Hello, Endeavour here. I first remember hearing the phrase “woke capital” being used on the internet by the dissident right in late 2018. The great (once banned, now unbanned) Twitter account under that handle was created in May of 2018. I don’t know if it was this user who coined the phrase, but it has become one of the most potent weapons in the dissident right’s memetic arsenal.
The “woke” as they have become known, present themselves as the defenders of the oppressed and downtrodden racial and sexual victim groups of society against the alleged, straight, white, and male power structure, championing causes like racial egalitarianism, feminism, and LGBT rights. This façade of victimhood and rebellion quickly fades away when exposed to the fact that billions upon billions of dollars are put into pushing these causes by the likes of BlackRock and Goldman Sachs each year and that the entire international media is dedicated to upholding the narratives they are founded upon.
When viewed in this light, “wokeism” appears, not as a righteous crusade for social justice, but as top-down, social engineering being forced upon Western society by the elite class, which is exactly what it is. There is no better indication of this reality than the now annual tradition of corporations replacing their logos with LGBT rainbow themed versions on social media in the month of June each year.
I first considered making a video on the phenomenon of woke capital in June 2019 to coincide with that year’s over-the-top and ridiculous offerings corporations devote to LGBT Pride Month, but I never got around to it for some reason. I finally decided the time was right when this phenomenon of woke capital reached its zenith (at least so far) in the summer of 2020, after the death of the drug addict and convicted felon, now elevated to progressive sainthood, George Floyd.
I published what is to date my most popular video by far titled ‘The Base and Superstructure of Woke Capitalism’ on July 9th, 2020 after a month of the BLM riots raging across the United States, spilling over into the rest of the Western world. The most shocking thing about those few months in 2020 was not the widespread lawlessness, but the degree to which all institutions in the Western world not only enabled but encouraged it.
The United States experienced the most flagrant violations of rule of law ever seen in a Western country during the summer of Floyd. Rioters destroyed property and assaulted ordinary citizens while law enforcement either stood by doing nothing or in some cases, arrested victims for defending themselves. It was the truest and most extreme form of anarcho-tyranny I’ve ever seen.
What’s more is that every single major corporation responded to this calamity by donating millions or in some cases billions of dollars towards BLM and the so-called cause of “anti-racism”. This is the context in which I made what would become my most viewed video. In it, I tried to explain, why is it that corporations so relentlessly support woke politics. The conclusion that I came to in that video was that they wanted to create a soulless, deracinated, global consumer class whose entire being would be devoted to consumption. The assumption I was operating under was that the goal of corporations is to make money. Therefore, they must be pushing wokeism as a means of increasing their potential to make money.
Looking back three years later, I no longer think this is the case. Instead, I think there’s something else behind the phenomenon of woke capital which is even darker. To give even more context for why I though this at the time, but no longer do, I need to address the even bigger international news story which preceded the summer of Floyd and long outlasted it; COVID. By that point, the COVID era had begun a few months prior, but we really didn’t get a full understanding of the true implications of COVID until a year later during the unprecedented madness surrounding the vaccine.
I’m not going to rehash the whole two years of COVID. For the purposes of this essay, I will say that COVID and the other rabbit holes which it led me down brought me to the conclusion that profit is not the main driving force behind woke capital as I theorized in my video on the subject in 2020.
First of all, the one thing which COVID showed us was that the elites don’t actually care about the economy at all. They were all too enthusiastic to devastate the economy even after it was clear to all that the COVID restrictions were doing far more harm than good. Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that for many, there was a huge financial incentive for advancing the COVID tyranny, namely among the pharmaceutical companies and corporations which thrive off the further atomization of society such as big tech, online shopping, etc.
However, COVID was in effect a wealth transfer as it made the vast majority of people a lot poorer and resulted in the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. It didn’t grow the economy, but rather it transferred huge sums of money from the bottom and the middle to the top. Most people have a lot of less an ability to spend on consumer products than they did back in 2019. So, furthering consumerism was not the goal of everything that was done from 2020 to 2022. What really was achieved during that period is in line with what I now consider to be the real driving force behind woke capital.
Moving on from COVID, the past three years have made me a lot more conscious of the climate change and sustainable development agenda. The phrases “The Great Reset” and “Build Back Better” were first heard in 2020 during COVID. They fell out of use a year or two later when they were no longer useful to the regime’s messaging, but what they were essentially referring to is Agenda 2030 or the UN Sustainable Development Goals for which wokeism is baked into the cake along with the environmental policies.
Another force I only became conscious of in the past few years which is intertwined with all this is the Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance rating system or ESG. This is essentially a social credit system which rates corporations to determine which are worthy of investment or not. The social criteria for ESG are essentially how woke a corporation is. The more woke they are, the higher their rating. The environmental criteria are mostly related to the climate agenda and how devoted they are to achieving the lauded goal of net-zero carbon emissions.
ESG has existed since 2006, but it became a lot more prominent when BlackRock announced in 2020 that ESG would be taken into consideration for all of their future investments. There is a large overlap between ESG and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and an effort is being made to bring the two fully inline. So, there is a clear link between the driving forces behind the climate agenda and the woke agenda. And this is reflected by the establishment stooges who promote both of these. Take Justin Trudeau for example. As often as he is sure to denounce Canada’s history of racism, sexism, and homophobia, he is just as sure to proclaim his government’s devotion to fighting climate change.
I’ve been acutely aware of anti-white policies such as mass immigration, affirmative action, etc. for almost a decade now, but I largely ignored the environmental policies being advocated by the same individuals and institutions, seeing them as a lot less relevant to the very real threats the aforementioned policies posed. It’s only within the last two or three years that I’ve started to consider the latter of equal importance and the two as inseparable.
As I now see the two agendas as inextricably linked, I’ve come to the conclusion that profit and consumerism are most certainly not the motivation behind woke capital. If there is one thing the climate agenda is definitely not designed to do, it is to facilitate consumerism. On the contrary, it appears that the purpose is to put an end to the consumer society neoliberal capitalism has created. The policies being proposed will kneecap massive industries such as the agricultural industry, the tourism industry, the automotive industry, and more.
And then there’s the ludicrous and dystopian prospect of the introduction of a carbon credit score (which I made a recent video about). Such a system would severely limit the average person’s ability to consume and reduce their incentive to produce given that it could also act as a kind of UBI. This would all be a radical departure from the neoliberal capitalism of the past few decades. So, where does wokeism fit into all of this if the two are so deeply connected? And if profit isn’t the goal, then what really is?
It is now my opinion that the phenomenon of woke capital and its symbiotic relationship with the sustainable development agenda are primarily motivated by control. Ultimately, wokeism is creating a more dysfunctional society. It is facilitating the importation of a class of people accustomed to a lower standard of living into Western countries via mass immigration, deracinating and atomizing the population through multiculturalism, destroying the family unit through feminism and the LGBT agenda, and reducing competency via affirmative action.
In short, it is creating a new people who won’t be able to do anything about the drastic fall in quality of life in the West or the tyrannical system of control the elites have in mind. The easiest person to control is someone with no agency of their own. Someone who is sick, incompetent, lazy, and without an ounce of will. Not only would such a person not resist the system, they would defend it to the end as it is their sole source of both status and sustenance. That is the kind of person being created by woke capital.
If nothing else, the last three years have taught me that elites are not primarily motivated by money, but by power. By definition, someone in the elite is wealthy. They already can afford any material goods they would ever want. When you become that wealthy, what becomes a lot more valuable to you is not further profit but expanding your own power and influence. And that does a lot to explain the phenomenon of wokeism throughout every elite Western institution.
I do not subscribe to the theory of “Go woke, go broke.” Every Fortune 500 company has gone woke at this point and none of them have gone broke as a result. However, going woke certainly doesn’t make these companies more profitable. They do lose money as a result (though never enough to go broke), but they gain power by furthering the broader degradation of a healthy society which they are more than happy to spend the extra money on.
This is perfectly exemplified by ESG. This year, there has been a backlash against ESG in the corporate world for the simple fact that ESG is not profitable. One reason for this is that it rewards companies for hiring people based on their identity (not being White, straight, or male) rather than their actual merit. Another is that it forces companies to reduce their net carbon output which means spending extra money on buying carbon credits from smaller companies.
While it is presented a guide to ethical investing, the real function of ESG is that it funnels investment to a small number of large corporations who have the excess capital to spend on being ESG sufficient and denies funding to smaller firms who simply cannot afford to be so wasteful. This doesn’t necessarily make larger corporation more profitable, but a lot more powerful by crushing opposition.
Now, in my original video and so far in this essay, I’ve framed woke capital as a purely Machiavellian force for attaining more power. I’ve thus far failed to address another major driving force behind Woke Capital. That is genuine belief among the elite in the causes which they profess to support. While I don’t think this is the case for every billionaire out there, there are a sizeable number who genuinely believe that wokeism is making the world a better place. The cause for them is not simply about power, but also about achieving some kind of ideological ends. And they are in many cases willing to put their deeply held principles above both profitability and practicality.
A prominent example of this is ethnic identity among elites of Jewish ancestry. The role which Jews have played in the movements which would later come to be known as “woke” throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century has been well documented on the dissident right. Jewish support for mass non-white immigration into Western countries, multiculturalism, feminism, the LGBT movement, etc. has often been motivated by a desire to dismantle White rule of Western countries which they see as in conflict with Jewish interests.
Among White gentile elites, support for woke causes is often motivated by a universalist, egalitarian worldview. For them, Wokeism is a moral crusade against the ultimate evils of racism, sexism, and homophobia. I suppose you could add climate change to that list as well. While this worldview was primarily developed by Jewish intellectuals during the 20th century with their own ethnic interests in mind, it has been hegemonic throughout cultural and intellectual life in the West for decades now.
The entire current ruling class of elites in the West has been raised and educated in it. As a result, many White elites have internalized this worldview (minus the Jewish particularism) and genuinely believe it is a noble cause. Lastly, there is the newer, but rising phenomenon of non-White elites in the West, primarily from South and South-East Asia. Much like with Jews, woke politics often serve their own ethnic interests too, though in a much more upfront and less deceptive manner.
Whether deeply held principles or a Machiavellian pursuit of power is the main driving force behind woke capital is up for debate. Personally, I think the two feed off each other. One can start from a point of sincerely held beliefs and justify their actions through ruthless Machiavellianism or they can start off as a power-hungry opportunist who eventually begins to believe their own lies. But either way, I do not think that their goal is the furtherance of the consumer society which we’ve become accustomed to over the past several decades.
Instead, the current trends suggest that their goal is to replace it with something else. I’d even dispute the title of my original video which I called “woke capitalism”. Now, the word “capitalism” has lost all meaning over the past century. It’s gotten to the point where self-proclaimed anarchists are the foot soldiers of BlackRock while claiming to be fighting capitalism. However, if we take it to mean neoliberal consumerism, wokeism is certainly not designed to maintain that.
As we can see in East Asia, neoliberal consumerism can still exist within a homogenous society without importing the third world or demonizing the dominant ethnic group. While nihilism and materialism are prerequisites, the full-scale cultural of wokeism iconoclasm isn’t. When you zoom out and look at the broader narratives behind wokeism in combination with the climate agenda on a global scale, it appears that the goal is to impoverish the West in order to bring down to the level of the rest of the world.
The cash cow of neoliberal capitalism might end, but those at the top are already so wealthy that they aren’t motivated by further profit, but by the potential for absolute and permanent control on a global scale. If what they are planning actually works, that is. But that’s a topic for another day.