Trump Again Defines National Priorities

The former president has again defined the territory over which an upcoming national election will be fought. And in so doing, he’s done the nation a great service.

by Edward Ring for American Greatness

Political observers and partisan activists debate whether Donald Trump or some other Republican candidate has the best chance of beating a Democratic rival in the 2024 presidential election. But earlier this month, Trump demonstrated that just as he did in 2016, he is raising campaign issues central to America’s future, issues that no other candidate is talking about. The latest flare-ups of what have been nearly eight years of relentless, orchestrated prosecution of Trump are a massive distraction but don’t change this reality.

Candidate Trump in 2016 raised issues Michael Anton adroitly summarized in “The Flight 93 Election” as “open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.” Making these neglected issues the themes of his campaign, Trump beat the odds and won the election. These are now among the most public and polarizing issues in America. They may be unresolved, but they are now central instead of peripheral.

This time, Trump’s 2024 campaign website includes under his agenda a list of the issues that have defined him since his political debut. They include deregulation, opportunity zones, fair trade, reshoring of industry, energy dominance, secure borders, reclaiming national sovereignty, war on drug cartels, law and order, military readiness, parents’ rights, ending censorship, election integrity, and more. Anyone questioning the coherence of Trump’s policy agenda is invited to read this list, which is long on specifics. But in a video released on his campaign website on March 4, Trump looked into the future.

The Future According to Trump

Calling it Agenda 47—presumably based on his aspiration to become America’s 47th president—Trump challenges Americans to once again “pursue big dreams and daring projects.” He points to previous national accomplishments, such as the settlement of the frontier, the interstate highway system, and the deployment of communications satellites. In what he characterized as America’s next “quantum leap” in progress, Trump calls for a national contest for urban developers to submit designs for new “Freedom Cities,” with 10 winning designs to be allocated federal land for their construction.

Trump then enumerates several related goals, including calling for American industry to win the race to commercialize airborne mobility, revitalization of economically depressed regions by investing in the manufacturing assets we’re going to need as we disconnect from China, and initiatives to lower the cost of a car and lower the cost of a single-family home. Trump also wants “baby bonuses” to encourage a new baby boom in America. Finally, Trump says he would challenge the state governors to make cities and towns more livable and build monuments to American heroes.

At the conclusion of Trump’s four-minute video, he vows to “dramatically increase living standards and build a future that brings our country together through excitement, opportunity, and success.”

Trump is on to something. Every one of his goals is a driver of productivity and innovation, starting with new cities. Why shouldn’t the federal government allow for the privatization of a mere 0.5 percent of federal land in the United States? That would be roughly 5,000 square miles which, if split evenly and allocated as squares, would be 10 new cities, each 22 miles on a side.

What’s intriguing about this proposal is that at its core it is a libertarian notion—turning public land back over to the private sector. Digging deeper, it invites Americans to create 10 futuristic scenarios for urban development on a blank slate. The mix of public and private funding could be left up to the individual participating states. How these cities planned to manage their transportation, energy, food, water, and waste management challenges could differ greatly, and how successful each of them would be could then become an instructive model for urban revitalization all over America.

Red states might strike a balance between innovation and sticking with more cost-effective conventional building codes and enabling infrastructure, whereas in blue states, one might expect new cities that aspire to become models of sustainability, hopefully in sufficiently practical applications. Plenty of innovations are at our disposal today, including using laminated timber for construction of high-rise and mid-rise structures, innovative ways to reuse water and harvest nutrients from wastewater, indoor agriculture, and radical expansion of transportation conduits, both underground and in the air.

It Might Be “The Jetsons”

Even some of Trump’s media detractors acknowledged that decentralized air mobility is just around the corner. Within a decade or less, we will begin seeing small passenger drones ferrying people from point to point within and between cities. The surprising simplicity of the technology, leveraging what we’re learning from unmanned drones and self-driving cars, may eventually bring the prices down within reach of the average consumer.

And Trump is absolutely right when he urges Americans to pioneer this technology, which will yield valuable technological spin-offs, relieve traffic congestion on the ground, and open up otherwise inaccessible real estate.

Several years ago, discussing his groundbreaking (pun intended) tunneling company, Elon Musk said, “the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.” While Musk might have overstated his case, new developments in materials science, robotics, electronics, communications, and systems integration promise to revolutionize the construction industry. And again, to paraphrase Trump, that revolution is going to happen in America, or it is going to happen somewhere else.

The fact that we are developing the capacity to use new materials and technologies to build and manufacture at far lower costs brings credibility to Trump’s challenge to reduce the cost of cars, single-family homes, and the cost of living generally. Trump’s commitment to deregulation—clearly demonstrated in his first term—perhaps along with new and bipartisan antitrust legislation, could be the key to a new era of competition as major manufacturers and developers adopt new technologies to create 21st-century versions of the Model T concept: cars and homes that families with a single wage earner can nonetheless afford. This is a goal worthy of a great nation.

From Baby Bust to Baby Boom

Which brings us to one of the most urgent issues in America that nobody’s talking about: the Baby Bust. It’s been a long time coming. In 1988, observing that baby boomers were not having children at replacement levels, demographer Ben Wattenberg wrote The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Enough Babies?. His book was prophetic. It turns out the entire developed world, including the United States, is experiencing a population crash. In the United States, the severity of the problem is temporarily obscured by the fact that baby boomers (Americans born between 1946 and 1964, years when birth rates were unusually high) are only beginning to reach the end of their natural life spans, and because since 1988 the United States has admitted tens of millions of immigrants.

A population crash in the United States is no joke. Our current replacement rate of 1.6 births per woman means that for every 1 million Americans today, there will only be 440,000 great-grandchildren. Put another way, if the time span of one generation averages 25 years, based on current birth rates, two-thirds of America’s total population will be wiped out within the next century. There are only two ways to stop this: mass replacement of the population through immigration or increased native birth rates.

For Trump to launch a serious national dialogue about what it is going to take to increase birth rates in America is perhaps the most futurist oriented, and the most consequential, of all the new issues he’s raising. Trump is proposing “baby bonuses” in the form of financial incentives for couples to have more children.

But Trump’s other new priorities also should make it easier for young Americans to choose to have more children: creating room for growth in new cities, creating new job opportunities by reshoring manufacturing jobs, stimulating new technologies and boosting productivity with air mobility, and by making homes and cars affordable.

Bringing Americans Together

Trump’s final priority, echoing themes he’s explored before, adds an intangible incentive for people to form families. As he put it, we will “bring our country together through excitement, opportunity, and success.”

There is a shared excitement created by beautifying America’s urban spaces, by making cities and towns more livable, and by building monuments to American heroes. It makes people feel like they’re part of something big and worthwhile. It is a unifying force with a natural attractive power completely missing from the leftist obsession to make “inclusion” a mandate.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who has announced his intention to compete with Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, seems pretty solid on many issues. He has repeatedly stated that one of the biggest challenges facing Americans today is to define “what does it mean to be an American?” Trump, with the new issues he’s bringing before the American people, is answering that question. To be optimistic, successful, and excited by what promises to be a dazzling future.

Trump is not only raising the core issues facing Americans today that no other politician has the vision or courage to raise. This is also the side of Trump that nobody acknowledges outside of his own supporters. Trump has indulged in sometimes overwrought counterattacks in the ongoing and perpetual campaign of character assassination against him. But nonetheless, he quietly and tirelessly worked for solutions during his entire presidency, from funding black colleges and eliminating excessive federal regulations to encouraging medical freedom and implementing criminal justice reform. It’s a long list. Now Trump is identifying new challenges and proposing big solutions.

It is healthy and necessary to debate who may be the best standard bearer for the GOP in November 2024 and who may be the candidate most likely to win. But Donald Trump has again defined the territory over which that contest will be fought, and for that, once again, he has done us all a tremendous service.

X22, And we Know, and more- March 28

 

Do White Leftists Really Hate Themselves?

Having rich tastes and a fashionable ZIP code does not prevent such a person from doing nasty (and, yes, antiwhite racist) things.

by Paul Gottfried for American Greatness

For about a decade a self-described “conservative” has been flooding me with email notes arguing that woke white leftists do not, in fact, dislike other whites. In fact, such seeming antiwhite radicals adore their whiteness. White leftists live in the same neighborhoods with other whites, dress the same way, and send their children to heavily white institutions. For all their talk about being for blacks, these white leftists are just hypocrites. They don’t give up their professional positions for members of other races or sexual orientations, and whatever set asides and preferential hiring these virtue-signalers claim to be working toward, many or most of their colleagues are racially the same as they are. 

Admittedly the situation we’re describing is historically rare. Most examples of discrimination and exclusion in human history have involved a majority group establishing for itself a superior position relative to a despised or unwelcome minority.  Sometimes the pecking order changed over time, so that the Athenians extended their franchise to the lower orders and made them eligible for public offices, while the Roman founding fathers over several centuries extended rights to the plebeian class. But what made that situation different from the current American one is that other societies in which rights were extended did not gnash their teeth in self-mortification over someone’s past exclusion. They just extended certain rights to those who had not previously exercised them. 

Watching American whites writhing in agony over past discrimination against nonwhites strikes me as utterly bizarre. The fact that this collective behavior becomes even more fitful or convulsive the further one moves away from slavery or legal segregation, makes it look even more grotesque. Yes, I’m aware that black urban society has disintegrated, and this may overshadow for residents of inner cities the acquisition of certain rights and even the enforcement of what is misleadingly called equity. Still the continued or increasing social dysfunctionality of inner-city residents does not explain the paroxysms of self-hate that many whites now routinely indulge in. Disintegrating black family life and high black crime rates hardly justify elaborate public rituals of white self-rejection and passionate condemnation of the civilization that white Westerners built. 

So bizarre have these rituals become that one might be justified in asking whether those who mandate and enforce them really believe in the white sinfulness they lament. Quite noticeably those who push critical race theory and run to put Black Lives Matter signs on their lawns often live in white neighborhoods that are hardly touched by black crime. This makes one wonder whether antiwhite hysteria is nothing more than show. The hypocrisy of the Left is a theme that the Right is always hitting on, and Tucker Carlson has made himself a national celebrity by offering examples of this odious practice. 

What I would like to ask, however, is whether it really matters that the white Left is not consistent in its antiwhite, pro-black nationalist politics. The effects are the same, whether or not the actors are sincere or consistent.  

Those who have supported vicious totalitarian movements and financed their violence have not necessarily engaged in violence on their own. When the board of Silicon Valley Bank sent over $73 million to BLM and when other banking and corporate enterprises donate to violent, racially divisive organizations, they are inciting racial strife. The white liberals who support public officials like Alvin Bragg, Larry Krasner, Lori Lightfoot, and cheer on race-baiters like Reverend Al Sharpton, back antiwhite politics, although not necessarily for the purpose of advancing blacks.  The white Left increasingly stokes black racial animosity, an act that Joe Biden engages in whenever he is coherent enough to read an antiwhite rant prepared by one of his race-hustling speech writers. 

Finally I am utterly baffled by the contention that someone cannot hate a group that he in some way resembles. Brigitte Hamann in her classic Hitler’s Vienna shows graphically that her once indigent subject was attracted to Viennese Jewish circles before World War I. Hitler shared many of the tastes of the group he later tried to exterminate, and even his predilection for Wagner (and earlier for Gustav Mahler) was then common among Austrian Jews. Eduard Bloch, Hitler’s mother’s physician and a close family friend, was obviously Jewish. Hitler protected Bloch even from his own antisemitic policies. Given his aesthetic and onetime social preferences, Hitler, according to my friend’s standards, must have been a self-denying or dissembling philosemite. 

Angela Davis, who is descended from Mayflower Pilgrims, is a light-skinned black intellectual, who revels in all the amenities of the white upper class. Davis has also been deeply entangled in Black Panther violence and remains a black socialist revolutionary. Having an affluent white “lifestyle” does not rule out being a cultural radical or promoter of violence, even for someone who enjoys fine coffees and lives in a well-guarded home. Having rich tastes and a fashionable ZIP code does not prevent such a person from doing nasty (and, yes, antiwhite racist) things.

Supreme Court May Hear Case With Serious Ramifications for the Transgender Debate

posted by Jeff Charles at RedStateVIP 

The Supreme Court might just be considering a case that could have a substantial impact on the transgender debate. As the nation grapples with how society should handle the transgender issue, this one will almost certainly ignite even more debate and controversy.

On Monday, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorneys submitted a petition to the US Supreme Court, requesting that the case of Brian Tingley, a licensed marriage and family counselor, be heard. Tingley claims that a Washington state law is unconstitutionally censoring him.

According to ADF, the Washington state’s law regarding “conversion therapy” of minors infringes on Tingley’s freedom of speech and religious faith, as well as those of his clients, by censoring and prohibiting private client-counselor conversations on sexual orientation and gender identity that the government disapproves of. ADF is urging the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which upheld a district court’s decision to dismiss Tingley’s challenge to the law.

“The government can’t control a counselor’s speech. Washington’s counseling censorship law violates freedom of speech and harms counselors as well as clients,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “Brian has counseled all types of people for more than 20 years, and those conversations are private—certainly not open for the government to censor. The government has no business dictating what personal goals a client can pursue in counseling. We hope the Supreme Court will agree to hear this case and halt the unlawful attempt of Washington state officials to ban someone’s speech simply because they disagree with the viewpoints expressed.”

In 2018, the state of Washington enacted a law that prohibits conversations between a counselor and a minor client aimed at “changing” the young person’s perceived gender identity or sexual attractions. The lawsuit notes that the law censors simple conversations within a voluntary counseling relationship between a client and a counselor that are directed toward personal goals that the client chooses for themselves.

As noted by the ADF, the law only allows counselors to counsel in an affirming direction when it comes to LGBTQ minors. “It allows counseling conversations that aim to steer young people towards a transgender identity but prohibits conversations that aim to help the same person return to comfort with their sex.” This is especially problematic given that the vast majority of children who suffer from gender dysphoria end up growing out of it. Further, the ADF points out, “The law threatens fines of $5,000 per violation, suspension from practice, and even permanent revocation of a counselor’s license.”

This is in line with efforts on the part of the Biden administration to stop therapy designed to offer different solutions for children suffering from gender dysphoria.

The State Department, under Secretary Antony Blinken, issued a memo last year as part of its efforts to implement President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14075, which calls for an end to “conversion therapy” by federal agencies. The practice of conversion therapy, which aims to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, has been widely criticized for its harmful effects on homosexual and bisexual individuals.

However, some have raised concerns about the administration’s definition of conversion therapy, particularly when it comes to children with gender dysphoria. The definition includes any attempt to “suppress or change an individual’s … gender identity,” which some argue could encompass even talk therapy aimed at helping children move away from gender dysphoria.

Critics see this as part of a larger push by progressives to promote “gender-affirming” treatments like puberty blockers and surgical procedures for children instead of talk therapy. The White House’s inclusion of extreme methods like “electric shock” and “corrective rape” in the definition of conversion therapy has also been criticized as a way to conceal its true intentions.

The petition that ADF attorneys submitted to the Supreme Court in Tingley v. Ferguson states:

In the Ninth Circuit, counseling speech is not speech at all; it is professional conduct the government can freely regulate. But that view is indefensible after this Court [held in the ADF case NIFLA v. Becerra] that “[s]peech is not unprotected merely because it is uttered by ‘professionals….'” It also places the Ninth Circuit in conflict with the Third and Eleventh Circuits, both of which have held that speech in a counseling context is still speech entitled to First Amendment protection…. The Court should not allow the circuit split to stand.

This is not the first such case being adjudicated regarding a state law. Fox News reported:

A similar case out of New York was successfully litigated by the group in 2019 on behalf of Dr. Dovid Schwartz, an Orthodox Jewish psychotherapist who sued New York City claiming that a similar law prohibited certain patient-counselor conversations, which he said violated his free speech rights.

If the Supreme Court chooses to hear this case, it would likely send shockwaves through the national conversation on transgenderism, especially among minor children. The First Amendment issue will certainly be the focus, as will a parent’s right to seek treatment for their children that they deem appropriate. In 20 states, these laws essentially dictate how a person can seek medical or psychological care.

What is even more rich about this whole situation is that most of those who support the government preventing therapists from counseling a child against transgenderism fully support the notion that medical professionals should prescribe medications and surgeries that have an irreversible impact on the young one. You can’t tell a kid not to transition to the opposite gender, but you can certainly cut off body parts or put them on dangerous drugs. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will take up this case and rule in favor of the plaintiff.

DeSantis-Hating Sports Writer Tries To Ruin Baseball With Identity Politics

People from all walks of life, regardless of their race, sex, or religion, just want to support their favorite sports teams.

Evan Berryhill reporting for The Federalist

In a predominantly left-wing sports media industry that thrives on controversial hot takes, it should come as no surprise to see Florida and Gov. Ron DeSantis as the target of Washington Post columnist and ESPN personality Kevin Blackistone.

In his recent column, Blackistone argues that the 15 teams making up the Grapefruit League, a spring training club in Florida, should leave the state as long as DeSantis is governor and move to the politically obedient Arizona. His arguments diverted from the facts and leaned on the political talking points frequently used to attack DeSantis.

The column begins by referencing Florida’s history of racial challenges, including Jim Crow laws, around the time Cleveland’s baseball team moved the organization’s spring training operations to Arizona in 1947.

Blackistone’s column ignores Cleveland’s nickname at the time — the Indians — despite including nicknames for the Nationals, Brooklyn Dodgers, and every single other team he mentions.

He cites Florida as having three of the deadliest counties in the South in per capita lynchings at the time Cleveland made the move. Fortunately, Florida has rectified that type of crime against black players, players of any race, or even regular citizens. Under the leadership of DeSantis, Florida is experiencing a 50-year record-low crime rate.

Next, Blackistone criticizes DeSantis for taking issue with an Advanced Placement course in African American studies, which he called “indoctrination.”

But for anyone who cares to understand the issue beyond a headline or quick soundbite, DeSantis does not object to these courses being taught in principle. He takes issue with political propaganda being fed to students under the guise of historical facts. Teaching students that African Americans have wanted to eliminate jails and prisons is not historical or factual. As the governor stated, this is an attempt to “use black history to shoehorn” political ideologies into the curriculum.

Blackistone takes exception to DeSantis’ proposed ban on state funding for colleges that embrace critical race theory or racially divisive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs.

He claims CRT has been “purposefully disfigured by DeSantis, an Ivy Leaguer, and others of his reactionary ilk into a boogeyman for white citizens who believe they are losing this country that wasn’t theirs in the first place.”

DeSantis and the Florida legislature have prioritized ensuring that the state’s students are not taught to hate one another or fed divisive political rhetoric meant to indoctrinate students. Florida is placing a priority on preventing children from feeling shame over immutable traits such as race because of events that happened generations ago.

A bill passed by the Florida legislature and signed into law in 2022 that bans teaching critical race theory also prevents the teaching that “one race, color, national origin, or sex are morally superior to members of another race, color, national origin, or sex” and that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Nothing about that is controversial to the majority of Americans, yet it is grounds for relocating the Grapefruit League’s spring training, according to Blackistone.

Blackistone repeats the false talking point that DeSantis is seeking to ban books in Florida. As evidence, he cites three books that were considered “under review” in Florida: “Henry Aaron’s Dream,” “Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates,” and “Thank You, Jackie Robinson.” Obviously, nobody believes these books should be removed from schools.

But what Blackistone fails to acknowledge is that the very same NBC article he cites also notes that a whopping 1.5 million books were included for possible review — a better-safe-than-sorry approach.

Nobody believes that the people of Florida — including DeSantis, who was captain of the Yale baseball team — think those books are inappropriate.

Blackistone fails to discuss what precipitated the need to review materials in Florida schools. Last week, the governor’s office released a video showing some of the inappropriate and, in some cases, pornographic materials that had been discovered in Florida schools.

The article also points to teams moving west in the 1950s to find “more hospitable settings” for their nonwhite players. Major League Baseball has by far the highest percentage of Hispanic and Latino players — nearly 30 percent of the league — of any major sport in America.

There is perhaps no more hospitable setting in America for Hispanic or Latino players than Florida. The state is diverse, with its vibrant Hispanic culture and a population full of immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and other places whose people love baseball.

And in case anyone was wondering what those communities thought of DeSantis, he just won nearly 60 percent of the Latino vote and increased his share of that vote by double digits from when he was first elected governor in 2018.

Blackistone’s final grievance is that at a time when baseball has begun celebrating “Pride month,” the sport is “deeply rooted” in Florida, which passed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. While Blackistone acknowledges that the term is merely a nickname given to the bill by critics, he fails to show that the bill is aimed at prohibiting the sexual instruction of young children, grades pre-K through three.

People from all walks of life, regardless of their race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation come to support their favorite sports teams. And all of those individuals are welcome in Florida and will have the freedom to achieve the American dream in the Sunshine State.

I look at my 75-year-old father’s sports heroes growing up, and many were black athletes like Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. These icons of baseball may well be DeSantis’ sports heroes as well. The governor knows as well as anyone the power of sports to unite Americans. And above all, he understands that sports transcend the identity politics that the media and a vocal minority on Twitter want us to believe must prevail in every aspect of our society.

Shock Poll Reveals Biden in Trouble in NY, and Good News for Trump

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

People are already going crazy about the 2024 presidential race even though it’s still some time away and a lot of things can happen in the meantime.

But a poll of New York voters shows just how much trouble Joe Biden is in with his party in that blue state. Some Democrats are getting it and they don’t think Joe is the right guy to put back in office.

A new Siena College poll found that more than half the Democrats in the state don’t want Biden and think someone else should be nominated. 51 percent of Democrats want a “different candidate,” while 43 percent think he should be nominated. That’s not exactly a reassuring thing for Biden and the Democrats in terms of him running again. Biden still has not formally declared and this can’t help.

Even in the most liberal area of New York — New York City — only a slight majority (52 percent) of Democrats want Biden. However, what’s killing him is that 60 percent of suburban Democrats and 57 percent of upstate Democrats want someone else.

But the problem is that the Democrats’ bench is horrible when they’re casting around for that “someone else.” Folks like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg don’t inspire confidence. Their failure at their jobs has only dropped their stock to the public. So while the Democrats want someone else, a whopping 63 percent of those who want someone else said they didn’t know or had no opinion about who should pick up the torch in the wake of Biden.

When given a choice to pick from, however, they picked Buttigieg (five percent), Harris (three percent), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) (three percent), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (three percent), Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (two percent), and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (one percent). 20 percent said that they wanted “someone else” other than these characters.

When you step beyond the Democrats on the opinion about Biden, “a strong majority of independents and an overwhelming majority of Republicans view him unfavorably and disapprove of the job he’s doing,” Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg said. That’s also not a good sign for Biden.

If Biden is in trouble in New York, you know that the powers behind the scene have to be scrambling about what to do.

When you look at the Republicans, it’s Donald Trump leading by a lot with 52 percent saying they would vote for Trump, 27 percent for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and 18 percent wanting another candidate. DeSantis has not yet formally declared that he would be running, but it’s pretty clear that he intends to run.

Of the folks who want another candidate, 20 percent would pick Nikki Haley and six percent would go for former Rep. Liz Cheney. What are those Cheney folks thinking? Granted, that’s six percent of the 20 percent, so it’s not exactly a huge number there. But most of the people who wanted someone else didn’t know who they wanted or had no opinion.

Trump is beating DeSantis with self-described conservative Republicans by 24 points (54-30 percent), as well as with suburban Republicans (52-23 percent) and upstate Republicans (52-31 percent). He’s also up by 29 points in New York City, 49-20 percent.

This tracks with a Monmouth poll that showed that Trump was up by 14 points over DeSantis, which showed that Trump had been gaining ground since January.

Mounting Evidence Shows ‘Get Woke, Go Broke’ May Be More Than A Mantra

Most diaper companies support Planned Parenthood. 

But if you’re a diaper company, shouldn't you

 want more babies, not fewer babies?

Pamela Danziger reporting for The Federalist

As far-left ideologies further embed themselves into American society, growing evidence shows that companies embracing woke capitalism tend to alienate customers, drive away potential employees, and lose profits for investors.

As with all cultural revolutions, it will take decades to measure the total outcome that woke capitalism has had on the economy, but businesses and investors that depend upon quarterly growth and earnings cannot wait that long. Unfortunately, the financial data for companies that go woke is spotty and largely anecdotal.

Some evidence indicates, however, that corporations should awaken from their woke malaise.

Woke capitalism’s fatal flaw is that its principles come from an ideological system, not from rigorous scientific business management principles on which critical decisions should be made.

Take a Trafalgar poll conducted in February 2023 among 1,000-plus likely voters. Nearly 80 percent, whether left, right, or center, said they were more likely to do business with a company that stayed politically neutral or tolerated the many viewpoints of employees and customers.

People across the political divide overwhelmingly want all voices to be heard, including 77 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of Republicans, and 77 percent of independents. While support for corporate political neutrality rises with age, still some 70 percent of young voters aged 25 to 34 and 73 percent aged 35 to 44 favor companies that stay out of politics and support differing views.

Woke Capitalism Hurts Business

Despite the public’s disdain for woke capitalism, many American corporations are entering the divisive political and social fray by going woke.

Journalist and Wall Street Journal opinion contributor Dave Seminara keeps the most comprehensive, up-to-date list of woke corporations. He began compiling it in April 2021 when a whole cadre of companies spoke out against Georgia’s election-integrity law.

Since then, the list has grown exponentially as corporations have taken leftist positions on a whole range of contentious issues, such as abortion, sexuality, parental rights in education, and others.

It is odd that so many corporations oppose these grassroots, family-values issues since family households spend far more money than single households. And families raise the next generation of potential customers.

“Corporations are taking their eye off the ball and ignoring what’s best for business,” said serial entrepreneur Andrew Crapuchettes, founder of RedBalloon, a job board that connects employers and job seekers looking for a place where they fit in.

“Most diaper companies support Planned Parenthood. Regardless of where you stand on the abortion issue, if you’re a diaper company, you want more babies, not fewer babies. Supporting Planned Parenthood is bad for business,” he said.

Politically Neutral Companies Perform Best

Further evidence that going woke erodes business success comes from an analysis done by 2nd Vote Value Investments on large-cap and mid-cap companies measuring their level of engagement on social and political issues against their return on investment.

The group rated companies on a scale from most liberal to most conservative across six issues, including the environment, education, abortion, Second Amendment rights, other constitutional freedoms, and support for a safe civil society.

The analysis showed that neutral companies, which took no political or social stances, outperformed the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000 index, which both went down during the last half of 2021 through early 2023, falling 1.8 percent and 3.2 percent respectively. Neutral companies, however, gained 2.9 percent in the same period.

The group did a 10-year analysis of more than 200 companies that remained neutral over the period and found that neutral company portfolios delivered a far greater return of 334 percent, compared with the overall market’s 230 percent gain.  

“Proponents of so-called woke capitalism claim that companies can do ‘well’ financially by doing ‘good’ politically,” wrote Mike Edleson and Andy Puzder, but the analysis proves otherwise. “The data indicate that, as common sense would suggest, companies that focus on profits outperform companies that don’t.”

CEOs and Boards Abdicate Responsibility

Recognizing the need for more academically rigorous research into woke capitalism, Nicolai Foss of the Copenhagen Business School and Peter Klein of Baylor University set out to answer the question, “Why Do Companies Go Woke?”

They defined woke companies as those committed to socially leftist causes with a focus on so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that began with French postmodernist thinking and the Frankfurt School philosophical movement. These philosophies prioritize personal experience over objective data.

“There is little evidence of systematic support for woke ideas among executives and the population at large, and going woke does not appear to improve company performance,” they wrote. “If corporate wokeness is simply a reflection of a rapid change in social and cultural mores, then why are firms embracing it so quickly, while they often adapt slowly to other exogenous shocks?”

Corporations normally adapt to change slowly and methodically with detailed analyses of potential costs and benefits to guide executive decisions, but in the case of woke capitalism, they have jumped on the bandwagon without a second thought.

“Traditionally, you have corporate policy set by the executive team then middle-managers are tasked to execute the policies that are handed down,” Klein said in an interview. “But we found woke policies are originating from a cadre of middle-management ideologues. They are a minority within the organization but have outsized power and influence.”

He said senior executives, who have not been schooled in woke ideologies, have turned over the reins to the true believers, acting out of fear of backlash. The hoped-for, short-term gain from going woke can come with a high, long-term cost to the company.

They risk alienating customers as well as potential employees who want to work without worrying about their skin color, religious beliefs, or political views. This woke alienation has attracted millions of job seekers to RedBalloon, which offers freedom from stultifying woke corporate cultures.

“Non-woke employees are living and operating in a hostile work environment. They’re not free to speak up. They’re not free to express opinions. That can’t be good for productivity or employee well-being. Companies need to build cultures where everybody feels welcome, but they’re doing exactly the opposite when they go woke,” Klein shared.

And he believes the greatest long-term price corporations will pay for going woke is the loss of creativity and innovation.

“The loss of viewpoint diversity is an impediment to creativity. There is a lifecycle argument here. Once companies have a dominant market share — after they’ve created and innovated — where will the next new idea come from in corporate cultures where everyone is forced to think the same way? Is Disney more creative and innovative now than in Walt’s day? No. Disney keeps following the same old stale formula,” Klein said.

ESG Policies Aren’t the Same as DEI

Klein quickly pointed out that going woke is distinct from environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies consistent with good corporate citizenship, governance, and ethical behavior. But leftists don’t have a monopoly on that.

“When in a position of running a company and employing people, you have a great responsibility. Companies have to be good citizens and stewards of the planet. They must operate ethically. These ideas, along with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), are actually conservative Christian principles,” RedBallon’s Crapuchettes observed.

It’s Not Too Late to Reverse Woke Capitalism

The good news is that woke capitalism recently arrived on the corporate scene. The concept of “woke capitalism” was introduced in the lexicon by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in 2015 and it has become a driving force in business since then.

But corporations can still reverse course and prioritize the beliefs and needs of their customers, employees, and stakeholders. Employees want to be rewarded for the work they do, not their skin color, ethnicity, or background. Shareholders want a return on their investments, and consumers want better products and services at good prices.

Early signs show going woke leads companies to go broke. They should turn around now before the company you work for, patronize, or invest in becomes another statistic proving the go-woke-go-broke hypothesis.