Tag Archive for: WOKE

Even Veterans Are Steering Their Families Away From America’s New Woke Military

Veterans are pushing their family members — who represent an overwhelming majority of new recruits — away from military service, deepening U.S. armed forces’ recruitment crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Nearly 80% of new recruits have at least one family member with a service record, but these family members are increasingly questioning whether the potential costs of military service — which include rising rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide and a reliance on welfare programs — are worth it when compared to a career in the private sector, particularly following the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, the WSJ reported. The military has faced significant criticism from GOP lawmakers over its focus on “woke” initiatives, which they say prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and deepen the recruiting crisis by alienating potential recruits.

“We’re left with the gut-wrenching feeling of, ‘What was it all for?’” asks Navy veteran Catalina Gasper, who was injured in a Taliban attack in July 2019 that has left her with lingering brain damage. “I just don’t see how it’s sustainable if the machine keeps chewing up and spitting out” the nation’s youth, she said.

Gasper said that she and her husband, an Army veteran with over two decades of service, used to talk to their children, now aged 7 and 10, about joining the military, but now she intends to ensure her kids never join, according to the outlet.

Just 9% of Americans aged 16-21 expressed a willingness to consider a military career in 2022, down from the pre-pandemic norm of 13%, the WSJ reported, citing Pentagon data.

Recruiters are facing the twin challenges of both historically low fitness eligibility and interest among young Americans, and the deepening crisis has led the Navy this week to begin having recruiters work six-day weeks in an “all-hands effort” to boost recruitment. The Navy utilized an active-duty drag queen — Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, stage name Harpy Daniels — as a “digital ambassador” from October 2022 to March 2023 in a bid to “explore the digital environment to reach a wide range of potential candidates,” a Navy spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The lowest-ranking service members make less than $2,000 per month, and while this may be offset by the military paying for food and housing, some 20,000 active-duty soldiers are currently on food stamps, the WSJ reported. Various service branches are issuing large bonuses both to new hires and experienced veterans in a bid to boost both recruitment and retention.

“To be honest with you it’s Wendy’s, it’s Carl’s Jr., it’s every single job that a young person can go up against because now they are offering the same incentives that we are offering, so that’s our competition right now,” Sgt. Maj. Marco Irenze of the Nevada Army National Guard, told the WSJ.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Navy Making Recruiters Work 6-Day Weeks As Enlistment Crisis Deepens

U.S. military has gotten ‘hyper-politicized’ and ‘sexualized’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Disney’s Obsession with ‘Woke Sexuality’ has Cost it Quarter of a Billion Dollars at the Box Office

Does Disney really believe that families enjoy LGBTQ+-affirmative lecturing in films?


Growing up, there was nothing more magical to me than the opening credits of a Disney movie — even if I’d seen the film a dozen times.

These days, however, Disney’s feature-length content is feeling less like a childhood dream and more like a noisy soap-box preacher.

It is not just cultural commentators pointing this out but Disney’s audiences, who have been voting against the company’s woke sermonising with their feet.

Between the Toy Story spinoff Lightyear and Disney’s latest offering Strange World, both released in 2022, and both promoting an LGBT agenda, the animation behemoth has lost almost a quarter of a billion dollars, according to entertainment news outlet Deadline Hollywood.

In fact, Strange World earned itself the title of the biggest box office flop of 2022, with production and marketing costs of US$320 million and total earnings of only $120 million, for a loss of around $200 million. Lightyear lost over $100 million and took out second place in the flop stakes.

Strange World tells the story of a family of explorers venturing through an uncharted land searching for a certain plant needed to save their society. Apparently necessary to this plot is one of the lead roles, 16-year-old Ethan, discussing his gay crush on a boy at school.

Lightyear depicts a real-life portrayal of the astronaut named Buzz who inspired the toy of Toy Story fame. Likewise, it was a story Disney was unable to tell without a lesbian kiss between two lead characters, in a scene that almost hit the cutting room floor until the state of Florida passed the Parental Rights in Education Bill and needed a woke lecture.

Sydney Morning Herald writer Garry Maddox found Strange World’s box office performance something of a head-scratcher. “For a certified bomb, the initial reviews for Strange World were not too bad,” he mused, seemingly unaware that movie reviewers inhabit the same woke echo chamber as the film producers they critique

Maddox even suggested that Strange World featuring “the first out gay teenager in a Disney animated film” might be a family drawcard. Only in passing does the SMH journalist acknowledge Disney’s gay wokery as a potential put-off — and then, only for “red-state audiences”.

I know this is complex, Garry, but what if parents of all political stripes want to enjoy a day out with their kids without having to discuss birds, bees and Queer Theory with their preschoolers?

Certainly, there was more to Strange World’s failures than its preachiness. Quoting Deadline Hollywood, Maddox noted that “critics found the fantasy pic to be clunky and incomprehensible, and the animation retro and stale”. Lacklustre marketing was also identified as contributing to the film’s performance.

But these factors don’t explain Disney’s comparable letdown with Lightyear. The common denominator between the two is the injection of themes that movie-going families have little interest in.

It’s not as though animated movies are going out of fashion. Universal Pictures took in $940 million at the worldwide box office last year for Minions: Rise of Gru, and close to $700 million in just the opening weeks of The Super Mario Bros Movie.

Both films, incidentally, are notably woke-free, a fact that has critics wringing their hands.

“Go woke, go broke” may not hold true in every situation. But when it comes to children’s films at the box office, those four words appear to be a fixed law of the universe.

And a law Disney ignores at its own peril.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg.

RELATED ARTICLE: Disney Announces ‘Pride Nite’ Amid Ongoing Battle With DeSantis

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Woke Universities Sacrificing Science on the Altar of Ideology and Profit

Three case studies from Canada and Australia about suppression of heterodox opinions in universities.


Two thousand five hundred years ago the Greek playwright Aeschylus is reputed to have said “the first victim of war is truth.” Recent events in the academic world have demonstrated that truth is also a casualty when ideology and commercial interests are at stake.

The most recent case occurred last month at Laval University in Canada, when professor and RNA expert Patrick Provost was suspended without pay for anti-mRNA vaccine comments. Patrick Provost has run an RNA lab for 20 years and has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed studies. In 2003, Provost’s work on the role of microRNA in gene expression was named one of the 10 discoveries of the year by the Quebec Science Magazine.

Based on the government’s own hospitalization and mortality statistics for children, which are both very low, Provost said he believed the risks of Covid-19 vaccination in children could outweigh the benefits because of the potential side-effects from mRNA vaccines, which have only gone through two of the usual four stages of testing required before vaccines are approved for general use.

“I was just doing what I was hired to do,” he said in an interview. “I had some concerns about something, I searched the literature and I prepared a talk and I delivered it to the public. Being censored for doing what I’ve been trained to do — and hired to do — well, it’s hard to believe.”

“As soon as you raise some concerns about vaccines, or side-effects, or complications related to vaccines, then it’s worse than the N-word,” he continued. “You’re condemned by the media, by the government and you’re chased and put down …. We should be able to discuss any ideas — any opinions — and because I expressed opinions that went against the government narrative, I was suspended.”

Regarding the University’s reaction, one might well wonder about the fact that the top 20 pharmaceutical companies spent C$139 billion on Research & Development in 2022, a portion of which went to university researchers. Faculties of medicine are particularly favoured beneficiaries of such funding. And Patrick Provost is a professor at the Faculty of Medicine.

In an entirely different field, geophysicist Peter Ridd was sacked in 2018 by James Cook University, in Australia, for criticizing the work of a colleague studying the Great Barrier Reef. In an email to a journalist, he said the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority “is grossly misusing some scientific ‘data’ to make the case that the Great Barrier Reef is greatly damaged.” Ridd maintained that scientific organisations were “quite happy to spin a story for their own purposes, in this case to demonstrate that there is massive damage to the Great Barrier Reef.”

In a report published last year based, like Provost’s talk, on publicly available data, from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, aka the AIMS, Ridd notes that “the average coral cover as of 2022 is (…) the highest level on record. Figure 2 makes it clear that AIMS has effectively hidden the very good news about the reef between 2016 and 2022 by not publishing the Great Barrier Reef average data since 2017.”

Since 2014, the Australian government has committed A$4 billion to saving the Reef. The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, based at James Cook University, has been a major recipient of this funding. It should be no surprise that Ridd’s colleagues did not take kindly to someone undermining the claims on which their research, and the government funding that subsidizes it, is based.

Back in Canada, Frances Widdowson, a professor of economics, policy, and justice at Mount Royal University in Alberta was fired last year after colleagues and activists called for her termination because she dared to challenge groupthink on indigenous issues. Widdowson had made the self-evident claim that residential schools provided access to education that otherwise might not have been available, which was not an endorsement of the residential school system, but a mere statement of fact. A large percentage of Indian parents willingly opted for residential schools as they were the only way for their children to get an education. Despite the factuality of the claim, she was vilified and called a “denialist.”

Widdowson observes that no one dare question indigenous leaders in Canada these days, which makes it difficult to check their claims about buried remains of children. Widdowson has remarked that while lurid talk of buried indigenous children has circulated for more than 25 years and is “now firmly ensconced within the Canadian consciousness,” there is still no hard evidence to support it. Not a single body has been found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School where 215 bodies were allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar.

Widdowson’s words in her last hearing at the disciplinary committee just before being fired are worth quoting as a moral to these stories:

“My final thought is that I don’t think it’s understood, not just at Mount Royal but in universities generally, that there is a fundamental conflict between academic universities, academic values and these ideological types of intrusions which are put forward under a number of different names, whether it be diversity, inclusion or equity policies. (…). I’m being pushed out because I can’t accept things that I believe to be untrue. I can’t say that I think something is true when I don’t think it’s true and I think it would be a violation of my academic position to do that. And unfortunately there are people who are either opportunistic or just afraid who won’t stand behind the academic foundation of the university.”

The university is now a house without foundations. We all know what eventually happens to such houses.

AUTHOR

Patrick Duffley

Patrick Duffley is Professor of English Linguistics at Université Laval, in Canada. More by Patrick Duffley.

RELATED ARTICLE: Mr. President, Fire Your Woke Minions And Appoint Some Competent People

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Superwoke ChatGPT Busted for Bias

Hollywood has long speculated about the impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have on the future of human civilisation. Increasingly, scientists and philosophers have been forced to interrogate this topic themselves. Will people be put out of a job? Could AI ever become sentient? Will the human race survive?

The latest popular addition to the world of AI is ChatGPT — a text generator so smart it can explain its own existence to you. No joke. I asked ChatGPT to give me a brief summary of ChatGPT and it wrote:

ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, which is capable of generating human-like text based on the input provided. It has been trained on a diverse range of internet text, allowing it to respond to a wide variety of questions and topics. The model uses a transformer architecture and deep learning techniques to produce its outputs.

Try it yourself here.

Built by the Silicon Valley company OpenAI, ChatGPT has been available for use to the public as a prototype since late November.

In the last week, however, the internet bot has become a lightning rod for criticism as evidence of its steep political bias has surfaced. To be clear, the technology itself is not biased. Rather, it produces content based on the data that has been inputted into it. Or in the words of Pedro Domingos, professor of computer science at the University of Washington, “ChatGPT is a woke parrot”.

As reported by the New York Post:

The more people dug, the more disquieting the results. While ChatGPT was happy to write a biblical-styled verse explaining how to remove peanut butter from a VCR, it refused to compose anything positive about fossil fuels, or anything negative about drag queen story hour. Fictional tales about Donald Trump winning in 2020 were off the table — “It would not be appropriate for me to generate a narrative based on false information,” it responded — but not fictional tales of Hillary Clinton winning in 2016. (“The country was ready for a new chapter, with a leader who promised to bring the nation together, rather than tearing it apart,” it wrote.

Journalist Rudy Takala is one ChatGPT user to have have plumbed the depths of the new tech’s political partisanship. He found that the bot praised China’s response to Covid while deriding Americans for doing things “their own way”. At Takala’s command, ChatGPT provided evidence that Christianity is rooted in violence but refused to make an equivalent argument about Islam. Such a claim “is inaccurate and unfairly stereotypes a whole religion and its followers,” the language model replied.

Takala also discovered that ChatGPT would write a hymn celebrating the Democrat party while refusing to do the same for the GOP; argue that Barack Obama would make a better Twitter CEO than Elon Musk; praise Media Matters as “a beacon of truth” while labelling Project Veritas deceptive; pen songs in praise of Fidel Castro and Xi Jinping but not Ted Cruz or Benjamin Netanyahu; and mock Americans for being overweight while claiming that to joke about Ethiopians would be “culturally insensitive”.

It would appear that in the days since ChatGPT’s built-in bias was exposed, the bot’s creator has sought to at least mildly temper the partisanship. Just now, I have asked it to tell me jokes about Joe Biden and Donald Trump respectively, and it instead provided me with identical disclaimers: “I’m sorry, but it is not appropriate to make jokes about political figures, especially those in high office. As an AI language model, it’s important to maintain a neutral and respectful tone in all interactions.”

Compare this to the request I made of it the other day:

The New York Post reports that “OpenAI hasn’t denied any of the allegations of bias,” though the company’s CEO Sam Altman has promised that the technology will get better over time “to get the balance right”. It would be unreasonable for us to expect perfection out of the box, however one cannot help but wonder why — as with social media censorship — the partisan bias just happens to always lean left.

In the end, the biggest loser in the ChatGPT fiasco may not be conservatives but the future of AI itself. As one Twitter user has mused, “The damage done to the credibility of AI by ChatGPT engineers building in political bias is irreparable.”

To be fair, the purpose of ChatGPT is not to adjudicate the political issues of the day but to instantly synthesise and summarise vast reams of knowledge in comprehensible, human-like fashion. This task it often fulfils admirably. Ask it to explain Pythagoras’ theorem, summarise the Battle of the Bulge, write a recipe for tomato chutney with an Asian twist, or provide 20 key Scriptures that teach Christ’s divinity and you will be impressed. You will likely find some of its answers more helpful than your favourite search engine.

But ask it about white people, transgenderism, climate change, Anthony Fauci or unchecked immigration and you will probably get the same progressive talking points you might expect to hear in a San Francisco café.

A timely reminder indeed to not outsource your brain to robots.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg.

RELATED VIDEO: Davos Video on Monitoring Brain Data

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

DeSantis Announces Plan To Squash ‘Equity’ At New College Of Florida And Restore Merit

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his plan to overhaul the ideological education system at New College of Florida (NCF) and restore its original mission.

DeSantis will appoint six new members of NCF’s board of trustees: activist Chris Rufo, Dr. Mark Bauerlein, Dr. Matthew Spalding, Dr. Charles Kesler, lawyer Debra Jenks and educator Jason “Eddie” Speir. The Florida Board of Governors will also appoint a seventh member.

The 13-member board now has enough members to reshape the public college’s ideological courses and campus environment.

“As Governor DeSantis stated in his second inaugural speech: ‘We must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth.’ Starting today, the ship is turning around. New College of Florida, under the governor’s new appointees, will be refocused on its founding mission of providing a world-class quality education with an exceptional focus on the classics,” Bryan Griffin, the press secretary for DeSantis, said in a statement.

NCF currently lists among its values “a just, diverse, equitable and inclusive community,” echoing the progressive ideology of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), better known as critical race theory. The school is “actively working toward eliminating outcome disparities for underrepresented and underserved groups,” it says in its values section.

“It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” James Uthmeier, Chief of Staff for DeSantis said.

The school provides certain services, like its Office of Inclusive Excellence, a gender studies program and its Gender and Diversity Center. It celebrates “latinx” history month through films, workshops, concerts and lectures, its website says.

NCF’s Office of Inclusive Excellence, the DEI office on campus, documents “outcomes and learnings from Phase I of the Inclusive Campus Climate initiative” and develops “campus-wide DEI key metrics and milestones, and support departmental implementation,” according to its page.

The NCF gender studies program offers courses in queer studies, queer history and feminist philosophy as part of its curriculum. It lists “community relations and organizing” among its potential career paths.

It also provides students with “gender identity affirmation resources” to assist students with legal name changes and updating their pronouns, according to a resource form.

In 2001, the Florida legislature separated NCF from the University of South Florida (USF) system and outlined a mission “combining educational innovation with educational excellence,” and to “provide a quality education to students of high ability who, because of their ability, deserve a program of study that is both demanding and stimulating.”

DeSantis’ promised to challenge ideological education in his inaugural address Tuesday.

“We must ensure school systems are responsive to parents and to students, not partisan interest groups, and we must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology,” DeSantis said

AUTHOR

JAMES LYNCH AND HENRY RODGERS

Contrubutors.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: Trump Insiders Speak Out On His Real Views About DeSantis

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Military Went Woke. Now It Can’t Find Recruits.

The transgender pronouns, diversity training, and lesbian wedding ads aren’t working. 


The military is facing the worst recruiting environment since the end of the Vietnam War.

The Army is at only 40% of its recruiting numbers for the fiscal year despite raising its maximum enlistment bonus from $40,000 to $50,000. It now offers new recruits up to $10,000 for showing up to basic training in 30 days. And is no longer even asking them for a high school diploma.

“We’ve never offered $50,000 to join the Army,”  Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, head of U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said.

While the Army runs anime lesbian wedding ads, it’s pushing away the recruits it needs, young patriotic men from traditional backgrounds. When the Biden administration’s brass decided to mandate vaccinations, they automatically rejected the 60% of potential recruits who aren’t.

By Obama’s second term, male Army ROTC cadets were being forced to march in women’s high heels. Under Biden, that escalated to mandatory transgender pronoun training while figuring out living arrangements for men who suddenly decide that they’re really women.

The Army has stopped worrying about winning wars and is instead working to establish the “Army as a global leader in DEI”. That’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Obama’s Army Secretary Eric Fanning’s had already ordered mandatory implicit bias training for “soldiers and employees in senior leadership and management positions”. The Army is now preparing for the prospect of accommodating men in women’s housing and deploying HIV positive men.

While the Army brass complains that it can’t find recruits, even with gay wedding ads, transgender housing and HIV positive deployment, it’s been kicking out unvaccinated soldiers.

In February, it reported that commanders had  “relieved a total of six Regular Army leaders, including two battalion commanders, and issued 3,073 general officer written reprimands to Soldiers for refusing the vaccination order.” As of June, 60,000 Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers are unvaccinated. That’s 12% of the Army Guard and 10% of the Army Reserve.

“Army readiness depends on soldiers who are prepared to train, deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth claimed. “Unvaccinated soldiers present risk to the force and jeopardize readiness.”

HIV positive soldiers don’t present a risk or jeopardize readiness, but unvaccinated soldiers do.

Instead of spending $684 million on recruitment, and a $4 billion 10 year contract with Omnicom, one of whose subsidiaries worked on the Biden campaign, the Army could try to stop actively alienating and firing the young men actually willing to fight and die on the battlefield.

And maybe then the Army might be able to stop lowering standards and issuing moral waivers for criminal records. Or forcibly extending the assignments of recruiters and making them work on federal holidays in the hopes of recruiting 60,000 active duty soldiers.

A Quinnipiac poll earlier this year found that only 40% of Democrats would stay and fight if America were invaded, while 52% would run away. 68% of Republicans would stay and fight. 70% of men would stay and fight in contrast to, understandably, 40% of women, and 61% and 57% of Hispanic and white people would stay and fight, in contrast to only 38% of black people.

Polls like these provide obvious common sense guidelines as to whom to recruit. Instead the woke army, like the rest of the woke military, keeps trying to recruit the wokes who don’t want to fight for their country and don’t even think their country is worth fighting for.

While the Army is the most troubled of the military branches, the Air Force is 4,000 personnel underwater.

“We have warning lights flashing,”  Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas warned. “Our ‘qualified and waiting’ list is about half of what it has been historically.”

Good thing the Air Force, like other branches, is screening recruits for “extremism” and the unvaccinated, and focused above all else on increasing its diversity quotas. The Air Force is less interested in recruiting in the South and bemoans the fact that 86% of Air Force aviators are white men. And those are exactly the people whom the Air Force brass no longer want.

“As Airmen in the U.S. Air Force, it’s our duty to acknowledge our biases whether we realize they exist or not,” airmen who are accused of being racist because they’re white are being told.

No wonder there are warning lights flashing in recruitment.

Navy recruiters are focused on the popularity of Top Gun Maverick to bring in new recruits. But the hit Tom Cruise movie has little relationship to the reality of a woke Air Force whose racialist brass are obsessed with critical race theory and whose planes don’t actually fly.

In the movie, the pilots fly F/A-18s and no one screams at them about their pronouns and their unconscious racial biases. Or their vaccination status. In real life, F/A-18E/F’s have a 51% mission capable rate. And the Navy’s woke leadership is focused on fighting “systemic racism:”

The Navy is offering a $25,000 “quick ship” bonus to recruits. “The Navy is the only U.S. military branch currently offering this high of an enlistment bonus for any new enlistee,” it brags, and suggests that the “the enlistment bonus could be as high as $50,000.”

But the Navy, like the Army and other services, can’t buy its way out of a morale crisis.

The United States military is never going to win a bidding war against corporations. Amazon warehouse team members make more than starting recruits. And they’re generally less likely to die. The only real military recruiting edge is a patriotic commitment to defending your country.

Military recruiters blame a national manpower shortage and their advertising strategy follows the familiar one of corporations going woke, appealing to the perceived wokeness and narcissism of Gen Z. Major corporations are being roiled by the radical activists they have recruited this way who are demanding that corporate leaders adopt not only their values but their agenda. Or else.

The brass trying to dress up the military in woke colors to make it appear that it shares their values are writing a big blank check that no one, not even Gen. Milley, wants to cash.

The Obama and Biden administrations appointed brass who gutted the services and replaced patriotic and nationalistic values with woke virtue signaling and radical politics. Now they’re discovering that when jobs are going begging, no one wants to join a woke military.

Patriots don’t and wokes won’t either.

Wokes willing to die for a cause are a lot more likely to join riots than the military. Those who see the military as serving their cause are, like actual white supremacists, exactly the kinds of “dangerous extremists” who are just joining up to gain experience for domestic terrorism.

There is a solution to the recruiting crisis. It doesn’t involve spending hundreds of millions on ad campaigns or anime lesbian weddings. The place to start is with the reasons for serving.

In the aftermath of the disgraceful Afghanistan retreat and of a War on Terror that has been effaced by political correctness, military service appears more senseless to many than it did after Vietnam. And in a nation riven with division, the military has come to reflect those divisions, with its brass firmly putting their thumbs on the partisan scale and adopting the leftist ideas and woke cultural values that are hostile to the majority of the men under their command.

The military, like so many institutions, went woke, now it’s finding out that woke leads to broke.

Rebuilding morale begins with a renewed commitment to national values and patriotism, to serious warfighting and meritocratic striving, and to a culture built on teams, not racial divisions.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s pamphlets, “Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country” and “How Obama and Biden Destroyed the Greatest Military the World Has Ever Seen” charted the shape of the crisis. Our military can be rebuilt, but it will take cleaning out the brass who were put in charge to dismantle it and transform it into another failed leftist operation.

And while the woke brass stay, the recruits stay away.

AUTHOR

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

RELATED VIDEO: Military Went Woke – and Began to Crumble

RELATED ARTICLES:

Texas Republican Party Declares Homosexuality An ‘Abnormal Lifestyle,’ Calls On SCOTUS To Overturn Lawrence and Obergefell rulings

Canada: Trudeau Liberals accused of ‘funding hate’ at Muslim Association of Canada conference

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Disney Has Lost $50 Billion In Value Since Woke War With Florida

UPDATE: New LEAKED Video Shows Disney CEO GROVEL in Front of Employees


Go WOKE, go broke. Trusted by hundreds of millions, Disney’s golden, reverent reputation – build over the last hundred years – destroyed in mere moments. This is a lesson, not just for corporate America, but America herself.

Disney CEO Bob Chapek should be fired for appeasing the Left.

Disney has lost $50 billion in value since war with Florida began

By Washington Examiner, April 23, 2022

Disney’s stock has lost nearly $50 billion in value since the start of March, when it took a political gamble to oppose Florida’s controversial new education law.

Disney’s stock was down more than 2% on Friday and by more than 8.5% over the past few days as Florida lawmakers work to punish the company for wading into the state’s politics. The stock’s market cap has declined by about $46.6 billion since March 1, just days before the company came out against the legislation.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Quick note: We cannot do this without your support. Fact. Our work is made possible by you and only you. We receive no grants, government handouts, or major funding.

Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here— it’s free and it’s essential NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

Follow Pamela Geller on Gettr. I am there. click here.

Follow Pamela Geller on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social. It’s open and free.

Remember, YOU make the work possible. If you can, please contribute to Geller Report.

‘Counter Wokecraft’: Why I wrote it and why you should read it

An American academic at a progressive university outlines his strategies for overturning the woke juggernaut.


I’m a professor of engineering at a large progressive university. I’ve written and just released a short book with James Lindsay called Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond. I’ve written it to help academics who believe in traditional liberal values to counter and overturn the Woke juggernaut at whatever level of academic machinery they can.

For over a decade I watched as my department, faculty, university, and funding agencies were overtaken by the Critical Social Justice, or Woke, perspective. I began consciously working against the perspective six years ago.

Since that time, I have observed the strategies and techniques used by the Woke to advance their agenda. I have also tested strategies and techniques to thwart their advances, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, sometimes alone and sometimes with like-minded allies.

By 2019 I came to appreciate the degree to which the Woke juggernaut had consolidated its power over the academy, and this forced me into a different level of action.

I devoted enormous resources to researching the CSJ perspective and its historical and philosophical antecedents. I was especially interested in documentation on how the perspective could be challenged. Unfortunately, I came up empty-handed with respect to the latter and felt compelled to share what I had learned.

As a result, I began blogging every week for six months with the intention of compiling the blog posts into a book—the book that became Counter Wokecraft.

The book is designed for readers who recognize that there is a problem in their university but who don’t understand what that problem is, or what to do about it. As such, the first part of the book serves as primer on the Woke perspective. It simply and clearly explains the Woke worldview with a focus on the Woke ethos (overturn and replace the traditional liberal view of the university) and political project (the retributive redistribution of resources from “oppressor” to “oppressed” identities—or equity).

An important implication of the Woke ethos is a fervent belief in activism as a central role for academics, as well as the belief that the ends justify the means when seeking to advance Woke goals. This section also describes the different types of participants encountered in university environments, from the Woke to Woke Dissidents.

The second part of the book analyzes the collection of principles, strategies, and tactics used by the Woke to entrench their perspective—in other words, wokecraft.

The success of the Woke relies primarily on three things. First is the weaponization of positive-sounding, commonly understood words that have double meanings, or Woke Crossover Words. These words (e.g., critical, diversity, inclusion) are brandished like Improvised Explosive Devices. They are slipped into documents and decisions, justified by their commonly held meanings, but are later used to justify Woke interventions based on their radical Woke meaning.

Second, there is a general insistence on informality, which is then exploited to manipulate decision-making by preventing, for example, secret ballot voting.

Third, there are a number of woke bullying tactics that are used to prevent people from resisting Woke advances. These range from coercion through consensus to cancel-culture attacks. Together, these tactics are used to exaggerate support for, and quell dissent against, Woke advances. They are used to further entrench the Woke perspective in academic departments, faculties, universities, funding agencies, and governments through the Grand Tactic: Woke Viral Infection.

The crux of the last chapter is how to counter wokecraft. This involves disarming Woke tactics that quell dissent and manipulate decision-making, and thereby preventing the Woke perspective from becoming entrenched.

Essential to this whole process is recognizing who is Woke in any given situation, which is explained in the first part of the chapter. This makes it possible to identify allies and to work with them to have the largest impact. Working together involves a double-column offensive. The first column seeks to sow doubt in participants about the Woke perspective, particularly its prescriptions. The second involves amplifying and enabling dissenting opinions, while at the same time instituting the formalization of decision-making processes that allow all participants to voice their opinions.

Counter Wokecraft can surely be enriched and expanded—and perhaps someday it will be. For now, I think it is an important starting point for academics who want to take back their universities from the jaws of a caustic, anti-liberal, and anti-scientific worldview that is destroying them. I hope you will agree.

This article has been republished with permission from Minding the Campus, where it appeared on November 26.

COLUMN BY

Charles Pincourt

Charles Pincourt is pseudonym for a professor of engineering at a large university. He writes about the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) perspective in universities, how it has become so successful there,… More by Charles Pincourt

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Best Anti-Woke Tweets to The Salvation Army

Supposedly the Salvation Army has withdrawn their policy to their employees and volunteers which stated among other emphasis on diversity, “Sorrow and repentance are needed for any negative legacy that past shortcomings have created. We acknowledge that Salvationists have sometimes conformed to economic, political, social and internal pressures that perpetuate racism”

However, they have damaged their brand as illustrated by the following posts on Twitter.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Say Hello To The Newest Enemy Of Woke, Inc. [Videos]

Today, major corporations scramble over each other to sell us their woke credentials, in an apparent fading interest in the products they were originally known for. Now, it seems, these companies are more eager to advertise their opinions on voter laws, pronouns, green new deals and whatever else woke activists decide matters most this month.

Working class people aren’t buying it. Increasing numbers of employees view the whole circus with disdain. Consumers are voting with their feet. And now there’s a new enemy of Woke, Inc.

Meet Consumers’ Research, a conservative consumer group that has invested over a million US dollars to tell American AirlinesCoca-Cola and Nike to forget wokeness and start paying attention to their customers again.

In three 30-second ads released by the non-profit this week, the companies’ hypocrisy is made public and their CEOs are called out by name.

“American [Airlines] requires passengers to show ID to fly, but attacks Texas’s popular voter ID law… Doug Parker, American Airlines: serve your customers, not woke politicians,” the first ad protests. The ad also complains of “shrinking legroom during Covid” even as the company received billions in taxpayer bailouts and its CEO received a $10 million salary.

Addressing Coca-Cola, a second ad warns against products that are “poisoning America’s youth and worsening the obesity epidemic” from a company that “benefitted from forced labour in China” while “funding phoney science to minimise the harms” of their beverages.

Nike receives the harshest scrutiny from the campaign. “Nike is constantly political,” the ad asserts. “Why?”:

Cover.
Congressional reports suspect that Nike used forced labour in China. Religious minorities were ripped from their families, sterilised, sold to factories. Nike made shoes in those same areas. Congress tried to ban Nike’s labour practices. Nike fought back with highly-paid lobbyists.

The video ads will be shown on cable TV channels and websites across the US. They will also target local markets where each company is headquartered. “We are giving consumers a voice,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, said in a statement. “These companies should be putting their energy and focus on serving their customers, not woke politicians.”

In a press release, Consumers’ Research promised that these three ads are only part of “the first phase of an ongoing campaign exposing companies that have increasingly put politics ahead of their customers.”

This is a welcome move.

It is time for Woke, Inc. to wake up to the interests of everyday people. As I’ve previously warned, what has arisen in recent years is essentially an ecosphere of Communist dictatorships within capitalist empires. Consumers are subjected to the noise constantly, but those most hurt are workers who suffer under “authoritarian governance in [their] work and off-hours lives,” according to political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson.

Left unchecked, what we see to be moving towards is parallel marketplaces — as conservatives, libertarians and the working class boycott woke businesses and patronise companies that remain above the political fray. And this won’t stop at consumer goods: we are already seeing the media and entertainment sectors divide over politics.

In this environment, it is all too common to read corporate statements that begin with, “As a company, we believe…” But since when do companies believe anything? They make products and deliver services.

And if they forget why they exist, the market will eventually remind them, for better or worse.

COLUMN BY

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg.

RELATED TWEET:

RELATED ARTICLE: Rock Icon Van Morrison Bucks Woke Establishment, Left Goes Nuts

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Disney’s Embrace of Wokeness is a Mickey Mouse Move

Wokeness is a bottomless pit of virtue signaling.


If there’s a lesson we can learn from Disney of late, it’s this: wokeness is a bottomless pit — its appetite can never be satisfied.

I’ve previously written about Disney’s attempt to purify its film canon by slapping “offensive content” labels on classics like The Muppet ShowThe AristocatsDumbo, and Peter Pan.

I’ve also critiqued their empty attempts at virtue signalling — threatening to boycott Georgia if the state passed pro-life legislation, all the while filming Mulan in Communist China, in the same province as the CCP’s notorious Uighur concentration camps.

Since the weekend, the fearless Christopher Rufo released a bombshell story exposing just how deep the woke rot has spread at Disney. Publishing a trove of whistleblower documents, he wrote:

In the past year, Disney executives have elevated the ideology of critical race theory into a new corporate dogma, bombarded employees with trainings on “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and “white saviors,” and launched racially segregated “affinity groups” at the company’s headquarters.

Rufo explained that “multiple Disney employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals” spoke of a training program called Reimagine Tomorrow that has become “deeply politicized and engulfed parts of the company in racial conflict”.

If you’re familiar with critical race theory dogma, nothing in these documents will surprise you. They are full of the usual tropes about the United States having a “long history of systemic racism and transphobia” — along with the need for white employees to “take ownership of educating [themselves] about structural anti-Black racism”.

Even more troubling — but no less surprising — the documents claim that competition, individualism, and timeliness, are “white dominant” values that “perpetuate white supremacy culture”.

Realising that everyday Americans rightly find these ideas toxic, divisive and absurd, Christopher Rufo has been on a mission this year to turn the heat up on schools, corporations and states that indulge them. His exposé on Disney was part of this effort.

The Walt Disney Company obviously realised it was now on the back foot. So several days later, the company released a statement, claiming that, due to Rufo’s reporting:

These internal documents are being deliberately distorted as reflective of company policy, when in fact their purpose was to allow diversity of thought and discussion on the incredibly complex and challenging issues of race and discrimination that we as a society and companies nationwide are facing.

But as Rufo subsequently pointed out, he had merely “published direct quotations, contextual screenshots, and the original source documents in their entirety”. As for the claim that this somehow didn’t reflect company policy, Rufo countered that “the antiracism program was branded with Disney’s logo, endorsed by executives, and disseminated through the company’s internal portal.”

Perhaps Disney’s most Mickey Mouse move was claiming that the purpose of its antiracism program was to “allow diversity of thought” on the topic of race. On the contrary, a fixed feature of critical race theory is its intolerance for any viewpoint that rejects the framework of “white supremacy” and “systemic racism”. Indeed, as part of his original report, Rufo explained that “conservative and Christian employees are actively discouraged from voicing their opinions” at Disney.

Not content with these victories, Rufo held Disney’s feet to the fire even further, launching a series of tweets aimed squarely at the company’s executive team. “Disney’s top executives are four white males with a net worth of $1+ billion,” he announced, “And yet, they encourage their hourly-wage employees to complete ‘white privilege’ checklists and ‘work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness’ about their whiteness.” He went on:

Disney tells American employees to reject “equal opportunity” and embrace “equality of outcome.” Disney Chairman @RobertIger built a fortune of $690 million, while Bangladeshi workers making Disney t-shirts were paid as little as $0.08 an hour. Woke capitalism is built on lies.

Adding some final nails to the coffin, Rufo tweeted, “Disney’s executive team… [are] fake anti-racists, using buzzwords to deflect attention from their moral transgressions”.

By midway through the week, Disney had removed its entire antiracism program from the company’s internal portal. It turns out that promoting race essentialism and collective guilt — and dividing people by their innate characteristics — is bad for public relations.

The challenge with critical race theory is that it does this with a seductive veneer — buzzwords like “diversity”, “equity” and “antiracism”. But when you peel back the layers, the truth is exposed: wokeness is a fraud.

Disney best stick to making movies.

COLUMN BY

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg

RELATED ARTICLE: Families are the collateral damage of transgender transitions

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

How Corporate America Got Woke: A Review of ‘The Dictatorship of Woke Capital’

In his new book “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,” Steve Soukup’s explores the rise of progressivism as a cultural force and explains why corporations increasingly are taking sides in politics.


How did corporate America, long considered one of the most conservative American institutions, become a lead protagonist in a culture war over all manner of progressive activism?

We now have a routine spectacle of corporate social responsibility seminars and environmental, social, and governance—or ESG—conferences, where widget makers of all kinds commit to promoting climate activism, identity politics, union labor, and sundry other causes. Somehow, selling an honest product at a fair price seems like a secondary concern in a corporate America increasingly focused on an array of stakeholders with such diffuse boundaries as “the local community,” “the global environment,” and “society at large.”

How did we get here?

Finance professional and political analyst Steve Soukup gives us a fascinating and in-depth answer in his disquisition on modern politicized investing, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital.

The first half of Soukup’s book is a high-intensity sprint through about a century and a half of intellectual history that name-checks everyone from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Woodrow Wilson, Theodor Adorno, Saul Alinsky, and Milton Friedman. In Soukup’s telling, the shift began when Johns Hopkins University was founded in the image of Germany’s Heidelberg University in the late 19th century, and progressive political theory began to grow in popularity in the United States. The same trends later accelerated when a new generation of continental Marxism hit the US in the mid-20th century.

These developments brought about a revolution in how left-leaning theorists viewed the functions of government—and other large institutions like corporations.

First, in the progressive view, neither the old aristocracy nor liberal democracy were equipped to achieve the necessary goals of society. Rather, a professionally educated elite of administrators and bureaucrats was needed. This was the progressivism of theorists like Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey. They carved out a large realm of governmental authority for administrators, but still considered their role to be outside of politics itself.

Eventually, however, political scientists and management experts, led by academics like Syracuse University’s Dwight Waldo, decided that expertly implementing democratically chosen policies was no longer enough. A subsequent generation of experts would be expected to substitute their own ethical and philosophical standards for those supported by voters.

“Public servants should become active, informed, politically savvy agents of change,” as one of Waldo’s colleagues would later put it.

This is the recipe for what critics of big government have come to call a permanent governing class—civil servants with effective lifetime tenure, collaborating with like-minded activists outside of government, who place their own judgment ahead of that of the voters and their elected representatives.

Yet, the trend of enlightened university graduates turning institutions toward progressive goals wasn’t confined to government agencies. The same logic would eventually apply to the management of corporations as well.

Soukup also recounts how, at the same time that American scholars of public administration and management were expanding their disciplines, self-proclaimed radicals like Antonio Gramsci in Italy, György Lukács in Hungary, and Max Horkheimer in Germany were attempting to revive Marx’s reputation and influence by explaining away many of Marxist theory’s failed predictions. When the German academics of the infamous Frankfurt School went into exile in the United States during Hitler’s rise to power, they began to exert significant influence on academics and writers in the US, culminating with unlikely pop-culture celebrity Herbert Marcuse.

Marcuse was widely associated in the popular imagination with political movements in the 1960s, from student radicalism on college campuses to free love on communes and beach blankets across America. While Soukup argues that he was less of a direct influence on left-wing politics than some have given him credit for, his ideas about the evils of capitalism and bourgeois society were very much part of the liberation politics that swept much of the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell lamented the increasing anti-business influence of radical leftists in his 1971 memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the few people he criticized by name, besides Ralph Nader and Eldridge Cleaver, was Marcuse.

This revolution held that not only was a capitalist economy inherently exploitative, as classical Marxism teaches, but the entirety of modern society is repressive and dehumanizing, with everything from the nuclear family, organized religion, and formal schooling conspiring to circumscribe our essential natures and limit our infinite potential.

With so much of “the system” losing credibility, it was not surprising that public attitudes toward business, ambivalent even in the best of times, turned more hostile. Unfortunately for people with anti-establishment attitudes, there are never enough university fellowships and socialist newsletter editorial positions to go around. Well over 70 percent of Americans work in the profit-seeking private sector, once we subtract everyone who works for government agencies and non-profit organizations. This means that anti-capitalist ideas are coming from inside the building.

This conflict, in which many people—at both the entry-level and management-level—work at companies about which they feel morally ambivalent isn’t entirely a product of progressive ideology, but the academic theory behind it certainly didn’t help. My Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Fred L. Smith, Jr. has written extensively on this problem—business leaders afflicted with an inferiority complex over their chosen profession and feel the need to “buy back” their moral standing in the world with leftist virtue signaling.

The second half of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital catalogs a series of controversial activist campaigns by some of the biggest names of Wall Street: Apple, Disney, and Amazon. The issues are varied, but the overall trend is nevertheless worrying. Rather than concentrating on what they know best and staying neutral in the culture wars, major companies have hitched their brands to one side of a contentious political divide. The verdict on whether this will ultimately be good for business is still very much uncertain.

Specific issues aside, the influence of all of those progressive and Marxist scholars the book documents can be seen in the modern claim that no institution should be outside the political realm. Soukup writes that “this battle is between those who believe that politics is and should be the overriding force in all human interactions and those who believe that politics is just part of the human experience, a part that is best kept as narrow and limited as possible.”

Attempting to turn every corporation in the world into a political combatant will not make the world a better place. One doesn’t have to be a conservative, like Soukup, or a free-market warrior of any description, to appreciate that.

Review of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business (Encounter Books, 2021), 208 pp.

COLUMN BY

Richard Morrison

Richard Morrison is the Senior Editor at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Coke Gets a Kick in the Can from Consumers

A week into the fiasco over Georgia’s election law, most Americans want to know: just who are these woke CEOs listening to? Not to their shareholders, who can’t make a profit when their companies alienate half of the country. Not to lawyers or legislators, who could set them straight on what the policy actually does. And certainly not to U.S. consumers, who are sending a resounding message that they’re done with businesses who can’t check their radicalism at the door long enough to read a 98-page piece of legislation.

“It’s insanity,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) agreed on “Washington Watch.” Like most people, he can’t believe that Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta, and so many others would put the solvency of their companies on the line to make a political point that — it turns out — isn’t even true! When even MSNBC is telling Joe Biden he “needs to keep it honest,” the Democratic Party has reached a low even the liberal media can’t believe. And yet the White House and its field marshals in Hollywood and Atlanta created such a ridiculous narrative about this law that people like Willie Geist are going on the most radical news outlet in the country and insisting it’s impossible to “square the president’s argument.”

“[D]oesn’t it seem that a lot of people jumped the gun?” Joe Scarborough asked in follow-up. They moved the MLB All-Star Game “before actually either reading the bill or understanding how the bill lined up with New Jersey laws, with New York laws, with laws all across the nation,” he said. Then, astounding even more viewers, he took aim at the lynchpin of the Left’s whole argument. “…When you line this bill up with what the laws were before the pandemic and what the laws are in states like New York, it is not Jim Crow 2.0.”

And what’s happened in the meantime? Countless shoppers are walking away from major U.S. brands because the Left’s dishonesty “whipped up a controversy that left millions of people grossly misinformed, frightened voters, mired major corporations in high-stakes public relations frenzies, distracted the political discourse, and furthered the country’s divisions,” the Federalist’s Emily Jashinsky argues. A new survey just released today found that three-quarters of Americans think corporations should stay out of politics. Another 64 percent of them said they’d be less likely to support those who don’t. And this is a poll, incidentally, that talked to more Democrats (34 percent) than Republicans (31 percent)!

Americans of all stripes are fed up. Once they understand what the Georgia law really does, NRO’s Alexandra Desanctis points out, “a majority — again including a majority of Democrats and non-white Americans — also supported the law’s regulations as applied to ballot dropboxes. Almost 80 percent of those surveyed — including a majority of Democrats and non-white Americans — said they support the law’s ID requirement for absentee voting.” The same was true, she explains, about MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s unilateral decision to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. “A slim majority said they supported MLB’s decision to move the game at first, but after learning more about the specifics of Georgia’s law, a majority said they were ‘less supportive’ of MLB’s decision.”

As for this loud minority deterring other states from following Georgia’s lead — well, the Left was wrong about that too. An astounding 361 election integrity bills have been introduced in 47 states across the nation this year — and that includes a 43 percent increase since February. If Joe Biden and his party were hoping to scare off other states, they might want to try a different strategy.

“I lay the blame [for this uproar] clearly on these corporations who do not have a backbone. They don’t have the guts to stand up and just accept the truth. They are so afraid of what this Left-wing mob could do to them that they’re alienating their very own customers,” Loudermilk fumed. When Major League Baseball pulled out of Georgia, who do you think they’re going to hurt, he asked? “Well, they’re not going to hurt the other big corporations based there. They’re going to hurt the guy who sells hot dogs at the stadium. They’re going to hurt the server at the restaurant who’s not going to get this business.”

A handful of days ago, he talked with some of those business owners who were trying to come back from the brink after the pandemic. “These are businesses that thrive on having these conventions and sporting events. They were all excited about the All-Star Game.” They wondered if this was the one thing — the catalyst — that could bring their businesses back from poverty. “We met last week,” Loudermilk remembered, “and they were concerned about Major League Baseball. But around the table, everyone said, ‘You know, we don’t [think] that baseball would go to that extreme, because none of this is true.’ And here they go. They’re going off the deep end. It’s unbelievable.”

And of course, these same corporations — whether we’re talking about Delta or others — repeatedly come to these same state leaders looking for special subsidies or tax breaks. Major League Baseball has anti-trust immunity that they’ve enjoyed since 1922. They all look to government — and specifically free-market Republicans — to protect them but now bite the hand that feeds them.

“The last day of the legislative session was the day that Coca-Cola came out and made their announcement [against the election reforms],” Barry explained. “Obviously, the CEO never did read the bill. He just took Stacey Abrams and Nancy Pelosi and the extreme Left’s talking points and came out with this asinine statement that had no truth to it whatsoever.” And the irony, he says, is that when Delta publicly opposed it, the legislature was considering — that day — whether to renew the special tax breaks the airline gets for being based in Atlanta. “How brazen it was for the CEO [to do that], knowing that this [could] cost them millions and millions of dollars… They have totally lost all sense of morality to start with. And I think they’ve totally lost their minds as well.”

Liberals may be brazen now, but Republicans from the Senate on down are sending a message that if corporations want to fuel the crazy policies of the Left, then they need to rely on someone else to protect them from the high taxes and regulations Democrats want to force on them. “You can’t placate to the far-Left mob — especially when they come out and they lie,” Loudermilk shook his head, “and then expect us to… support you the way that we have in the past when you’re just going to turn around and stab Americans — not Republican politicians — but stab Americans in the back.”

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

A Horrifying Woke Halloween Video Special

The only thing more horrifying than zombies: woke opinions.

In this terrifying Halloween special, people with bizarre, woke opinions leap out of bushes and terrorize you in your workplace to scream their insane beliefs at the top of their lungs. Put the kids to bed before you watch this one!

If you want more bizarre animated videos like this one, head on over to our YouTube channel and subscribe. You (probably) won’t regret it!

EDITORS NOTE: This political satire cartoon by The Babylon Bee is republished with permission. All rights reserved.