As we have noted before, Ike Brannon likes to lie about proxy advisors while omitting any reference to his affiliation with the CEO-funded dark money efforts to limit investor access to the sole source of independent research on proxy issues. Note that his comments appear in the unedited commentary section of Forbes, barely above Qnon in its journalistic legitimacy.

We refer to him as a sock puppet because not only does he decline to disclose his connection to a Koch-funded “policy” group, he declines to disclose the connection between his organization and the other people he cites.

In his latest, his reference to the “methodical and cautious way that the previous SEC arrived at the rule it went forward” on the previous rule, a rulemaking that was rushed through in the last weeks of the Trump administration despite serious concerns about the legitimacy of the “fishy” comments Bloomberg noted were not sent by the people whose names were used, the creation of fake social media profiles and fake “news” sites, the party-line vote over the strongest objections from the minority Commissioners, the current litigation over the rule, and the fatally flawed cost-benefit and paperwork reduction analyses. He mentions previous examinations of the issue as though there was a long, deliberate process, ignoring the reality that the earlier analyses led to a decision not to regulate and it was not until the massively funded disinformation campaign of 2020 led to a rushed and corrupt process. This skewing of the facts is its own best rebuttal, but his persistence is of interest as an indication of the efforts to keep the Trump-era rule in effect as the SEC proposes a revised version.