Yesterday, we wondered what Bud Light’s VP of marketing was thinking when she made transgender cultist Dylan Mulvaney a corporate spokesman. Today, we’ll ponder what powerful American companies are thinking when they listen to leftist nincompoops like Alissa Heinerscheid.

Because now we know what they’re thinking.

What they’re thinking is: We’d better not piss off the hard-left extortionists at the Human Rights Campaign. And, more specifically, We’d better not run afoul of the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index.

The HRC, whose overriding goal is “to ensure that all LGBTQ+ people, and particularly those of us who are trans, people of color and HIV+, are treated as full and equal citizens within our movement, across our country and around the world,” seems committed to achieving these ends by any means necessary, however brutish. And while it wouldn’t be fair to tar the entire of the HRC with the same brush as its cofounder, Democrat megadonor Terry Bean, who was arrested in 2014 and indicted in 2019 on charges of sodomy and sex abuse with a 15-year-old boy, we think it’s safe to say that his spirit lives on within HRC’s mission.

Fundamental to that mission is the organization’s so-called Corporate Equality Index, which works a lot like the Mob’s protection racket: Nice business ya got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.

Launched back in 2002, the CEI “has become a roadmap and benchmarking tool for U.S. businesses in the evolving field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer equality in the workplace.”

And not only that. Lest you think the HRC is obsessed only with sex, more recently the organization has come to wield the Left’s other cultural cudgel: race. “We cannot achieve LGBTQ+ equality,” it proclaims, “while LGBTQ+ people of color continue to be oppressed on the basis of race. We must lean into our responsibility to advocate for those within our community who are multiply marginalized and shut out by systems and institutions because they are people of color AND LGBTQ+.”

So now you know what keeps the corporate titans up at night: doing whatever they can to keep from running afoul of the HRC CEI.

It ain’t easy. As the New York Post reported recently:

Executives at companies like Nike, Anheuser-Busch and Kate Spade, whose brand endorsements have turned controversial trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney into today’s woke “It girl,” aren’t just virtue signaling.

They’re handing out lucrative deals to what were once considered fringe celebrities because they have to — or risk failing an all-important social credit score that could make or break their businesses.

Not surprisingly, as the Post continues, HRC “has received millions from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation among others, issues report cards for America’s biggest corporations via the CEI: awarding or subtracting points for how well companies adhere to what HRC calls its ‘rating criteria.’ Businesses that attain the maximum 100 total points earn the coveted title ‘Best Place To Work For LGBTQ Equality.’ Fifteen of the top 20 Fortune-ranked companies received 100% ratings last year, according to HRC data.”

Were that as far as this index went, it’d be one thing. But as political podcaster James Lindsay tells the Post, the HRC administers the CEI ranking “like an extortion racket, like the Mafia. It doesn’t just sit back passively either. HRC sends representatives to corporations every year telling them what kind of stuff they have to make visible at the company. They give them a list of demands and if they don’t follow through there’s a threat that you won’t keep your CEI score.”

So there you have it: Comply. Or else.

Today’s corporate executives have rarely been accused of excessive bravery, so it’s understandable — if no less infuriating — that they’d pursue the path of least resistance.

Earlier this week, our Nate Jackson offered this keen synopsis of the HRC and their fellow gender cultists: “They proselytize, they market, and they pass laws, all in service to an agenda.”

It’s that agenda, then, that we — all of us — must call out and fight against at every turn.