In school, they like to claim that fascism was the last gasp of capitalism in Europe. A cursory view of the facts of history will immediately dismiss that, as fascism was, in fact, born of socialism. But one piece of evidence the Socialist activists in our education system will present is that the corporations sided with Hitler. It’s hard to imagine why they would do that, but perhaps we are seeing history repeating now. Maybe it’s born out of fear of the violent radicalism of the Left, then and now, but no doubt today’s corporations have chosen to align themselves with the intellectual descendants of Hitler’s National Socialists, choosing the same “private/public cooperation” we saw back then, and like the corporations of the time, taking their marching orders from the government, rather than their own rational self-interests.
For those of us who believe in liberty, this development is especially troubling as it has led to big tech censorship, the embrace of divisive, antiquated, segregationist racial ideology, now ironically branded as, “anti-racist”, while integrationist and legal equality have been re-branded as racism and an all-out assault on the family and laid down as the foundation of our culture and society.
This isn’t new. The tendency on the Right has always been to roll our eyes and walk away, but in recent years the over-the-top ridiculousness has gotten worse, not better. We keep telling ourselves this can’t work for the Democrats, and yet it seems to. Trends we had hoped were just the latest fad have not gone away, and instead are becoming louder and even more obnoxious. We should have led boycotts in the past but didn’t want to, believing that the market would sort things out.
Meanwhile, the extreme Left has had no hesitation at all to lead boycotts, and in that time, they have won a number of massive concessions. Fox separated from Glenn Beck in a way that allowed the Left to claim a scalp. Later on, Bill O’Reilly was fired and now Disney is the wokest corporation in the world, happily using their products to go so far as to openly advocate for socialism as they did in the latest Ant-Man film. The Left has been gaining ground in the cultural space.
Note: Woke, by the way, is a strict and religious adherence to far-Left, Marxist ideology at the expense of coherent arguments or narrative. Don’t let them tell you it doesn’t mean anything. It absolutely does, and just because one Conservative commentator couldn’t define it doesn’t mean they get to pretend woke isn’t a thing anymore. It’s their albatross, their term, and they can wear it. But I digress.
Every time we open a comic book, watch a movie, play a game, and now, try to enjoy a beverage, we are met with a barrage of far-Left extremism. It is constant. It is aggressive, and we tend to just wish it would go away on its own. But just as the Nazis bullied board rooms into compliance back then, the same thing has been going on in America for generations with no pushback. Despite Disney boasting a “not-so-secret, openly gay agenda,” targeting children with obnoxious propaganda every chance they get, Disney is still unconcerned. Even though the value of their stock is half of what it was a couple of years ago, recent investor meetings featuring upset investors voicing their discontent and threatening the termination of our dividend (full disclosure, I do have a very small stake in Disney), has not motivated Bob Iger to move toward a change in direction at all. If anything, the recent announcement of more Rey centric Star Wars movies indicates they are doubling down.
The recent trouble with Anheuser-Busch will very likely have similar results. I recently saw a number of conservatives celebrating a 15 cent drop in stock values as widespread calls for boycotts sounded throughout the Internet. The problem is that Anheuser-Busch will not even notice it. If Disney hasn’t felt the pinch of their stock values being halved and going several years without a billion-dollar hit (which they need to profit from the expenses of making the kinds of movies they do) and the 71-billion-dollar expenditure on the purchase of 20th Century Fox, for which they have yet to make a single dime, what makes us think Anheuser-Busch will feel 15 cents?
The truth is, this is going to take some time, quite possibly years. Some of these mega-corporations are so vast that boycotting them at all is virtually impossible. Microsoft and Sony, for instance, own so much of multiple markets that if you blink, they make money. That doesn’t mean a boycott isn’t worth it, only that if we’re going to do it, we must be ready for a protracted and uphill battle, one so intense that even Sisyphus would feel sorry for us. We aren’t going to have an overnight victory. But I do think we have the means to expedite things. Elon Musk showed us how.
The Democrats accuse us of being the party of the rich. Surely, we have a few billionaires who can select a domino to topple and buy out, and who won’t mind that I call them Shirley. Pressure needs to be put on our millionaires and billionaires to follow Elon Musk’s lead. Buy these companies out, clean them up, and make them profitable for shareholders, like me, once more. While we’re doing that, and while the market is clinging to life under Biden’s “trickle-up economics,” even the poorest among us can buy in. After all, all the money we are saving not paying for Left Wing propagandists can go to more constructive ends.
I’m not offering financial or investment advice, but I have noticed that whenever there’s a problem, we tend to walk away. Even the activist investors on our side will dump our stocks in protest. But whenever we do this, we are choosing to silence ourselves, ceding ground in America’s board rooms, and in doing so, enabling this woke infestation to continue to poison the American market and marketing experience.
If our goal is to get corporations out of politics, it won’t happen by taking our money and going home alone. We have to put that money to good use.
I propose a different tactic, one that does involve significant financial risk. I believe that boycotting is a necessary component of our strategy, but we should also seek to control the board rooms, either by pushing the rich among us to do so, on behalf of ending corporate tyranny and far Left propaganda, or by creating an investment strategy to do it ourselves.
Whatever we decide, we should be aware of and keep in mind that this process is going to take time, so while we are working to preserve our culture and heritage, we don’t succumb to the despair that comes when we declare victory too soon, and see our hopes dashed when the stock value rebounds and fails to lose enough value to yield the changes we seek.
