Have a Woke Festive Period : The Corporate Christmas Come Down

Target has just wheeled out its Black Santa in a wheelchair. The Marks and Spencer’s Christmas Cards selection features a Chinese Santa Claus, a British Post Box, Transgender Penguins and a Robin in a tree. What about Jesus? Then there’s a chocolate manufacturer who omits ‘Advent’ from their selection of ‘festive’ chocolates. ‘Tony’s Chocolonely‘ refuses to put ‘Advent’ on its packaging, although it was cited in a US Modern Slavery legal case for being part of a group sourcing cocoa from child labour in the Ivory Coast. Woke hypocrites?

Target’s recommended Christmas book offerings for children include books ‘Pride 1,2,3,’ (age 2-8), ‘Bye Bye, Binary’, and ‘I’m Not a Girl.’ For those precocious child readers of 0-3 there is the ‘The Pronoun Book’; sure to make them leap with joy when they open their ‘Festive Sock’. Highly recommended is the Children’s mugs ‘Gender Fluid.’ A cup of Gender Fluid goes nicely with that Christmas pudding. I’ll stick to my collection of Sandeman’s Port.

Meanwhile, down under in the woke paradise of Australia, the City of Stonnington has replaced Merry Christmas with the vacuous slogan ‘Make Merry’. I know they are Australians but Make Merry is just bad English. The local councillors should be transported back to the UK as a punishment.

And then there’s the Christmas Party. Last year, a pair of flirty London Investment Bankers got up to hanky-panky in the disabled toilet. On CCTV. This was a ‘double whammy’ so to speak. They were fired. Shares ‘plunged’. Now firms in Britain issue ‘policy guidelines’ for Christmas Parties. I knew a brilliant photographer who had photographed the Beatles in their prime, who was fired from his Council job after a flirtatious remark to a 19-year-old PA. That was 20 years ago. Today, he would be on the Sex Offenders Register. A UK employment lawyer I know maintains many firms have a policy of asking for details of any relationships in the office. The Royal Court Theatre, the home of Shakespeare, now has a rule to call out ‘abuse’ at Christmas parties before it goes too far. When does the abuse
start? Caressing the Vol-Au-Vents? Offering a glass of bubbly to the transgender actor/actress who played Ophelia. Waggling a cocktail stick or sucking the cherry? Poor Hamlet. The ‘Renaissance Man’ reduced to the ‘Woke Man’.

Where does all this puritanical nonsense come from? Well, its institutionalised. There’s an audience for it. George Soros is behind it. His ‘Open Society Foundation’ offers millions to Corporates playing the game. It’s PBW (Performance Based Wokery). At stake is their Corporate Equality Index, CEI score. This is policed by the Human Rights Campaign, the LGBTQ+ group, which persecutes non players and receives millions of dollars in funding from George. It is a points system for how America’s biggest corporations perform. A league table of Wokery.

‘Home Alone’ is being revamped – that cosy family Christmas of innocent fun, will be wokified: a black kid playing Kevin McAllister, a Fentanyl Crack House in the Bronx and a soundtrack by Gil Scott Heron. But this isn’t make-believe, it’s here and now. The Daniel Craig 2022 version of Macbeth on Broadway featured Banquo (a black actress) in a wheelchair, and most characters were binary with blue hair.

So, at Christmas let’s raise a glass for the few Anti-Woke heroes who, despite media
harassment, have spoken their mind. Those who are fearless in their speech, what the Ancient Greeks called ‘Parrhesia’. They are the likes of Shane McGowan (he was friends with an Irish Republican), Ezra Pound (liked ‘Fascism’), Morrissey (‘I don’t recognise England any more’), Nick Cave (‘Cancel culture is ‘mercy’s antithesis’) ; these are the ‘naysayers’, who don’t gobble up the trash culture increasingly dominating the arts scene, in woke world. They are the beacons of hope in a Liberal world having lost its bearings. Enjoy them while you can because the blinking Christmas lights are being extinguished one by one …at Christmastime.

Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and
applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US,
the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as ‘The American Spectator’,
‘Asian Affairs’, ‘Deliberatio’, ‘L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica’, ’The
National Interest’, ‘GeoPolitical Monitor’, ‘Merion West’, ‘Voegelin View’, ‘The Montreal
Review’, ’The European Conservative’, ‘Visegrad Insight’, The Hungarian Review’ ,’The
Salisbury Review’, ‘The Village’, ‘New English Review’, ‘The Burkean’, ‘ ‘The Daily Globe’,
‘American Thinker’, ‘The Internationalist’, ‘Philosophy News’. His new book- ‘Nowhere
Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century’ will be published soon by
Ethics International Press.

www.brianpatrickbolger.com