The Woke Choice Is Always the Wrong Choice
There’s a riveting scene in the classic World War II adventure film, The Guns of Navarone (1961), where the Allied commando leader played by Gregory Peck is devastated to learn the pretty Greek freedom fighter (Gia Scala) he has fallen for (spoiler alert) is a traitor. “When we got here,” he tells her, “why didn’t you put in with us? You could’ve come with us! It was your only chance to get free of them!” The girl had made the wrong choice. Not only does the team have to kill her, they succeed in their mission to blow up two German super-cannons.
The status of the country today prompts many public and private entities to make a similar fateful choice — go woke and alienate conservatives or eschew ideology altogether and enjoy their continued patronage. The choice should be simple in that it is not between leftwing and rightwing activism but between any activism and neutrality. Traditionalists don’t need a company’s validation to continue patronizing it. They just don’t want their values assaulted by it. And yet almost every entity chooses to politicize on the progressive side — screw their deplorable, backward patrons.
Until this year, it may have been the cleverer decision. Marketers could earn virtue signaling points from their elite cronies and the media and endure their consumer base’s ineffectual protests while taking their money. Thus, they would toast their high ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) scores, which mean nothing in the real world, yet suffer zero profit loss, which does. But, as always, contempt for a group — in this case, their unvalued customers — led to total ignorance of them. The actors have failed to read the room.
A new Gallup Poll shows Americans are more conservative than they have been in a decade. The number of those identifying as conservative or very conservative spiked eight points in the past two years. Additionally, 38 percent say they are socially conservative or very conservative, only 29 percent identify as liberal. Yet the woke assault from on high continues.
