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November 19, 2024 - 8:00pm
The “anti-woke economy” is struggling to prove its value in a country that just handed the popular vote to Donald Trump. That isn’t to say it’s over for investors like the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who is joining a venture capital firm that invests in companies espousing conservative values. It’s merely to say that the rest of the corporate world has social license to compete again.
Tensions between elites and their customers grew after Trump’s 2016 victory, soared higher during the height of #MeToo, then exploded in 2020. Much of corporate America went on the political offence, fearing backlash from the Left over “microaggressions”, accusations of complicity, and any personal or professional association with the Right.
Savvy entrepreneurs knew this would alienate significant swathes of the public. They saw an opening for businesses that gave shoppers options to patronise companies that were proactively anti-woke and openly patriotic, either in their messaging, their manufacturing, or both.
Enter PublicSquare. In a Monday profile of Donald Trump Jr.’s anti-woke business ventures, the Wall Street Journal reported that PublicSquare appeared to be struggling. The company, founded in 2021 as a platform for businesses to find anti-woke consumers, “reported a loss of $36.9 million on revenue of $16 million in the first nine months of 2024. PublicSquare announced last week it laid off about 35% of its workforce.”
After going public in 2023, the Journal says “PublicSquare’s shares closed at $29.80 that day but are now trading at around $2, a decline of more than 90%, giving the company a market value of around $70 million. PublicSquare now plans to “shift its focus to providing ‘cancel proof’ payments technology for merchants — some of whom say their payment processors have ‘canceled’ them based on politics.”
There’s a version of the future in which this could be a profitable venture. But does that future exist after a second Trump administration? Donald Trump Jr., an early PublicSquare investor, clearly believes so. The President-elect’s son recently joined 1789, a venture capital fund dedicated to investing in the “parallel economy”, from Tucker Carlson’s media company to aerospace.
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SubscribePublicSquare’s failure probably has a lot more to do with hiring a coked up nepo baby moron like Donald Trump Jnr than anything else.
Cun*
I think coked up nepo baby moron said it better but you do you, champ!
***t.
You are obviously talking about Hunter, I wish you could get your facts straight!
Hunter’s laptop does not exist. I go farther than that. Hunter does not exist!
So there.
There is a hilarious column penned by Marina Hyde in The Guardian today eviscerating the nepo baby and describing his removal as Donald’s favourite son to be replaced by Elon.
IDK. It all sounds silly to me. You build a company, sell a product or service, and if people like it, they buy it. Anti woke sounds just a cringe as woke.
Agreed. Many who bang on about being antiwoke are often just as intolerable as their woke counterparts.
If the last few years has taught companies anything it’s surely to be apolitical. Coming down on either side is simply going to alienate half the public and diminish your number of customers
Companies have to be apolitical unless they are categorically sure that their products are bought only by people of a particular political persuasion. There wouldn’t be many companies in that category.
I think solar cells would qualify. They appeal to the liberal — and the cynical who see an opportunity to farm the government for subsidies. Backyard nuke plants, should there ever be such a thing, would appeal to the other side. Imagine having a private source of power that would keep your house lit right through the Apocalypse.
I’d be only marginally more interested in an anti-woke business strategy than in a woke business strategy. And to be honest we don’t need an organisation to help us decide what’s anti-woke anyway because the woke nonsense is so shrill and spectacularly self-parodying that it’s a simple case of doing the opposite of whatever they’re complaining about this week.
Like the time they tried a divestment campaign on fossil fuels: BP and Shell shares dipped briefly because of that campaign so I bought some, and made a nice little profit a few months later after the world realised that it can’t actually do without oil and gas. I don’t say this to brag in any way: I’m not a regular or talented investor, but that one seemed to me to be a slam-dunk-obvious way to invest in a sure thing, and so it proved.
The point is, the fascist left ( woke ) have institutional power and use that power to perscuate and tyrannise vast swathes of the population. After years of impotence, the ‘right’ ( normal people ) realise they have no choice but to build a parallel society. This is just the beginning.
“That isn’t to say it’s over for [investment] … in companies espousing conservative values. It’s merely to say that the rest of the corporate world has social license to compete again.”
These two sentences amount to the nonsensical argument that the entire economy will become anti-woke, ergo the anti-woke economy won’t survive.
A ‘gulf’ is ‘sharpening’? Well, at least the column is short, so not too much of a waste of time.
What is needed is investment in good companies not woke companies or anti-woke companies but good companies.