Bradley Foundation President to Deliver Keynote at SFOF’s Investing in Energy Summit

Richard Graber, president of the Bradley Foundation, will deliver the keynote address today at the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) summit in Anchorage, Alaska, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has learned. SFOF’s Investing in American Energy summit began yesterday with a five-hour glacier cruise sponsored by the New York-based tech company Saige, materials obtained by CMD detail.

Other speakers listed on the agenda for the summit include Ben Carson, Trump’s former secretary of Housing and Urban Development; GOP pollster Scott Rasmussen; and Kimberley Strassel, a Wall Street Journal opinion columnist and 2014 Bradley Prize recipient.

The Bradley Foundation has disclosed funneling $750,000 to SFOF in 2022–23, and its “aligned” Impact Fund, of which Graber is vice president, gave another $272,813 in 2022. The grants the Impact Fund distributed in 2023 are not yet publicly available.

The more than $1 million Bradley has contributed to SFOF over the past two years eclipses the amount given by the next largest known contributor, Consumers’ Research, which gave SFOF $467,500 in 2021–22. In its 2023 annual report obtained and published by CMD, SFOF disclosed receiving 59% of its revenue from foundations and 31% from corporations. The corporations that have been identified as donors are listed on CMD’s SFOF Exposed site.

SFOF, a membership organization of 37 Republican state treasurers, auditors, and financial executives weaponized to fight “woke” capitalism, more than doubled its revenue in 2022 to over $2 million, CMD reported in December.

Bradley’s Strategic Fight Against ESG

Bradley declared war against sustainable investing — or the consideration of environmental, social, and corporate governance factors (ESG) — in its 2023–2025 strategic plan, CMD first reported. In the planning document, Bradley calls ESG “distortions that inhibit free enterprise,” whereas proponents argue that the consideration of ESG factors provides important insights since it helps investors evaluate the return on investments in light of their larger environmental and societal impacts.

While Bradley makes its fight against ESG clear in its most recent strategic plan, it actually began focusing on the effort as early as 2019 with funding for the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR). Established in 2007, the project is designed to counter “liberal shareholder activism” by filing shareholder resolutions, confronting executives at shareholder meetings, and sponsoring media campaigns. It is directed by Scott Shepard, an operative in the Right’s manufactured crisis around sustainable investing. Bradley is the largest known investor in the Free Enterprise Project, providing $2.2 million (2019–23) in grants, according to CMD’s analysis of IRS filings and annual reports.

Bradley began featuring many of the Right’s anti-ESG operatives at its Bradley Impact donor conferences starting in 2021. The conferences bring together wealthy individuals and foundation managers who utilize Bradley’s curated lists of grantees to contribute to groups through BIF, its donor advised fund.

In a 2021 session titled “Acronyms Galore: The Real Threats Behind ESG and DEI,” Acton Institute Research Director Samuel Gregg moderated the panel with anti-ESG zealots Justin Danhof and Andy Puzder. At the time, Danhof was NCPPR’s executive vice president and director of the Free Enterprise Project, though now he’s executive vice president and head of corporate governance at Strive Asset Management, the investment firm cofounded by recent GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Puzder, a former fast food group CEO, is a member of SFOF’s national advisory committee and a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, where his work is focused on anti-ESG activism.

All three on the panel worked to demonize ESG and DEI, a recording obtained by CMD reveals.

In his opening remarks, Gregg defined the two acronyms and tied them to Marxism, perhaps the Right’s most vilified political philosophy. “There are some scholars who say that, well, if you dig into the roots of some of these ideas, you find the face of Karl Marx not far behind,” he said, adding that together ESG and DEI create “the phenomena of what’s called ‘woke capitalism.’”

Danhof used his remarks to promote his practice of filing shareholder resolutions as effective in fighting this phenomenon and therefore worth funding. “As cancel culture comes for conservatives everywhere, I’ve protected more than five and a half million American employees from being canceled for their private personal politics,” he boasted.

Puzder went furthest in his remarks, warning that ESG and DEI threaten capitalism. “Free market capitalism is under attack by big government socialists. And some of you — I’m 71 — some of you are close to my age. You can probably remember when they were called communist or socialist or just plain liberals…. They have to change their name every decade or so because people figure out what they’re trying to do. And what they’re trying to do now is destroy the American system,” Puzder claimed. “They want to eliminate our personal liberty and our economic freedom in the interest of growing government, expanding government to the maximum extent possible and trying to impose government dependence really from cradle to grave. And if you don’t think that’s what’s going on in Washington right now, you’re not paying very close attention.”

In 2022, Bradley welcomed Ramaswamy as another anti-woke warrior ready to continue attacks on ESG at its Impact Conference, where he called sustainable investing “the largest-scale fraud, not just a financial fraud, but a fraud on the identity of the 21st century.” In a video of his speech obtained by CMD, Ramaswamy was also given an opportunity to promote Strive as an alternative to what he calls the “ESG industrial complex” or “woke industrial complex.”

In 2022, Ramaswamy received SFOF’s Honors Lifetime Achievement Award.

Then, in 2023, Bradley again invited anti-ESG activists to its annual Impact Conference, an agenda obtained by CMD shows.

A session titled “Public Service for the Public Trust” brought together SFOF CEO Derek Kreifels, Wisconsin State Treasurer John Leiber (R), and Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks (R) to discuss how state financial officers “collaborate to be good stewards” of the public’s trust. That marks Kreifels’ final Bradley conference as SFOF’s CEO now that he has announced his departure from the pay-to-play group as of last week.

Other organizations CMD has exposed as key actors in the Right’s war on sustainable investing and responsible business practices and that received Bradley Foundation and Impact Fund grants in 2022 and Bradley Foundation grants in 2023 include: Advancing American Freedom ($110,000); Alliance Defending Freedom ($824,000); American Legislative Exchange Council ($1 million); Lucy Burns Institute DBA Ballotpedia ($515,500); Consumers’ Research ($50,000); Foundation for Government Accountability ($1.2 million); Independent Women’s Forum ($480,000); Reason Foundation ($457,000); State Policy Network ($435,000); Texas Public Policy Foundation ($551,350); and The Heritage Foundation ($529,850).