Peak Woke

From Walmart to HBO, the Times Are Changing

Happy Thanksgiving.

With any luck, the turkey’s in the oven and you’ve got a moment to chill. If so, we’re privileged that you chose to open this email and spend a little time with us. We hope we’ll make it worth your while…

If you’re among the legions trudging out to Walmart tomorrow for Black Friday, you might be interested to know the company is dialing back some of its “woke” endeavors.

From Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:

The retailer will wind down the Center for Racial Equity, a nonprofit Walmart funded with $100 million in 2020 for five years, and programs that provide assistance to suppliers that are 51%-owned by women, minorities, veterans or members of the LGBTQ community.

Walmart will also stop allowing third-party sellers to offer some LGBTQ-themed items on Walmart.com, including items marketed to transgender children such as chest binders and some books, a spokeswoman said.

Walmart has more than 2 million global employees and typically tries to stay neutral on hot-button social issues to appeal to a spectrum of shoppers and workers.

Hold that last thought about staying neutral. We’ll come back to it shortly…

Meanwhile, HBO says it will continue doing business with Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling.

As you might be aware, Rowling is a feminist and a vocal opponent of transgender policies that she believes undermine women’s rights.

Now HBO — a unit of the media giant Warner Bros. Discovery — is defying the demands of trans activists, pledging it will continue to work with Rowling. Thus, a new Potter series will premiere on the Max streaming service in 2026.

“J.K. Rowling has a right to express her personal views,” says a company statement. “We will remain focused on the development of the new series, which will only benefit from her involvement.”

The times, they are a-changin’, it seems.

In general, I’ve kept my silence on this topic — for the most part, even during the Bud Light and similar business controversies that raged last year.

That’s not because I shy away from controversy, goodness knows, but because I seek something different and interesting to say. Something that stands apart from whatever it is you’re seeing elsewhere online. “The story no one else is telling,” as we like to say at Paradigm Press.

I did address certain issues related to “wokeism” during the surreal summer of 2020 — when we were supposed to stay confined indoors unless we were protesting police brutality — er, excuse me, systemic racism.

But throughout I stuck to two additional principles: 1) There had to be a money-and-markets angle and 2) I would address them in a descriptive way, not a normative one.

I’ll revisit some of those thoughts today and bring the same approach to more recent developments.

First, a little history…

All Things to All People: A Short History of World-Class Brands

For as long as brand advertising has existed, brand advertisers were leery about hawking their wares in proximity to “controversial” content.

In 2020, I cited some old-media examples from the previous three decades…

• In 2009, Procter & Gamble and Geico were among the name-brand advertisers who bailed from Glenn Beck’s daily program on Fox News when Beck labeled Barack Obama a “racist.” High viewership notwithstanding, Fox dispensed with Beck and his chalkboard in 2011

• In 1997, several regular advertisers on the sitcom Ellen — including Chrysler and JCPenney — sat out the episode where Ellen DeGeneres’ character came out as a lesbian

• In 1989, Coca-Cola apologized for airing a Coke spot during an especially raunchy episode of Married… With Children. For a while, McDonald’s and Procter & Gamble also bailed from the sitcom. However, in an instance of the “Streisand effect,” the publicity ended up drawing even more attention to the show. Advertisers eventually returned, and the nascent Fox network had its first genuine hit.

Then and now, Coca-Cola and its peers want to be all things to all people. That’s how you build and maintain a world-class brand to begin with.

What I also observed in 2020 was that it had become more difficult — maybe impossible — to be all things to all people.

Undoubtedly it started with the political rise of Donald Trump in 2016. By 2020, between COVID and George Floyd, everything was becoming politicized.

That was a tricky environment for a name-brand advertiser — and an uncharted one. Ditching Peggy Bundy in 1989 or Ellen DeGeneres in 1997 or Glenn Beck in 2009 were easy calls. No one was going to stop buying Coke or Crest as a consequence.

But when a boycott knocks down Bud Light’s share of the beer market by 25% in only three months — as happened last year? That’s an earthquake.

The Turning Point: June 2023

In retrospect, corporate America probably reached “Peak Woke” during Pride Month in June 2023.

“Pride™ has become so accepted it’s inescapable,” wrote Bridget Phetasy in an outstanding piece for The Spectator at that time. “Corporations change their social media logos to rainbows (unless, of course, it’s their Saudi account)...

“On the surface this might look like capitalism at work. These companies just want the gay dollar! Though there’s some truth to that, there’s also an undertow dragging these huge corporations down. They aren’t making decisions that are in the best interest of their shareholders; they are acting out of concern for their social credit score.”

Ah yes, the social credit score.

Maybe you’ve come across that term before — usually in reference to China, usually in reference to individuals.

As a Time article described it in 2019, “Good deeds gain points; bad deeds lose them, with perks and hardships attached. If you fall afoul of a [social credit] system, you cannot get a loan or mortgage, even if your offense is nonfinancial, like quarreling with neighbors. Conversely, nonfinancial ‘good deeds’ — like giving blood — can cause your loan’s interest rate to drop.”

When it comes to corporate America, the best-known form of social credit score is the Corporate Equality Index issued by the Human Rights Campaign, the leading LGBTQ+ activist group.

Its impact in recent years has been — well, read on…

The Corporations, the Consultants… and the Activists

“Corporate publicists are misleading their clients to pay for pricey Pride initiatives, which generate backlash for both corporations AND gays,” laments Mitchell Jackson, founder of the Miami-based public relations firm BCC Communications.

Jackson was one of many LGBT figures interviewed for Phetasy’s 2023 article. He expanded on his quotes in a LinkedIn post.

“Corporations seek Pride sponsorships because gays spend more on products,” he went on. “We are one of the wealthiest demos on the planet.

“But these corporations aren’t getting any gay dollars from their Pride fiascos. For one, gays hate corporations at Pride. Activists call it ‘pink-washing,’ and more mainstream gays roll their eyes at banks’ Pride floats. It comes across as pandering.

“Worst of all, these corporate campaigns backfire on LGBTQ people. Currently, most polls show a decline in acceptance of homosexuals.”

As Jackson sums up pithily, “Gay rights are being threatened again because big-box stores needed to sell tucking underwear” — a reference to a 2023 controversy at Target.

But why did these companies feel the need to do what they did?

Answer: Because they and their consultants fell under the sway of LGBTQ+ activist groups like HRC.

As Jackson explained in Phetasy’s article, “Corporations go to these groups for advice, hoping to avoid a woke controversy, and they get led into a hornet’s nest — and then these nonprofits can fundraise off of the Bud Light controversy of the week.”

Please reread the preceding paragraph and let it sink in.

The activist groups aren’t looking out for the companies’ best interests or even the interests of the people on whose behalf they advocate. They’re ginning up controversy to line their own pockets, indifferent to the collateral damage.

It’s an age-old strategy — transcending time, technology and political differences.

I referred to it briefly in Tuesday’s edition: If you’re old enough and conservative enough, you might remember snail-mail fundraising letters from the late ’80s and early ’90s railing against PBS, NPR and the National Endowment for the Arts.

It was all pointlessly performative. Even when they had the power to do so, the Republicans never defunded these institutions. There was too much money to raise off the outrage they generated!

In the 2020s it’s also a case of the gay rights movement becoming a victim of its own success.

“What changed is that LGBT activist groups could not afford to obtain victory,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tells Phetasy.

“When activist groups win, their reason for existing, and their large budgets and salaries, dry up.”

This too is an age-old phenomenon. The March of Dimes was formed to combat polio — but once polio had been contained, it’s not as if the organizers were going to fold their tent. So they seamlessly shifted to combating birth defects.

Of course in the 2020s, the consequences have been much more divisive.

Greenwald again: “They always have to push debates into whatever places Americans resist. They also have to be losing, have a claim to victimhood, a reason to assert that they are righting the bigotry of Americans.”

So Now What?

But that was 2023 and this is 2024.

This year, under pressure from conservative activists like Robby Starbuck and Christopher Rufo, companies including Ford and John Deere have backed away from the Human Rights Campaign.

As part of its announcement this week, Walmart said it would stop sharing data on its LGBT policies with HRC. For his part, Starbuck calls it “the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America.”

We won’t belabor exactly which companies are doing what to shed the woke cred they worked so hard to acquire — or exactly what Starbuck et al. did to turn the tide.

That’s the part of the story you can read about anywhere.

There’s also a part of the story yet to be told. What happens from here? Will the activist groups like HRC find new ways to stir up “Bud Light controversies of the week”?

Or after a few years in which corporate America bent over backward in homage to the values of “diversity, equity and inclusion”... can world-class brands like Walmart once again be all things to all people?

We shall see… and we’ll leave it there today. Time to baste the turkey, no?

Happy Thanksgiving,

Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets