Tag Archive for: WOKE

The Rise of MAGA Marks the End of Corporate Wokeness

This has been quite an anti-woke week. More and more companies are finding they are losing market share. It looks like the end of wokeness is on the way. How can I say that? Easy. Larry Fink CEO of the criminal enterprise Blackrock just announced that Blackrock will no longer participate in the ESG Green scam. Why did that happen? Money honey. It was always about the money. Fink realized with Trump in office, his firm will have a hard time convincing MAGA to be globalists. They might not invest. He will lose profit,

Mark Zuckerberg is also following suit, He announced that Facebook (Meta) will restore freedom of speech. No more biased fact checkers. I guess he didn’t like Musk ‘s hands in Zuckerberg’s pocket. X was becoming a hit again. Zuckerberg could sit around and let Musk win. The new election is giving him the chance to reimagine META. And so he did.

WATCH: Mark Zuckerberg announces sweeping changes to Facebook and Instagram to move toward Free Speech

I find it so interesting to see all of the woke CEO’s run to Mar-A-Largo. Make no mistake, if a Dem gets in office, they will change their stripes again. I do not trust them but if the result is free speech lets get the truth out.

There are so many thing happening all at once it will be hard to keep track.
so pick you passion and follow that. Find the legislators in your state on that committee and make sure they know who you are and follow your ideas, their campaign promises. Don’t let them forget. Let them know you are watching them. Watch President Trump. He is a great teacher. He believes everything is negotiable. Who knows we might wind up with Greenland, Panama Canal and have a very different relationship with Canada. Don’t be afraid to ask, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Call your senator. Tell them to advance and vote for every one of Trump’s picks. Trump has ever right to work with the people he chooses. I don’t want to hear about qualifications. Just look at Biden chosen ones. No qualifications there and yet they were voted in. Also no excuses to slow walk anyone. They must do their jobs and get it done quickly.

Just think: East Palestine, The Francis Scott Key Bridge, The summer of Love, Hawaii, Hurricane Helene and the CA fires, the glaring in your face incompetence of this administration is more proof of the failure of progressive policies. Let us pray for the families who suffer but remember these tragedies and prepare for the future. We know what doesn’t work, lets not repeat if. Prepare in your local community, time to deep 6 those progressive policies in your local community. After all we know this government will not help even though Biden is leaving, we still have remnants locally of his failures.

As the green policies fail, Joe continues his scorched earth for America. His hatred is showing. Banning off shore drilling, banning gas furnaces, more money to Ukraine, more to Israel, emptying Gitmo, enticing illegals with free stuff, banning cigarettes, encouraging gangs and drugs, pushing transgenderism on kids, vaccines, inflation, lies about job numbers, Afghanistan and poor education. I could go on and on but we all lived this bad movie and it is days away from the finale. It can’t come soon enough. I do pray for the people in CA. President Trump is right the green policies have destroyed this once beautiful state. As the people rebuild and they will, I hope they have learned that poor leadership following insane policies is a bad mix. Maybe this will be their turning point.

The green scam will become more evident as AI needs electricity to operate. Solar and wind are not ready for prime time. As were are being told fossil fuel and nuclear are bad, watch while the criminals use it themselves. Bill Gate is buying and reactivating 3 mile island. plenty of cheap energy for him, none for us. The area of Alaska, Tx, Mt combined is the size of Joe’s off shore ban on drilling. We were energy independent before Joe and we will be again. But watch those law suits roll in. Energy is power. and cheap energy give the people power. These criminals don’t want us to have power. They want high prices so we will beg for government hand outs.. Petroleum is used in almost everything we do. When gas is high so is everything else. Lets look for Presidents Trump’s executive orders and make sure our legislators support them.

©2025 . All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: The cost of Facebook’s now-repudiated censorship

Is wokeness an ideology for an effete elite?

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi | Princeton UP, 2024, 432 pages

Political and social developments during 2024 have led some to speculate that the “Woke” era is over.

Donald Trump’s victory over a Democratic candidate who owed her position to race and gender alone – and whose radicalism on transgender issues arguably cost her the election – was the best example of this.

Woke is certainly not dead, but it is in retreat. In fact, one brilliant American academic argues that Wokeness barely even existed, given that this social phenomenon was never really about standing up for the disadvantaged.

Musa al-Gharbi’s biography is one of those “only in America” stories. He is mixed-race, raised in a military family in Arizona, a cradle Catholic who converted to Islam (via atheism) and has earned a PhD in one of the most leftist fields (sociology) in one of the most progressive universities (Columbia).

His diverse background has probably contributed to the shaping of an outstanding book which hit the shelves in October: We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.


This book is not about Donald Trump, but what al-Gharbi saw on the campus of Columbia University in the aftermath of Trump’s shock 2016 win left a lasting imprint on his thinking.

Prior to this, he had been disturbed by the “racialised caste system” which existed in New York, where affluent progressives with all the right social views were served by low-paid workers who were usually either minorities and/or immigrants.

Then, in November 2016, he witnessed Columbia students – overwhelmingly born of rich parents – arguing that trauma arising from Trump’s victory meant they could not sit exams or complete assignments.

While the university authorities bent over backwards to wipe away bourgeois tears, al-Gharbi perceived that neither the authorities nor the students themselves seemed to care about the low-income workers employed on campus, many of whom were immigrants potentially threatened by Trump’s policies.

Rich liberal students were crying, but only for themselves, and nor were they campaigning for better conditions for those workers.

“Nor,” al-Gharbi writes, “were these ignored labourers, the people with the most at stake in this election in the students’ own narratives, saying they needed time off because they were too traumatised. They weren’t painting themselves as victims. Although the classrooms were full of tears on the days that followed, one never saw, say, the janitors making a scene sobbing uncontrollably about politics as they scrubbed rich kids’ mess out of toilets.”

This helped to prompt the author to explore the connection between this new economic elite and the various causes which they tend to champion under the wide umbrella term of “social justice.”

While We Have Never Been Woke includes an overview of Woke thinking and how it has evolved in line with structural changes in the American economy, the author does not attempt to provide an analytical definition of Wokeness.

His aim instead is to ask unsettling questions of his own class and contemporaries.

“Symbolic capitalists,” as al-Gharbi calls them, are not the factory owning capitalists of old. In a modern post-industrial society, the rulers look very different.

“[S]ymbolic capitalists are defined first and foremost by how they make a living, non-manual work associated with the production and manipulation of data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organisational structures and operations, art and entertainment, traditions and innovations and so forth. Think academics, consultants, journalists, administrators, lawyers, people who work in finance, tech and so on,” al-Gharbi explains, before adding that Wokeness “can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of this increasingly dominant elite formation.”

In the second decade of the 21st century, between around 2010 and 2020, a “Great Awokening” took place in which socially radically views became common among that segment of the American population which is university-educated and left-leaning.

From 2011 onwards, a dramatic change can be seen in how white liberal Americans answer polling questions relating to race (such as the degree to which they believed minorities were being discriminated against, or the degree to which they viewed others as racists).

Before the overturning of Roe v Wade, American liberals had become more extreme on the issue of abortion, with Democrats showing significantly more opposition to any restrictions on abortion in 2020 compared to 2010.

In the cultural or artistic sphere, themes of discrimination became far more common, and there was a marked increase in the percentage of major films which featured LGBT characters, or which had non-white or female leads.

As the author explains, cultural Wokeness serves as a clear dividing line which separates the progressive from the regressive, and the commendables from the deplorables.

“Through espousing Woke beliefs, symbolic capitalists – and aspirants to the symbolic professions – demonstrate that they are the kind of people who play ball…That is, Wokeness is increasingly a means of identifying who is part of the club, and it provides a basis of deeming those who are not part of the club as unworthy of symbolic capital,” the author writes.

The Woke also have a tendency to demonstrate prejudice against those with differing views. As per Patrick Ruffini’s recent work, the core American political divide is now between left-leaning college graduates and right-leaning non-graduates, and it is therefore easy to see why the new elite resents being challenged by those they see as their intellectual and cultural inferiors. All of this helps to explain the phenomenon of cancel culture.

And yet the self-professed Woke activists are not quite as radical in practice as they are in theory.

While family structure in more economically deprived areas has grown less stable, marriage remains the norm among symbolic capitalists, who marry among their own class and prosper as a result.

Vocal declarations of social liberalism by many in the middle- and upper-class go hand-in-hand with a certain unspoken social conservatism on their own part.

“Symbolic capitalists bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatisation of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families,” al-Gharbi points out.

If the reader comes to view much left-wing social activism as hypocritical posturing, they can be excused.

A similar story is told about a range of social causes and protest movements, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement which came about in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008.

In that case, al-Gharbi suggests that affluent protestors obscured the economic realities of the day by presenting it as a battle of the 99% against the 1% in control, while ignoring the fact that there were major economic divides within that 99% faction.

He describes the various other Awokenings which have occurred in recent American history. The unrest on American campuses in the late 1960s was one major example of this: during this time, affluent American youths flocked to university as a means of avoiding military service in Vietnam, thereby ensuring that poorer youths with fewer options were conscripted instead.

The “Great Awokening” is a term which alludes to the “the Great Awakening” – the mass religious revivals which have taken place in America in recent centuries.

As a student of religion, al-Gharbi is quick to explore this analogy, and he sees strong evidence that Wokeness is filling a void left by liberal Americans’ declining faith in Christianity, especially the mainline Protestantism which has collapsed precipitously in recent times.

“Many of the attitudes and dispositions now associated with Wokeness are derivative of the anti-hierarchical, anti-traditional and anti-communitarian impulses of American Protestantism,” he points out.

Dissatisfaction with the elite’s position within their society is a recurring cause of these Awokenings. One major explanation for the recent upheaval has been what the academic Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” – the tendency of the society to produce too many elite members (i.e., college graduates) for the number of well-paid and high-status job positions which exist.

This has likely led to many symbolic capitalists latching onto various fashionable social causes whose progression could conceivably lead to the replacement of the current elites with new ones.

For the moment, no actual revolution appears to be on the cards, and so other means of gaining advantage have become common.

Symbolic capitalists are increasingly likely to embrace victimhood for selfish reasons. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s risible claim to be Native American is one example which al-Gharbi cites; the growing number of highly-educated Australians pretending to be Aboriginals is another; yet one more is the study which found that college applicants from American families with annual incomes above US$100,000 are significantly more likely than poor applicants to claim they had overcome disabilities, mental health challenges or discrimination in their admissions essays.

What triggered al-Gharbi’s interest originally was the economic dimension in all of this. The symbolic capitalists in America’s major metropolitan areas have their economic and social needs (like cheap transportation and food delivery options) catered for by poorly paid workers with few employment rights and scant job security.

It disturbs him that so few within the hyper-politicised elite are interested in campaigning for their rights.

Ultra-progressive California is highlighted as a classic example of the new socio-economic model: the richest state in the union where one in 12 residents is a millionaire, and simultaneously the state with the highest poverty rate. Other blue states and cities exhibit similar tendencies, and this helps to explain why so many disillusioned low-income workers have gone over to the Republicans.

Near the conclusion of the book, Al-Gharbi rightly suggests that a similar process is at play in other countries and points to France and Britain as examples.

Ireland would have been an even better one. It is an economically Americanised and highly-educated society where progressive values are more embedded than anywhere else. Many are employed in well-paid positions in ultra-liberal knowledge industries like tech and pharma.

A disastrous decision in the 1990s to make university education free has led to Ireland having the highestrates of third-level education in Europe. While the degrees themselves are often functionally useless, they remain a much-prized status symbol.

Symbolic capitalists are in over-supply, but booming corporation tax receipts are allowing for the massive public spending which is just about glossing over the intractable housing crisis and the growing tensions over large-scale immigration – immigration being necessary to fill the professional vacancies which over-educated and under-skilled Irish graduates cannot or will not consider.

Ireland’s next crash will not just be economic (as in 2008), but social and political as well, and understanding Wokeness as a concept helps to explain modern Ireland’s political economy perfectly.

Al-Gharbi’s book is essential reading. Without ever even seeking to provide a textbook definition of Wokeness, We Have Never Been Woke proves to be the most profound analysis of this social shift yet published.

It should be regarded as the best book of 2024.


Is Wokeness dead in your neck of the woods?   


AUTHOR

James Bradshaw writes from Ireland on topics including history, culture, film and literature.

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

Poll: Do Americans Really Care about where Companies Stand Politically?

A recent Gallup poll revealed only 38% percent of American adults “want businesses to take a stance on current events.” The remaining majority, however, would prefer corporations to stay quiet on their beliefs.

After several years of political madness, society has witnessed waves of boycotts from the Left and the Right. For instance, many conservatives and Christians have chosen to stray from doing business with organizations such as Bud Light, Target, Starbucks, and others, that unabashedly promote LGBT ideology. The same is true on the opposite side of the spectrum, as pro-Palestinian groups that support Hamas have chosen to boycott organizations with Israeli ties.

But notably, the poll, which measured the opinions of 5,835 people, found that “nearly all age groups, genders, races, and partisan groups” were represented in those who felt corporations should keep their political views to themselves. The groups that most strongly felt otherwise included Democrats, black adults, and those who promote LGBT ideology.

The question is: why is this the case? Is it possible consumers are tired of having to pick and choose where they buy a cup of coffee? Or could it simply be that the American people don’t want to associate everyday shopping with a particular worldview? To help give possible explanations to these questions, Family Research Council’s Director of the Center for Biblical Worldview David Closson commented to The Washington Stand.

“We live in incredibly hyper-politicized times,” he stated. “For the last several years, it seems that politics has exploded onto the headlines, and one can’t navigate through the public square without being forced to confront the latest cultural or social issue.” As such, Closson noted he’s “not at all surprised that Americans are expressing to pollsters the fact that they are utterly exhausted” to be faced with politics 24/7.

According to Closson, there are times when political engagement within an everyday shopping experience is justified. For instance, “The backlash against Bud Light and Target for their aggressive LGBT activism” had a purpose. Considering that many of the leftist companies faced severe drops in sales, it’s now obvious that the boycotts “sent a warning shot across the bow to many corporations that tens of millions of Christians were tired of having a moral agenda shoved down their throat that was not congruent with their biblical worldview.”

In the broad analysis, it stands to reason that Christians aren’t the only ones to be “getting tired of the constant, frantic political news cycle” that’s seemingly impossible “to extricate ourselves from.” However, arguably, Christians do face a unique dilemma when it comes to the political stance of an organization. As Closson emphasized, “Fundamentally, Christians are called to be good stewards” — a call applicable to both our time and resources.

However, from Closson’s perspective, “Christians should be good stewards with everything God has entrusted us with, which would include our consumer habits.” He continued, “When Target was putting chest-binders in swimsuits for those who identify as transgender on the very front display rack, I do believe Christians have an obligation not to support companies that so flagrantly and blatantly disregard traditional biblical ethic.”

Ultimately, in a fallen world, Christians will never be truly free of businesses that reflect anti-biblical beliefs. But that doesn’t mean, as Closson contended, that we should “worry about every little detail” and rob ourselves of joy. “Some of these large companies do our homework for us by virtue signaling and seemingly taking every step possible to let us know where they stand on the moral issues of our day.” And “when an organization, company, or business tells you what they believe on certain hot button issues, it’s appropriate for Christians to take them at their word.”

Closson concluded that when it comes to these matters, “Wisdom is needed.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Fairness Fraud: This is behind the DEI, CRT, Woke charades

We hear the term “fair” used a lot these days. As stated in prior commentaries, the Left is very skilled at manipulating the language to their political advantage — and this is representative.

Some (of many) examples:

a) having open borders is fair for disadvantaged foreigners,

b) giving special treatment to LGBTQ+ persons is fair for these mistreated minorities,

c) promoting the insidious SEL, in K-12 is the fair thing for our children,

d) undermining meritocracy is fair for those who have fewer skills,

e) reducing our lifestyle and conveniences is what’s fair for the planet,

f) cheating on elections is fair because the end justifies the means,

g) etc., etc.

One reason this word was carefully chosen is due to its ambiguity. According to Merriam-Webster, the adjective fair can have ten (10) different meanings!

Another reason is: who can argue against advocating fairness?

Again this is where Critical Thinking can come to the rescue to separate the wheat from the chaff. Yes, all things being equal, fairness is a desirable attribute. But, we are rarely dealing with all things being equal situations.

All religions — like the Judeo-Christian standards that America was founded on — convey a message of ultimate fairness. So what, for example, does the Bible say about fairness? There are multiple references, but the New Testament parable about talents is indicative.

There are three (3) relevant messages in this story…

First, we are NOT given an equal playing field! In the parable, one servant gets five talents, another two, and a third only one. That’s a very large five times discrepancy. Note that in the parable, the two getting less did not complain, or demand equality (on the basis of fairness)! These differences are akin to the cards we are dealt in our life. There are enormous inequities in life — which actually makes things more interesting. For example, how would it be if every woman looked exactly the same?

Second, the parable spells out that fairness does not get meted out until the end (“after a long time” when the Master returns to settle up accounts). In other words, on our day of judgment we will likely be asked: “I gave you a certain amount of skills and opportunities. What did you do with them?”

Third, the parable makes clear that what counts is how well we do with what we are given. This is where fairness comes in: those who are given more, don’t get a free ride, but rather they have higher expectations imposed on them.

Those who don’t believe in God, or his fairness, say that we need to fix inequities here and now. This is an impossible aspiration for numerous reasons — like the fact that each person has multiple inequalities from every other person. How can they all be properly adjusted? They can’t.

Consider injecting height fairness into playing basketball. How is it fair to have tall players playing against shorter (vertically challenged) players? To make things “fairer” it is proposed that a basket scored by a seven-foot person would count 2 points, but one scored by a six-foot individual would count 10 points. The absurdity of adjusting for numerous personal differences is a fool’s errand.

Like a lot of what the Left says, the objective of “fairness” sounds nice, but it is subjective and anything but fair. Typically what is happening is raw politics. On the one hand allies of the Left (certain favored minorities) are being given privileges, while enemies (e.g., those financially successful) are targeted for penalties. The end result is anything but fair (e.g., biological men competing in women’s sports).

Lastly, there is an underlying assumption to all this: that Life is Fair. It is NOT! Atheists cling to imposing fairness now, as there is no afterlife where everything is properly accounted for.

This whole matter is easily resolved by Americans adhering to Judeo-Christian standards.

Note: The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has a free quarterly publication called Academic Questions (AQ). It has many excellent commentaries. Regarding the subject at hand, a recent AQ article by college professor Naomi Farber is well worth reading.

©2024. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.


Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.orgdiscusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.infocovers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.infomultiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

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.

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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

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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.

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‘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.

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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.

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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

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