Last week we examined “woke” corporate extortionists and their new business model, wherein it makes financial sense to align with the Left against the center and the Right, even when said position opposes a majoritarian consensus among the electorate.
A lemming-like alignment with “woke” goals benefits corporations for a number of reasons: the avoidance of leftist boycotts, proxy issues, and coordinated negative media; the prospect of governmental rewards, such as tax breaks, subsidies, and other legislative favors from the crony socialist Democratic Party; support (or at least apathy) from their elitist peers and the international globalist community; and, critically, international revenue streams, most notably from genocidal communist China.
While not an exhaustive list, we have limned the outlines of the problem; and conclude that woke corporate extortion is less about virtue signaling than it is about rent-seeking. Regrettably, it is as good for their bottom line as it is bad for our free republic. For this reason, especially, it should concern every American.
Fighting Back Against Corporate Overreach
What can be done to end woke corporate extortion?
Since the initial article appeared, woke corporate extortionists have issued a nebulous manifesto regarding the franchise that states must obey—or else. In coordination, the corporate media has endeavored to coerce compliance from dissenting corporations.
On a brighter note, defenders of our free republic have begun fashioning solutions to end woke corporate extortion. Ned Ryun of American Majority (and an American Greatness regular) is a leader in this fight who has advocated measures including the elimination of tax breaks, special exemptions, the banning of imports produced in whole or in part by forced and/or enslaved labor, and moving our supply chains and American jobs back home from nations antithetical to liberty, such as genocidal Communist China. Republican politicians should take note, too, as there is strong evidence that such measures are widely supported by their constitutents.
Further, there are calls for organized boycotts; divesting from woke corporations; and for the proxy voting reforms to protect the interests of retirees and other shareholders from being hijacked by leftists who, despite their fiduciary duty, claim a “higher duty” to use and diminish other people’s hard-earned money to advance their political aims on behalf of “stakeholders” (read, “their lefty cohorts”), all the while getting their victims to pay for it.
Other right-of-center populists have gone further, either softening their opposition to or, in some cases, joining with Progressive populists to support anti-corporate measures, including: increased corporate tax rates; monopoly taxes that increase with the size of the corporation and its market share; and capping of corporate CEO pay. Some of these measures may prove counterproductive, and it pays to remember not every enterprise engages in woke corporate extortion. It is also true that as we must never become what we denounce, one must never harm the innocent to punish the guilty.
In addition to abiding by and honoring our principles, there is the eminently practical aspect of not reducing the size of any potential coalition against woke corporate extortion.
Depoliticizing the Free Market
Yet, regardless of which solutions one finds appealing, the crux of the issue remains how best to adversely affect the bottom lines of woke corporate extortionists; end their extortionate behavior; and return them to apolitical engines for Americans’ prosperity. As noted above, this must be viewed through a prism of practicality—one that realizes the difficulty of the challenge and recognizes the Right’s antipathy for using the free market to accomplish political goals.
First, the philosophical concern about using the free market to accomplish political goals is easily answered. It is the woke crew that has injected their politics into the free market and yoked corporations to their radical agenda. To engage in measures to oppose woke corporate extortion is not to politicize the free market; it is to depoliticize the free market.
Further, one is not using the free market to quash the democratic decisions of legislatures and their sovereign citizens; one is defending the democratic decisions—be they favored by the Right or the Left—of legislatures and sovereign citizens. (For example, compare and contrast the 2019 corporate and media responses to Georgia’s fetal heartbeat law and New York’s “Reproductive Health Act.”) In point of fact, then, refusing to battle woke corporate is to support the Left’s continued politicizing and, ultimately, devolving of our free market into a socialist oligarchy.
In truth, the greatest hurdle for an individual who wants to defend liberty against woke corporate extortion is not the Left, per se. It is the enormity of the task—an enormity the Left, woke corporate extortionists, and their media cohorts are constantly propagandizing to demoralize the defenders of our free republic. Their narrative is simple and aims to prey upon our fears of being overwhelmed by the inevitable: How can one person really make a difference—let alone level—this Leftist dung heap of crony socialism?
Dozens of Daily Acts of Dissent
You can do it through a daily act of dissent.
One person is not expected to overcome the Left’s concentration of governmental, corporate, and media power and wealth. After all, a singular leftist didn’t build their socialist dung hill alone or overnight. Neither will there be a singular solution to leveling the Left’s socialist dunghill and ending woke corporate extortion.
But whether you act as an individual or in conjunction with your fellow defenders of our free republic, you can make a difference every day through an act of dissent of your choosing. (The task has even been made less onerous for us because, in its hubris, the Left has provided lists of companies engaged and not engaged in woke corporate extortion.)
One needn’t possess Biblical amounts of willpower to make a difference. One needn’t feel guilty about not being able to stop buying all the products one wants or, worse, one may need. One can make a difference by switching brands where feasible and desirable or simply by using less of the offending products. You don’t have a magic wand, but you have a magic mouse—one that can click on products not made by woke corporate extortionists, or order fewer of them.
Equally, one can shop locally rather than from major corporations. Despite the best efforts of the lockdown governors and their lemmings, small business remains the backbone of our economy. Now more than ever, they need our patronage. And the owners, no matter their politics, will not be able to personally extort a state.
Whatever means by which one can dissent, in a grand irony defending the free market will be accomplished by the very means through which the wisdom of the free market works: the culmination of individual decisions freely made. From these multitudinous daily acts of dissent shall come a billion ripples of freedom that will level the Left’s crony socialist dunghill; decimate the bottom lines and jeopardize the jobs of the woke corporate extortionists; and, most importantly, protect and promote the sovereignty of all citizens within our free republic.