Kanye West or Ye is a celebrity, business mogul and the richest black man in the world. He's a Trump ally. The recent 'White Lives Matter' episode in a fashion show in Paris last week and subsequent interview by Tucker Carlson where Ye spewed some conservative narratives, spontaneously made him the latest enemy #1 of the leftist woketards. No siree, they cannot let social influencers project conservative views to the public. Two days after the Tucker interview, JP Morgan closed Ye's bank accounts.
We all know conservative voices are being suppressed by mainstream media and big tech who are anti-Trump and ideologically skewed to the radical Left. There are also many celebrities and social influencers who have actively participated in vicious attacks against conservatives. But let's ignore these individuals. Most are those who sold their soul to anyone who would transfer some cash into their bank accounts. It's the big corporations who are aligned with the extreme left socialist policies of the Biden admin that have the wherewithal to suppress free speech and weaponise their commercial or financial services to fuel cancel culture.
The list below are the major corporations hogging the headlines for their social activism. It is by no means exclusive. Certainly the CEO and many executives in these companies are Liberals, many of whom are taking their eyes off the bottom lines to focus on political agendas. Powerful as these group of people are, they do not have carte blanche to jeorpardise their profit mission. They do report to higher echelons. So who let the dogs out on the conservatives?
It is estimated that 1% of households in the US own 40% of the entire wealth of the country. In the equities market, several ETFs practically own the entire market. Vanguard is the dominant giant, Fidelity is second and Blackrock third. Between Vanguard and Blackrock, they took in 67% of investor cash inflow last year. As dominant shareholders of a few hundred companies listed on the stock exchanges, their power is immense.
No doubt Larry Flint and Mortimer Buckley, CEOs of Blackrock and Vanguard, may exhort the narrative that investor capital is purely to create value and not promulgate ideology. There has been growing accusations asset managers are making public statements in support of racial equity, justice and progressive Left ESG soundbites. Tobias Salinger of Financial Planning said : "Firms such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity Investments and J.P. Morgan Chase drove a wave of shareholder votes last year for environmental and diversity proposals at large publicly traded firms, to the point that two Republican U.S. senators said two of them “may be prioritizing their CEOs’ personal policy views over retirees’ financial security.”
If the fund managers are not directly and actively pushing social activism in the companies they control, they most certainly condone it.
Temasek holds 3.36% of the shares of Blackrock. It is the 4th largest shareholder. Temasek has no seat in the board of Blackrock. It thus appears the Singapore SWF is only a passive investor. Nevertheless, as the 4th major shareholder, it certainly has some clout. Does Temasek have an opinion on the social activism going on? In the counterinsurgency episode of Operation Spectrum (see my previous blog) the Singapore government, the ultimate shareholder of Temasek, has made known clearly its stand on social activism and Marxist adventurism. Tulsi Gabbard, a contending Democratic Party candidate for the 2020 US presidential election, recently resigned from her party on grounds it has gone too far to the radical left and no longer represents the principles she believed in. Gabbard sets a high bar for integrity. Where principles are no longer aligned, one either fights within the party to right it, or one cuts the bridge. Will Temasek cross the Rubicon? Very unlikely. To be passive is to acquiesce to the Marxist creep.
The cancel culture and the social divisions in US is not the work of Donald Trump. The slide to the Left in the US started the moment McCarthyism ended in the 1950s. The socialist capture of institutions and government agencies take decades. It takes years to insidiously restructure education to churn out a generation of Americans who no longer believe in God but the absolutism of liberalism of individual rights. Obama era was the culmination of identity politics, the cauldron to tear the traditional social structure down. Obama's identity politics lie at the root of today's social and cultural divide, a chasm that now seems irreparable. The Democrat Party is now a socialist party, sliding into authoritarianism with the weaponisation of security agencies and judiciary. The Left's claim of fascism against Trump is the age-old tactic of the Leninists and Maoists to accuse the opponent of the very things they themselves are guilty off. Obama came within the cusp of turning the US socialist. Hillary Clinton could have tipped the scale over. Unfortunately for them, a Trump presidency was the greatest discruptor they never anticipated. Hence the vitrolic animosity at the orange mop.
Trump's presidency forced Leninists and Maoists to come out of the woodwork. That is why activism for critical race theory, transgenderism, pronouns, pro-abortion, open borders, gun control, normalisation of pedophile, defund police, no cash bonds, and many other identity issues, all exploded into the open. These people are now publicly identified. The advent of Trump caused the Left to fast forward their plans at a time when their ground is not ready. The demographics have not yet shifted in their favour. Today, Liberals form only about 25% of the population. There is no way they can win at the ballots except by cheating and bringing in illegal immigrants. Biden's policy failures, particularly in the economy, is now swelling the GOP poll numbers amongst the independents, the youths, Hispanics, blacks and browns.
The groundswell to the conservative Right comes with it the power of the consumers to fight back corporate social activism. Mainstream media are all in trouble with disastrous drop in subscription and membership. Fox News is doing well mainly on the backs of programmes hemmed by conservatives such as Tucker Carlson, Guttfeld, Jesse Water, Dan Bongino and a few others. The management remains woke. The rest of media aren't doing too well. Mainstream media has lost viewership to podcasters like Joe Roegan and many other conservative sites like Infowars. CNN is in so deep trouble that CEO Zucker, the epitome of liberal hack, has been sacked. Netflix flexed their cancel power muscles, and conservatives left them dangling in survival mode. Twitter's bearded one is long gone. Zuckerberg no longer has the money to pump into the mid-terms election like he did in 2020. Disney has lost their municipal powers and visitors. And the latest, PayPal, had to walk back their damning autocratic move to deduct US$2,500 from the accounts of users for posting anything they deem misinformation. The avalanche of users pulling out their deposits hit PalPal's liquidity. To prevent from sinking under, they had to resort to delaying tactics to slow down the withdrawal with hahaha, misinformation about administrative hitches and miscommunication. To show how low they can go, the account cancellation option was shamelessly deactivated to keep users fro leaving the platform.
Go woke Go broke is a truism. The following charts show the valuation losses of these companies as their share prices plummeted.
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