Lessons from the battle against woke capital

After decades of corporate cheerleading, conservatives are learning a critical lesson: Big business is not your friend. In the past, Pride Month has come and gone with little pushback from the American right. The celebrations get larger and more explicit, companies switch to rainbow logos and issue statements of support, and a few weeks later, GOP politicians argue for the next round of corporate tax cuts.

This year is different, however, as the rapid push to advance radical gender ideology onto children has awakened parents to the dangers of the trans movement, which has simultaneously been pushed to the front of the wider LGBTQ+ coalition. Bud Light and Target have already seen steep profit losses due to their elevation of transitionist propaganda, as effective boycotts from red America decimate their bottom line. Companies like the North Face and Kohl's are also feeling the heat due to their shameless attempts to push Pride-themed merchandise onto children.

While it is encouraging to see effective action being taken by conservatives, populist movements have a habit of losing focus and dying out unless they are used to achieve more durable transformations inside institutions, and it is worth stopping to understanding the forces at play that keep those kinds of lasting changes from occurring.

The wokeness of brands like Bud Light or Target is nothing new. In fact, the beer maker has been offering Pride-themed cans for many years, but public consciousness can be focused by the particularly brazen acceleration of what was already an ongoing process. Once red America became focused on the radical gender propaganda printed on the side of a familiar beer can, their eyes were suddenly opened to a revolution that had been happening all around them for decades.

The Bud Light phenomenon is doing for corporate grooming what remote classes during the pandemic lockdown did for critical race theory and public-school gender indoctrination. Busy parents who dutifully sent their children to the local public school for an education were not truly aware of what their kids were being taught until they were forced to listen to classes during the lockdown. That realization sparked protests at school board meetings and eventually gave birth to a parental rights movement that successfully passed bills in a number of states banning CRT and gender theory indoctrination in public schools. Conservatives are now having a similar experience with woke capital, which is making a phenomenon that was already ubiquitous impossible to ignore.

Success is essential and drives a popular movement forward, but the momentary exuberance it brings on can also dissipate quickly if it is not properly focused. As Target’s losses blow past $10 billion and Bud Light’s market share sinks like a rock, conservatives intoxicated by the thrill of successful collective action have sought additional companies to boycott.

The options are plentiful, as almost every major corporation has fully dedicated itself to venerating America’s new state religion and has invested heavily in celebrating the most holy month of Pride. But the long-term success of these boycotts requires focus, and the instinct to identify and include the next big woke corporation threatens to end the effort before it has even begun. Both Target and Bud Light are facing financial consequences, the kind of serious losses that cause corporate leadership to panic, but neither have bothered to apologize, much less take any substantive action to repair the relationship with their customer bases.

These woke corporations have chosen ideology and elite favor over those who actually buy their products and can only be shaken from that position by the prospect of financial destruction. Real victory in these situations looks like what the left gets when progressives put pressure on a company: Your political friends are hired, your enemies are fired, money is donated to your patronage network, and human resources trains employees never to cross you again. These corporations may choose to go out of business before bowing to the demands of red America the way they cater to the whims of blue America, but that is a theory that should be put to the test.

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