Meeting Wokeism's Ever-Present Existential Threat, the Neighbourhood Ice Cream Truck, and Getting Back in the Saddle

In 2021, J.D. Vance, then a candidate for the US Senate, laid out a roadmap on how to effectively bring wokeism to heel by going scorched earth on woke capital

Jun 19, 2023

There are a number of pieces that are in their nascent stages, but it seems I just can’t get started on any of them unless I truly feel that I have something to say. That tells me I need to adopt some discipline if I’m serious about this effort.

Seinfeld set aside a definite length of time every single day to write, but not this:

My understanding is that he would disconnect his phone, then sit down at his desk, or kitchen table at the same time every day with a pad of paper and a pen/pencil. He allowed himself to do nothing or write – no watching TV, no listening to music, no reading a newspaper or magazine – he may not have written one word, but he did nothing else for the duration.

If I manage to put that into effect, all of you will notice.

I ran across this video the other day.

Upon viewing it once again, there are a number of points that bear further examination and on which I hope The Hon. Sen. J.D. Vance elaborates. What is in block quotes is, for the most part, what was transcribed from his address to those in attendance at an event sponsored and hosted by The Claremont Institute (not Claremont College – the two could not be more different from each other).

I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own to raise a family [in] dignity on a single middle class [income].
It's a simple vision – that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to live a good life in this country that is your own – that was built by your grandparents and parents, [and] that will be inherited by your children.
That requires that we respect our history in order to give that to people, so that they are anchored in the traditions of this country, so that they can teach their children those traditions, and so they can pass along a feeling of rootedness in their own community.

Respecting our history means teaching a more complete, and accurate history – and that means some dearly-held myths need to be dispelled and replaced with facts which will likely not be compatible with most of the current curricula and content in our public and private schools.

For example, what is commonly referred to as the Civil War, or the War Between the States, was not only about the abolition of slavery, but rather its spreading to the territories in the west; that slavery in the US, courtesy of the slave trade (heads of African tribal nations sold their own to those who trafficked in slavery), was not an isolated incident; was relatively short-lived vis-á-vis its acceptance as a practice in other predominantly moslem cultures; and continues today in Africa (of all places). What it does not mean is replacing the America-hating propaganda with America-loving propaganda.

This nation’s history is an overwhelmingly positive one, of lifting people up, of creating wealth, of elevating the standard of living for everyone, and there are no shortages of factual accounts of those who came here with only the belief in the promise that through their own agency they could overcome adversity and realize the American dream to varying degrees, whatever they perceived that to be. There are hundreds if not thousands of such accounts in any given decade since the turn of the twentieth century.

It requires that we give our children, and ourselves the right to speak openly and participate meaningfully in this democratic society of ours.

This is a much heavier lift – and it must begin at home, with parents teaching their kids the difference between being considerate of the feelings of other people and not imposing such on others; allowing genuine bigots, real racists and actual white/black supremacists reveal themselves to be as abhorrent as the ideology they embrace and espouse. Letting others reveal their true selves is far more powerful than the ever-expanding criminal codification of the expression of ideas that the left doesn’t like.

In our schools, perhaps it’s time for forensics to be more than just an extra-curricular activity, like the chess club. It ought to be part of the required course load, and those who demonstrate the talent and who are interested, can try out for the debate team – but everyone ought to be taught how to think critically, and there is no better method for teaching that than forensics.

It requires that we live, and have work that has dignity, and is meaningful. That's why we worry about our trade and economic policy; so that the people who do work hard and play by the rules actually have good jobs there to employ them.

Bring back shop classes like wood, metal, automotive (though, ICEs have become so technology-driven, it might have to be something else). In my day, a four-banger was a four-banger and a V-8 was a V-8, and it was much easier to modify that stock engine and turn dad’s Oldsmobile into a muscle car, but I digress.

Such classes can give more than a few of the students hope that a career awaits them in one of the trades. A college education is not for everyone, and whether the powers that be recognize it or not, it will soon be painfully obvious to everyone else. Classes like drafting may pique the interest of some to pursue careers in design, architecture, and engineering.

Chorus:
“Well I can't wait till I move to the city
Till I finally make up my mind
To learn design and study overseas”
–Donald Fagen, The New Frontier

Regardless, our schools have a role in restoring some dignity and value to a career in the trades.

…the biggest obstacle to accomplishing this vision is woke capital…
We have lost nearly every institution in this country that actually matters. We've lost the academy, we have lost the media, we have now lost the government, and we've lost the business and financial institutions, too. That's what woke capital is really about, if we're trying to define this term and understand what it means. It's rooted in the fact that the biggest businesses, the most powerful institutions, the most powerful banks in this country have aligned themselves against us.

This is no lie. Several years ago, I was employed by one of the members of this nation’s “banking” cartel. In one of the regularly scheduled mandatory meetings that I attended, the hosting C-level executive spoke with great pride how she was able to put in place a policy designed to not only terminate the organization’s relationship with firearms and munitions manufacturers and members of their supply chains, but to further punish them by denying them any continuing or new financing. This to demonstrate the “bank’s” commitment to an America free of the second amendment. You can bet that did not appear anywhere on the website.

Those of us on the right have to accept…when the big corporations come against you for passing abortion restrictions, when corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don't want people to parent children, she [then-candidate for Governor of Georgia, Stacy Abrams] is right to say that abortion restrictions are bad for business, and what that means for those of us who want to protect the dignity of the unborn is that we should be for abortion restrictions, even if they are bad for business. We should support the dignity of human life even if it means the Corporate Class doesn't like it.

I say that we should support not only restrictions on abortion, but its abolition entirely – make it an outlawed practice – especially if the Corporate Class doesn’t like it. If that’s the only other reason, it is sufficient.

Woke capital is when the companies and businesses are more invested in a movement like #BLM than traditional American principles – and they are – and importantly, if you peel back the onion, what you often find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefiting financially from it.

This is frightening.

Now, who was one of the biggest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement? The insurance companies. They avoided the criticism that they weren't paying their own insureds for their own damaged property while at the same time they were making that damage more likely by funding the movement that was causing it – this is happening. The best example, of course, is Jeff Bezos, one of the largest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement in this country to the tune of millions of dollars, now. Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people so that you [have to] get it delivered in [that] brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos. There is a direct connection between woke capital and the plunder that's happening in our society, today. The people who are invested in destroying America via our Corporate Class are also getting rich from it. This is an important piece of the puzzle to understand.
I want to offer three suggestions for what's driving woke capital:
1. The rise of the digital over the real economy. By and large the digitalization of the American economy is one of the biggest drivers of the American Corporate Class becoming woke.
2. The rise of globalization. The companies that are most invested in the American nation-state and the people who live here – the laborers that build and make our goods – are those who tend to be far less woke than the people who are employed [and] who are employing people overseas who are more invested and more committed to overseas regimes.
I've heard of a banker who was asked by a union leader, ‘Don't you worry about all the projects that you're funding that are causing destruction of American jobs? You're shipping jobs overseas, you're funding the Chinese regime, you're making it easier for the Chinese middle class to rise and harder for the middle class of your own country.’ The banker's response was telling, and I think we should take it to heart. He said, ‘I have international shareholders. I have international customers. I have international investors, and I have international clients. I am not an American company. Why do I care about America more than anyone else?’ That attitude is driving a lot of the woke Corporate Class because when you're invested in American workers, when you depend on American customers, when American consumers have more power over you than the Chinese regime…if your laborers are people in my hometown of Middletown, Ohio, and not Chinese slaves over in China, then you are fundamentally more attached to the American nation-state. You can't criticize it in the same way, and you face different incentives. So, the rise of globalization, the rise of a new Corporate Class that's more invested in regimes overseas than in their own country is another big driver of woke capital.

This just made the covid scamdemic and its downstream effects that much worse. The administrations of HW, Bubba Clinton, and W were all fully committed to the global economy and had no problem sending entire American industries overseas, or at least, out of the country (NAFTA). It was the high-end, big-ticket consumer goods that brought the supply-chain issues to light, but there were other, more critical industries affected – pharmaceuticals, for example; the automotive industry (both domestic and foreign) had to all but shut down because production of integrated circuit boards had ground to a halt because the raw materials weren’t being mined because of the covid restrictions; and later, baby formula was nowhere to be found for much the same reason – all of this by design.

These globalist elites and their minions managed to make legitimate consumer-goods items only available on the black market, all so that the Wilhelm administration could take credit once formula production resumed and product became available once again, eventually at pre-crisis levels. It’s done the same with the unemployment numbers – the jobs that went away as a result of the knee-jerk reactions by every governor except Noem in South Dakota, and DeSantis in Florida, ought not be counted as new jobs created. If the statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Statistics had any integrity, the measurement of new jobs created would only be counted if total employment was more than that at the height of the scamdemic.

As I was writing this, I was interrupted by the chimes of the Blue Bonnet Ice Cream truck coming down the street. Our home is located on a ’T’ intersection, so when I step out of the front door, I’m quite literally looking down the street as though I were standing on the center line that divides the two lanes. As I emerged from the house, there in the middle of the intersection was a little girl on her bicycle with training wheels, staring straight ahead – not moving a muscle – until she realized just what was headed her way. Suddenly, screaming with delight, she announces to her folks (who are walking by on the way home from the pool) that the ice cream truck is coming!

She is so excited she can hardly contain herself. Truth be told, neither can I. I am sixty-one years old, but still get excited when I hear the ice cream truck coming – it’s among my most fond of swiftly vanishing memories from my childhood.

There is another reason that such a simple, ordinary occurrence had extraordinary significance. Since Monday of last week, my wife’s grandson from California has been staying with us – he’s here until the end of the month. This past weekend, the other two grandchildren were here, too – so it was a full house, and I loved every minute of it.

Today (Sunday), the other two went back home and that was when the ice cream truck arrived. Once again, I’m eight years old, tightly grasping my money in my hand waiting for this magical vehicle to come to a stop. I purchased a couple drumsticks for my wife and me, and a multi-flavoured push-up for the grandson. As my ex-wife and I selfishly chose to not have children (words cannot describe the bitterness of such regret – may God damn it all to Hell), that’s something I’ve never experienced before now, so I was more than thrilled to do it for my wife’s grandson. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to doing it for my own.

Now, back to the countdown (so to speak)…

3. All across our country we have non-profits – big foundations that are effectively social-justice hedge funds. The Ford Foundation has 14 billion dollars in assets under management [and] its leadership is serving on many of our corporate boards, and of course, [many members of] the corporate boards of our biggest companies are serving as the leadership of the Ford Foundation. The biggest projects that they're investing in are Critical Race Theory. They're investing in the racial division all across our country. They're invested in all of the progressive social causes of the moment. [It is] one of the biggest investors the Black Lives Matter movement that destroyed many of our towns and cities last summer.

Why This Matters

Our public policy has enriched and prioritized the foundations and the non-profits that are destroying our country. If you're in venture capital, [or] in private equity, [or]…you're a hedge-fund manager, or just a company that needs money to operate your business, you have to go to these people to get the capital to maintain your enterprise as a going concern.

The “banking” cartel is calling the shots on whether you get to keep your business or not. ESG is a social credit system for the corporate sector. Gone are the days when the only really important criteria were whether your business was legitimate and legal, and whether it could perform on the loan. Nothing but the balance sheet, income statement, and credit history mattered. Now, the first thing that matters is your company’s ESG score. If it’s high enough, all the other can be overlooked (until it can’t).

One of the biggest capital allocators in the world is that woke social-justice hedge fund known as Harvard University, which has over 120 billion dollars under management, which funds some of the most destructive ideologies all across our country, which literally trains the next generation of priests in the woke seminary that's dominating our professional class. That university's endowment pays not a dollar of tax, it has no obligation to draw down the principle – it is literally ammunition for the left and we, through our public policy, have given that endowment more power.

Harvard is but one instance – the same is true of virtually every other elite private university, and it is certainly true of every other publicly-funded state university and land-grant college, and sadly, far too many smaller private schools funded by the Catholic church and Protestant denominations like the Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Evangelical Covenant, and even Baptist churches. When he declared earlier that we had lost the academy, he wasn’t lying. We’ve also largely lost the church.

What to Do

Solutions…should start from a fundamental premise that if you are fighting the American nation-state; if you are fighting the values and virtues that make this country great; the conservative movement should be about nothing if not reducing your power and if necessary, destroying you – we cannot let the people who are driving this country into the ground continue to benefit from special privileges from tax breaks, from subsidies, and from liability protections.

We ought to take a page from the Malcom X-era of the Nation of Islam and reserve the option to destroy institutions like woke academia, the Donor Class’ foundations, and their for-profit corporations by any means necessary. That doesn’t mean we resort to violence as a first option, but if push comes to shove, we need to be prepared to exercise it, and do so fully knowing the consequences, and accepting them.

If you cannot go after the pocketbook of these people, if you cannot make them pay, then you are accepting defeat. it's that simple. We're never going to beat them unless we go after them where it hurts.

How to Do It

1.   Eliminate all of the special privileges that exist for our non-profit and foundation class
2.   Levy disproportionately punitive taxes on their wealth
3.   We need to reorient our entire economy towards the real economy and not the digital economy
Recall that banker and what he said about his international customers, shareholders, and employees – we should take that person at face value. If that person doesn't believe that he's an American institution or part of an American institution, we should treat him [thusly].
4.   If you are more invested in regimes that hate this country, if you're more invested in workers in slave camps in China than the people in my hometown, [then] no more tax breaks, no more tax cuts. We should be raising their taxes if they're shipping American jobs overseas, not cutting them. That's how you fight them. That's how you fight them at the pocketbook, and that's how you make them pay.
5.   It's important to go after the human resources bureaucracy, of course. If you are actively teaching racism in American schools, in American corporations, if you're creating a hostile work environment because you have to tell everybody that they need to deconstruct their privilege, or they need to sacrifice or repent of their whiteness, then you're committing what should be a violation of the law in this country, and people should be able to sue you. We have used the human resources bureaucracy to enforce Critical Race Theory on our Corporate Class, we could use it to enforce the opposite. Again, we just have to be willing to use the power that's been given to us and go after these companies where it actually hurts.

Fight Fire with Fire

We have a constitution, and we have a constitutional republic created by that constitution and that gives we, the people, the power to fight back against woke capital. I get so annoyed every time…congressional Republicans haul Google or Facebook or Amazon or whoever…before their committees. They whine at them, they complain at them, they criticize their practices, but we're so unwilling as a movement to actually do anything. It's not enough to tell Google, ‘you're being bad’ – clearly, they don't stop being bad. We have to punish them for being bad. If they're going to keep on fighting against us, then we have to fight against them – it really is that simple. We have to be willing to use the power granted to us by our constitutional republic.

From the 00:02:15 mark to 00:02:29

We, as the conservative movement (an oxymoron, I know) need to have the will to do what the left will not – since there is nothing the left will not do to achieve its ends, that leaves us with an unlimited number of options. We would do well to get over any squeamishness that comes with such liberty.

Now, I was the butt of criticism in the high-quality conservative journal called, The Dispatch. I’m not sure if it was Goldberg or David French…but the criticism was, ‘…you, J.D. Vance, are too willing to use the means of the left. You want to accomplish a totally different vision of society, but you're willing to use the means that they're willing to use…’ and I think about that quote – my friends, it's so revealing of how so much of the establishment ‘conservative’ movement thinks – if our enemies are using guns and bazookas, we damn well better fight back with more than wet noodles. We need to use the same means if we're actually going to win this fight.

We need to go The Chicago Way on these people – they’re no different than organized crime lords.

That criticism directed toward Vance is the mentality of the vanguards (Cocaine Mitch “The Turtle” McConnell, Kevin “Beach Boy” McCarthy, Mittens, Lindsey Graham, McDaniel and the RNC) of the so-called, Conservative Brand. They would rather enjoy the spoils of being “honourable” losers than winning, and this is why they hate Trump, so.

Despite his missteps (and they are his), it is amazing what Trump was able to accomplish while fighting not only the left and Democrats (but I repeat myself) in congress, but the media, the majority of his own supposed party, and most of his cabinet – and the one person he should have been able to trust, his own VP. He was waging a war on three fronts, while a guerilla war on a fourth front was being waged on him by his own staff.

It’s clear what a second Trump administration should look like, and I say, to Hell with the optics – doing what is right is not going to look good – but it needs to be done.

Cultural Orphan

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