Scott Shay, the chairman of the now-collapsed Signature Bank, co-hosted a seminar called “Know Your Pronouns” last October, where employees were lectured on how to avoid misgendering other staff.
A video of the seminar on Signature Bank’s YouTube channel went viral across social media as regulators took control of the bank.
Shay co-hosted the seminar with the Manhattan-based corporate consulate on gender issues, Finn Brigham.
Brigham was described as a “genderqueer trans masculine person” during the seminar.
Shay opened the seminar by lauding Signature Bank as “the first bank in the United States to have an openly gay man on our board,” referencing former board member Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), who co-sponsored legislation to regulate banks after the 2008 financial crash.
The video shows Brigham going through a list of pronouns, including she, hers, he, his, they, them, ze, and hir.
The lecture titled “Know Your Pronouns” was part of Signature Bank’s “Social Impact” series.
Watch
“The most common pronouns folks are familiar with are ‘she’ and ‘he,'” Brigham said. “I don’t know if there’s anyone in the Signature Bank world, but probably you have clients that use ‘they’/’ them’ as pronouns. They’re gender-neutral pronouns on purpose.”
“‘Ze’ is another gender-neutral pronoun,” Brigham claimed. “The other part of that would be ‘hir’ — spelled H-I-R.”
It wasn’t just Signature bank wasting money on ‘woke’ causes.
Silicon Valley Bank was throwing money at social justice causes like Black Lives Matter to the tune of nearly $74 million.
Kira Davis from Red State reported:
The figure comes from an extensive report dropped by the Claremont Institute on Tuesday. The report details $82 billion dollars in social justice/BLM investments by major American companies. SVB stands out as one of the larger donors, next to big donors like Apple ($100 million) and Comcast ($165 million). While at the top of the donation pool, those contributors do pale in comparison to donors like Blackrock ($810 million) and Citigroup ($1.1 billion). However, the group did pledge on their website to provide in total up to $11 billion dollars by 2026 for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and racial justice causes.
SVB executives explained on their website the turbulent racial atmosphere following the George Floyd killing and protests prompted them to expand “opportunities for dialogue,” a calling that doesn’t seem to have much concrete investment return, but ended up taking $74 million dollars out of bank coffers anyway.
According to the company’s Corporate Responsibility report, the focus leaned heavily on Climate and Social and Governance (ESG) actions.
There were some major concerns, but it apparently did not include banking:
- Climate and environmental finance and investment
- Climate and environmental risk management
- Climate and environmental impacts from operations
- Diversity, equity and inclusion across our leadership, workforce, supply chain and communities
- Community Development, financial inclusion and economic equality
- Quality of leadership (including skills and diversity)
On Monday, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus said the bank failed due to adopting “woke” policies.
“I feel bad for all of these people that lost all their money in this woke bank. You know, it was more distressing to hear that the bank officials sold off their stock before this happened. It’s depressing to me,” Marcus said.
“Who knows whether the Justice Department would go after them? They’re a woke company, so I guess not. And they’ll probably get away with it,” he added.
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