For the past year, liberals unleashed on the nation an avalanche of ideological nonsense, coupled with brutal pressure to conform. Those who bucked the party line found themselves canceled and unpersoned and had their opinions subjected to mockery and claims of delusion and “anti-science” prejudices.

Until now. Because the tide is turning. And sometimes the break from the party line comes from surprising places. 

Late-night comics are usually reliable parroters of the message of the day. So it says something that last week, Bill Maher launched an impassioned critique of “woke” culture, while this week, Jon Stewart went on Stephen Colbert’s show to say in no uncertain terms that it looks like the Wuhan coronavirus came from . . . the Wuhan lab.

Using a term from Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, Maher accused liberals of “progressophobia” — “a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress.”

That is, they’re unwilling to admit that things have gotten better. To hear them talk about race, you’d think we were still in the era of Selma and Bull Connor. (My dad marched with Freedom Riders and at Selma; trust me, things have changed.) To hear them talk about women’s rights, you’d think it was still 1958. And gay activists, despite “Pride Month” being celebrated by pretty much every corporation, are still somehow stuck in the pre-Stonewall era.

Maher’s right.

The HBO satirist also slammed President Joe Biden’s free-college plan, characterizing higher education as “a racket,” which it is. “I know free college is a left-wing thing, but is it really liberal for someone who doesn’t go to college and makes less money to pay for people who do go and make more? Especially since colleges have turned into giant luxury daycare centers with overpaid babysitters anxious to indulge every student whim?”

Stewart went further. To Colbert’s horror, he targeted the Wuhan virus’ likely origins in the Wuhan virology lab. Observed Stewart: “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic . . . which was more than likely caused by science.”

He noted the coincidence: “‘Oh my God, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China! What do we do?’ ‘Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.’”

And he mocked the Chinese response: “And then they ask those scientists, ‘So wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. How did this happen?’ And they’re like, ‘Hmmm, a pangolin kissed a turtle? . . . Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey, and then it sneezed into my chili, and now we all have coronavirus!’”

AOC praises mayoral contender Maya Wiley, touts her left-wing cred in new ad

All of this makes sense, and there have been people trying to point it out for more than a year. But until a few weeks ago, those people were mostly called kooks and silenced by Big Tech oligarchs. But now the truth is leaking out on Colbert’s show, one of the cathedrals of the woke.

It isn’t just late-night comics who are pushing back. It’s also local politicians and ordinary people. After a year of bullying, they’ve had enough.

The death of George Floyd has been used to push a vast array of unrelated racial policies, including the defunding of police and the teaching of left-wing critical race theory that blames every ill in society — even violence by blacks against other minorities — on “white supremacy.”

In Baltimore, defunding police has led to an outright tax revolt among businesses, which see no reason to pay good money to a city that doesn’t consider them worthy of protection. Businesses in the historic Fells Point district have written the city, demanding the return of basic services like law enforcement and trash pickup before they pay any more taxes. 

Meanwhile, at famed Thomas Jefferson High in Fairfax County, Va., a slate of parents opposed to critical race theory won election to the board. One of those candidates, Harry Jackson, the first black man elected to the board, denounced how CRT is “teaching that white people are inherently racist.” Yes. 

Fight the power. It’s easier than you think.

Glenn H. Reynolds

This week, a video from a San Francisco Walgreens went viral on Twitter. The video depicted a man standing next to his bicycle, loading up a garbage bag with products. The man then rides his bicycle down the aisle, past a security guard, who limply throws out a hand to try to grab the bag; the shoplifter simply brushes past him, then rides out the door.

This sort of thing has become exceedingly common in San Francisco. In late May, Thomas Fuller wrote in The New York Times, “At a board of supervisors hearing last week, representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable.” Employees at Walgreens had been told to stand aside as shoplifting took place because security officers had been assaulted repeatedly.

All of this is the result of a 2014 California ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent theft as a misdemeanor, so long as the thief took less than $950 worth of material. Thieves quickly hit on a strategy: Hit up different stores for less than $950 worth of stuff. Then, amid the Black Lives Matter protests and riots of 2020, San Francisco decided to crack down on the police. Mayor London Breed announced that booking photos would no longer be released, lest the prevalence of Black and brown faces lead to stereotyping; she announced a $120 million cut to the police and sheriff’s department over the next two years, in the interest of “prioritizing investments in the African American community”; in the first six months of 2020, 23 officers resigned from the force.

Property crime has skyrocketed. It’s not just shoplifting: burglaries increased nearly 50% year-on-year in 2020, and car theft jumped 34%. Meanwhile, the streets are littered with garbage, and have been for years thanks to lax law enforcement. In 2018, a survey of 153 blocks in downtown San Francisco showed trash on every block, 41 blocks “dotted with needles” and 96 blocks with open human feces.

This form of governance has become all too common. Los Angeles, my former hometown, has steadily declined in terms of livability. Suburban areas have been inundated with homeless vagrants, often openly shooting up, while the police have been directed to do nothing; Venice Beach has become an enormous open-air homeless encampment. Seattle has morphed from the Emerald City into a refuge for those living on the street, regardless of the risks to other citizens.

There is a reason why Americans are fleeing America’s major cities. The problem predated COVID-19, and it will post-date it, too. Americans like having a Walgreens in their neighborhoods. They enjoy being able to walk down the sidewalk without severely mentally ill homeless people — who should be in institutions where they can receive actual care — urinating on curbs. They should not have to instruct their children to hop over used needles on street corners.

Yet the governance of “compassion” continues. So does the migration away from such foolhardy policy. The top outbound states in America, according to North American Moving Services, were all deep blue: Illinois, New York, California, New Jersey and Maryland. The top inbound states were all red or purple: Idaho, Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina.

At some point, there will be no more Walgreens in San Francisco. Then we will undoubtedly hear about how this is the product of systemic racism and white privilege; we will hear tell of the brutality of American capitalism. The truth is far simpler: Where Leftist governance reigns, criminality thrives. And where criminality thrives, Americans flee.

Ben Shapiro

These days it’s not your typical latte-sipping millennials who are going woke. Taking a stroll around America’s largest metro areas will have one believe social justice is the latest fad that’s sweeping across corporate boardrooms. Much has been written about woke capital—businesses’ recent pivot to signal their affinity for leftist movements—and what it means for society at large. Suffice it to say that since last year, this trend has accelerated at breakneck speeds.

Scratching one’s head in utter confusion should be a natural response to corporate America’s virtue signaling. One has to wonder why big business, which has traditionally been perceived as a reactionary institution aligned with the political right, would make common cause with radicals on the cultural left. Counterintuitive as it may seem, corporations and prominent business moguls have many incentives to jump on the virtue-signaling bandwagon.

For megacorporations, woke signaling is a matter of self-preservation in order to protect themselves from ravenous mobs in both the virtual and physical realms. What’s more, in a time when hall monitors—state and nonstate—are lurking around every corner waiting for individuals to commit some kind of impropriety, many institutions will go out of their way to signal their compliance with the regime’s standards. Not abiding by the regime’s accepted behavior comes with major social and financial costs that the bulk of businesses are not willing to bear.

For wealthy members of society who have leftist inclinations, there’s a diminishing marginal utility of money, as Mises Institute president Jeff Deist spelled out in an interview with Jay Taylor two years back. Put simply, spending hundreds of millions on civilization-destroying campaigns is a casual expense for America’s premier tycoons, who have plenty of money to spare after covering their expenses on basic necessities. 

When someone is rich, say an individual who has $10 billion, they have the luxury of throwing money at uneconomic ventures without losing any sleep about meeting their basic economic needs. The multibillionaire spearheading a woke project that is rejected by the public will not land in the poorhouse from the financial fallout. They can go back to their private affairs or pivot to another political cause that is not as divisive. By contrast, for a small business owner, such virtue signaling could mean bankruptcy if their customer base tends to be right wing or is at least hostile toward culturally radical virtue signaling.

Indeed, one of the more perverse developments in Western societies is the rich’s penchant to squander away the wealth they’ve accumulated by funding all sorts of bizarre social projects. Only in such a developed economy, characterized by hyperabundance and unprecedented luxuries, can people engage in bizarre activities that in previous eras would have been viewed as masochistic and self-destructive.

The likes of George Soros and Michael Bloomberg offer stark counterexamples to the business elites of the past. The two financial titans have built a reputation of bankrolling a wide network of gun control groups which strive to pass legislation designed to infringe on millions of people’s ability to defend themselves. By contrast, Bloomberg and his left-leaning oligarchical counterparts have the luxury of living in gated communities and relying on private security to defend themselves. In fairness, business magnates in previous eras were likely not fervent champions of wedge political issues like gun rights, but you would not see them enthusiastically throwing their weight behind the latest political fads the Left gravitates toward these days.

Bolsheviks and Billionaires

Although the Left has changed in its overall strategy, going from class-reductionist conflicts toward an identity politics focus over the course of the past century, there exist several commonalities between the contemporary left and its past iterations. Foremost of these is its elitist origins.

In his polemical work, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, economic historian Antony Sutton uncovered the oligarchical backing of Bolshevism—the twentieth century’s most destructive political movement in terms of the body count and economic mayhem it unleashed in countries that embraced its precepts.

Contrary to the mythology that leftist historians have created, Bolshevism was no spontaneous uprising of workers, but rather a movement of elite aspirants. Lenin himself counted on a law degree and worked as a writer and political activist during his time in exile while living in Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom. Similar to Karl Marx, who relied on industrialist Friedrich Engels’s lavish patronage to subsidize his daily activities, prominent financiers such as Swedish banker Olof Aschberg helped bankroll Lenin and his revolutionary compatriots, Sutton’s work revealed.

It’s perhaps counterintuitive for financial heavyweights to throw their weight behind an individual and a movement advocating for the destruction of private property, but it makes sense when analyzing how rent-seeking economic actors behave in the context of state centralization.

The inherently centralist nature of socialist systems, even when policymakers make deviations around the margins, as seen with Lenin’s New Economic Policy, remains attractive to unscrupulous financial actors, who seek to exploit these features for the sake of easy profits while not facing any serious competition. Sutton observed how economic radicals and big financial interests can become strange bedfellows:

Bolshevists and bankers have then this significant common ground—internationalism. Revolution and international finance are not at all inconsistent if the result of revolution is to establish more centralized authority. International finance prefers to deal with central governments. The last thing the banking community wants is laissez-faire economy and decentralized power because these would disperse power.

Likewise, Ludwig von Mises acknowledged in Omnipotent Government how the salt of the earth are not the ones responsible for making collectivist political movements mainstream:

It is not true that the dangers to the maintenance of peace, democracy, freedom, and capitalism are a result of a “revolt of the masses.” They are an achievement of scholars and intellectuals, of sons of the well-to-do, of writers and artists pampered by the best society. In every country of the world dynasties and aristocrats have worked with the socialists and interventionists against freedom.

“Wokeness” as a Public Relations Strategy

Furthermore, woke signaling has an obfuscation function that businesses and individuals can use to divert attention away from their questionable behavior. In a world dominated by woke standards of conduct, these actors are banking on the assumption that being against the prevailing orthodoxy constitutes a larger social offense than providing shoddy services or participating in morally questionable behavior.

Instead of competing with other companies on the basis of fulfilling consumer wants, companies try to one-up each other by trying to display their woke credentials. Those with skeletons in their closets would likely find use in this type of signaling as a way to avoid any unwanted attention. Going woke acts as a release from all social obligations. By viewing their nation’s history as fundamentally bigoted, individuals and institutions no longer feel compelled to abide by basic rules of decency and serve their clients and community.

With this in mind, one cannot underestimate the role of ideology in shaping the way corporate actors behave in contemporary times. Business magnates are often caricatured as homines oeconomici whose only concern is profit and who see human relations through an exclusively transactional lens. Such a perception understates the level of socialization that has permeated across class lines throughout America.

There’s nothing special about the upper-middle class and higher that exempts them from being infected by the cultural left’s ideology. As a matter of fact, America’s well-to-do grow up in milieus, from the educational institutions they’re enrolled in to the social clubs they participate in, that expose them to the dominant political and social trends. Over the course of their development, many members of this class end up being conditioned to accept the established ruling doctrine.

The current crop of business elites have little in common with Gilded Age corporate titans who still operated within the confines of bourgeois propriety. In fact, traditional values and resistance to cultural radicalism are more the province of the working classes and other Americans who have not placed themselves in the PC conveyer belt that is the contemporary education-to-corporation pipeline.

One thing is certain, though: woke leftism is not about fighting for the interests of the common man. Grievance politics’ ornamental displays of victimhood only obscure the oligarchical nature of this project.Author:

Contact José Niño

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Sign up for his mailing list here. Contact him via Facebook or Twitter. Get his premium newsletter here.