WHY DO COMPANIES PRETEND TO BE LEFT-WING?

by Colin Liddell

According to a story in The Independent, an online "ghost" site of a former print newspaper, the Left-wing is now trying to destroy Breitbart's ad revenue:

"Another 100 companies have reportedly pulled their advertising from the far-right news site Breitbart, as the momentum builds behind a grassroots campaign calling on advertisers to boycott the site. Audi, Visa, T Mobile and Lufthansa have joined the growing list of companies to withdraw, according to Sleeping Giants, the group behind the campaign, which claims that at least 1,250 advertisers no longer wish to be associated with it. Campaigners have successfully encouraged Twitter users to name and shame companies who advertise on the site by posting screenshots of Breitbart ads."

This is simply economic terrorism by the Left, on a par with doxxing individuals, but on a much bigger scale. The Left is totalitarian in nature and attempts to destroy anything that does not share its premises, which is also why ultimately the Left itself has to be destroyed.

Political leaders on the right—yes Steve Bannon, I mean you—should recognize this threat and take strong counter measures, including a more powerful counter boycott of all the companies that endorse the erosion of freedom of speech by giving into this type of blackmail. 

It is also a reminder to those on the right to adopt rigorous "anti-fragile" strategies by avoiding imagery and rhetoric that can serve as easy targets for the Left. After all, we are not destined to be the target; the Left is, with its immoral positions on a wide range of issues.

But why is a previously unheard-off Left-wing group like Sleeping Giants able to make such headway with such a program of economic blackmail? I believe it has to do with changes in the media and corporate culture in recent years. The media has changed a lot in these years. Media companies that once depended on people directly buying their product, either through subscriptions or at the newsstand, have, since the internet took off, been increasingly dependent on advertising revenue to survive, unless they can find a rich patron like Carlos Slim at the New York Times.

This, in turn, means that they are dependent on large companies or corporations, which, for their own reasons, tend to be left-leaning in their projected image and public pronouncements. Interestingly, companies are anything but left-leaning or egalitarian in their hiring practices, promotion of staff, and payment of salaries. Apart from a bit of box ticking with regard to PC quotas, the rule is one of harsh inequality, and usually inequality that exceeds differences in merit.

Indeed, in recent years, as companies have increasingly sought to signal their "social conscience" and "inclusivity," they have become even more inegalitarian at the more fundamental level. This graph showing the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio should amply demonstrate that:

From around 20 times in 1965 to over 295 times today, the internal inequality in companies has sky-rocketed. Interestingly, it appears that the period of "inequality inflation" correlates with increasing "moral signalling" by companies pretending to care about the environment, have a social conscience, or be committed to "diversity."

Quite clearly what has happened is that companies have become internally less egalitarian, but externally more egalitarian, and that the two trends are related in some way. But how exactly?

As traditional market groups have become saturated through overproduction, all companies have had to work harder to find new markets—to literally diversify. For example, a beer company that traditionally and successfully sells beer to White working class males soon finds its market saturated to the point where beer sales stagnate, unless of course it can find additional demographics, such as women, ethnics, or foreigners to sell to. This will have an immediate effect on how it presents itself or on what messages it tries to distance itself from.

This characteristic of customer saturation—the limited ability of each customer to consume one particular product—is also inherently egalitarian. Once the company has a loyal customer who can buy no more, the focus shifts to prioritizing the as-yet untapped market, making non-customers as valuable—or even more valuable in growth terms—than existing customers. The key here is not to alienate any demographic, especially an untapped one, by being seen as part of a political divide. In this respect, right-wing positions are often more problematic than left-wing positions, as they emphasise differences while the left pretends they don't exist.

Another factor is that as companies have become increasingly unequal internally, they have had to "offset" this externally by leaning to the left. Furthermore, the degree to which they are allowed to do this and signal as "progressive" and egalitarian enables them to be internally much less so.