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The Power Of Woke: How Leftist Ideology Is Undermining Our Society And Economy
The Power Of Woke: How Leftist Ideology Is Undermining Our Society And Economy
Authored by Allen Mendenhall via The Mises Institute,
“It’s an important part of society whether you like it or not,” lexicologist Tony Thorne, referring to “wokeness,” told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in January. That’s an understatement.
Wokeness is poisoning the Western workplace and constraining small and family businesses, midsized banks, and entrepreneurs while enriching powerful corporations and billionaires. It’s eating away at the capitalist ethos and killing the bottom-up modes of economic ordering and exchange that propelled the United States of America to prosperity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s infecting Gen Z and millennials, who, suffering high depression rates and prone to “quiet quitting,” are not as well off as their parents and grandparents, and who feel isolated and alone even as they enjoy a technological connectivity that’s unprecedented in human history.
What, exactly, is wokeness, and how does it impact business and the wider society?
The term as it’s widely used today differs from earlier significations. “Woke,” which plays on African American vernacular, once meant “awake to” or “aware of” social and racial injustices. The term expanded to encompass a wider array of causes from climate change, gun control, and LGTBQ rights to domestic violence, sexual harassment, and abortion.
Now, wielded by its opponents, it’s chiefly a pejorative dismissing the person or party it modifies. It’s the successor to “political correctness,” a catchall idiom that ridicules a broad range of leftist hobbyhorses. Carl Rhodes submits, in Woke Capitalism, that “woke transmuted from being a political call for self-awareness through solidarity in the face of massive racial injustice, to being an identity marker for self-righteousness.”
John McWhorter’s Woke Racism argues that wokeness is religious in character, unintentionally and intrinsically racist, and deleterious to black people. McWhorter, a black linguist, asserts that “white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species.” Books like Stephen R. Soukup’s The Dictatorship of Woke Capital and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. highlight the nefarious side of the wokeism adopted by large companies, in particular in the field of asset management, investment, and financial services.
Wokeism, in both the affirming and derogatory sense, is predicated on a belief in systemic or structural forces that condition culture and behavior. The phrases “structural racism” or “systemic racism” suggest that rational agents are nevertheless embedded in a network of interacting and interconnected rules, norms, and values that perpetuate white supremacy or marginalize people of color and groups without privilege.
Breaking entirely free from these inherited constraints is not possible, according to the woke, because we cannot operate outside the discursive frames established by long use and entrenched power. Nevertheless, the argument runs, we can decenter the power relations bolstering this system and subvert the techniques employed, wittingly or unwittingly, to preserve extant hierarchies. That requires, however, new structures and power relations.
Corporate executives and boards of directors are unsuspectingly and inadvertently—though sometimes deliberately—caught up in these ideas. They’re immersed in an ideological paradigm arising principally from Western universities. It’s difficult to identify the causative origin of this complex, disparate movement to undo the self-extending power structures that supposedly enable hegemony. Yet businesses, which, of course, are made up of people, including disaffected Gen Zs and millennials, develop alongside this sustained effort to dismantle structures and introduce novel organizing principles for society.
The problem is, rather than neutralizing power, the “woke” pursue and claim power for their own ends. Criticizing systems and structures, they erect systems and structures in which they occupy the center, seeking to dominate and subjugate the people or groups they allege to have subjugated or dominated throughout history. They replace one hegemony with another.
The old systems had problems, of course. They were imperfect. But they retained elements of classical liberalism that protected hard-won principles like private property, due process of law, rule of law, free speech, and equality under the law. Wokeism dispenses with these. It’s about strength and control. And it has produced a corporate-government nexus that rigidifies power in the hands of an elite few.
Consider the extravagant spectacle in Davos, the beautiful resort town that combined luxury and activism at the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, perhaps the largest gathering of self-selected, influential lobbyists and “c suiters” across countries and cultures. This annual event occasions cartoonish portrayals of evil, conspiratorial overlords—the soi-disant saviors paternalistically preaching about planetary improvement, glorifying their chosen burden to shape global affairs. The World Economic Forum has become a symbol of sanctimony and lavish inauthenticity, silly in its ostentation.
The near-ubiquitous celebration of lofty Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies at the World Economic Forum reveals a seemingly uniform commitment among prominent leaders to harness government to pull companies—and, alas, everyone else—to the left.
ESG is, of course, an acronym for the nonfinancial standards and metrics that asset managers, bankers, and investors factor while allocating capital or assessing risk. A growing consortium of governments, central banks, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), asset management firms, finance ministries, financial institutions, and institutional investors advocates ESG as the top-down, long-term solution to purported social and climate risks. Even if these risks are real, is ESG the proper remedy?
Attendees of the World Economic Forum would not champion ESG if they did not benefit from doing so. That plain fact doesn’t alone discredit ESG, but it raises questions about ulterior motives: What’s really going on? How will these titans of finance and government benefit from ESG?
One obvious answer involves the institutional investors that prioritize activism over purely financial objectives or returns on investment (for legal reasons, activist investors would not characterize their priorities as such). It has only been a century since buying and selling shares in publicly traded companies became commonplace among workers and households. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), created in response to the Great Depression, isn’t even 100 years old.
Until recently, most investors divested if they owned stock in a company that behaved contrary to their beliefs. They rarely voted their shares or voted only on major issues like mergers and acquisitions. In 2023, however, institutional investors such as hedge funds and asset management firms engage boards of directors, exercise proxy voting, and issue shareholder reports with the primary goal of politicizing companies. As intermediaries, they invest pension funds, mutual funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, 401(k)s and more on behalf of beneficiaries who may or may not know what political causes their invested assets support.
If a publicly traded company “goes woke,” consider which entities hold how much of its shares and whether unwanted shareholder pressure is to blame. Consider, too, the role of third-party proxy advisors in the company’s policies and practices.
Big companies go woke to eliminate competition. After all, they can afford the costs to comply with woke regulations whereas small companies cannot. Institutional investors warn of prospective risks of government regulation while lobbying for such regulation. In the United States, under the Biden Administration, woke federal regulations are, unsurprisingly, emerging. Perhaps publicly traded companies will privatize to avoid proposed SEC mandates regarding ESG disclosures, but regulation in other forms and through other agencies will come for private companies too.
The woke should question why they’re collaborating with their erstwhile corporate enemies. Have they abandoned concerns about poverty for the more lucrative industry of identity politics and environmentalism? Have they sold out, happily exploiting the uncouth masses, oppressing the already oppressed, and trading socioeconomic class struggle for the proliferating dogma of race, sexuality, and climate change? As wokeness becomes inextricably tied to ESG, we can no longer say, “Go woke, go broke.” Presently, wokeness is a vehicle to affluence, a status marker, the ticket to the center of the superstructure.
ESG helps the wealthiest to feel better about themselves while widening the gap between the rich and poor and disproportionately burdening economies in developing countries. It’s supplanting the classical liberal rules and institutions that leveled playing fields, engendered equality of opportunity, expanded the franchise, reduced undue discrimination, eliminated barriers to entry, facilitated entrepreneurship and innovation, and empowered individuals to realize their dreams and rise above their station at birth.
When politics is ubiquitous, wokeness breeds antiwokeness. The right caught on to institutional investing; counteroffensives are underway. The totalizing politicization of corporations is a zero-sum arms race in which the right captures some companies while the left captures others.
Soon there’ll be no escaping politics, no tranquil zones, and little space for emotional detachment, contemplative privacy, or principled neutrality; parallel economies will emerge for different political affiliations; noise, fighting, anger, distraction, and division will multiply; every quotidian act will signal a grand ideology. For the woke, “silence is violence”; there’s no middle ground; you must speak up; and increasingly for their opponents as well, you must choose sides.
Which will you choose in this corporatized dystopia? If the factions continue to concentrate and centralize power, classical liberals will have no good options. Coercion and compulsion will prevail over freedom and cooperation. And commerce and command will go hand in hand.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 02/26/2023 – 23:00
Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting details her 34-year extramarital affair
Lady Anne Glenconner can vividly recall one of the final moments she spent with her husband of 54 years.
The 90-year-old, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret for three decades, looked after Lord Colin Tennant, the Baron Glenconner, as he battled prostate cancer.
“We had separate bedrooms,” she recalled to Fox News Digital. “I was very upset… and I was crying quietly to myself. I didn’t think he could hear that. He did. He came in and he hugged me. It was the first time in years that he touched me. He said, ‘Was it all bad, Anne?’ I said, ‘No, of course it wasn’t all bad. A lot of it was fine.’ But it was very touching. I always remembered that. And it was a wonderful thing to happen.”
The British aristocrat passed away in 2010 at age 83. Glenconner, who wrote a book in 2020 about her friendship with Queen Elizabeth II’s younger sister, has written a follow-up published on Feb. 21 titled “Whatever Next? Lessons from an Unexpected Life,” which details her troubled marriage. Glenconner, who was inspired by Queen Consort Camilla and her work with domestic violence victims, decided to finally come forward with her story. She said her three children supported her decision. Her eldest two sons passed away in the 1990s.
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“[In my first book] I made light of a lot of things,” Glenconner admitted. “I didn’t say everything I really wanted to say… [But] I was influenced, I supposed, by the Queen Consort, who has done so much for battered wives and women who are abused. And I had a talk with my children… That’s why I did it.”
Glenconner is the eldest daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester and was childhood friends with both the queen and Margaret. She went on to become a maid of honor at the queen’s coronation in 1953. Glenconner married Tennant, the charming and charismatic friend of Margaret’s, in 1956.
“He was quite different from anybody else I’d ever met,” she said. “He was attractive, he was funny. He was full of wonderful ideas and just made me see that my life could be different. It could be a great adventure. And I completely fell for him. He was also a great friend of Princess Margaret. He was one of the young men she went out with. And I was always rather amazed that he chose me, that he actually wanted to marry me. And a lot of the time we were very happy.”
But according to Glenconner, it didn’t take long for her to see her spouse’s dark side.
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“I had seen him lose his temper before we got married,” she said. “He always said, ‘The minute we’re married, I won’t need to lose my temper.’ Which, of course, I believed. But he lost his temper on our honeymoon. His promise of not to lose his temper didn’t last long.”
Glenconner alleged that Tennent was physically abusive behind closed doors. She described him as having violent outbursts. He would allegedly scream at her and throw things in her direction. She claimed in the book that at one point, he beat her with a stick, leaving her deaf in one ear. The attack in question, she claimed, was never repeated. She also suspected that he once spiked her drink so she could loosen up in the bedroom.
“The trouble was one never knew when he would lose his temper,” she explained. “And that made it very exhausting to be with him.”
Glenconner said she felt as if she was “treading on eggshells” throughout her marriage. The family nanny, Barbara Barnes, who later became a nanny to Princes William and Harry, kept the young children in the dark about the tumultuous union.
“I was brought up quite old-fashioned, I suppose,” she reflected. “We were brought up [with the idea] that you stick with things. When I went back to my mother once and said, ‘Look, I don’t think I can cope,’ she said, ‘You’re married Anne, you’ll go straight back.’ And I did. And you know, people didn’t divorce so much when I was young. We stuck with it. We tried to make the best of it.”
According to Glenconner, Tennant had many mistresses. To cope, she turned to a close friend, who was also married. It resulted in a 34-year affair. Glenconner has never named her lover.
“I lost my trust in men,” she said. “We saw each other once a week. We had lunch and the occasional weekend. But he gave me back [my trust]. And I realized that men can be wonderful, that men could be kind, and all that. He made so much difference in my life.”
Glenconner said her lover’s wife was aware of the arrangement. Affairs among the upper crust were very common, she pointed out. And when the mystery man was on his deathbed, his wife invited Glenconner to come to say goodbye.
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“I didn’t know she was going to ask me, but I [was] so pleased when she did,” said Glenconner. “She sent me a memento after he died… I think she probably had some of her own. That’s what people used to do in marriages. That’s how they kept marriages together, really. People had affairs. And yet, we carried on. It was an alternative to divorce.”
Glenconner also found solace in her friendship with Margaret, who was struggling in her own marriage. She and the Earl of Snowden had their own extramarital affairs before they eventually divorced in 1978.
“[Princess Margaret] knew Colin had a terrible temper,” she said. “He used to lose his temper in front of her. So she knew it. Once, he was particularly awful to me and I started to cry. She said to me, ‘Anne, there’s absolutely no point in crying. Come on. Brace up, man up.’ She was very practical. She said, ‘You mustn’t let him see he has this effect on you. You’ve got to be stronger.’ And she was in a very difficult marriage herself… [And] for one wonderful year, I lived with her… We would just talk and talk. And in the end, when I left, she said, ‘I really enjoyed having you, Anne. We got on so well. So much better than our awful husbands.’ We just had to laugh. You have to laugh. Otherwise, life is impossible.”
During the final years of her marriage, Glenconner resided in England while her husband stayed in the West Indies. Tennant spent vast amounts of his fortune on transforming Mustique, a tiny island in the Caribbean, into a party resort for the rich and famous. He paid nearly $54,000 for the island in 1958, the New Yorker reported.
“I stayed with Colin,” she said. “We were married for 54 years, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody else. But I think that we were lucky toward the end, especially. We didn’t spend a great deal of time together… We spoke to each other on the telephone frequently, two or three times a week.”
But Glenconner said she received a final blow from her husband when he passed away. According to reports, he cut her from his will and instead, left a sizable amount of his fortune to his devoted valet Kent Adonai. It resulted in a legal battle with Tennant’s grandson.
“I got over everything else, more or less,” she said. “All his private things should have gone to the children and me. And I minded about that. I didn’t know how to take it, really couldn’t believe it… After seven years… we took it to court and [my grandson] got half of it back. So something came back.”
Today, life for Glenconner has been “wonderful.” Since sharing her story, she’s received countless letters from women who’ve also endured struggles in their marriages. She’s also penned two historic novels. Her new book offers a list of addresses for those “who are going through a difficult time,” including SafeLives, a charity the queen consort supports.
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“I’ve never been so happy,” she said. “Walking away from a marriage can be quite difficult for many reasons. And I hope my story helps others realize they’re not alone.”
Michelle Yeoh makes SAG Awards history with ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ win
Much like her “Everything Everywhere All at Once” character, Michelle Yeoh has become an unstoppable force — especially as she traipses through 2023 awards circuit.
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Review: ‘The Last of Us’ takes another break to tell a different love story
We again interrupt your regularly scheduled zombie drama with a touching love story, this time in the form of an extended flashback during a different phase of life.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/entertainment/the-last-of-us-episode-7-review/index.html
Suspect bashed man in the head with empty bottle in Soho: cops
The unidentified suspect hit the 42-year-old victim multiple times over the head with the glass bottle.
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L.A. County residents without power since Friday ask why the city can’t do better
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‘American Idol’: Katy Perry shouts America has ‘failed us’ at school shooting survivor’s audition
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These 51 big businesses target conservatives. Here’s what you can do to stop them
It is not a secret that over the past decade, hundreds of large U.S. corporations have adopted woke policies, regularly injecting left-wing ideals into their products, services and employment practices. But some of these businesses have recently gone much further than merely promoting social justice causes; they have chosen to target conservative customers and employees, coercing or forcing Americans to abandon their deeply held beliefs in order to receive important goods or services or to stay employed.
Although many conservatives have heard stories about corporate discrimination in recent years, they have often struggled to keep track of which businesses have been part of this movement, and which have largely stayed on the sidelines. A new project launched by the 1792 Exchange, a nonprofit organization, seeks to shed light on this important problem.
The 1792 Exchange recently launched its Spotlight Report, which assesses more than 1,000 companies’ “policies, practices, and other relevant criteria to determine the likelihood a company will cancel a contract or client, or boycott, divest, or deny services based on views or beliefs.”
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The 1792 Exchange team then used those assessments to assign businesses to three categories — “Lower Risk,” “Medium Risk,” and “High Risk.”
According to the group’s website, “‘High Risk’ companies have generally canceled or denied business relationships based on viewpoint disagreements or pose a high risk of canceling people and businesses who do not share their views.” Out of the more than 1,000 companies evaluated, 147 are currently classified as “High Risk,” which means they are much more likely than other businesses to engage in direct discrimination.
I have carefully reviewed the assessments produced by the 1792 Exchange and have selected 51 of the most impactful for this article. Those companies are grouped by category and listed below.
Perhaps the most influential groups of woke companies in the report are banks. Numerous large banks are using their financial might to effectively force business customers into adopting climate change policies, even when it will require that those customers dramatically change their business practices.
Many of these banks have also weaponized their operations to promote social and ideological views favored by the left. For example, Bank of America vets its vendors based on their commitment to LGBTQ views, and it has ceased lending with some gun manufacturers. It has also provided funding to Planned Parenthood, as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a long track record of targeting conservative groups.
Bank of America and its CEO, Brian Moynihan, as well as many of the other banks that have been assigned a “High Risk” score by the 1792 Exchange have been some of the biggest supporters of the radical environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement. ESG is a kind of social credit scoring model that aims to fundamentally transform the global economy so that it’s more in line with the United Nations’ left-wing Sustainable Development Goals.
The 1792 Exchange identified 21 “High Risk” banks: Ally Financial, Amalgamated Bank, Bank of America, Berkshire Bank, BMO Harris, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Eastern Bank, Fifth Third Bank, First Republic Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, PNC, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD Bank, Bancorp, Trillium Asset Management, Truist, US Bank, and Wells Fargo.
The 1792 Exchange determined that five large transportation companies fall into its “High Risk” category — Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and XPO Logistics.
Although the transportation companies listed in the 1792 Exchange report do not regularly refuse to do business based on ideological or religious considerations, they have engaged in left-wing activism and even promoted partisan legislation.
For instance, American Airlines publicly fought against the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act — commonly and falsely labeled the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” by liberals. The legislation prevents public schools from teaching young children, kindergarten through third grade, about topics related to sex and gender identity.
Similarly, Southwest Airlines fought against state laws that sought to enhance election integrity by limiting questionable practices like mail-in balloting.
The 1792 Exchange labeled 15 large businesses in the “Retailing” industry as “High Risk” companies, including popular brick-and-mortar stores Best Buy, Home Depot, Kohl’s, Lululemon, Macy’s, Madewell, Target and Walmart. The online retailers included in the report as “High Risk” are Alibaba, Amazon, Chewy, eBay, Etsy, Shopify and Warby Parker.
The reasons behind the decision to identify these companies as “High Risk” varied, but in every case, the 1792 Exchange provided significant evidence showing that these businesses have actively promoted left-wing ideological views.
For example, 1792 Exchange notes Home Depot “advertised flyers to its employees about confronting their ‘white privilege, Christian privilege, heterosexual privilege, able-bodied privilege,’ etc.”
Target has removed books from its stores at the request of liberal activists, and it has fought against numerous legislative proposals backed by conservative lawmakers, including election integrity legislation in Georgia.
Ten large food and beverage companies were given “High Risk” ratings in the 1792 Exchange report: Altria, Ben & Jerry’s, Cargill, Coca-Cola, HelloFresh, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Starbucks and the JM Smucker Company.
Although all of these businesses engaged in troubling activities, the company with the most radical practices is, by far, Ben & Jerry’s. The famous Vermont-based ice cream company has promoted “Defund the Police” campaigns, opposed legislation meant to limit election fraud, said that the criminal justice system “must be dismantled,” and openly advocated for pro-abortion policies, among many other actions.
Unfortunately, the 51 companies mentioned throughout this article are just the tip of the iceberg. Numerous other important corporations are also actively undermining conservatives and/or discriminating against families or businesses who do not share their radical views.
The 1792 Exchange outlined nearly 100 additional “High Risk” companies in its report, including some of the most powerful in the world, like Alphabet (the owners of Google), Disney, and Apple.
How can conservatives push back against these businesses?
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The first step is to share instances of discrimination and reports like the one produced by the 1792 Exchange with like-minded friends and family.
Conservatives should identify companies that offer similar products and services to those offered by businesses that discriminate and switch, whenever possible. If you can switch products or services, be sure to tell both the business you’re leaving and the new, non-discriminatory business why you’re making the change.
If there aren’t any good alternatives, then send a letter to businesses that are engaging in discrimination to tell them that you’re considering leaving because of their actions. Companies don’t often receive letters like these, so they do have an impact.
Finally, conservative lawmakers need to prioritize policies that reject ESG social credit scores and other systematic attempts meant to coerce companies into embracing leftist causes. The legislation proposed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis earlier this month that would limit the use of ESG scores in banking is a great place to start.
If conservatives don’t soon make a concerted effort to fight back against woke corporations, America could soon be transformed beyond repair. We simply cannot afford to wait any longer.
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