Always a great time when I join my pal Jesse Kelly on his great radio show in Texas. We discuss the coming red state battle with woke capital, and the embarrassing opening round loss of Kristi Noem on the transgender sports issue. As the woke capital impulse gets stronger, the big business community will increasingly use their power–and risk sacrificing their bottom lines–in order to advance their woke, partisan political priorities. The only way to combat this trend, going forward, is to offer Americans what amounts too an alternative economy.
Jesse Kelly: I’ve been looking forward to this all morning. Joining me now, my friend national security analyst, Dave Reaboi. Oh, I forgot to mention—and now author of an awesome book, I would highly recommend called, Qatar’s Shadow War. Not one that people really think about. You probably should think about it more. Dave, I see things like this Georgia law happening, and I see the Georgia House. I think the Senate shot it down, but the Georgia House pushing back against corporations who were whining about the law, is this a good thing or a bad thing? I saw it and I cheered, I see a GOP that’s developing teeth. Am I wrong?
Look, I think it’s great. I was celebrating, and I know that many people out there were also celebrating—just as a sign of life. I mean, where has the Republican party been since January? Where has anybody been since January? And I’m talking about from Washington down. Really, the only one who’s been doing anything that’s praiseworthy and fighting is Ron DeSantis in Florida. Everyone else from the states to inside the Beltway is just, is either AWOL or bending over. We saw Kristi Noem the other week, just totally flubbing.
Dave, the Kristi Noem decision: I’m still just floored by it. And I understand the political dynamics of it. You get a bunch of guys from the Chamber of Commerce, pouring honey in your ear, you get this donor and that donor telling you, “we’re going to lose this much money—this city’s going to lose this much money—you can’t do this,” and you get yourself talked out of it. But our politicians, unable to take a step back and view the 30,000-foot view and say, there’s no way I can basically veto a transgender bill at this time with the mood of the Right. What I mean is, how could she be so dumb?
Well, I dunno. I mean, it’s craven on one hand. But on the other hand—I don’t even blame her that much, because she knows what will be brought to bear. I mean, something you and I talk about all the time is the fact that the right has none of these institutions of our own. We have no Amazon; we have no alternate infrastructure for economics or entertainment or, what-have-you. So that when the Chamber of Commerce comes and says, “you need to do X,” there’s not much they can do.
Now on the other hand, let’s say all of these companies moved out of Georgia—which they have been spending a lot of time in over the last few decades because of the tax incentives. Wouldn’t that cause a bunch of smart, right-leaning investors to say, “you know what? We can service Georgia. We can build companies. We’ve got a market here. All the left-wing woke capital guys left the state, so we can jump in. Here’s an opportunity.”
So I think we’re at the stage now. And increasingly, woke capital is going to decide that every single fight is going to be like the Civil Rights fight—the “most important” fight of all times. So the Georgia voter ID and voter security bill is going to be the equivalent of the Civil Rights struggle; everything is going to be the equivalent of the Civil Rights struggle. So very soon, a particular bill in Kentucky having to do with repaving, some roads is going to be the equivalent of the Civil Rights struggle. And these companies are going to demand the Democratic party line on every single vote. And you see it expanding already, where they only used to do this when it came to social issues. But now they’re doing it for everything. So, at some point, somebody somewhere—some courageous governor or some courageous politician—is going to have to say, “get stuffed.” Hopefully that will open the door to some of the things that we’ve been talking about for years, which is, the creation of an alternate economy.
Dave, what should I want? What is right? What is moral? What should I want for Coca-Cola? American Airlines? Should I want them to wake up and change their ways? Or should I be at the point where I accept the loss—that we’ve lost the major corporate world and we can’t get it back. We have to go start our own what’s what should, what’s the right thing to want, Dave?
I think the right thing want would be, “get woke, go broke.” I think that’s the only solution. People say we need to recapture some of these institutions, but I don’t think it’s ever been successfully done. If you can point me to one example—forget about huge corporations, but even at the level of a school board somewhere—where it’s gone from hard left to conservative, I’m willing to entertain that possibility. But I’ve never seen that animal before. That’s not a thing that I know exists. Building our own is the strategy that we’ve got to embrace.
Okay. Are we doing it already? Like, is the process already happening? Because I hear a lot of talk from those idiot CEOs threatening to pull out a Georgia, but I don’t see them actually doing it. Are they just trying to check a public box of, “Oh, I tried to fight for it,” or are they actually going to move? (I’m in agreement with you. I think it’d be a good thing in the long run.)
I don’t know. I think some will. We’ll see maybe some corporations and some CEOs grow a spine, but not a many. Once a company grows a spine, they’re going to start to be targeted, because one thing the left has perfected is the art of targeting institutions. So they can level a tremendous amount of pressure on one or two companies that decide not to buckle—but I think most will actually buckle.
This is why this is why a lot of the “free market supremacists,” who’ve been walking around for the last couple of decades, end up being wrong. You know, it’s not all about economics; it’s all about ideology. It has to do with what you value. And at the end of the day, that’s more akin to a religious conviction than it is anything else. And we know that people will sacrifice money for religion and people will sacrifice money for ideology.
