The Anti-LGBT Backlash
Have we reached an inflection point in The Culture Wars?
By now, everyone has heard about the consumer boycotts which are hacking away at the share prices of Target, The North Face, and Anheuser Busch. After it promoted transgender influence Dylan Mulvaney, for example, Anheuser Busch’s stock crashed 10 percent in a month. The Wall Street Journal reports that companies are now actively avoiding the culture wars.
People are tired of LGBT propaganda. In an anti-trans protest in Canada, Muslim children stomped on a Pride flag. The most-watched documentary of all time, What Is A Woman?, questions the gender-transitioning of children. And one Toronto school board refused to fly the rainbow flag for Pride Month.
Why is this backlash occurring now? There are at least three reasons:
Higher interest rates make it harder for companies to squander money on gays.
COVID lockdowns exposed parents to what their children are learning in schools.
Woke Boomers are retiring and dying, hence handing power over to their more pragmatic Generation X children.
I will cover each of these reasons in this article.
First, however, let me explain exactly why corporations, which are supposed to focus on profit, have bent the knee to the 2SLGBTQIA+ alphabet mafia of woke. It has to do with two companies which control corporate America: BlackRock and Vanguard.
Masters of The Financial Universe
Through their control of American capitalism, BlackRock and Vanguard enforce woke policies, at the core of which is ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), an ideology which requires companies to obey Leftist dogmas about sex, race, and the environment.
BlackRock and Vanguard, which collectively manage over $16 trillion in assets, have the financial power to enforce this nonsense. Almost every publicly-traded company, from Google to Target to The Home Depot, has BlackRock and Vanguard as significant owners.
Why does your company actively try to promote women, African Americans, and gays to leadership positions? Likely because BlackRock told them to. In a recent New York Times interview, Blackrock CEO and Co-Founder Larry Fink said that he “forces” companies to comply with ESG.
ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) is essentially Leftism for corporations. It gained traction in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, amid growing discontent against the ruling class. The elite channelled this populist anger into ESG, which prioritizes climate alarmism, feminism, LGBT, and race warfare to divide and conquer the masses.
It worked. Whereas Leftists used to care about concrete issues like war, corruption, and wealth inequality, their attention is now on ESG. Conspiracy theories about race and sex have replaced legitimate concerns about economics and foreign policy. This has served corporate America well, as it does not have to worry about a populist revolt.
(Of course, there is a more sinister aspect to ESG, but that is beyond this article’s scope.)
What matters is that ESG is disastrous to a corporation’s main goal: maximizing profits. It is bad for business if an incompetent black woman is promoted to Vice President of Marketing. If a gold miner is forced to invest in ‘carbon capture technology,’ then that increases its costs. The only reason that ESG has proliferated is because of low interest rates.
The Federal Reserve Crushes ESG
When interest rates are low and companies can borrow cheaply, then they can afford to waste cash on Pride Month and Black Lives Matter. In 2020, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to near-zero, allowing companies to go on a spending spree. TikTok videos showed young professional women wasting their workday on free food, alcohol, and ‘meetings.’ However, the past year has seen the Fed dramatically increase interest rates, weakening woke corporate policies.
Although the full extent of the Fed’s rate hikes won’t be felt for another six months or so, the casualties are already starting to mount. Black Lives Matter, for example, is close to insolvency as donations dry up. Vanguard exited a key climate change fund, with its CEO recently announcing that it would no longer commit to ‘net-zero’ climate initiatives. Investors are fleeing ESG funds.
Higher interest rates also reduce consumer spending, hurting woke brands. When consumers pay more on their mortgage bills, they have less to spend on radical corporate indoctrination. As wallets are squeezed, retailers increasingly compete for every cent of spending, and are less likely to take stands on divisive social issues.
This of course explains why private companies are slowly abandoning ESG and wokeness, but public institutions — like schools — are being faced with backlash for a completely different reason: COVID lockdowns.
Locking Down The Woke
COVID lockdowns, which commenced in the Spring of 2020, shut down schools and forced parents to home-school their kids. As a result, parents were exposed to exactly what their children were learning in schools: gay pornography and rejection of traditional religious values.
Parents were furious. Buzzfeed reported in 2020 that parents became ‘homophobic’ after discovering that their children were not straight. The parents’ rights movement, which seeks to overturn gay curricula, surged in popularity over the past three years. The Department of Justice branded parents who spoke out against sexualization in schools as terrorists.
This parental pressure has led to concrete changes against gay grooming. U.S. states like Florida, Montana, and Arizona, have banned LGBT content in schools. Florida now punishes teachers who teach young kids about sex. In Hungary, new legislation protects children from LGBT disinformation. Poland implemented anti-LGBT zones to protect children.
Of course, these populist uprisings would be ineffective were it not for another factor: those in leadership positions are increasinly less dogmatic in their outlook.
Gen X To the Rescue
Until recently, the corporate, academic, and political world was controlled by Boomers, those born from 1946 to 1964. This generation is what William Strauss and Neil Howe call ‘Prophetic.’ Boomers believe they have a prophetic calling to hurl down established traditions and free mankind; historically, they supported movements against racial discrimination, the Vietnam War, and abortion restrictions.
This explains why Boomers support wokeness: they still embrace immature ideologies. Unfortunately, they are also a significant chunk of the U.S. population, and influence politics through lobby groups like the AARP. Prominent Boomers include Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump. Trump may be a Republican, for example, but as President he did nothing to stall the advance of feminism or LGBT infiltration; on the contrary, Trump is openly pro-LGBT.
That is changing as Boomers are retiring and dying, being replaced by the more pragmatic Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1981). Coming of age during economic malaise and social upheaval, Gen X is hardened to the realities of life, and is far less ideological. As children they were the ‘latchkey kids,’ coming home from school to empty houses, having to fend for themselves. This has made them into gritty, hardworking, and in some cases cuthroat individuals.
They do not fundamentally care about wokeness. They might virtue-signal to please their Boomer overlords, but when given control over their own organizations, they pursue self-interest. This is best seen in Elon Musk, a Gen X-er who bought Twitter and has allowed conservative and traditionalist voices on the platform. Other Gen X-ers, like Marc Andreesen, are subtily promoting the dissident right.
COVID did not kill the Boomers, but most of them are retiring by the end of the decade. By then, we may see a complete ideological realignment in America.
Conclusion
I am glad about the backlash against the GAE (Global American Empire), and its spread of woke ideologies. However, I remain cautious. The regime will crack down like it always does. It is currently barraging us with psy-ops: forest fires, Ukraine, UFOs, etc. They could exploit these to plunge us into a dark tyranny with Central Bank Digital Currencies and woke dictatorship.
On the other hand, we could see a pushback against all of the radical nonsense which has been foisted upon us. Already, I am hearing from former gay advocates that recents events have made them anti-LGBT. The COVID scam exposed people to medical lies and government corruption. Russia is winning its war in Ukraine.
Maybe, just maybe, we can win.
Of all of these, I suspect generational turnover is the largest factor. Gen X has been languishing under the fat boomer thumb for its entire existence, and the generation's one uniting characteristic is to loathe everything the Eternal Boomer stands for.
As the Boomers die off, the power struggle is going to be between Gen X and the Millennials, with the hearts and minds of the Zoomers being the terrain over which they fight.
Wow!! Great analysis. Could be true, make sense to me:)
And where to put China and WEF in this narrative?