Could Ending Wokeism Save the U.S. Economy?
Brandon Smith

The ESG frenzy has plagued American businesses for long enough, leading to complex regulatory requirements and lost profits. Fortunately, the dismantlement of ESG is well underway. Today, Brandon Smith of alt-market.com proposes an alternate to save the economy…

A couple years ago in an article about ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) programs, I noted that when the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates there was an observable decline in woke programs and propaganda across the board. In other words, there were a lot of non-governmental organizations and other entities that were receiving low-interest funds thanks to the Fed.

And they were recycling those funds into far-left ESG, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), and CRT (Critical Race Theory) projects.

When the central bank started hiking interest rates, the money began to dry up…

The exposure of ESG globally and the strangled flow of cheap cash signaled the death knell of a decade long agenda to “woke-ify” the west. It was so exposed, in fact, that Lynn de Rothschild, a leader in ESG and the head of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, admitted the idea was sullied and needed to be rebranded.

I don't think many Americans realize just how pervasive the ESG agenda truly was.

The recent exposure of USAID by Elon Musk and his DOGE team is shining a light on just a portion of it.

For example, the USAID spending millions to prop up leftist propaganda machines like Politico is quite the eye opener, but what about the billions of dollars that went into ESG venture capital projects to fund dozens if not hundreds of liberal online media outlets, movies, TV shows, video games, woke advertising, etc.

The extent of the influence was massive.

And, it is likely that most of the cash supporting this enormous social engineering project came from the Federal Reserve and the pockets of taxpayers.

We were paying for our own indoctrination and economic demise, and I'm sure the people behind USAID and other rogue institutions had a good laugh about that.

Of course, they aren't laughing now.

Now they're out of a job. But is the damage already done? Is there no going back?

The excessive spending through ESG and related programs was not only designed to change western culture, it was also designed to hide glaring weaknesses in the current system. Since before the elections I have continued to argue that Trump's greatest adversary is not the Democrats or the “deep state” or leftist activists; rather, his greatest adversary is the U.S. economy. Trump has inherited an system in stark decline, but much of this data is unknown to the public at large.

The Biden administration used creative accounting to hide much of the damage. They were unable to obscure the effects of stagflation on grocery store shelves, but the inherent weaknesses in the labor market, wages, GDP, energy markets, national debt and the U.S. dollar are all less understood by the public.

The Biden Admin is gone but they have left a ticking time bomb behind; the data they were suppressing is about to be unleashed and Trump's first year is going to look like a financial disaster unless he addresses the problem immediately.

It's also important to keep in mind that as the truth is revealed there is always a chance the public (and the investment world) will panic.

A lot of alternative economists including myself have discussed the possibility that if the truth about our economy was ever made widely known, the entire global edifice might come crashing down from the weight of the revelation. If people knew how much corruption and fraud was a part of our daily lives and our national framework, what would happen?

It's not enough to simply draw the curtain and unveil the ugly problem, a solution must also be offered. Any path to an expedient solution is temporary.

The answer might actually come from the very ESG projects that were designed to destroy the U.S. in the first place.

Harnessing the power of government for good

ESG was drawing its money from unprecedented government debt creation and taxpayer dollars.

That's not going to work for obvious reasons. However, Trump's tariff measures may hold the key.

In other words, tax importers, and the corporations they supply, to pay for the rejuvenation of domestic manufacturing – and perhaps even breathe new life into an American cultural renaissance.

The original NAFTA agreement (and similar policies) removing most trade barriers between the U.S., Mexico and Canada was an incredible betrayal of the U.S. economy by a coalition of neocons and Democrats, facilitated in 1992 by George H.W. Bush who was obsessed with globalization.

Bush (and others in government) wanted a European Union-like arrangement here in North America, a supranational body that would eventually dissolve borders and operate as a single economic and social entity. Which, it must be admitted, does sound a little bit like Trump’s jokes about Canada as the 51st state in the union.

NAFTA didn't go into effect until 1994, but then President Bill Clinton certainly ran with it. Within six years U.S. manufacturing jobs and industry collapsed.

Pay close attention to the difference in jobs before and after the 1994 watershed.

Any return of tariffs is consistently demonized by the globalists as a trigger for financial catastrophe (much like any attempt to freeze the debt ceiling was portrayed as the end of human civilization by former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and her allies in Congress).

The example of Herbert Hoover and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs is always brought up in comparison to Donald Trump's efforts.

It's something I warned about often during his first term – that Trump's tariffs could be used as a scapegoat for the inflationary crisis actually created by the Federal Reserve and federal deficit spending.

Even though the stagflation crisis broke out under Joe Biden's presidency, they still tried to blame Trump and conservatives for the event. Luckily it didn't stick, but it might this time if Trump isn't careful.

For now it appears that Trump is using tariffs as short term leverage to force countries to correct geopolitical imbalances (like the illegal immigration issue). This is the best use of tariffs under the current conditions, and so far Mexico and Canada have folded quickly. That said, lesser long term tariffs will be needed to correct longer term trade imbalances, and the U.S. just doesn't have the industrial base anymore to do that.

If the president hopes to stop the avalanche of national debt and money printing while also freeing the common American worker from the tyranny of the income tax, he's going to need an expertly established tariff system in place along with revamped manufacturing to prevent high inflation.

Tariffs will ultimately require the U.S. to become a producer nation again, at least to some extent. But how can this be accomplished quickly? I would suggest, as mentioned above, that Trump implement an ESG-like program which is designed to partially subsidize companies that establish new manufacturing on U.S. soil.

I think this program could also be used to offer grants or low cost funding to cultural works with a pro-western stance. And, it could all be funded through a percentage of revenues from the Trump tariffs.

In other words, make corporations and importers pay for the rebuilding of the U.S. economy and the American culture that they tried to destroy over the past ten years.

Would this be a form of government interference in the free market?

To be fair, yes and no.

Let's not pretend that there's a market for anti-American propaganda or woke companies. The past several years have proven that consumers don't want what the woke movement is selling. The government would simply be subsidizing parts of the economy that U.S. consumers actually want to survive.

In the end, if we're going to reverse the damage done to the west and to America by the attempted ESG coup and the corruption of institutions like USAID, we need to follow the laws of physics – every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. They used ESG for evil, and we'll use ESG (or something similar) for good. I can't imagine a better way to incentivize a manufacturing boom and a cultural boom in the U.S. and avoid a stagflationary death spiral all at the same time.

You can contact Brandon Smith at:

[email protected]

You can also follow me at –

TwitterX: @AltMarket1

The Alternative Market Project was initially launched in 2010-2011 after I wrote for 4-5 years at Neithercorp.us. This website (Alt-Market.us), is the sister website to Alt-Market.com, which I am keeping up as an archive site for people that would like to read all of my older articles. 

The goal of this site has always been to educate the public on facts, evidence and philosophies that the mainstream establishment refuses to discuss in an honest way. But beyond that, Alt-Market focuses on SOLUTIONS, not just threat analysis. 

My goal is to encourage people around the world (and Americans in particular) to start decoupling from the existing system; we must become more independent and self reliant as individuals, and communities must adopt localized economic networks including barter markets in order to insulate themselves from the ongoing decline of the corrupt financial structure. In other words, if centralization is the problem, then decentralization is the answer.

Alt-Market is about freedom, in the purest sense, and we stand against those that are working relentlessly to undermine our most fundamental values.

 

 

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