The Problem With People Who Say "Get Woke, Go Broke"

Complacent Sloganeering Is NGMI

In 2016, a reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise “subverted expectations” by turning up the girlpower: rather than four men, it would be Kristen Wiig and her friends saving NYC from the Marshmallow Man (and presumably battling the Patriarchy at the same time). Audiences were underwhelmed. The film grossed a modest $229M worldwide—not terrible, but falling short of the $300M spent on production and marketing.

Few adaptations, sequels, or reboots had ever messed with a classic franchise so blatantly—and Ghostbusters seemed to give other studio executives ideas and/or permission. Soon enough all your favorite franchises had been restyled and injected with what the Critical Drinker calls “THE MESSAGE.” Anything boys can do girls can do better. Diversity is our strength. Straight white men are ugh. Representation. Tolerance. Gayness. And so on. It hardly mattered that most of these wokeified films lost as much money as Ghostbusters—“subverting expectations” at the box office—or that films taking a more old-school approach had raked in the cash. Executives were committed to staying the course, and still are. A recent headline reported that the trans actor Hunter Schafer might be in the running to play Princess Zelda in an upcoming movie adaptation.

Anger is the natural response to this stuff, though it can hardly be surprising that Hollywood continues to do Hollywood things. In recent years a more complacent response has emerged. And not just complacent but clueless. It’s the breezy mantra of “Get woke, go broke.”

GWGB

“Get woke, go broke” essentially means that we need not be overly troubled by this nonsense. We just need to trust the magic of the Market: enlightened consumerism will win out, box office receipts will tell the truth, and Hollywood executives will eventually get the message and return to making movies that audiences actually want to see. Simple as. But this optimism presumes that the world works a certain rational way, the way your Econ 201 professor explained. Tyler Durden would ask, “How’s that working out for you, thinking like a libertarian?”

I don’t pretend to understand the complexities and shenanigans, but I know for certain that things don’t work the way I was taught. One suspects that these workings cannot actually be comprehended except by people like Mike Benz with 150+ IQs and abundant time for deep dives into muddy waters—and that this difficulty is the point.

But consider Exhibit A: what we learned about USAID a few months ago, as well as the outrage of our opponents when a light was shined on the racket. To take one example: Politico, the New York Times, and the BBC were among those receiving taxpayer money. The National Pulse estimated that “up to 90% of Politico’s subscriptions were fake or taxpayer funded.” One suspects that the Department of Government Efficiency was only scratching the surface with these findings, but now it seems that Elon’s project has been defanged and we will never know the extent of the shadiness involved in channeling your tax dollars to left wing causes. Either way, these institutions and others no longer answer to market forces.

And Exhibit B: the financial muscle of BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, that group of “asset managers” referred to as the Big Three. The scope of their operations is enormous. BlackRock currently manages assets totaling $11.6T, Vanguard $10.4T, and State Street $4.7T. Those are T’s—meaning TRILLIONS. The combined assets-under-management of these three firms falls only a few trillion shy of the annual Gross Domestic Product of the United States of America (currently around $30T).

The fact that the Big Three do not own but instead manage (and charge fees on) this colossal haul hardly makes their coup any less impressive. They have ingeniously harnessed the power of funds they don’t own, and this allows them to steer corporate policy by voting on behalf of others at shareholder meetings. To pick a few companies at random, the Big Three manage 22.08% of Moderna shares, 19.47% of Coca-Cola shares, and 25.33% of Target shares.¹ Thus they push their ESG program: environment, social, governance. When Larry Fink—CEO of this “fourth branch of government”—says ominous things like “At BlackRock we are forcing behaviors … You have to force behaviors,” we ought to take him seriously.

So a movie studio’s fiduciary duty to its shareholders begins with their duty to the Big Three—who have proven more concerned about pushing an agenda than selling tickets.

Understanding USAID (and similar operations) and the Big Three (and similar operations) should help one to understand why the principles you learned in civics class don’t really apply anymore.

Untrue Truisms & Deficiencies of Character

How comforting it is to believe the fiction that the Market will save us! It means our main duty is to consume rationally. No real virtue is required, just a boycott here or there, maybe switching to Miller when Budweiser does something stupid like turning to Dylan Mulvaney to help expand their market. But that’s about it.

Delusional mantras about the Market tell all about the character of the people who utter them. They announce that complacent conservatives adore systems which they can hide behind. Thus spared from having to make sacrifices and take risks in defending what belongs (or should belong) to them, these people are free to go about their private pursuits with an easy conscience: making money, having a couple kids, taking vacations, watching tv, grilling.

There’s a similar phenomenon at work in the way controlled opposition conservatives talk about the Constitution, as though it actually protects them from forces which would do harm. It’s their shield, and it only requires them cast a vote every two or four years. And whenever you’re tempted to think that more might be required, just remember that voice in your ear: What if the roles were reversed?! What if the Left decided to use power to oppress their political enemies, in obvious violation of the Constitution?! What then?! People actually say such things with a straight face, as though we haven’t already been on the receiving end of the violations for several decades now. What this quasi-religious Constitutionism actually accomplishes is to make Republicans fight with one hand tied behind their backs, forbidding them from taking muscular action and ensuring that the game is given to the Democrats, who have no compunction about violating some old document. As James Kirpatrick recently tweeted when court rulings upheld the “rights” of illegal aliens:

Meanwhile the other side is playing a very different game. They are out to win. They do not observe the “laws” proclaimed by economic theorists any more than they heed the dictates of America’s founding legal document. They show themselves perfectly willing to leave money on the table and invest heavily in the bigger and more strategic aims of vandalizing the things normal Americans love. Because they can. Films like the girlpower-infused Ghostbusters are humiliation rituals in which you get to observe the Left’s power.

Ghostbusters is probably not the hill to die on. But Lord of the Rings is. Amazon recently spent $250M on the rights to bring Tolkien to the screen, in addition to $58M for every episode of the first season of The Rings of Power. And then they urinated on it. Profits were never the point—pissing on the story is the point. In the process, they demoralize you, rewrite the culture, and alter future memories. Their slop crowds into the universe of Tolkien’s work in the attempt to dilute its power and prevent it from being a rallying point for those who want more than the corporate garbage currently on offer.

“Get woke, go broke” is the kind of thinking that hands a country over to those who despise it. Do you have any idea how much the Left loves it when Ben Shapiro-types and other “thought leaders” mouth lines like these? It’s almost like a feudal vow in which conservative vassals promise to be nothing more than controlled opposition to the petty tyrants and tycoons of our times. And unlike the lords of the Middle Ages, these ones don’t have your back and won’t protect you; they will instead take every opportunity revile you, replace your people, castrate your children, and generally “force behavior.” Nothing works like a few dumb axioms, repeated over and over again, to make sure the conquered populations are trained not to fight back.

1. You will find predictable articles from the corporate media defending the Big Three from accusations that their visions align. “Nothing to see here—please disperse!” It’s not all that difficult, though, to imagine that executives in the capital class want similar things and are willing to use their combined power toward those ends. In a recent lawsuit brought forth by twelve states, the Big Three are accused of “breaking antitrust laws by reducing coal production and boosting electricity prices through their investments.” These asset managers are “the largest shareholders in all nine publicly listed U.S. coal companies.”