In speaking of Democrats verbally attacking law enforcement officers, President Trump is quoted as saying, “Well, they would not be saying that if they didn’t hate our country. And obviously, they do.”
Then President Trump spoke a generality concerning Democrats and said, “This is the problem with Democrats, they have a lot of bad things going on in their heads. They’ve become very…they’ve lost their confidence, number one. And they’re really, they’ve become somewhat deranged.”
Just to prove President Trump correct when he stated Democrats have “a lot of bad things going on in their heads” causing them to “become somewhat deranged,” U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded that the White House unfreeze billions in National Institute of Health (NIH) funding and foreign aid. If that weren’t enough, Schumer demanded that the White House would issue no more “clawback packages” trying to reduce spending and reclaim waste, fraud, and abuse. Schumer was trying to apply political extortion on the White House by saying if you don’t fulfill our requests, we are not going to “greenlight” even Trump’s non-controversial nominees to their appointments.
So, let’s get this lows Democrat wasteful spending of taxpayer money, Schumer is going to instruct Democrats not to do their job. A good question to ask Mr. Schumer is, “What part of a $37,193,339, 958,268 national debt don’t you understand?” It looks like Trump was also right in that Democrats “hate our country.”
If Schumer ever had an honest thought in his brain, I’ll bet that thought would die from loneliness.
According to Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), Schumer kept upping the price tag on his demands. Concerning Schumer’s demands, Mullin stated, “We’ve had three different deals since last night, and every time it’s, ‘I want more’.”
Mullin accused Schumer of going “too far.” Mullin stated, “You get to a realization that … it was never about making a deal. [Instead, Democrats] want to go out and say the President’s being unrealistic, and because he can’t answer to his base to make a deal, like we have in every other president in history.”
Mullin hit the nail on the head. Schumer never wanted a deal, but wanted to slow the Trump agenda, while continuing his slander of President Trump. If Democrats are correct that they could make deals with every other president in history, that clearly explains how our country has a $37,193,339, 958,268 national debt, which is rising rapidly.
In response to Schumer’s negligence in doing his job, President Trump stated on Truth Social,
Senator Cryin’ Chuck Schumer is demanding over One Billion Dollars in order to approve a small number of our highly qualified nominees, who should right now be helping to run our Country. This demand is egregious and unprecedented and would be embarrassing to the Republican Party if it were accepted. It is political extortion, by any other name. Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL! Do not accept the offer, go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are, and what a great job the Republicans are doing, and have done, for our Country. Have a great RECESS and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
To further prove President Trump is correct concerning Democrats having “a lot of bad things going on in their heads” causing them to be “deranged,” Democrat state lawmakers in Texas fled the state to prevent a quorum needed in the Republican-dominated state legislature to vote on bills they were trying to pass. A quorum is the minimum number of lawmakers needed to be present to conduct legislative business.
So, instead of doing their job, the Democrats fled Texas to stay in the Democrat-led states of Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts, where they were welcomed with open arms.
Republican strategist Matt Whitlock called the actions of the Democrats, “cartoonishly dumb.” Unfortunately, this is not a cartoon. These Democrats are wasting taxpayer money, and since they are in the minority, they are also not doing the will of the people who elected the representatives to office.
Most of the Democrats fled to Illinois, a state Whitlock called “the Mecca of partisan Gerrymandering,” in favor of Democrat congressional appointments.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is fining the Democrats $500 per day and had Texas Speaker of the House Dustin Burrows issue arrest warrants for these absent Democrats. After the vote in the chamber authorized the arrest warrants, Abbott swiftly called on the Texas Department of Public Safety to arrest the “delinquent Texas House Democrats.” Governor Abbott has also threatened to expel and prosecute Democrat lawmakers who have fled Texas, stating, “In addition to abandoning their offices, these legislators may also have committed felonies. Many absentee Democrats are soliciting funds to evade the fines they will incur under House rules.”
Concerning the bills that the GOP is trying to pass in Texas, Governor Abbott stated, Texas is doing what is allowed “by the law.”
In 2021 fifty Texas Democrat lawmakers fled Texas to go to Washington, DC to once again halt a vote on Texas legislation concerning voter ID. They returned to Texas after multiple members caught COVID-19 and the vote was passed several months later. So, their actions were nothing more than a political stunt, and once again, a waste of taxpayer money.
With what Tom Homan calls “the former first drug addict” Hunter Biden’s interview where every third word was the F-bomb, and him saying he might run for president, and Democrats like Stephen Colbert who can’t seem to wave at the crowd without using his middle finger, perversely cursing at the president of the United States on television, and with Kamala Harris allegedly breaking the law using campaign finances to pay celebrities to support her, and Massachusetts Democrat Attorney General Andrea Campbell spending nearly $300,000 of tax payer money on world travel, and Pete Buttigieg spending $80 billion on DEI in aviation, refusing to upgrade air traffic control, and the DOJ launching grand jury investigations into Russiagate conspiracy allegations against top leaders of the Democrat party, it really seems to confirm what President Trump said — that Democrats “have a lot of bad things going on in their heads” and they have “become somewhat deranged.”
If you think about it, what does the Democrat party stand for? They stand for killing babies, homosexual marriage, teaching sexual perversion in schools, transgendering children, illegal immigration, and allowing deranged boys in girls’ sports and locker rooms. This shows the effects of Democrats voting God off their party platform in 2012.
Erin Maguire on the Gutfeld show stated, “Democrats do have a major issue, but they still haven’t figured out what the problem is yet. You saw Senator Mark Kelly on television this past weekend saying Democrats have a messaging problem. You saw Ken Martin, DNC chair, saying they have a brand problem. No! The have a moral rot problem.”
Well, it looks Democrats really do have a lot of bad things going on in their heads and they are deranged, so it’s time to update our red hats to say, “Trump is STILL right about everything.”
Barack Obama’s presidency didn’t just strain America—it shattered its social fabric, fueling the political divide that made today’s bitter polarization inevitable.
Someday, when today’s young Americans look back in anger at what their country has become—and believe me, they will be angry—they will have their pick of culprits to blame for the sad state of affairs. If there is any justice in the universe, however, they will focus their resentment and frustration on one man: Barack Obama. Although the United States (and the West more generally) had been drifting toward collapse for decades, Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform” the nation were, in retrospect, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
Now, to be clear, I’m not referring here to something as small and meaningless as policy, foreign or domestic. As Presidents Trump and Biden amply demonstrated, policy can be changed and then changed back again, over and over and over. To be sure, the effects of these changes may be deleterious, and they may create substantively different outcomes than would have occurred otherwise. For the most part, however, the effects of policy changes are limited and, if corrected, temporary. Obama, for example, may have thrown the entire Middle East into flux and threatened the very future of the planet with his policy of appeasing the Mullahs of Iran, but Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, between them, undid most of that damage and returned the region to its pre-Obama status quo.
And nor am I referring to Obama’s inarguable and inarguably troubling role in the scheme to undermine Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign (and, eventually, his presidency) by painting him as an agent of Russian influence. Russia-gate is ugly and treacherous, and a significant number of players—perhaps including Obama—should be held to account for what they did and how they manipulated the nation’s intelligence apparatus to serve partisan political ends. Some of them—perhaps including Obama—deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison. This “scandal” is far more serious and far more perfidious than any other in American history—save, perhaps, the scandal of saddling the American people with an incoherent and incompetent president for a full four years, while others, still to be named, ran the country surreptitiously.
Nevertheless, Obama’s true offense is even more damning still.
As I have argued in these pages and elsewhere, none of the people who deserve to go to jail for the crimes involved in the scandals noted above will ever actually do so. A handful of lesser players may pay some minimal price for their involvement, but none of the big players, who made the big decisions and committed serious crimes, will ever do so. The nation today is simply too divided, too thoroughly bifurcated along partisan and ideological lines for serious punishment, much less widespread acknowledgement of guilt, ever to be a realistic outcome. Regardless of what documents, investigations, or testimony may conclusively demonstrate, roughly half of the country will refuse to believe it, including many elected representatives. Even if their guilt could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama nor anyone else of significance, will ever pay a significant price for their actions. Today, everything is political, and political lines cannot be crossed, no matter how vital to the country’s future crossing those lines might be.
And in a very real sense, Barack Obama is responsible for this.
The evolution of the Total State—the state that no longer acknowledges anything as nonpolitical—by and large dates from the Enlightenment and its fostering of “liberalism.” From that point on, matters that had once been handled by families and communities slowly but surely became the purview of governments and, eventually, centralized states.
The inimitable Russell Kirk famously noted that “All history, and especially modern history, is in some sense the account of the decline of community and the ruin consequent upon that loss.” Much of that “ruin” can be attributed to the concentration of power in the hands of the centralized state and the expansion of that state’s jurisdiction to every aspect of people’s lives. There is no standard definition for the onset of “modern history,” although the Enlightenment serves as a reasonable approximate start date, given its ideas, ideologies, and revolutionary moral schemes. Those ideas, ideologies, and schemes radically accelerated the destruction of community and made the rise of the Total State virtually inevitable.
In Europe, the Total State grew steadily throughout the 19th century, in coordination with the nation-state and as an outgrowth of the consolidation of leftist ideologies. World War I, however, marked the line that separated the old from the new and signaled the inescapability of the Total States (and the slaughter that would accompany the descent from sovereign democracy to sovereign dictatorship).
In the United States, by contrast, the slide into the Total State largely happened in stages—four of them. The first of these was the advent of the Progressive Era. The Progressive movement was, more or less, the politicization of Protestant pietism. The Progressives—especially their intellectual godfathers, Richard Ely and his protégé Woodrow Wilson—were advocates of what is known as the Social Gospel, a religious movement spawned by the Second Great Awakening, which posited that the state can and should be harnessed to fix the problems of society and to make man’s existence more “Christlike.” Progressivism built on this foundation and largely succeeded in making the American state more religion-like, while also making American Protestantism more state-like. The damage done to the constitutional republic during the Progressive Era is both incalculable and still felt today.
The second stage in the growth of the American Total State was the New Deal. Hoover and then FDR expanded the size and the scope of the state dramatically, giving it almost unlimited power to impact the everyday lives of its citizens-turned-subjects. Those aspects of pre-modern American communities that weren’t destroyed by the Progressive reforms were finally done in by the New Deal. By the time World War II ended, the centralized American state stood supreme, both at home and abroad, and little could challenge its power.
The third stage of the American Total State began with the consolidation of power by the cultural Left during the 1960s. The New Democrats and their anti-war, anti-establishment agendas took what remained of the cultural remnants and pulverized them, making everything in man’s life subject to politics. “The personal is political,” the cultural Left insisted, and then, it did its damnedest to ensure that was the case.
Finally, in 2008, with the advent of the “Hope and Change” era, Americans were given implicit permission to hate one another for their differing “values” and to see one another exclusively as friends or enemies in accordance with those values. Rather than approach his election as the enormous racial accomplishment it was, the essential redemption of the nation’s long and sordid racial history, Obama chose to scold those unlike him and to turn them into the sociological “other.” He told his supporters to “fight” their political opponents, to “go low” when they “go high,” and to “punch back twice as hard” when confronted by opponents who resisted their proclamations of moral superiority. He and his administration demanded that supporters turn family gatherings into policy debates/arguments. He mocked his adversaries mercilessly and encouraged his “team” to laugh at them and see them as “lesser than.” In short, Obama took the political and cultural degeneration of the previous two centuries and made the acknowledgement and application of that “ruin” socially acceptable, if not socially mandatory.
As I said above, Obama arrived in the Oval Office and purposefully added as many straws to the already overburdened camel’s back as it took to break it.
Many political observers today think that Donald Trump is the most aggressive and uncompromising politicizer of American life who has ever existed. Whatever else he is, though, Trump is, first and foremost, the reaction to Obama’s action. Trump the politician did not spring, fully formed like Athena, from his father’s forehead. He was created over time, just like the rest of the American Total State.
Michelle Obama says she’s been oppressed, which has contributed to chronic stress and mental health challenges.
She’s so oppressed she just sold her Martha’s Vineyard retreat for $37 million. [@danielledsouzag on X]
Elevation to a completely undeserved status with no talent, no character, relentless loathing for the nation that lifted you, and nothing in particular to offer other than your race (which you did not choose) — I guess that is pretty hard and stressful on your mental health.
Many enemies of Israel, including some in the United States Congress, see the U.S.-Israel relationship as one-sided. This is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who, in interview with Steve Bannon earlier this month, stated, “I’m entering amendments to strike 500 million more dollars for nuclear-armed Israel. And it’s important to say nuclear-armed Israel, because they do have nuclear weapons. This is not a helpless country, and we already give them $3.4 billion every single year in the state — from the State Department. Three point four billion dollars every single year.”
The $500 million Rep. Greene is speaking of is for missile defense cooperation, and the U.S. Defense Department is a major beneficiary of Israeli research and development. As a result of the experience Israel has garnered from employing various missile defense systems — such as the Iron Dome, David Sling, and Arrow — the Pentagon has received valuable technological capability information, which has saved the U.S. millions — some even say billions — of dollars. President Trump has repeatedly called for a “Golden Dome for America,” which would utilize some of Israel’s missile defense research.
Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the Somali Muslim native and member of the anti-Israel and anti-American “Squad,” posted on X, “The genocide of the people of Gaza continues as members of Congress vote to fund Israel’s defensive and offensive military capabilities. This is immoral and no amount of excuses will ever make it okay.”
Omar’s usage of the word “genocide” is not only outrageous, but a lie. Israel does not target civilians, but rather warns them to evacuate from combat zones. No other army, in the midst of war, has put itself at such a disadvantage in order to avoid hurting civilians. On the other hand, Hamas uses its civilians as human shields, hence the high casualty rates among Gazans. Omar, unlike her “Squad” colleague AOC (D-N.Y.), seeks to deny Israel funding for defensive arms, such as the Iron Dome.
Moreover, Omar ignores how the U.S. benefits from the $3.3 billion Israel receives in military aid, including supporting thousands of jobs for U.S. citizens. Alexander Haig, former secretary of State and U.S. Army general, notably remarked, “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.”
Additionally, Israel provides the U.S. with valuable intelligence and, as “eyes and ears” in the Middle East, shares with the U.S. any anti-American moves by Israel’s neighbors and beyond. At the height of the Cold War, during the 1960s, Israel captured advanced Soviet Mig jets and turned them over to the U.S., which helped the U.S. Air Force combat North Vietnamese, Soviet, and Chinese Migs — and saved America lives.
U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) commander General Bantz J. Craddock stated on March 15, 2007 that Israel was America’s “closest ally” in the Middle East and that it “consistently and directly” supported U.S. interests. General George F. Keegan, a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence chief, disclosed in 1986 that the intelligence information he obtained from Israel was greater than what would have been possible had he had “five CIAs.”
Israel continues to help the U.S. deal with traditional security threats. The two countries share intelligence on terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and Middle Eastern politics. Israel’s military experiences have shaped the U.S. approach to counterterrorism and homeland security.
Israel’s military research and development complex has pioneered many cutting-edge technologies that are transforming the face of modern war, including cyberweapons, unmanned vehicles (such as land robots and aerial drones), sensors and electronic warfare systems, and advanced defenses for military vehicles. It is difficult to quantify the value of Israeli assistance to the U.S., but it clearly reveals a relationship between two allies that is a “two-way street.”
Another example of shared knowledge is with Oketz, Israel’s specialized canine unit, which trains dogs to perform life-saving tasks for soldiers by alerting them to potential dangers that include explosives and weapon caches. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has trained American G.I. canine units on how to use dogs without a leash, which saved American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan from improvised explosive devices.
Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, and Google have research and development offices staffed by Israeli engineers and programmers whose technological innovations are helping the U.S. maintain its economic competitiveness, promote sustainable development, and address a range of non-military security challenges.
Israel’s contributions to the U.S. are not limited to the spheres of intelligence and military innovations. The U.S. has benefited from technologies such as drip irrigation technology and wastewater recycling, which the U.S. has provided to third-world countries, which has enhanced American prestige worldwide.
Countless American lives were saved during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign in Iraq because in 1981, Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear facility.
During the 2023 Republican presidential debate, Vivek Ramaswamy argued for reducing U.S. military aid for Israel. Nikki Haley, Republican former governor of South Carolina, responded to Ramaswamy by stating that he was “completely wrong”: “Support for Israel is both the morally right and strategically smart thing to do. Both countries are stronger and safer because of our ironclad friendship. As president, I will never abandon Israel.”
Although friendship between Israel and the U.S. is grounded in shared democratic values, the strategic component is key. The Jewish state is one of America’s best investments abroad. The relationship is a two-way street, with Israel giving as much as it gets from Washington.
I have heard a lot of discussion about the potential ramifications of the One Big Beautiful Bill over the last few weeks. I bet you have, too.
Here’s something I’d wager you haven’t heard much about: of about 340 million Americans, 83 million are on Medicaid.
That’s one-fourth of us.
Forty percent of American children are on Medicaid. Forty percent!
Try to wrap your head around those figures. One in four of us has his healthcare paid for by the other three, who are also paying for their own healthcare. Two of every five children in the country have been brought into the world by people who are not in a condition to provide them healthcare, so the rest of us pick up the tab, in addition to paying for the healthcare of our own children.
If one adheres to broadly Christian principles, he should not object to helping people in demonstrable need—that is, those who, for reasons completely out of their control, genuinely cannot do for themselves or those close to them. But if we truly live in a society in which a quarter of us are incapable of providing for our most basic needs—something would seem to be dreadfully wrong. Something must be wrong with us.
In other words, something is wrong with some portion of that quarter of Americans who are perfectly able-bodied but cannot get themselves together sufficiently to handle even this basic aspect of adult life. And something must be wrong with those of us outside that quarter who think so little of that portion of able-bodied recipients that we consider them incapable and prefer, instead, to subsidize and infantilize them.
A closer look at usage of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is informative. The dependence on Medicaid is disproportionately high among blacks and Latinos, although white rates of dependence are also unacceptably high. Non-Hispanic whites are around 60 percent of the American population, and 43 percent of Medicaid/CHIP users. Latinos are 19 percent of the population, and 28 percent of Medicaid/CHIP users. Blacks are 12 percent of the population and 21 percent of the Medicaid/CHIP users.
Any society with even the slightest interest in cultivating self-reliance and responsibility in its population would wonder about these figures and endeavor to lower them. In the United States today, however, our media seldom mentions any of these facts.
Indeed, whenever someone raises the questions I am addressing here, you can reliably count on the standard narratives of victimhood, structural inequality, and white supremacy being trotted out, and you know at that point what you will be called if you even dare to ask for the evidence supporting those interpretations of the situation.
Fearmongering about the One Big Beautiful Bill from the left typically centers on those currently receiving Medicaid who, leftists insist, “will not be able to navigate the red tape” required to show they meet new work requirements. But why won’t they be able to navigate this? Why shouldn’t they have to prove their eligibility? In advancing these arguments, aren’t they admitting these people are not competent to function in the adult world?
The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to everyone up to 138 percent of the poverty rate. What this means is that, if you are by definition not poor, but insufficiently far away from poor to satisfy the desires of progressive elites, you can get still Medicaid. Why are people who are not at poverty level getting taxpayer-supported healthcare that was meant for the poor? And why is the Trump administration’s attempt to undo this error viewed as some kind of moral monstrosity? Since when do we not require non-poor people to provide these basics for themselves?
The fact that there are this many Americans on the healthcare dole, frankly, should embarrass and shame the whole country. It is an indication that we have given up on the project of morally training our citizens to avoid relying on the state for their basic needs.
Walking around my middle-class neighborhood, I see yard signs reading “Hands off Medicaid.” I have perfect confidence that none of the solidly middle-class households that put those signs up on their lawns are receiving Medicaid. I have nearly as much confidence that none of them even know anyone who is receiving Medicaid, nor do they know how many Americans are on Medicaid. They have drunk the Kool-Aid our leftist political elites have mixed up for them on this issue. They believe the plain falsehood that the One Big Beautiful Bill is somehow relegating helpless people to the poor house merely by requiring Medicaid recipients to justify their presence on the rolls.
By contrast, I grew up poor, and I have known other poor people. The single thought that most dominated my consciousness for much of my youth was, “Being poor is a drag, I do not like it, so I am going to do everything I can to get myself out of this, and I am confident that if I commit myself to that goal, it can be reached.” I applied myself consistently to hard work in school and in all the various jobs I could get to help me accomplish that goal. I do not believe my story is anything particularly special or unique.
Unlike the patronizing left, which thinks of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy as grown-up children who are too incompetent to handle life, I give others enough credit as human beings to believe they are capable of rising out of poverty. I refuse to believe that we must bail them out and make excuses for them when they do not do what is necessary to make themselves independent.
Some people will fall into unfortunate circumstances beyond their control, and we have a moral obligation as a society to help them get back on their feet. But when 25 percent of us are on Medicaid and many, if not most, of them are perfectly able-bodied and capable of supporting themselves, we have to begin to wonder whether our elite class simply finds it desirable to infantilize people in this way. If we can’t even ask people receiving public funds to prove their indigent status, we have a problem.
I applaud it all…BUT: until or unless we lock these people up and throw away the key (at a minimum), they and their kind will continue to wreck our freedom and steal from our prosperity. We must make tyrants PETRIFIED to victimize Americans. We have got a long way to go to make that happen.
BREAKING NEWS
The House Oversight Committee is compelling the following individuals to appear for depositions through issued subpoenas: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: October 9 Former President Bill Clinton: October 14 Former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland: October 2 Former FBI Director James Comey: October 7 Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr: August 18 Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales: August 26 Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions: August 28 Former FBI Director Robert Mueller: September 2 Former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch: September 9 Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder: September 30
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“Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.”
— Frank Zappa
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“The only entitlement I expect from my government is freedom.”
You are not — mostly — your race, your gender, your family-of-origin, your DSM-approved behavioral health label. You are not primarily your DNA. You are not your ancestry.
Mostly, you are your CHOICES. You are the sum total of your accumulated choices, large and small, over the course of your life. Your choices are always subject to change. But first: You must own them.
The Hamas terrorist organization claims that significant progress was made toward a “final agreement” in the latest round of talks, but Netanyahu withdrew from the negotiations.
The murderous terrorist organization Hamas has harshly criticized comments made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview with Fox News regarding Israel’s plans to take control of Gaza.
In the interview, Netanyahu was asked if Israel would take control of all of Gaza. He answered that “we intend to, in order to ensure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of [Hamas], and to pass it to civilian governance that is not Hamas and not anyone who seeks the destruction of Israel. We want to liberate ourselves and the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas.”
When asked if Israel wants to reverse the Disengagement from Gaza that was carried out 20 years ago this month, Netanyahu responded: “We don’t want to keep it. We want a security perimeter, [but] we don’t want to govern it. We don’t want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us, and giving Gazans a good life. That’s not possible with Hamas.”
In response, Hamas issued a statement claiming that substantial progress had been made toward a “final agreement” during recent negotiations. However, according to the statement, Netanyahu pulled out of the talks and exposed his true intentions.
The statement further accused Netanyahu of expanding Israel’s military campaign, asserting that he intended to “sacrifice the hostages for personal reasons and due to his extremist ideological agenda.”
Hamas also declared, “The Gaza Strip will not surrender, and the campaign will be tough and exact a heavy price from Israel and the IDF.”
The phrase “go woke, go broke” is often used by critics of corporate social responsibility. It implies that companies face a binary choice: embrace progressive values or pursue profit.
But this dichotomy between “wokeness” and capitalism is both simplistic and increasingly out of step with corporate reality.
Many companies are learning to navigate a middle path. They are embedding social, environmental and ethical considerations into their business strategies – not in spite of profit, but because it contributes to long-term value creation.
Understanding this shift – and the backlash to it – is fundamental to grasping modern corporate responsibility.
Our research examines the growing tension between evolving “woke” agendas within firms and the enduring demands of shareholder value, known as “shareholder revanchism”.
We explore this dynamic using academic Archie Carroll’s Pyramid of Corporate Social Responsibility, where economic responsibility forms the foundation for higher legal, ethical and philanthropic obligations.
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Ultimately, we argue for a reassessment of the prevailing emphasis on shareholder profit and short-termism. Directors should adopt a more balanced approach when pursuing profit and discharging their duties.
The illusion of choice
The idea that directors must choose between shareholders and stakeholders – between profit and progressive causes – has deep roots in law and economics.
For decades, shareholder primacy prevailed in global business. This principle was famously reinforced in court decisions such as the 1919 Dodge v Ford case in the United States. Henry Ford was found to have a duty to operate his company in the interests of shareholders. It was later popularised by Milton Friedman, who declared that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”.
A stark example of this tension came with the ousting of Emmanuel Faber, chief executive of food giant Danone in 2021. Faber was accused by some shareholders of failing to “strike the right balance between shareholder value creation and sustainability”. His critics felt he focused too much on people, the planet and social responsibility and not enough on profits.
Yet corporate law has begun to evolve. In the United Kingdom, section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 still requires directors to promote the success of the company “for the benefit of its members”. But the legislation also requires directors to consider employees, suppliers, communities and environmental outcomes.
This model – sometimes termed “enlightened shareholder value” – preserves profit as the goal, while recognising that broader factors shape how it is achieved.
New Zealand’s brief experiment with section 131 of the Companies Act 1993, which allowed directors to consider environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, is another example. The amendment was introduced under Labour before being revoked by the National-led coalition.
The challenge of defining ‘woke capitalism’
The phrase “woke capitalism” was popularised in a 2018 New York Times opinion piece about corporate activism.
It originally described how firms were supporting progressive causes to attract younger, values-driven consumers – not out of altruism, but to strengthen brand appeal.
In 2019, the US Business Roundtable – a group of 200 top chief executives – rejected shareholder primacy in favour of stakeholder governance. It pledged to run companies for the benefit of all stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.
This followed a 2018 letter by Larry Fink, chairman of BlackRock, calling on firms to pursue a broader purpose and serve all their stakeholders.
Jaguar’s sales plunged after a rebrand was criticised as pandering. Even ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s has clashed with parent company Unilever over the limits of its political expression.
These examples show that progressive branding is not always rewarded – but nor is silence. Companies now risk criticism for failing to speak out on issues their stakeholders care about. It is clear consumers are increasingly attuned to corporate social responsibility.
Creating value for everyone
A central challenge in reconciling these tensions is the definition of profit itself. Traditional corporate law treats profit as the ultimate end of business activity.
But scholars such as Edward Freeman argue that profit is a precondition for continuity – not an end in itself. As he puts it, profit to a company is like red blood cells to a human: essential for survival, but not the purpose of life.
Under this view, profit becomes cyclical. It is a means of sustaining activity, not a fixed destination. This may seem open ended, but it avoids the fiction that companies ever reach a final “profit goal”.
Firms pursuing social impact are not abandoning capitalism; they are redefining it.
In a polarised climate, “woke capitalism” remains a lightning rod. But the supposed conflict between ethics and economics is a false one. Courts, lawmakers and firms alike are recognising that social responsibility can support, rather than undermine, long-term value.
Directors are no longer torn between duty and decency. They are navigating a broader understanding of corporate success – one in which “wokeness” and capitalism are not opposing forces, but interdependent elements of a sustainable business strategy.
This article is based on research completed with Dr Philip Gavin from the University College of London.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 