their acronym, ESG."

This announcement was confusing for BlackRock, which noted, “As a fiduciary, everything we do is with the sole goal of driving returns for our clients,” and “We are surprised by the Florida CFO’s decision given the strong returns BlackRock has delivered to Florida taxpayers over the last five years. Neither the CFO nor his staff have raised any performance concerns.” But Patronis' divestment wasn't so much related to performance, as to a bizarre internet theory.

"Florida’s move in divesting from BlackRock is arguably the most mainstream expression so far of a wide-ranging conspiracy theory centering around the World Economic Forum, a global coalition of business leaders that launched the ESG movement," wrote Butler. "In June 2020, the Forum introduced what it called the Great Reset, a pandemic initiative for businesses to recommit to values of social good, accompanied by a scoring system to track their progress on issues such as environmentalism, LGBTQ inclusiveness, and poverty reduction. Conspiracy theorists on social media, YouTube, and QAnon communities quickly latched on to the Forum’s use of the pandemic to promote ESG values." These theories alleged that global elites engineered COVID-19, then implanted microchips in vaccines to track people; some anti-Semitic activists also claimed the Jews were behind the operation, chiefly Hungarian billionaire philanthropist George Soros.

"From there, the false narratives around ESG initiatives snowballed, and what began as conspiracy theories embraced only by the paranoid fringe have gained traction in a wide array of settings, from churches to Instagram influencer feeds to parents’ groups," said the report. "In January of this year, talk radio personality Glenn Back published a book called The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of 21st Century Fascism, in which he warned of “an international conspiracy between powerful bankers, business leaders, and government officials; closed-door meetings in the Swiss Alps; and calls for a radical transformation of every society on earth.” It quickly became a bestseller." Even people like former Vice President Mike Pence have now pushed the conspiracy theory.

In some ways, the panic over ESG and the Great Reset parallel right-wing panic over Agenda 21, a nonbinding 1992 U.N. initiative on sustainability and resource management that Republicans characterized as a scheme to force a "socialist/communist redistribution of wealth" on countries worldwide.