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Many have pondered corporate America’s slide into “wokeism” and cultural leftism. A prime example is Nike paying Colin Kaepernick millions to be the face of an ad campaign because the athlete refused to stand during the national anthem, then removing a sneaker with the American flag on it from its shelves at Kaepernick’s request.

Some people theorized this is simply corporate America appealing to its younger and relatively liberal customer base. While that’s probably true in part, the ultimate explanation might be both simpler and more profound: China has bent corporate America to its will.

The Simple Explanation of Corporate Wokeness

A Harvard Business Review article from earlier this year conducted an admittedly limited survey of consumers’ views of when corporations engage in political activity. It found Democrats are much more intolerant of corporations that engage in conservative activism than are Republicans toward corporations that engage in liberal activism. ...

Nevertheless, the message to corporate America has been clear: Liberal activism doesn’t cost anything, while even latent conservatism might result in boycotts and media frenzies. In the face of this asymmetric intolerance, corporations rationally take the path of least resistance and slide into corporate leftism.

It turns out a great many of the baffling frustrations Americans feel — from Nike paying Kaepernick millions, to Hollywood bowing to Chinese censors, to China holding an undue and sinister influence over the World Health Organization (WHO) — may be explained by a simple axiom: “The Most Intolerant Wins.” As we’ve seen in Hollywood, the media, Big Tech, and now the World Health Organization, often the most intolerant is China.

In his 2018 book “Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life,” statistician, options trader, and professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb includes a chapter titled “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority,” in which he explains this widely applicable premise. For instance, peanuts aren’t found in most schools and airplanes. Someone with a peanut allergy will not consume products that touch peanuts, but someone without the allergy can easily eat foods without peanut traces in them. The most intolerant wins.

Taleb closes his chapter writing, “Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meeting, academic conferences, and polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere. And asymmetry is present in about everything.”
China’s Bullying of Corporate America

The “Most Intolerant Wins” explains why China has been able to meld global institutions and corporate America. Hollywood cuts scenes, radically changes plots, and doesn’t release entire movies because China is much more intolerant than America. Not only will China not show an offending film, the filmmaking company, such as Walt Disney, risks being cut out of China altogether for even the smallest perceived offense. ...

Corporate mainstream media has taken to repeating Chinese propaganda, saying China is handling the Wuhan virus better than America and that it is “racist” to attribute the pandemic to the ineptitude, corruption, and possibly even ill intent of China’s government. ...

Conservatives attribute this media malpractice to Trump Derangement Syndrome, but it has been going on long before President Donald Trump entered the scene. It’s also largely due to the most intolerant also winning in the media.

Michael Bloomberg has openly admitted that Bloomberg News censors stories embarrassing to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) due to business concerns. For example, in 2013, Bloomberg News killed a story about the massive and ill-gotten wealth of CCP officials. Then it fired the reporter behind the story and tried to silence his wife. ...

How Does One Combat the Intolerant Minority?

How, then, does one combat the “Dictatorship of the Small Minority”? One possibility is out-intolerating the intolerant. For example, America could try to emulate China’s intransigence, although this may be hard to do across the board given our freedom-loving inherent nature, which is also a great strength. ...

Another step is to name and shame those who bend to an unpopular minority, especially the CCP. “Whores of China,” or WOCs, is a suggested epitaph. But both of these strategies may be ineffective in the long run, especially when combatting against strong financial incentives the CCP provides to those who would bend and break. ...

Amazon and the Washington Post shouldn’t be co-owned. Nor should CNN be part of AT&T.

We need a “Glass-Steagall” for our press. Congress should look into requiring news media corporations to be standalone enterprises, separate from entertainment media companies and with limits on shareholders who have other interests. This is in the spirit of the First Amendment, not in conflict with it.

Likewise, the U.S. government should crack down on Chinese investment in U.S. movies. The government may think of imposing restrictions on the “export” of films to China. This is entirely warranted because we are in no less than a cold war. It’s baffling that people obsessed over Russia when China literally controls the movies we watch.

Finally, the ultimate removal of the perverse incentive to take the path of least resistance will require systematically cutting ties between China and the United States. This means ensuring the independence of our health-care supply chains and onshoring much else. We should pursue something the Japanese are doing: paying manufacturers to bring jobs out of China and back to America.

For now, the first step is to use the disinfectant of sunlight on those who have bowed to China’s intolerance. Congressional hearings would be a start.