It is said when Elon Musk arrived at failing Twitter, he realized he had paid $44 billion for a crime scene. He found "Stay Woke" T-shirts. And he found information that details Twitter essentially being an arm of the DNC and perhaps the Deep State.
Twitter is not alone. Failing and underperforming "woke" American companies are rotten with woke-ism. It is an easy way to mask poor performance: Pat yourself on the back and say that you have achieved some mystical form of diversity or social justice, or that you have saved the planet.
The stock of such companies also has underperformed of late. The most obvious examples are Twitter, of course, which crashed and is being rescued by Musk. Then we have Facebook (down 66%), FTX Crypto-Creep Samuel Bankman-Fried's DNC donating scam (collapsing from a net worth of $32 billion to a net worth of zero), Google (down 33%), Netflix (down 50%), and of course Disney (down 40%). These compare to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, down 7% year-to-date.
All were underperforming while putting their self-serving, woke agenda in front of gullible shareholders who have been conditioned to view their high-minded, progressive, political agenda as one where the end justifies the means.
Keeping up in the constantly changing temperament of the woke agenda must be exhausting to corporations, which should just be doing a good job for their shareholders. Instead, they pretend to operate more like a Democrat PAC. Delta Air Lines opined on the Georgia voting law, saying it was "oppressive," which resulted in the largest voter turnout ever. The result? Major League Baseball moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta (50% percent Black) to Colorado (4% Black and with stricter voting laws than Georgia). Delta should get back to canceling flights and losing luggage, its core business strategy.
You will find layer upon layer of confusion in wokeness. Kanye West is now a white supremacist, and Musk is an African American. We know the names of every person at the Jan. 6 protest but none of the Dems at Jeffrey Epstein's island. Wokeness is kept intentionally opaque and whimsical. That way they can jack us around as they please. The problem is corporate America keeps playing along.
Kanye West went off the rails, and Musk banned him from Twitter for his antisemitic Tourette's syndrome rants. "Ye" praised Hitler and said flattering things about Mussolini. This prompted a swift response from Joe Biden, who told a long story about when he and Mussolini had a rumble while Biden worked at a public swimming pool in Delaware.
Part of the reason universities and companies talk so much about their "woke" agenda is that it relieves them of real accountability for the quality of education they give or their financial performance. If you can keep pointing to all the woke things you pretend you did, you can divert attention from the things that are hard, like accountability metrics.
The woke nature of corporate America must make working there boring. Group-think corporate shills advance. I can totally see the James Bond series going away as it glorified the Sean Connery-type, manly man. In the 2023 version of a Bond film, 007 flirts with disaster, is reported to human resources for flirting on the job and is canned.
Certainly Netflix, cowing to leftist protesters about the stand-up comedy of Dave Chappelle, falls into this category. I just hope he never told my joke about Michelle Obama and a transgender and God walking into a bar. The bartender says, "It better be a mean joke about God. Otherwise, Ron will have his column canceled in five more papers."
Contact Ron Hart, a syndicated op-ed satirist, author and radio/TV commentator, at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.