In response to Curtis Yarvin’s post “The riddle of the niggardly billionaires,” I posit philanthropy is largely ineffective for opposing wokeness. The right is much more successful at affecting sentiment through a more bottom-up or grassroots process starting online, than patronage or indirect power. Negative sentiment can affect the ‘real world’ in material ways, much more so than bloated charitable organizations or easily-ignored newsletters or magazines. When was the last time AEI, National Review, or Reason affected the state of discourse on anything, compared to Twitter pundits or nobodies/anons on 4chan?
Even the the Koch brothers’ massive funding ecosystem has only few successes that can be attributed to it. Since the founding of the Koch Network in 2003 it has spent hundreds of millions bankrolling such organizations as the Heritage Foundation to advance libertarian-friendly policies. Decades later, the Libertarian Party is still a footnote in U.S. politics. Trump’s rise to power is the antithesis of libertarianism, supporting big government policies and protectionism, such as tariffs. This followed 8 years of Obama, who signed Obamacare, which Heritage vigorously opposed to no avail. Did they get their money’s worth? Maybe indirectly thorough lower taxes, but it has not moved the needle on discourse either. The woke only solidified their grip in the interim. The Koch brothers serves as an example of the wrong way to go about philanthropy for ‘the right’.
However, to clarify, is patronage of individuals is more effective than philanthropy in the context of organizations. So I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater in dismissing all philanthropy as ineffectual. “We”, in addressing wealthy donors, need to find these individuals, like ‘randos’ on Twitter, who will move the needle on discourse and fund their continued uninterrupted productivity. I understand what he is saying about soft power, but the right has never had much interest in power and cannot be compelled to care, so I don’t see it as a productive path.
Affecting online sentiment is a much more powerful tool for for the right, especially for opposing wokeness, than think tanks or publications, especially following Elon’s 2022 acquisition and subsequent rebranding of Twitter. I remember in early 2023, by which point the transfer of power from the old management to the new ownership was finalized, seeing anti-woke posts regularly go viral, thanks to being signal-boosted by the new owner. There was an entire network, like @clownworld_, @EndWokeness, and @TheBabylonBee, which today have 3, 3.8 and 4.9 million followers, respectively. Such virality could be weaponized like a guided missile on targets, for either openly being woke or caving to woke-pressure.
A recent example is how Cracker Barrel stock fell 8% the following day after it changed its logo. This would have otherwise gone unnoticed had it not gone viral on Twitter after being picked up by right-ring influencer accounts, who lambasted the brand, and the stock price consequently crashing:
Not even the left, with their grip on the universities, the media, and Hollywood, can affect individual stock prices as acutely or with the precision as the right is capable of. This harkens back to April 2023 when Anheuser-Busch (AB-InBev) stock tanked amid the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light controversy, thanks to backlash Twitter. Or Target, Nike, and Disney whose share prices met a similar fate after being perceived as woke. One can go so far as to say that the fear of online backlash, fanned by the likes of Trump and Elon, engendered the post-2024 repudiation of wokeness by major tech companies. Even mighty trillion-dollar tech companies saw that they were no longer immune to online sentiment.
‘Big tech’ companies are not known for backing down readily, and have the highest paid and best legal teams known plucked from the best law schools. They have built impenetrable fortresses of fine print written in such a way as to cover all possible legal challenges by their users. If you have a problem that is outside the scope of useless auto-replies, you’re forced into arbitration or small claims, which is a time-consuming process that tends to lead to unfavorable outcomes for the aggrieved party. Google and Meta will fly one of these 7-figure lawyers to fight even the smallest of small claims cases, just to prove a point that they do not lose. But lawyers are useless against changes of sentiment or vibe-shifts.
Like the silent majority that led to GOP dominance during the ’70s and ’80s, it’s upper-middle-class Republicans who are a major consumer bloc, even if they are invisible or silent in terms of politics or discourse. This is why sentiment is so important, and why ‘the right’ succeeds at it, because shareholders feel it and want to see heads roll, so it cannot be ignored by management. Another example, in April 2024 Google stock fell 4% in the immediate aftermath of its Gemini chatbot ‘going woke’, which forced the otherwise notoriously unyielding tech giant to act immediately to stem the avalanche of negative feedback online. Same again for AB-InBev, which in the immediate aftermath put two marketing executives involved in the Bud Light campaign on involuntary leave.
The left has the opposite problem: lots highly-visible journalists and academics, but they don’t have much sway economically, nor much virality online compared to Twitter’s massive anti-woke ecosystem. So multinationals can ignore their complaints about privacy concerns (in the context of social networks like Facebook), worker conditions (like Amazon drivers, Uber drivers), or failing to pay enough taxes (Amazon, Facebook, Google) despite these companies otherwise signaling woke values (so-called woke-capitalism). Think of all the antitrust investigations, by either side, that went nowhere or resulted in only small concessions. Meanwhile, Cracker Barrel is facing a very real and immediate PR crisis just from some guys on Twitter.