Why is 'woke' not going broke?

Around the world, people are reacting against having ‘white privilege’ and ‘transgender affirmation’ shoved down their throats.

In general, most people hate wokeness, or, at the very least, are averse to it.

Yet the movement keeps marching on, and schools, corporations and governments which push it are not, in fact, going ‘broke’. Yes, they might take a hit here and there, but we are certainly not seeing anything approaching defeat.

Consider instead some examples of global acceleration:

Target, a leading clothing retail chain in the US, this month launched transgender-friendly swimming costumes for Pride Month, in which boys have a space in the garment to tuck their genitals away.

Quite shockingly, their new Pride line features clothes from a British designer, Abprallen, who openly embraces the symbolism of Satan:

Note the ‘baby’ colours used.

Target’s CEO, Brian Cornell, at the outset of Pride Month, stated that the company is committed to catering for “all the families” who shop at Target, and defended his diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as “just the right things for our business today.” What kind of business is this, then?

Across the Atlantic, this weekend the traditional home of rugby, London’s Twickenham, will fly the LGBT flag, in response to a World XV side playing this weekend selecting the outspoken Christian player, Israel Folau. The coach who selected him, former world champion New Zealand coach, Steve Hansen, supports the decision.

Another sports team, the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, is marking the religious festivities of Pride by inviting the explicitly anti-Christian LGBT group, the ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’, to their games.

Bear in mind that a man recently got 15 years of jail time in the US for burning a Pride flag.

(There is an important clue here as to the origin of ‘wokeness’. Whilst it was launched as an anti-white movement, at its deepest level, this is religious warfare. It apes Christianity because it wants to replace it and destroy it. It is no accident that ‘pride’ used to be considered the deadliest of sins. The ‘open society’ is reaching a climax in which categories of male and female, right and wrong, true and false, and borders themselves are all erased.

Is there an element of ‘Marxism’ involved? Certainly, particularly of the cultural kind. But big corporate embrace of wokeness suggests it goes well beyond any kind of old-fashioned class warfare. This revolution has gone beyond Marxism, but by tapping into the same roots of Marxism which were long hidden - a general hatred and resentment towards God, hierarchy, patriarchy, and all of European civilization.)

What about ‘masculine’ car and beer brands?

Budweiser beer has a man with five o’clock shadow dressed up a girl as a brand ambassador. (Nike uses him too.)

Let’s check in on Ford:

Of course it goes without saying where the west’s chief miliary alliance stands on this issue:

Even in the ostensibly ‘red state’ of Texas, the state’s university, in the aftermath of the Floyd event, adopted bureaucratic language that “equates ‘objectivity’ with ‘white supremacy,’ recommends the word ‘wimmin’ as a replacement for ‘women,’ and affirms ‘polyamory’ and ‘polyfidelity’ as positive sexual identities.”

The university, after three years of this, is not going broke.

And while some companies like Disney and Budweiser may have taken a hit, wokeness itself marches on. Perhaps some corporations and schools change the packaging, but the same sexual propaganda is pushed, along with the same pernicious racial agenda. Militaries, after all, remain committed to the new religion.

It is clear woke is not going broke. If anything, woke is escalating. This escalation should not be surprising, however.

Has a major government fallen yet for lockdowns and vaccine disinformation? What about a corporate or academic board who were complicit in the destruction?

Why then would wokeness lead to their downfall?

In short, it does not matter if the majority disagree with the state religion, so long as the elite, or ‘managerial’ classes continue to ‘believe’.

I have long been sceptical of the notion that ‘woke’ companies or schools will eventually go ‘broke’ as they alienate themselves from their target markets.

First of all, such an idea assumes the economy is a free market made up of rational, self-interested consumers and companies governed by ‘the bottom line’. Will the LA Dodgers be boycotted into oblivion? Do enough people care about the Pride flag at Twickenham to stay away? No, most will accept the revolution one inch at a time until they are either completely conditioned by the regime or it is too late.

A clear example: the official Black Lives Matter foundation is literally broke. Is that the end of BLM in schools, government, and business? Of course not. And why is that? Because we live under neither socialism or capitalism but ‘managerialism’ in which managers straddle public and private sectors whilst perpetuating official liberal ideology and making money.

These managers, the mandarins of Big Tech, Blackrock, Vanguard, the handful of truly significiant media houses, the big banks, NATO, and the WHO, recruit their footsoldiers from the dregs of society, the ‘activists’ shown above, in a ‘high-low’ alliance which has no regard for normal families and the middle class, for anybody who may have interests opposed to or independent of the regime. The same managers are often in government too, or at least fund political campaigns.

The managerial class does not need to ‘respect’ the market, or the representatives of ‘the people’. They make the market and condition the people.

As Neema Parvini makes clear in his groundbreaking book, The Populist Delusion, open societies do not have or need Soviet commissars. They have instead “armies of HR officers, diversity tsars, and equalities ministers” within and without government.

Parvini goes on to use the example of Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock. One of Fink’s clients is the US Federal Reserve. Fink continuously speaks of ‘public-private partnership’, of arguing that CEOs need to speak with one voice on climate, social, and health issues. If they don’t, they will be ‘left behind’.

In theory ‘the market’ decides, but in practice, men like Larry Fink decide. A company can now be sunk regardless of its actual success with consumers simply through investor activism. Likewise, products that have little to no market demand such as Beyond Meat can be thrust onto the shelves despite continually failing to sell; appalling sales figures have not stopped massive corporations such as McDonalds and KFC pushing Beyond Meat ‘plant burgers’ to the front and centre of their menus using the full might of their advertising budgets.

The markets are made and the people are conditioned.

Second of all, the idea of ‘woke going broke’ neglects the long history of corporate and governmental embrace of nascent wokeness, even when it has hurt the economy and society. They can absorb the costs for ‘the greater good’ of maintaining their grip on the global liberal polity.

Consider the Great Recession. Whilst films and books have routinely laid the blame for the crisis at the feet of greedy bank executives, it is possibly more true to blame the entry of ‘affirmative action’ into bank lending policy.

Intriguingly, these radical policies were not pushed by Democrats in the US, but by George W. Bush, who, you may recall, was once regarded as a far right Christian imperialist.

This is what Bush said at a White House conference in 2002, quite incoherently to be sure:

More and more people own their homes in America today. Two-thirds of all Americans own their homes. Yet, we have a problem here in America because fewer than half of the Hispanics and half the African Americans own the home… I set an ambitious goal. It’s one that I believe we can achieve. It’s a clear goal, that by the end of this decade we’ll increase the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families… To open up the doors of homeownership there are some barriers, and I want to talk about four that need to be overcome… First, downpayments–a lot of folks can’t make a downpayment. They may be qualified. They may desire to buy a home, but they don’t have the money to make a downpayment… If you put your mind to it, the first-time homebuyer, the low-income homebuyer can have just as nice a house as anybody else.

Bush would later admit in his memoirs:

I had supported policies to expand homeownership, including down-payment assistance for low-income and first-time buyers. I was pleased to see the ownership society grow. But the exuberance of the moment masked the underlying risk.

Yes, affirmative action was at the heart of the Great Recession. Some financial institutions would go under, of course, but the bulk of the pain would hit the middle class around the world.

And when it came time to ‘reform’ the banking sector under Obama, the same ethos of ‘diversity and inclusion’ (D&I) would be further entrenched into law by the Dodd-Frank Act:

While the system may have had a casualty or two, the big banks are more powerful than ever.

While the wokeness they allowed in may have temporarily hurt them, the ideology is now embraced more tightly than ever before, even if it hurts profits.

Even as it causes destruction, even as an outcry goes up from the masses, even from important people, it grows stronger, because it does not exist in a marketplace of ideas and is not subject to popular control. It is top-down, not driven by the people; it is the religion of the elites.

It can destroy things right in front of us, hurt us and break us, but it will not go broke or die by natural causes.

Consider the fact that the modern conception of diversity itself has long been known to be harmful for society. The liberal Harvard professor, who had worked for the Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, Robert Putnam, wrote a famous book in 2000 called Bowling Alone, in which he pointed out that social science was unequivocal on the fact that diversity harms communities:

In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.

Admittedly, Putnam was apologetic about his findings. He delayed publication whilst he tried to ‘balance’ the data. He concluded that the solution is not to question diversity, but to generate a new ‘universal’ identity by magic.

The fact remains: a Harvard liberal knows and has pointed out wokeness is actively harmful for his own people, yet the diversity regime is not going ‘broke’ and questioning the doctrine ‘diversity is our strength’ remains heresy.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that our woke regimes are stable.

The screeching about masks, vaccines, BLM, and child sex changes betrays a real desperation. The managers know that their zeal to overturn all norms is finding friction against much of ‘the middle’ who largely cherish the realities of ordinary life, who do not ask or want the government to be their security blanket.

The propaganda is thus reaching absurd proportions, because these same elites equally lack the courage or will to use hard power against their opposition, except in limited, concentrated bursts.

What I am suggesting is that market forces or electoral politics will not be enough to exploit this friction, this narrative instability.

The masses will not suddenly wake up. The market will not suddenly bankrupt whole sports codes or Ford Motors.

Even in South Africa, where affirmative action within the power utility has plunged the nation into rolling black-outs and economic hopelessness, the ‘liberation’ party, the ANC, alongside its radical breakaway, the Economic Freedom Fighters, who together lead the charge for increased revolution, command much higher levels of support than any opposition party.

No, what we need is elite revolution.

By this, I mean that we need a new class of aristocrats, true to the etymology of the word, ‘excellent rulers’, who will challenge and dislodge the managerial class. These new elites will need to be populist in spirit, but they will not rely on the people. They will lead. They will look for imaginative opportunities to create new political realities and structures. Change can come no other way. It never has.

There is a reason the populism of 2016 failed in Britain and the US. There is a reason lockdown protests were never successful.

Yes, many more of us around the world are now aware that the emperor has no clothes. Moreover, many more of us are now aware that he is also an irrational, perverted pedophile. But that is not enough. The very structures and contours of the system are not neutral. They favour the woke, safetyist regime.

What is required therefore are not numerically more enlightened voters and consumers, but lions who will overthrow our degraded managers and their corrupt networks and systems.

Nothing else will suffice.

To be continued.