The mechanism. Since 2021, roughly a dozen red states have passed laws — Texas's SB 13 and SB 19 are the model — barring public pension funds and state contracts from doing business with financial firms deemed to "boycott" fossil fuels or firearms. The target was always BlackRock: Louisiana and Missouri each pulled $500 million in 2022, Texas's teacher and school funds divested billions in 2023-24, and the political theater has been real. But theater has a release valve. Texas's comptroller quietly removed BlackRock from the state's official boycott list in 2025 after the firm reworked its ESG proxy-voting policy, and a federal judge in February 2026 ruled the Texas divestment statute unconstitutionally vague. The underlying capital never actually fled asset management — it fled the public-markets, proxy-voting version of asset management. Money that state treasurers wanted out of ESG-flagged index funds increasingly lands instead in private infrastructure vehicles, where there's no proxy ballot to boycott, no shareholder climate resolution to vote down, and no annual 13F disclosure for an attorney general to scrutinize. That's Blackstone's lane.