WOKE POLITICS IS THE STATE RELIGION OF THE OLIGARCHS: Why big business loves Black Lives Matter: No one should be surprised that BLM’s co-founder is buying million-dollar mansions. “Woke politics has also been useful for firms hiding all kinds of unsavoury practices. Many firms will proclaim allegiance to BLM one day, while lobbying against curbs on forced labour the next, for instance. Indeed, whether you take the Marxist view, that all firms in a capitalist system exploit labour anyway, or the Adam Smith view, that sellers in a marketplace act out of self-interest rather than kindness, it is surely hard to take any company’s proclamations of righteousness too seriously. But there is more to all this than cynicism and wokewashing. Many of the ideas about race being pushed by BLM – particularly the ubiquity of structural racism – are now part and parcel of corporate culture and the white-collar workplace. Race experts are invited to give workshops and training on diversity and inclusion. Employees are tested for their unconscious bias. An entire race industry worth billions has mushroomed. The most famous and sought-after race entrepreneurs, like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi, can earn vast sums of money in the corporate sector – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per hour. Those BLM protesters setting fire to police stations were not radical revolutionaries — they were more like the militant wing of the human-resources department.”