Are you a PublicSquare shopaholic? Drew Angerer/Getty Images
PublicSquare, America’s finest anti-woke online marketplace, is spreading the Christmas cheer. It’s been hocking “Right to Bare Arms Christmas Ornaments” and, in the spirit of good will towards men, a kid-sized, ride-on Toyota Land Cruiser in combat colours — as featured in Delta Force Commando II: Priority Red One. This is in addition to an impressive catalogue of body armour, holsters, armour-piercing bullets, ammo cases, cartridge holders, and scopes.
Welcome to America’s parallel economy, which is hell-bent on forcing profit out of MAGA ideology. The term refers to the strictly capitalist side of what promises to be a wild political ride over the next four years — the idea that one must buy, sell, and invest in nothing but the sort of things Donald Trump might buy, sell, and invest in, from proverbial fruit to nuts. Last week, the news that none other than Donald Trump Jr was joining PublicSquare’s board of directors saw the company’s market value soar by 270% within a day.
Two weeks earlier, Omeed Malik, founder and president of venture capital firm 1789 Capital, had appeared on MSN’s Squawk Box. Malik — a former corporate lawyer and Merrill Lynch employee who has also appeared on Showtime’s TV series Billions — declared that his company was dedicated to investing in something called the “EIG” economy, an acronym for “Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Growth”. This, he insisted, “stands totally contrary to ESG”, which is shorthand for Left-wing investment principles that prioritise Environmental, Social, and responsible corporate Governance. In other words, it was time for MAGA diehards to put their money where their mouth is.
In a similar fashion, the American Conservative Values ETF — which is trading as ACVF, with around $100 million in assets under management — has vowed to “stand against woke liberal investments” and implores investors to “take action with your wallet”. Thus Strive Asset Management’s Exxon and Chevron-laden DRLL ETF, now trading on the Bloomberg US Energy Select Index. Thus the burgeoning Azoria Meritocracy ETF, set to begin trading in 2025, a self-proclaimed “S&P 500 fund without the woke shit”.
“It’s time to invest in companies that don’t hate you,” is how Donald Trump Jr summed up PublicSquare’s attitude in a social media post last year. It’s an interesting concept — this nexus of emotion, politics, and money. In his 1,000-page tome Capital and Ideology, the French economist Thomas Piketty argued that history is full of Trumpian “ruptures” that can reshape ideology, and as a result transform patterns of economic activity. During the Biden years, the consumer imperative to buy brands that reflect one’s politics resulted in a tsunami of “woke-washing” that spanned everything from Goldfish snacks to Pedigree dog food and “Woke Coke”. Now, the same is happening on the Right.
It’s certainly not a new idea for Trump, who for the past half-century has sought a global monopoly of eponymous casinos, hotels, office towers, golf clubs, and most recently, a line of cologne that even Jill Biden can’t resist. His trademarked cocktail, the Trumptini (Bacardi, Cointreau, sour mix, and cranberry juice served in a salt-rimmed martini glass, garnished with red Atlantic salmon caviar) is the signature drink of the Trump International Resort in Miami, and the beverage of choice for the would-be parallel economist.
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It’s hard to take a writer’s troll serious when he doesn’t realize DEI fulfills the S criteria in “holistic” ESG agenda. You can criticize the MAGA ETF’s but unlike DEI, its not imposed. You can take it or leave it. In Capitalism a bad product fails. In a market socialist economy a failing product can stay around as long as the government props it up.
Get back to us once you’ve done your research.
Aye. The problem with putting zealots in charge of anything is they make decisions based on ideology, a desired ideal state, rather than the observed reality, so they make decisions based on this desired state and seek to justify them after the fact rather than make a decision based on the needs and environment of the present, then adjust according to the results if need be. Ideological decision makers tend to make bad decisions that ultimately undermine their own cause in addition to whatever other effects they may have. The Jewish scientists that Hitler ran out of Germany helped the US build the A bomb. 20th century Communism produced enough examples to that they managed to destroy themselves without a war or a revolution. It’s rarely noticed how seldom that happens in history. Even Rome could point at the Visigoths and the Huns. Ideological decision makers are apt to impale themselves with their own swords given the opportunity. The only way such nonsense can be sustained is the same way such nonsense has been sustained throughout history, through brute force. They eventually destroy themselves, but it takes a lot longer for the people to overthrow a government or for a war to run its course than it does for a company to go bankrupt out of stupidity. It’s also a lot more destructive.
The MAGA stuff this author mentions isn’t that. It’s not companies trying to be ideological. It’s companies trying to profit a social trend. MAGA isn’t an identifiable ideology. There’s very little in it that’s stated as universal principle. It’s just a political movement that wants a few specific policy changes at this specific moment. There’s no grand vision or idyllic future imagined. It’s a movement led by a master opportunist and salesman, a man whose entire life is defined by bouncing from one money making scheme to the next without any guiding principles or even much of plan. Of course he’s participating in the profit making from his own movement and of course nobody within the movement thinks anything of it. It’s all pretty consistent actually. Hit the iron while its hot is the order of the day. Populist movements are reactionary, driven by circumstances, not principles. Once the change they demand is accomplished, it will be over and there will be a new normal and people will move on. The companies spawned by the movement will just go out of business or move on to something else and nothing more need be said.
The defeated wokesters, on the other hand, are a problem that we’ll be dealing with for a while yet. The social justice movement is well on its way to being marginalized and pushed out of the mainstream, but it won’t go away entirely, because a lot of the social justice zealots are ideologically driven true believers who will still advocate for their failed ideology out of moral righteousness long after the profit has dried up and most people know better than to indulge in unproductive nonsense. A lot of the origins of these social justice movements can be traced to treatises and manifestos of university professors who were socialists in their youth. The wokesters will probably start some other nonsense a few decades from now as well, and the cycle of stupidity will continue.
Right. Its a Liberation Theology. They will never go away but always appear in new forms. I think it’s James Lindsay that said the issue is never the issue for ideological radicals. The issue is the revolution. They will do whatever they can to beat people over the head with moral Self-righteousness wherever possible. Any issue that can be leveraged will be leveraged. The only difference is that we’ve regained the knowledge that human nature is basically unchanging.
What a touchy overreaction. As usual my concern is that Trump himself doesn’t really care much about “woke” and most of his followers don’t understand how it works. Alienating vast amounts of centrist America by flaunting well known right wing tropes isn’t likely to be a winning strategy. Is opposing pollution dumped in rivers etc “woke” – or indeed questioning the extraordinary liberal attitudes towards gun ownership in the US, with its huge consequent death toll.
Woke means being “awakened” to the knowledge that every situation must be viewed through the Lens of Oppression.
So no on its face those are not “woke” concerns. But to your points, hardly any progressives talk about air and water pollution anymore. Every environmental concern is seen through the Lens of carbon emissions and climate change.
As for guns, there are certainly downsides to having a heavily armed population. But unlike Britain, we haven’t allowed ourselves to be conquered by tyrannical Socialists and outsourced our defense across the ocean. I’ll take that tradeoff.
There are, in fact, very few “downsides to a heavily armed population.”
Two thirds of our gun deaths are suicides, which are tragic, but our suicide rates are far lower than Japan’s, which has almost zero guns in civilian hands.
The other third (that are criminal homicides) are almost exclusively among young, disadvantaged urban males, and tend to arise from petty beefs that suburban and even rural young men (the latter of whom have FAR higher gun ownership rates) settle with fisticuffs.
Its otherwise very rare that Americans see firearms brandished by anyone other than the police. I personally only see firearms while hunting, while at a target range, or on the hips of policemen.
Contra what you see from Hollywood, we are no longer a nation of cowboys, gangsters, and frontiersmen, merely a free people who are allowed to defend ourselves.
Good riddance to Woke and soon let’s hope the same to hard right maladies of a parallel sort ( catchy name TBD)… Let’s hold fast to moderate Classical Liberalism the one true way to sanity and freedom for the West…
Hmm. Don’t know about that. I’m still going to continue with my hobby of baiting Christians. My current favorite is to tell Trump-supporting Christians that they are going to go to Hell, because supporting the Antichrist is a sin.
When you people are making those videos of yourself crying in your car, do you people manage to aim the snot through your bullring, or does it just splatter your BLM mask?
I’m not “crying in my car”. I’m having endlessly good sport with the terminally humorless.
And they with you, by the looks of it!
Not really. Christians are a remarkably humorless people. They take their absurd religion (and themselves) way too seriously,
Yeah, I’m curious. How do you decide who is a Christian to be abused and who is a Muslim who is to be supported, worshiping as they do, the same God…Then I’d like to know when you are going to start doing what you promise. So far all you have done is brag…either s__t or get off the throne.
Where on earth did you get the idea that I “support Muslims”? As to Christians, I have no issue with those who don’t try to impose their views on others (although that doesn’t seem to be all that many). I’d also be much happier with them if they got their priests to stop abusing minors. By contrast, I am kindly disposed towards Jews, because no Jew every told me I couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich.
You’re a chortle, Mr. Melonsmith. Also, you need something constructive to do with your day.
If there is something more constructive for me to do that annoying god-botherers, I’ve yet to find it. You’d actually be surprised at how seriously a lot of Christians take the suggestion that they’re going to burn in Hell.
Speaking as myself an atheist, why are you people so bothered by “god-botherers”? Can’t you people just accept that some people have faith which you people – and I – lack? Whatever happened to “live and let live”?
I have no issue about people who quietly practice their religion. My problem comes with people who want to impose their religion on others. The problem is compounded when the clergy of said religion think it is their god given right to sexually abuse minors.
Literally no one thinks child abuse or sex crimes are ok, so that’s ludicrous.
No one likes prosthelitizers, either, nor sanctimony, scoldings, and arrogance cloaked as morality.
These are precisely the reasons why wokery is so unpopular.
“Literally no one thinks child abuse or sex crimes are ok....” The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury didn’t seem to have a problem with them. Neither did the (now happily deceased) Cardinal Pell here in Australia.
Right…The religious must practice their faith quietly, but you on the other hand proudly and loudly practice your lack of faith in public…seems that you are more of a hypocrite and a troll than anything else. But then I’m being redundant as you are a lefty.
A Lefty, you say? It might interest you to know that I venerated both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in my young adulthood. Still, in those days, unlike now, you could be on the Right of politics without being a bigot.
Well, then again you ARE just a troll after all. You haven’t a point of view, just a shallow hobby.
I have a point of view. I have had it for a while. I believe in right-of-centre politics as they would have been understood in the days of Thatcher and Reagan: low taxes, small government, strong military, capitalism as the main driver of the economy, and Russia always being the “bad guy”. Bit unfashionable now, I concede, but still.
None of this incoherent rambling means anything. If a product or service has consumer appeal, it will succeed, regardless of politics. ESG and DEI were doomed to failure, with or without Trump.
Yep. decision making based on idealized future states has a long history of failure. The failure is pretty much a given. The timing isn’t. The MAGA movement and the populist rage behind in probably hastened the demise of DEI and ESG, and that’s a good thing. Such policies deal more damage the longer they’re in place. I’m sure a lot of Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs, and other European people wish the Soviet Union could have collapsed in 1965 or 1980 rather than limping along up to 1991 when it finally collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence.
So much of MAGA is a Grift? Who’d have thought.
You got anything to say about today’s article demonstrating Von Der Leyen’s anti-democratic manipulations regarding the Mercosur trade deal, after trying to make out the UK had “missed out” on it due to Brexit? Turns out, several other EU countries will be wishing they’d “missed out” on it too.
Yes I did read it. Some may not welcome it, and remains to be seen what Council of Ministers decide, but likely to pass. All Trade deals involve some compromises don’t they.
The Brexiteers of course made much of how they’d be striking deals here, there and everywhere to wean us off european trade reliance, only to then not. And hence we remain inextricably tied to our largest market, weakened and with no say. Clever that.
Here’s our current trade deals, jw;
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-trade-agreements-in-effect
I haven’t bothered counting them, there’s too many. You might wish to do so, to stop yourself making comments with.no substance in reality.
90% the same deal we had under EU. So no real increase. Come on LL, please tell me you didn’t fall for that, Hence we remain in same position with higher costs and more limited leverage as too small to drive the sort of deals we’d prefer.
The well known extra with Aus naffed off our farmers big time. Hence you ok with that, and thus sympathetic to the potential Mercursor trade-off? Or the contradiction in your point not registered?
There’s no contradiction in my point. The fact is, the trade deals we either continue with, or strike afresh, are commissioned by the UK government, democratically elected (for better or worse). My point is we’re not only free to do so, but free to not do so. You can’t read the article on the Mercursor deal and comment with a straight face on the UK “missing out”. It’s as simple as that, and you know it.
No actually that wasn’t your point. It’s another point. You’ve moved away from your initial point as it unravelled, that some aren’t all happy with the Mercursor deal.
As regards UK being free to do it’s own deals, this is true in a superficial way. But being desperate is a constriction in itself. And where is the big free trade deal since Brexit? And besides have you read the TCA? And have you not noticed we are largely having to follow EU rules as they are 40%+ of our trade and overwhelmingly our biggest trading partner? Rules we no longer have a say in.
It’s a childish argument that never stood up in a complex world. Nonetheless we are free now to have as many e numbers in our prawn cocktail crisps as we fancy.
At least Britain has got the EU jackboot off its throat.
BLM says what, now?
Black Lies Munter.
Oh yes big elements of Grift there too. Grifting is the primary motivation in likes of this and MAGA. Learned behaviour?
Undergrad requirements following AP secondary courses. The aforementioned explains the exceptional quantity of the sort to the left on a linear.
Amusing in a way. An early piece of Woke Nostalgia . I am sure there will be lots more of this nonsense to come.
I am going to do my bit buy buying a heap of “I love Elon” bumper stickers, and sticking them on Teslas.
If you people would care to stick one on my Audi TT too, that would be great, thanks.
The point is that Tesla buyers tend to be of the Green Left political persuasion, and are a bit uneasy about Elon’s politics. By contrast, in the country in which I live at least, Audi TTs are mostly driven by women and gay hairdressers.
Nah, most of us on the left here in the US still love Elon. It is only the terminally-online that swallow the propaganda.
I usually drive mine while wearing my neopreme gimpsuit in British racing green, as my father and his father did before me. You cannot put a price on tradition.
If Woolf Barnato or Tim Birkin were around nowadays, I doubt they’d drive Audi TTs.
That’s right, they/them would have driven Teslas and they/them’s gimpsuits would have been pink.
The Audi TT is a decent enough car (it is after all based on the Golf chassis and running gear), and the RS at least has pretty good performance. However, style wise, it is pure “girl’s car”.
Are you ok though?
“ Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Fox News pundit Pete Hegseth, may be an alleged sexual abuser, an inveterate womaniser, and, apparently, a drunk who dances on stage alongside strippers, but he may still get the nod from Congress to join the cabinet”
All lies except him being a womaniser.
Is Hegseth the one whose mother doesn’t even like him?
He may also be an alien from outer space. He may also like canned tuna. We don’t know! 😉
Sounds like all the MOS 03 Marines I was with. I’m 0331. He’ll do well with the rank and file.
I don’t like how Frederick tries to pigeonhole plain-jane capitalism as ‘right-wing’ capitalism. It is nauseating to what lenghts opinion writers will go to appear centrist.
I think there are two different things at play here. One is that political forces. money and power can and do try to push a certain ideology by manipulating the economy. Which has been done forever. The other is that actors in the market simply try to capitalize on trends and hypes. However, it is increasingly hard to know which is which, everything – including politics – becomes commodified. With ESGs too we have to wonder what the underlying goal really was. That is not to say all market actors are disingenuous but it’s hard to know and it does not even matter. Hypes can be anything and are automatically interesting to the market simply because they are hypes. I think this is not new either, it is consumerism and speculation supercharged by financialization and mass media. Consumerism can be traced back to when capitalism switched from a system based on needs to a system based on desires. Those desires have to be triggered, which is done using PR, exploiting herd psychology and mania. Edward Bernays played a big role in developing this PR theory in the early 20th century.
Financialization was accelerated in the 80s and 90s and this is when you get this typical late capitalist society with postmodernism as its cultural logic – as Fredric Jameson once argued. At this point PR and (completely irrational) financial manipulation, e.g. speculation and rent seeking, seem to completely dominate markets. From the 80s we see enormous financial Ponzi-like bubbles and each time they pop – they always do – the damage is bigger, central banks need to step in and we are left wondering if any of it produced any real value or growth in the first place
All this is quite a deviation from ‘capitalism’ as Adam Smith recognized it. And so we could wonder – as people like Varouvakis and Kotkin do – if we still live under capitalism at all.
Trump doesn’t drink.
Thank God! Can you imagine how unbearable he would be!?
What is with Unherd and American professors who still don’t get what happened last month? About this: “that privilege lies with DEI, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which the Right see as strangling American ingenuity.”
No, the right sees DEI as govt-sanctioned favoritism based on immutable characteristics and anti-meritocratic. In the old days, we called the former aspect racist and sexist, and the former just plain dumb. Don’t blame the right for reacting to the left’s insistence that politics be injected into every waking moment of life, especially those where it does not belong.
The descriptive “convicted felon” for Mike Flynn, with no explanation of how that came to be, is so on-brand for this journalism professor.
Yes — reminiscent of the continuing attempt to brand Trump a felon. Most people know how utterly fake the accusation is, but Flynn’s story is now forgotten, so perhaps the slur works better with him.
Trump did get convicted though, right? I mean, he might end up not suffering any penalty, but he committed the crime.
What was the “crime” for which a Democrat judge convicted him of?
I don’t recall the intricacies of it, but I’m sure the answer to your question can be found on the public record.
You will have to spend the time learning the intricacies of it, to understand why it was pretextual. I’m a former criminal defense attorney in NYC and have a low opinion of Trump’s character. My view is that the conviction is utterly bogus and political.
How many is a trove? Asking for a friend.
“gun-peddling Walmart”?
Good grief.
“Hocking” is taking an object to a pawn shop to get a loan. You mean “hawking,” which is to aggressively sell something.
It’s called an editor. Unherd might consider trying one.
This fellow wrote an awful lot of words to basically say “My side lost and I’m pissed we lost to those MAGA bums, but I still hate them and they’re still a bunch of deplorables.” This attitude is worse than useless. It’s kinda the reason they lost. It boggles my mind that they can’t see arrogant and conceited they come across, or maybe they do and just don’t care. There are rhetorical and writing styles and techniques that can be used to appeal to those of a different viewpoint. Persuasive writing and rhetoric is an art with a long history that goes back many centuries. This ain’t it. This article comes across as snide, dismissive, and insulting. Surely there’s somebody out there that can make a coherent argument for social justice woke ideology with a modicum of awareness of reality and some actual logical reasoning. If they’re out there, they’re not writing for Unherd, or the MSM. If there’s so few reasonable voices who know how to actually write and speak persuasively, well, that speaks to the problem with the ideology I suppose.
I always just assumed that there really aren’t any pro woke arguments that jibe with reality or that have any logical place from which to argue. Hate, derision and trolling is all they have….the followers are a very weak group in the long run.
It seems to me that Maverick Melonsmith is a former Champagne Socialist.
New name, new life after Trump’s victory, but the brains remain the same
Nope. Wrong. I’m sure CS is still around here somewhere. Anyway, he can be quite cutting in his comments. I on the other hand am witty and amusing.
I find the like of Melonsmith and CS rather amusing, in their way. Like a parrot that shrieks out insults, you can’t help, but laugh! You surely don’t take any offense!
I think CS (as his name suggests) is an actual socialist. I, on the other hand, am an old school Thatcherite/Reaganite. I was on the political right back when membership didn’t require you to be a bigot.
Right to bare arms…
They’ll have to prise my sleeveless T-shirt from my cold dead fingers.
How’d it work out for every singe private company as well as public trust in nearly every avenue of life. Politics and economy are forever interwoven in the history of every society ever…
How’d it work out for every singe private company as well as public trust in nearly every avenue of life in the U.S? Politics and economy are forever interwoven in the history of every society ever… totally working out in Europe.
Next…this was typical leftist clap trap, name calling and innuendo.