The conservative case for violent communist revolution*

*The title is a tongue-in-cheek homage to the ever-growing list of articles arguing The conservative case for something entirely un-Conservative with The conservative case for gay marriage still the ne plus ultra of the genre.

The genesis of woke capital

While the right has focussed on cultural Marxism in explaining the rise of political correctness, America’s hyper-capitalist corporations have been at the vanguard of the social revolution. Richard Hanania, one of the most insightful commentators on America’s ideological absurdity, explains in his article Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law: 

“It was civil rights law that revolutionized the American workplace. Corporations started to hire full time staff in order to keep track of government mandates, which were vague and could change at any moment. There was a sense of “keeping up with the Joneses,” in which every company and institution had to be more anti-racist and anti-sexist than the next one, leading to more and more absurd diversity trainings and other programs… The creation of bureaucracy means that it eventually gains its own power base and becomes able to advocate for its own interests.”

The private sector is not simply doing whatever it must to comply with government regulations. Over time, the regulatory environment has created a deeply entrenched permanent HR bureaucracy of true believers. Plenty of the America’s largest companies opposed Ronald Reagan’s attempt to dismantle affirmative action in the 1980s. In 2020 President Trump signed an executive order that banned the federal government, as well as its contractors, from teaching employees that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist”. The order had, in the words of USA Today, “sent chills through the private sector”. USA Today further reported that “Behind the scenes, individual companies and industry groups are supporting efforts to mount a legal challenge to the executive order”. Diversity training started as an attempt to ward off lawsuits but the value of such endeavours has long been internalized by corporate America, regardless of the cost (currently, in America alone, eight billion dollars is spent on such training every single year). To understand the ideology of HR bureaucrats, look to Robin DiAngelo, the doyenne of diversity training, who instructs her students to “Try to be less white”. Her client list includes Amazon and Unilever. Her book White Fragility became a canonical text in reading lists prescribed to employees by large companies in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. 

Few people read political theory but we all want a promotion. Far from a neutral marketplace of ideas, a key to understanding the ideological shift is incentives. HR managers have the power to fire people. For every James Damore or Brendan Eich there are thousand’s of nameless people defenestrated from their livelihood for holding an opinion. For the older generation of white male upper management, now feeling precarious under the drive for a diverse workforce, the easiest way to protect their own career is to jump on board the political program as enthusiastically as possible. At Telefónica, a pale male CEO has a “reverse mentor” half his age — inevitably an overweight black female Muslim — to “school him” on diversity.

Cultural Marxism Capitalism: the revolution will be corporate sponsored

The biggest misperception of the right is that wokeness is exclusively an ideology of the far-left. By focusing on blue-haired lunatics, we’ve lost sight of something terrifying: this ideology isn’t confined to Portland rioters and student radicals — it inescapably permeates every boardroom and institution in the Western world. 

In 2019 The Washington Post reported that the Business Roundtable, a group “representing the nation’s most powerful chief executives” had “abandoned the idea that companies must maximize profits for shareholders above all else”. An official statement from the Roundtable set out to redefine the purpose of a corporation, with a new raison d'être that included fostering “diversity and inclusion”.

Paul Polman, former Chief Executive of Unilever writes in the Financial Times that, as a CEO, “staff and customers believe you should embody the company’s values and speak out on big, touchstone issues, from race to fake news.” Describing government’s as “hamstrung”, it is a “morally conscious business elite” that must pick up the slack. “Our democracies are faltering amid a tide of misinformation, while the waves of populism and extremism show no sign of receding”. Thankfully then, writes Polman, more CEO’s are “being moved by the times to get off the sidelines”. He’s describing a top-down anti-democratic movement of neoliberal corporatocracy.

Unilever’s largest shareholder is BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. BlackRock manages more than $10 trillion in assets across index funds, pension plans and other investment products. “Capital markets have allowed companies and countries to flourish” says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. “But access to capital is not a right. It is a privilege.” With the rise of activist asset managers, whom has access to that capital depends on the political agenda of people like Mr Fink. Michael Rectenwald, a scholar who taught at NYU, describes wokeness as “a shibboleth for cartel members to identify and distinguish themselves from their non-woke competitors, who are to be starved of capital investments. Just as non-woke individuals are cancelled from civic life, so too will non-woke companies be cancelled from the economy.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, gave a TED talk in 2011 in which he advocated for an “impact economy” where woke corporations transform the world:

“The mission is encoded in the DNA of the business. Because it sets out not just to drive margin but to create movements... And what are these businesses? They are representative of the impact economy where supply and demand converge not on the notion of a market clearing price but on the notion of a world changing mission.” Under Greenblatt the ADL has been key to defining and coordinating that mission. PayPal, for example, has an official partnership with the ADL focused on “disrupting the financial pipelines” of the ADL’s ideological enemies. 

In 2015 Bernie Sanders famously referred to open borders as “a Koch brothers proposal”. While capitalism isn’t incompatible with sane immigration policies, open borders are often seen as an intrinsic part of neoliberal globalization: the free flow of not just goods, but of people, across the planet. Samuel Huntingdon coined the term Davos Man, named after the home of the World Economic Forum, to describe the denationalized elite for whom all values are “secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration”. Appropriately, it was at Davos that Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon announced that the firm “will only underwrite IPOs in the US and Europe of private companies that have at least one diverse board member”.

Multinational bank HSBC currently has a prominent advertising campaign pushing the message “Opportunity doesn’t do borders”. In 2019 the bank ran what was perceived by many as an anti-Brexit ad with the slogan “We Are Not An Island” in reference to Great Britain, a literal island. The ad was part of the bank’s 'Global Citizen' initiative. HSBC’s chief marketing officer said the campaign was intended to “celebrate the rich diversity that makes the UK what it is today”.

Oligarch benefactors of woke revolution 

Some of the most radical advocacy is coming from the very top. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo seemed to welcome the execution of his peers, tweeting in response to Coinbase vowing to stay out of contentious political issues like Black Lives Matter: “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I'll happily provide video commentary.” Meanwhile the CEO of Chick-fil-A debased himself by shining the shoes of a black rapper live on stage because he felt “a sense of shame” about racism.

Whole books have been written about the world-changing “philanthropy” of George Soros. While he’s rightfully the world’s most notorious politicised plutocrat, he’s far from alone — there are plenty of other deep-pocketed investors bankrolling radical social justice movements to the tune of billions of dollars. Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook, donated $2.5 million to the ADL. Jack Dorsey donated ten million dollars to Ibram Kendi and the Center for Antiracist Research. Jeff Bezos donated $100 million to Van Jones. His company, Amazon, donated 550 copies of Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You to Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va. His ex-wife has donated billions to a variety of groups including the Communities Transforming Policing Fund, the Black-led Movement Fund, the Emerging LGBTQ Leaders of Color Fund and BOLD, a group “focused on strengthening Black social justice infrastructure in the U.S”. Jewish billionaire Susan Sandler bestowed $200 million to “racial justice” groups including the New Virginia Majority and the New Florida Majority. The New York Times reports:

“Her efforts will support organizations trying to build political power in states that are undergoing rapid demographic change…In traditionally Republican states such as Arizona, Georgia and Texas, the prospect of a changing electorate has enthralled political observers for years.” In a blog post on Medium, Sandler explained her ambitions: “As the composition of the electorate in those states comes to reflect the full racial diversity of the population of those states, the social contract in these states can be rewritten…This reality is one of the reasons why we are excited to support efforts that are focused on changing power relationships in this region.”

Personnel is policy

It’s commonly believed that corporations as purely profit-seeking, their actions wholly determined by the financial incentives of the free market. This was always a delusion. When a Christian baker refused to to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding nobody questioned the bakers sincerity. Materialism is not the only driver of human behaviour — even in business. Companies are formed by people, and people are political. Robert Gibbs went from being a spokesman for Barack Obama to being a spokesman for McDonald’s. Nick Clegg went from being Deputy Prime Minister of the UK to being president for global affairs at Meta (previously Facebook). Facebook’s communications director Andy Stone previously worked for Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry. Political operatives with ideological agenda’s occupy the top level of the corporate world. 

While activist CEO’s are a part of the problem, leaders that have remained business-focused are often pushed into adopting radical positions by their own staff. When the CEO of cryptocurrency platform Coinbase said the company would not advocate for any political causes, five percent of employees left the company. 

Corporations of the world, unite!

Wells Fargo, the financial services colossus, sponsored a discussion titled “From Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter, the Movement Continues”. One of the panelists was DeRay Mckesson, a high-profile Black Lives Matter activist. Nikole Hannah-Jones, cheerleader for the riots of 2020 and author of the 1619 project, conducted a lecture proudly sponsored by Shell. 

For some businesses, social justice becomes a key part of their brand. Ben and Jerry’s, owned by Unilever, employs a full-time “Head of US Activism”. The company released a “Pecan Resist” ice-cream that, they claimed, delivered “a powerful message about resisting the Trump administration’s regressive and discriminatory policies” and raised funds for “organizations that are working on the front lines of the resistance”. A portion of proceeds from their “Change Is Brewing”  flavor went to the campaign to defund the police. They provided free ice cream to anarchists at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Ben & Jerry’s may be an extreme case, but the aftermath of George Floyd’s death was clarifying. It made plain the full extent of the ideological capture of big business — corporate America spoke with one monotonous voice. 

The far-left publication Jacobin acknowledges that “business elites’ structural power” has been “harnessed to movement goals — when activists imposed high enough costs.” Those cost’s included billions of dollars in property damage from the riots of 2020. Ashley Rae Goldenberg compiled a list of 269 large companies that had expressed support for Black Lives Matter in the midst of the violent revolt of that year. (Reiterating the hold corporations have over the narrative, Ashley was promptly deplatformed from Medium.com, where she had published the list. It has since been republished on VDare). “Go woke go broke” is conservative cope. If you were to vote with your feet and boycott these companies you would be reduced to the lifestyle of Ted Kaczynski — you wouldn’t be able to get on a plane or open a bank account or drive a car or buy groceries. American Express, Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Mastercard — every node of the capitalist system expressed fealty to BLM.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, perhaps the most well-known “scholar” of intersectionality and critical race theory, marveled at the corporate rhetoric: “You basically have a moment where every corporation worth its salt is saying something about structural racism and anti-blackness, and that stuff is even outdistancing what candidates in the Democratic Party were actually saying.” The support for “racial justice” was more than just rhetorical — companies collectively pledged billions of dollars in 2020. NIKE, to take just one example, pledged $40 million to invest in organizations “that put social justice, education and addressing racial inequality in America at the center of their work”. 

The corporate coup

Advertising revenue is the lifeblood of news media. That money is tied to toeing the correct political line. In 2019 Twitter users tagged companies that advertised on Tucker Carlson’s massively popular Fox News show with the hashtag #BoycottTuckerCarlson. In the aftermath of the George Floyd overdose, his show was again targeted. T-Mobile, Disney, Papa John’s and AstraZeneca were among some of the companies to pull their ads. T-Mobile chief executive Mike Sievert announced the decision via Twitter: “Bye-bye Tucker Carlson! #BlackLivesMatter”. This is an example of the symbiosis of Davos man and extremely-online social justice warriors, where pressure from below is answered by a corporate HQ that is happy to oblige. Other Fox News anchors have been targeted by boycott campaigns. In Britain, the Co-op announced via Twitter that they would stop advertising in The Spectator due to their coverage of gender dysphoria, before backtracking.

When North Carolina banned men from using women’s bathrooms in 2016, a group of over 180 major companies that included Apple, Airbnb, Bank of America, and Starbucks, urged North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory to repeal the law. Corporations didn’t just publicly oppose the law, they used their financial heft to economically punish North Carolina. PayPal and Deutsche Bank were among the many businesses that backed out of plans to invest in the state over the law. An analysis by the Associated Press estimated that the corporate backlash would cost the state more than $3.76 billion in lost business. 

Companies are willing to interfere in the political process in way’s we’ve not seen in previous decades. CEO of the Walt Disney Company, Bob Chapek, publicly apologized because the company “didn’t quite get the job done” when opposing the misnomered ‘don’t say gay’ bill. “I know that many are upset that we did not speak out against the bill”, he said at the 2022 annual shareholder meeting. “We were opposed to the bill from the outset, but we chose not to take a public position on it because we thought we could be more effective working behind the scenes, engaging directly with lawmakers.” Chapek told shareholders he would be meeting with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis about the issue. 

In early 2021 when Georgia passed a voting law to prevent election fraud more than 100 of America’s top corporate leaders took time out of their busy schedules to attend a Zoom call to discuss ways to oppose similar electoral reform across the country. Attendees included the CEO of Walmart; the CEO of United Airlines; the CEO of American Airlines; the chairman of Levi Strauss Company; and the co-founder of LinkedIn.  "These CEOs said, 'Enough of that, we're going to come together and reinforce our fellow CEOs.' It was a statement of affirmation that the voice of business in the political world is worthwhile," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the organizer of the online meeting. The combined power of the corporate elite supersedes the democratic will of the people.

A neologism for our age: Globohomo

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” Hillary Clinton asked in 2016, “would that end racism?” It was, perhaps, the ultimate expression of the globohomo tendency. A neologism of the online right, globohomo is a portmanteau of global and homogenized. Homo, of course, has a dual meaning. International corporations have homogenized culture, displacing or commodifying what was once authentic and inherited. The ideology of Hayek and Friedman has symbiotically entwined itself with the ideology of the New Left. In a world in which the mainstream right has abandoned conservative social values and the left has abandoned class politics, all that remains is an incredibly gay version of capitalism. 

The word is more expansive than simply referring to corporations that fly the rainbow flag. Homo here stands for a whole constellation of values - open borders, radical feminism, intersectionality, diversity, equity and inclusion, and the more recently adopted cause of gender dysphoria. Globohomo is a cash machine telling you “representation matters”. 

Globohomo is a skyline-dominating Nasdaq billboard in Times Square displaying the words “BLACK LIVES MATTER” in all caps above an image of raised black fists. Far-left Jacobin magazine, “even the iconography of dissent and inclusion is seamlessly slid in right next to the logo of your favorite carbonated beverage, ecommerce app, hookup service, or laser-guided munitions manufacturer.” This is not dissent, it’s radical conformity. Globohomo is the governing ideology of our age, the elite consensus. 

They’re not selling soap

Joe Biden, always given to off the cuff remarks, pointed out something it’s impossible to miss, and yet almost never mentioned — the massive overrepresentation of mixed race couples in advertising: “When you turn on the stations — sit on one station for two hours. And I don’t know how many commercials you’ll see — eight to five — two to three out of five have mixed-race couples in them. That’s not by accident. They’re selling soap, man.” Three out of five may well be an underestimation — much contemporary advertising is indistinguishable from blacked.com. London’s newspaper of record The Times also commented on the phenomenon, running the headline Big brands shun straight, white Britain in their adverts:

“Advertisers are so worried about being accused of racism or homophobia they are shying away from using images of white people and straight couples. Marketing departments are even putting diversity above relevance to their target audience to avoid accusations of bigotry, a survey of 500 companies has found.”

We’ve seen the Stonetoss comic strip play out repeatedly:

Burgers?

(Yes — that really was the official McDonald’s Twitter account.)

Sandwiches?

Creme eggs?

The advertising industry can’t even sell candy to kids without featuring highly suggestive gay miscegenation. 

Online dating site OkCupid pushed the envelope with their ‘Every Single Person’ campaign, which included “every single non-monogamist” messaging. The company had previously brought the world a campaign centred around the acronym DTF (Down to Fuck).

“Black women will lead this nation to a better place” and “we’re taking control” says Tamika Mallory, in a lavishly produced video from Cadillac as part of their Audacity of Blackness campaign. Mallory has been criticized by the New York Times for her vocal support of Louis Farrakhan and black nationalist cop killer Assata Shakur. 

At a time when advertising is omnipresent both online and IRL, the onslaught of lavishly funded corporate propaganda matters. The advertising industry is a more sophisticated propaganda apparatus than that of any totalitarian state. Its ability to shape narratives, to alter perceptions and to construct desire is historically unprecedented. As Rod Dreher notes in his book Live Not By Lies, capitalism “harnesses the unmatched propaganda resources of the advertising industry to send the message” and “mans the biggest guns in the culture war”. Campaigners are only too keen to make use of this asset. Cliff Albright, executive director of the political action group Black Voters Matter, told CBS News “the same way they try to convince people to have a Coke and a smile, they need to persuade people to fight voter suppression”. 

After years of celebrating gay weddings, advertisers are now at the vanguard of trans lobbying. “Today, on #JUNETEENTH2020”, Calvin Klein model Jari Jones tweeted, “a Fat Black Trans Woman Looks over NEW YORK!!! #BlackTransLivesMatter #ProudinMyCalvins”. The morbidly obese African American transsexual standing triumphantly before a hoarding of her own colossal visage is perhaps the defining image of late capitalism. 

An African American female-to-male transsexual looks into a bathroom mirror as his father teaches him to shave. “It’s not just myself transitioning. It’s everybody around me transitioning,” he tells the camera before the words “Gillette — The best a man can get” appear on screen. Not to be outdone, Pantene released what was ostensibly a shampoo commercial. A lesbian couple emotionally reveal their adopted child “has always been super gender creative” and “hair has been a big part of her transition” as a pre-teen brushes their shoulder-length hair. Meanwhile Sprite released a video that didn’t feature a single shot of their own product.  We’re instead shown a young woman having her breasts bound — a physically damaging practice that female-to-male transsexuals use to hide their cleavage, before we’re told that pride is “what you feel when someone you love chooses to be free”. The end reveal of the Sprite logo is the only indication of what is allegedly being sold. Touting the prelude to elective double-mastectomy doesn’t actually generate revenue. What’s really being sold isn’t shampoo or razors or soft drinks: it’s a new identity, a new morality, a new politics. 

Terms of service: A free-market Social Credit System

Critiques of woke capitalism often focus on the inconsequential. Whether it’s a barista in Starbucks scribbling the words “Race Together” on your cup of coffee, cereal brand Kellogg’s proclaiming “Black History EVERY Month” or the Oreo account tweeting “Trans people exist”, it’s tempting to simply roll ones eyes. It’s all cringeworthy but also largely insignificant. There is far more at stake here than hashtags. 

Writing in Tablet magazine, Michael Lind poses a clarifying thought experiment:

“The only newspaper in the county refuses to take ads for your business. The only bank in the county announces that it is closing your account and calling in your mortgage. Your car breaks down and the only garage and service shop in the county refuses to repair it. The only general store in the county refuses your patronage and the few restaurants in the county turn you away at the door. After you lose your business to the newspaper advertising boycott, you try to get a job, but discover that you have been blacklisted by all of the employers in the county. Nobody will hire you. Are you free, in this scenario, just because there is no official interference with your voting rights and your civil rights? Private power is power, no less than government power. You can be immobilized, impoverished, humiliated, tormented, and perhaps driven to suicide by hostile businesses and banks in an otherwise functioning liberal democracy, just as surely as by the police or military in a dictatorship.”

We’ve been reading about deplatforming from social media for years. It’s difficult to quantify just how many people have been banned from the digital public square over their political opinions but it’s safe to assume it’s at least tens of thousands. People can survive without Twitter, but there’s a new frontier in progressive neoliberalism’s quest for total control: basic necessities of everyday life are now contingent on appeasing the ideological demands of the private sector.

HSBC realise the life-changing implications of being excluded from the financial system: they recently started granting bank accounts to people with no fixed address. Maxine Pritchard, head of financial inclusion and vulnerability at HSBC UK, told The Big Issue: “Without a bank account, people can’t receive benefits which means they can become trapped in their current situation. That just simply isn’t fair.” Working any job other than cash-in-hand labouring is also rendered impossible. If you’re lucky enough to get a hold of any money, spending it could also be a problem. Post-COVID, many businesses won’t accept physical cash. Banks have only ever frozen bank accounts over illegal activity such as money laundering or terrorist financing — until now. 

The UK’s Patriotic Alternative is an entirely peaceful and legal organization. It’s leaders have no history of financial impropriety and yet they have had their personal accounts shut down by Monzo, Santander and HSBC. These banks are able to mete out extra-legal punishment for violating their own opaque terms of service, switching off an indispensable facility with no day in court and no right of appeal — they can turn off people’s lives in an instant.

In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Neoliberalism is immunocompromised. Capitalism has terminal GRIDS.