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:

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Famed North Korean defector Yeonmi Park offered a chilling account of her time at Columbia University, saying that not even North Korea went to the level of brainwashing that she witnessed.

Speaking with Fox News, Park became increasingly dismayed with the cost of an education that amounted to little more than what she described as indoctrination.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” she said. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

Like in North Korea, Park said she witnessed example after example of anti-Western sentiment and guilt-tripping. During her orientation, for instance, a staff member scolded her liking classic literature.

“I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing,” Park said of her orientation. “Then she said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.”

When it came to gender pronouns and manipulation of the English language, Park was even more confused.

“English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?” she remembered asking herself. “It was chaos. It felt like the regression in civilization.”

“Even North Korea is not this nuts,” she added. “North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”null

Eventually, Park stopped arguing with her professors and “learned how to just shut up” so that she could graduate. She reserved her most pointed criticisms for the woke scolds who constantly lament about being oppressed.

“Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like,” she said. “These kids keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they’ve experienced. They don’t know how hard it is to be free.”

“I literally crossed through the middle of the Gobi Desert to be free. But what I did was nothing, so many people fought harder than me and didn’t make it,” she added.null

Not being able to think critically has real-world consequences on society, noted Park as she recalled her inability to see that leader Kim Jong Un was the fattest man in the country while the people were starving.

“In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader [Kim Jong-un] was starving,” she said. “He’s the fattest guy – how can anyone believe that? And then somebody showed me a photo and said ‘Look at him, he’s the fattest guy. Other people are all thin.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, why did I not notice that he was fat?’ Because I never learned how to think critically.”

“That is what is happening in America,” she added. “People see things but they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.”

Having seen the worst of humanity in North Korea only to witness brainwashing in the United States, Park admitted to feeling quite bitter and hopeless about it all.

“You guys have lost common sense to degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend,” she said. “Where are we going from here? There’s no rule of law, no morality, nothing is good or bad anymore, it’s complete chaos. I guess that’s what they want, to destroy every single thing and rebuild into a Communist paradise.”

The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment.

Dmitry Orlov and Vladimir Putin believe the US is failing, because the US government, in Putin’s words, is “making sure-footed strides directly along the path of the Soviet Union.”

These strides are, in Orlov’s words: “exorbitant debt, problems in the energy sector and unreformable political systems mired in corruption, their elites delusional in their feelings of omnipotence. And now comes a truly eerie analogy: the powder keg that detonated under the USSR was ethnic nationalism and separatism; and the powder keg that is currently detonating under the US is “woke” (anti-)racism: another brand of ethnic fascism but with American characteristics.” https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/06/dmitry-orlov/putin-fully-agrees-with-me/

I don’t deny that these problems afflicted the Soviet Union and afflict the US today. Certainly, such problems, if not successfully dealt with, could bring about failure. However, in my view the Soviet Union collapsed because the belief system collapsed. The United or Disunited States is collapsing for the same reason, as is all of the Western World. Whether Russia joins this collapse as well remains to be seen.

The Soviet Union collapsed because communism did not produce the plenty that it promised, or the freedom, and frustrated communist reformers were sick of the system. Dissidents were punished, at times severely, and propaganda was used to control the narrative as it is used today in the US. The remaining threads of belief were cut when hardline elements in the Communist Party placed President Gorbachev under house arrest.

In the Western world the destruction of belief has been underway for many decades. The French novelist Jean Raspail captured the collapse of Western belief and its consequences in his novel, The Camp of the Saints, 48 years ago in 1973. The collapse is clearly visible today. The French, the Germans, the British, the Scandinavians cannot resist the dark-skinned immigrant-invaders that are are finally conquering Western Christianity with Islam.

German belief in themselves and their country was destroyed by American control of their educational system since 1945. Germans are indoctrinated with the belief that their country is shameful, responsible for heinous acts supported by the German people. Any manifestation of German pride or any defense of German ethnicity against immigrant-invaders is treated as a manifestation of Nazism. https://www.unz.com/ghood/the-washington-post-treat-america-like-a-conquered-nation/

In Britain assorted intellectuals and university professors have damned the British for their colonialism. Generation by generation the attack has eroded away British belief in their country. Today “the privileged few,” the students at Magdalen College, Oxford University, are “uncomfortable” with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in their common room and have removed the image of the Queen of England from their presence. Quite clearly, the disassociation of the privileged few from their country is extreme. How must the down and out feel?

In France the only politician who represents French ethnicity is Marine Le Pen, but the French ethnics will not elect the only politician who believes in a French nationalist state based on French ethnicity. When the Establishment is not trying to arrest her, they are calling her a nazi. So, if you are French and you stand for French people, you are a nazi. If patriotism still exists, it has been removed from association with French ethnicity.

In the now thoroughly Disunited States, split not north and south but red and blue, in the blue states white Americans are regarded as systemic racist oppressors of blacks and perpetrators of genocide of the native tribes. There is much talk of paying restitution, but the emphasis now is on eliminating “whiteness.” For the extremists, this means killing off the whites. You can see the flavor here: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/06/11/expressions-of-anti-white-hatred-in-high-places-aruna-khilanani-at-yale/ For others it means eliminating Western culture.

Black studies programs in American universities and all blue state public school systems and some red state ones, although the red states are moving against it, teach that white people are racist by nature and naturally oppress “people of color.” The effect of this teaching is to create hatred of whites on the part of “people of color” while destroying the confidence of white Americans to defend themselves from accusations, punishments, and violence. The manifestations of the attacks on white Americans are everywhere. Indeed, we drown in them. Yet there is no public or political discussion of the official demonization of white Americans, which is being implemented as the official policy of the Democrat Party.

As in Raspail’s novel the attack on French nationalists was led by the French themselves, so in the Disunited States the fierce demonizing attacks on white Americans are led by white American liberals. Self-repudiation by white persons is the rule in the Western world.

In New Zealand there was or is about to be a vote to dispossess themselves and hand over part of the country that New Zealanders built to the descendants of the original native inhabitants. There is similar intent in Australia and Canada. The Germans for years have been paying billions of dollars to the “descendants of the Holocaust.”

Even the US military is being programmed to weed out alleged racist attitudes toward people of color. If white US soldiers are guilty of oppressing blacks, they are also guilty of oppressing Arabs and Asians. How then can US troops fight in the Middle East or against China? If blacks have been oppressed, the US has oppressed people of color in the Arab countries it has bombed and invaded for 20 years. Is the US military being conditioned so that it can only fight white people? Are US sanctions against China, North Korea, and Iran racist?

Will self-denunciation spread to Russia and China? Both are vulnerable. Both stupidly welcomed Western influence and have a professorial class of academics imbued with Western thinking. Think about the oppression under Stalin, the Kulaks and so forth, the gulag, the executions of “enemies of the people.” Think about Mao and all those he eliminated. And Pol Pot.

Is the answer that class oppressions are OK, but not racial oppressions?

In North America no one alive today has been a slave or owned a slave. In North America slavery ended 156 years ago. If American white persons have to pay a price for what happened long before their time, how far back and how widely applied shall the punishments be? What does Turkey owe descendants of Byzantium? What do descendants of Barbary Pirates owe descendants of Americans they enslaved? What do descendants of Muslims who raided Italian coastal towns for slaves have to pay descendants of the slaves? What restitution must Israel make for stealing Palestine from the Palestinians? What do descendants of Normans have to pay descendants of Anglo-Saxons for conquering England?

What do the black inhabitants of Benin, formerly Dahomey, owe the descendants of black slaves Dahomey sold into slavery?

Black Africans were were the mainstay of the slave trade:

“The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into the interior of West Africa. These expeditions were typically carried out by African states, such as the Bono State, Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Kingdom of Benin, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, Aro Confederacy and the kingdom of Dahomey.[43][44] Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fear of disease and moreover fierce African resistance. The slaves were brought to coastal outposts where they were traded for goods.”

“African states played a key role in the slave trade, and slavery was a common practice among Sub Saharan Africans before the involvement of the Arabs, Berbers and Europeans. There were three types: those who were slaves through conquest, those who were slaves due to unpaid debts, or those whose parents gave them as slaves to tribal chiefs. Chieftains would barter their slaves to Arab, Berber, Ottoman or European buyers for rum, spices, cloth or other goods.[48] Selling captives or prisoners was commonly practiced among Africans, Turks, Berbers and Arabs during that era.”

“The kings of Dahomey sold their war captives into transatlantic slavery, who otherwise may have been killed in a ceremony known as the Annual Customs. As one of West Africa’s principal slave states, Dahomey became extremely unpopular with neighbouring peoples.[51][52][53] Like the Bambara Empire to the east, the Khasso kingdoms depended heavily on the slave trade for their economy. A family’s status was indicated by the number of slaves it owned, leading to wars for the sole purpose of taking more captives. This trade led the Khasso into increasing contact with the European settlements of Africa’s west coast, particularly the French.[54] Benin grew increasingly rich during the 16th and 17th centuries on the slave trade with Europe; slaves from enemy states of the interior were sold, and carried to the Americas in Dutch and Portuguese ships. The Bight of Benin’s shore soon came to be known as the ‘Slave Coast.’” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery .

According to Wikipedia’s entry, “History of Slavery,” today there is still some slavery in modern Nigeria, Benin, Sudan and parts of Ghana. Yet “black studies” and Critical Race Theory focus on 19th century slavery in the United States.

In other words, the only interest in slavery is in using it as a weapon against American white persons.

Slavery among black Africans existed long before the transatlantic slave trade. The black slaves sold to Europeans were first enslaved by other blacks. Yet black slavery is blamed on white people. This lie is used to foment hatred of whites by blacks and self-hatred by whites indoctrinated in their guilt. Clearly, this lie has destroyed any prospect of a multicultural America, which is the only America the white liberals believe in.

Paul Craig Roberts

Nobody decent is in charge anywhere. Israel has lost its firewall, just as America and Britain are run by fools and tyrants, propped up by an utterly dishonest media. This means we’re back where the world started before 1776. We will have to defend ourselves.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason