Is Your ‘Woke Credit Score’ High Enough to Keep You From Being Denied Service by Major Corporations?

The words 'cancel culture' typed on a typewriter. (Markus Winkler/Unsplash)

Commentary

America is no longer a country being divided between conservative and progressive, between Republican and Democrat. It’s now being divided between the “woke” and the “non-woke.” And thus far, the woke appear to be gaining the upper hand.

To be “woke” means to have been “awakened” to the awful truth about America, just how bad a place it is, and just how much it needs to change—fast.

To hear the woke tell it, the United States is a country filled to the brim with racism, sexism, transphobia, and just about every other evil -ism in the lexicon. Woke activists see their job as getting the rest of the country to “wake up,” acknowledge, and reject the insidious white supremacy that supposedly permeates ... well, just about everything in America.

The woke insist that not only does the United States need a vast cultural makeover, this crucial makeover also needs to happen with lightning speed.

Now, you might think that what these woke activists are saying and believing about America is so radical and extreme that they can be safely ignored. After all, the founders of Black Lives Matter are increasingly open and transparent about being trained Marxists intent on subverting this country.

But if the events of the past year and a half have done anything, they’ve demonstrated that these radicals can’t be ignored, because they’ve enlisted the help of many powerful international corporations in spreading and promoting their subversive cancel culture.

Friends in High Places

The woke culture, or as my friend Evan Sayet calls it in his recent book, “The Woke Supremacy,” has moved on from using celebrities and key sports figures to promote their agenda to attempting to force it on people by corporate fiat.

While before, they tried to make wokeness look “cool” and “hip” by having prominent U.S. movie stars and athletes avidly promoting cancel culture, the activists appear to think they’ve given Americans enough time to get on board with their agenda.

So those who have resisted the woke charm offensive for the past few years must now be subjected to, let’s say, harsher measures to get them to comply.

It’s not exactly a secret that powerful and influential woke corporations are networking to try to impose a de facto “social credit score” on their American customers. All you had to do was pay attention for the past year to see it happening.

Just 10 years ago, if I’d told you major corporations would suddenly be deplatforming millions of their own customers over “wrong” political views, you’d have told me that kind of thing could never happen.

And yet it’s been happening. We’ve all been watching it happen and are watching it continue to happen.

What’s the Best Response to Corporate Cancel Culture?

I believe that trying to enforce a “woke credit score” on ordinary Americans is going to engender a massive backlash that’s already developing against these corporations.

Of course, the legal eagles in our midst are quick to remind us that many companies reserve the right to refuse services to anyone for any reason. So, like it or not, these corporations engaging in this cancel culture activity do have some legal cover for what they’re doing.

But has there ever been a time in American history where millions of people were blatantly being denied services or expelled solely for their political beliefs?

Just because a woke corporatist calls your political beliefs “radical” and “extreme” and “dangerous,” thereby justifying their banning or excluding you, does that make them so? Is this merely an excuse to engage in political censorship?

It may have started with airlines expelling passengers who wouldn’t wear masks or who wore Trump hats, but it doesn’t seem to have ended there.

The pandemic has been used to attempt to enforce a “new normal” on American citizens without their consent. Major international businesses seem to be quite enthusiastic in doing their part to help enforce this “new normal.”

You didn’t flout your support for Trump or the MAGA agenda to your bank, but some activist went digging into your social media history and brought it to the bank’s attention, and so the bank expelled you anyway. Is that kind of behavior legal?

I doubt that it is, but major corporations attempting to enforce a “woke code” on American citizens seem to be determined to test these legal waters. They truly seem to care more about their radical ideology than their bottom line.

Fight the Corporations in Court or Go Around Them?

While I believe citizens are having their rights to free speech and association violated by these woke corporations, it may prove too costly to try to break down their legal protections with expensive litigation that could last for years.

A far better strategy could be for American patriots to go around them, not to fight them directly.

The best solution could be for Americans to bypass the woke corporate gatekeepers. It would be to render them irrelevant by getting services and access from companies and businesses who make it a deliberate policy not to use a “woke” litmus test on their customers.

Plenty of such companies exist, they just often aren’t the biggest and most visible in their field. But that could change.

In an age when Big Tech corporations seem to control so much of the digital sphere, it can seem like a daunting proposition to suddenly look for new banking access, for a new internet portal, and so on. But as the saying goes, necessity is often the mother of invention, and Americans are an especially creative people.

It’s not wise to put all your eggs into only one basket. And it’s certainly not wise to keep counting on having digital access to key services, goods, and financial accounts through staying in the good graces of an increasingly hostile woke conglomerate.

Access is everything. Perhaps while you weren’t paying attention, you didn’t see the danger of routing all your commerce or business through a “highway” that runs through a gate controlled by one of these hostile Big Tech cancel culture corporations. There’s really no excuse for such blindness to this danger now, however.

Everybody should see it.

The conservative social media platform Parler already got a brutal lesson about that earlier this year, and I’m sure that lesson was taken to heart by many people.

If these corporations stubbornly continue to insist on enforcing the new cancel culture, American citizens who care about their rights will have to improvise, they will have to adapt, and they will have to overcome.

I believe they can and they will. In the coming year, I expect to see developments that will shock these huge corporations that thought they were the only game in town.

They’re going to find out they’re not.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion ... But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Telegram at t.me/drawandstrikechannel.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.