What’s in it for me? Learn how corporations are exploiting social justice causes for their own gain.
You’re probably aware of how stage magicians make use of distractions as part of their performances.
They use flashing lights, smoke, and beautiful assistants to obscure what they’re actually doing.
But did you know that corporate America is, in its own way, up to the same tricks?
Corporations, at their core, seek profit and power.
But they don’t necessarily want that to be obvious.
So what’s the distraction they’ve been hiding behind?
A set of progressive social values known as wokeness.
By publicly throwing their support behind causes like gender diversity, racial justice, and climate change, companies win consumer trust, which translates into more revenue – all while they keep power-grabbing behind the scenes.
These blinks peel back the curtain and reveal how it’s done.
In these blinks, you’ll learn why wokeness could legally be considered a religion; how companies are aiding and abetting the Chinese Communist Party; and what enables Big Tech to engage in censorship.
Corporations use wokeness as a virtuous smokescreen.
The term woke originated decades ago, when Black activists warned each other to “stay woke” – in other words, to be alert to the realities of racism.
Since then, the term’s usage has expanded greatly.
Now, you can be woke to any number of race-, sex-, or gender-based injustices, such as microaggressions – small offenses that add up to a lot of harm.
If you’re woke, you’re hyperaware of invisible power structures operating everywhere.
Woke, progressive ideology has gained a lot of traction in America in recent years, particularly among white, coastal suburbanites.
And corporations have taken note.
They’ve seized on wokeness as a way to curry favor with a rising political sector, profit off their social values, and dictate those values back to the rest of America.
The key message here is: Corporations use wokeness as a virtuous smokescreen.
Innumerable companies have co-opted wokeness for their own purposes.
A good example of one involves the famous investment firm Goldman Sachs.
In January 2020, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon declared that Goldman would only take a company public if its board included at least one diverse member.
What exactly did diverse mean?
Goldman failed to specify, simply saying it would have a “focus on women.
” Of course, the social value Goldman was claiming to champion had already been popular for a while.
In fact, by July 2019, every company in the S&P 500 already had at least one woman on their boards.
So, Goldman was taking zero risk by making this pro-diversity proclamation.
It was merely emblazoning its logo on the cause.
While headlines focused on that, attention was conveniently diverted from a much less flattering scandal.
It had come to light that Goldman had paid over a billion dollars in bribes to get involved in raising money for the 1Malaysia Development Berhad Fund, which was supposed to be for public development projects but instead became a slush fund for corrupt Malaysian officials.
Goldman had just agreed to pay different governments a total of $5 billion in fines for its role in the scheme.
This is just one of countless examples of this form of what the author calls woke capitalism, where companies profit off of social values to distract from their less savory dealings.
In the process, those social values become debased, and, ultimately, American democracy bears the consequences – a topic we’ll explore more in the next blink.
The doctrine of stakeholder capitalism distorts American democracy.
In 2021, the state of Georgia implemented new voting rules.
Many left-leaning groups and individuals were unhappy with these, and, apparently, so were some companies.
In fact, the CEO of Delta Airlines declared that the voting bill was “unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.
” There was something bizarre about the statement.
Why should anyone care whether a voting law aligns with the values of an airline company?
In recent years, companies have felt an increasing need to provide commentary on social and political issues.
Previously, this was unheard of.
So what changed?
In short: the rise of a doctrine known as stakeholder capitalism, which demands that companies be responsible for social as well as shareholder welfare.
The key message here is: The doctrine of stakeholder capitalism distorts American democracy.
Near the end of 2018, the Business Roundtable – the top lobbying group for American companies – revised its policy statement.
Before, it said that a business’s primary purpose was to generate value for shareholders.
But the new statement said that companies are also beholden to stakeholders who are impacted by the business, like customers, suppliers, employees, and communities, in addition to the shareholders who own the business.
In doing so, it ushered in a new era of stakeholder capitalism.
What’s the problem with this?
Well, stakeholder capitalism requires companies to comment on and play an active role in political matters.
To do that, they need to choose which causes to prioritize and what positions to take.
But that isn’t a business judgment – it’s a moral one.
It makes little sense to ask a hedge fund manager what he thinks about climate change.
It’d make similarly little sense to ask an average politician to join the R&D department of a pharma company.
Beyond that, American citizens aren’t supposed to learn from corporations which causes and values they should support.
They’re supposed to learn about and debate those values in the civic sphere and at the voting booth.
When companies flex their corporate might to push their views, they effectively dictate people’s values for them.
Some CEOs do sincerely hold progressive values; others don’t.
But that’s not the point.
It’s perfectly acceptable for CEOs and other company employees to speak up about their values in their capacity as private citizens.
What’s not OK is for them to blast those messages out using their corporate megaphones, money, and market power.
Companies must bear the consequences of their conflicts of interest.
In September 2015, Hilary Clinton famously tweeted, “Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous.
Tomorrow I’ll lay out a plan to take it on.
” Soon after, then-candidate Donald Trump echoed her concerns.
For pharma companies, the writing was on the wall: no matter which candidate won, the new president's administration would focus on the issue of drug pricing.
But the pharma industry didn’t just wait for the other shoe to drop.
First, the CEO of the drug company Allergan, Brent Saunders, pledged to “only” increase prices a maximum of once per year, and “only” by single digits.
Other companies followed suit, establishing a new norm of companies increasing their prices by – no surprise – 9.
9 percent each year.
Allergan and the other companies got to look like the good guys when what they were really doing was avoiding government regulators stepping in and potentially restricting prices far more.
It’s time to prevent schemes like this from continuing.
The question is: How?
The key message here is: Companies must bear the consequences of their conflicts of interest.
In the world of stakeholder capitalism, consumers assume that companies are pursuing both financial and social interests.
Yet, by making that assumption, they become less likely to question company decisions.
And companies ultimately get away with doing things that leave society worse off.
One possible way to end this form of corporate misbehavior is to limit the scope of a special legal privilege for corporations called the business judgment rule, or BJR.
The purpose of the BJR is to protect directors and officers of a corporation in case they’re sued for making a bad business decision.
In practice, though, the only way to prove that someone has violated the BJR is to show that they had a conflict of interest when making a particular decision.
Conflicts of interest are typically defined in financial terms.
But, in real life, they’re rarely limited to that sphere.
Imagine, for instance, that you currently sit on the board of a pharmaceutical company, and you’re interested in winning a political appointment – becoming, say, Secretary of Health and Human Services.
When you’re asked to make a decision about how to price a drug, that decision is clearly in conflict with your desire to win a political appointment.
The BJR could be limited so that CEOs and directors don’t receive its protection if they use corporate resources to support their pet social causes.
Executives would start to think twice before writing a check to some social institution or exhorting their customers to support Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
Wokeness has become a religion, discriminating against those who don’t subscribe to it.
Emmanuel Cafferty was fired from his truck driving job.
What was his transgression, you ask?
Well, while Cafferty was at a traffic stop, another driver flipped him the middle finger, then made the OK sign with his fingers.
He yelled at Cafferty to imitate him.
Cafferty obeyed, confused and hoping to end the encounter.
The other driver took a picture of Cafferty making the OK sign and put it on the internet.
When his employer caught wind of the photo, Cafferty was promptly fired.
The OK sign is a common, innocuous gesture, but the alt-right has appropriated it to mean “white power.
” So even though Cafferty is actually Latino and had merely been tricked into using the gesture, he lost his job.
Forbidden gestures, words, and other transgressions are typically the trappings of religion.
But a religion is precisely what wokeness has become.
The key message here is: Wokeness has become a religion, discriminating against those who don’t subscribe to it.
Wokeness teaches its disciples to see injustice and privilege everywhere.
It states that one must subscribe to the entire catalogue of woke beliefs or risk being ejected from its church.
And the firing of employees who don’t subscribe to wokeness?
Well, that’s starting to seem like religious discrimination.
The author argues that fired employees may actually have legal recourse under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination.
Consider the following precedent: In 2007, an insurance company called CCG adopted a program called “Onionhead.
” Employees had to attend “positivity sessions” which taught that “choice, not chance, determines human destiny.
” CCG fired any employees who rejected Onionhead, and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – the EEOC – sued the company on the employees’ behalf for religious discrimination.
CCG insisted that Onionhead was secular, but the legal case ultimately found that Onionhead was, in fact, a religion.
It’s easy to see the analogue between Onionhead and wokeness.
Employees at woke corporations today have to attend “diversity and inclusion” sessions; companies like Coca-Cola hold trainings that teach employees to “be less white” and that systemic racism determines human destiny.
Employees who reject this narrative are often fired.
The author argues that wokeism meets the EEOC’s definition of a religion.
If that’s the case, companies couldn’t punish woke employees for expressing woke viewpoints.
But neither could an employer impose its own woke beliefs on employees.
It’s a solution that works for everyone.
Corporations are manipulated by dictators overseas while acting like dictators themselves.
Midway through 2019, the company Airbnb hired a former deputy director of the FBI, Sean Joyce, as its chief trust officer.
His job was to protect user safety on the platform.
Yet before the year was up, Joyce had resigned.
Why?
Well, it turns out that Airbnb regularly shares data about American users with China’s ruling political party, the CCP.
The data it hands over includes phone numbers, email addresses, and messages between users and the company.
When Joyce raised concerns about that practice with senior Airbnb executives, he was told “We’re not here to promote American values.
” The key message here is: Corporations are manipulated by dictators overseas while acting like dictators themselves.
Foreign dictators – primarily China’s Xi Jinping – have figured out how to capitalize off American company wokeness.
But how does a political party like the CCP manage to get involved in American company dealings?
Well, first, a company cultivates an image of itself as a paragon of virtue by promoting a woke social cause.
It wins consumer trust, then monetizes it by generating clicks, selling ads, and charging fees.
After the company has amassed a huge trove of user data this way, the CCP demands access to it in exchange for allowing the company to do business in China.
Companies do as the CCP says and make lots of money in the Chinese market.
Then they keep silent about Chinese abuses of power, such as its genocide against the Uighur ethnic group, while continuing to signal their support for woke causes back in the US.
Effectively, these companies trick consumers into believing they’re virtuous, even as they aid and abet horrifically oppressive, authoritarian regimes in countries like China.
Meanwhile, back in the US, they act like dictators themselves.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, YouTube banned videos that were critical of policies such as lockdowns.
YouTube’s stated justification for this was that the videos included medically unsubstantiated content.
But the author calls this approach nonsensical.
As he sees it, an opinion about the necessity of lockdowns is just that – an opinion, not a factual statement.
And if you look at it a certain way, no wonder these tech companies wanted to ensure people weren’t getting too critical of lockdowns.
After all, lockdowns meant more people shopping for groceries on Amazon, taking meetings over Zoom, and subscribing to Netflix.
But even that explanation doesn’t cover all of it.
Silicon Valley doesn’t just care about profit – it also wants raw political power.
We’ll discuss that next.
Under the banner of wokeness, Big Tech gets away with censorship.
Not long before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post ran an article featuring what it claimed was some unflattering information about then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
It alleged that Hunter had used his father’s name as leverage in his business dealings in Ukraine.
Was the story true?
At the time, the information was neither fully debunked nor verifiably true, but Twitter decided to step in regardless.
It promptly banned any users who shared the article, prevented individuals from sending it in private messages, and then, finally, suspended the personal accounts of certain New York Post editors and journalists.
Later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that his company had mishandled the situation.
But by then, it was clear how Big Tech controls the American information diet.
By censoring the article on the eve of a presidential election, Big Tech gravely distorted democracy.
The key message here is: Under the banner of wokeness, Big Tech gets away with censorship.
Often, Republicans and Democrats agree that Big Tech is too powerful.
Yet it just keeps growing.
But what’s the ultimate cause for the rapid and expansive growth of these companies?
In the author’s view, part of a law called Section 230 under the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is to blame.
The act gives what it calls Internet Service Providers, which include Facebook and Twitter, immunity from the content published on their platforms – meaning they can’t be sued for the things their users post or tweet.
It also protects platforms from liability for restricting content that it deems objectionable.
The law was created to, among other things, prevent children from accessing pornography on the internet.
But in practice, it’s what enabled companies like Facebook and Twitter to reach their behemoth size.
Today, the tech giants abuse their Section 230 power to prevent adults from reading articles or seeing content those tech companies dislike.
Does this mean the law should simply be repealed?
While that idea has gained some bipartisan traction, it may ultimately do more harm than good by preventing smaller social-media competitors from competing with the giants.
Instead, Section 230 should simply be amended to say that any company that benefits from it is bound by the standards of the First Amendment.
Either a company can continue to benefit from Section 230, or it can choose to moderate and censor user content – but not both at once.
Wokeness fills the void left by the bastardization of service.
As a teenager, the author was almost certain he was going to get into a good college.
He had the highest GPA at his school and was involved in plenty of extracurricular activities.
But his guidance counselor pointed out there was one area where he was lacking: community service.
So he, along with many of his peers, began spending Saturday mornings volunteering at a local hospital.
Except the “volunteering” was in name only.
The author mostly used the time to study, while other students competed to see who could do the least amount of work.
Everyone knew they were only there to list some community service hours on their college applications.
The author’s experience is far from unique.
Today in America, community service has been bastardized to mean something you do to get some other benefit for yourself.
The author believes this issue is the underlying reason behind the rise of wokeness.
The key message here is: Wokeness fills the void left by the bastardization of service.
Community service isn’t supposed to be something done in exchange for personal benefit, but that’s what it’s become.
As a result, America’s youth has, by and large, never performed real service for someone else, and wokeness is the result.
Consider popular woke slogans like “defund the police” and “dismantle the nuclear power structure.
” It’s unclear whether repeating these things actually helps anyone.
But they certainly do make those who utter them feel righteous and noble, and corporations exploit that feeling by echoing the slogans.
The solution is this: address the bastardization of service at its core.
Give citizens a real sense of meaning so there’s no void for companies to exploit in the first place.
To do that, all that would need to be done is to mandate civic service for all high school students.
Surprisingly, there’s already widespread support for this: a 2017 Gallup poll found that 49 percent of all Americans were in favor of mandatory civic service for young people.
Service could simply become a part of students’ summer breaks, and they’d be able to choose and contribute to causes they’re passionate about.
Along with giving students a sense of meaning, mandatory service would also help them develop a shared identity as Americans.
This is particularly important at a time when wokeness teaches Americans to focus on their physical differences while ignoring the deeper, shared qualities that unite them.
By rediscovering a shared identity, Americans can join in solidarity once more.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks is that: The doctrine of stakeholder capitalism has supplanted the old view that the primary purpose of a corporation was to generate profits for its shareholders.
Instead, stakeholder capitalism claims that companies have a duty to satisfy various stakeholders – and, in doing so, demands that companies take a stance on social and political issues.
The problem with this is that companies have attached themselves to the “woke” ideology that happens to be gaining in popularity at the moment, and in throwing their corporate megaphones and market power behind those values, companies are dictating what average Americans should believe.
More than that, company involvement in social issues distorts democracy, aids authoritarian regimes overseas, and exploits Americans’ missing system of meaning.