ESCAPE FROM PROGRESSIVILLE

I had a terrible nightmare last night. 

I dreamt I was living in a strange dystopian city called Progressiville where thousands of innocent children were having their genitals surgically removed and old ladies were imprisoned for timeworn tweets while gang rapists were freed to make room for TV licence dodgers. It was weird. Everyone had their own nonsensical pronoun and a global HR department, high on a new kind of McCarthyism, ruled the world. The city centre was overrun with blue haired non-binaries daubing businesses with orange paint, toppling statues and throwing soup at works of art. The streets were lined with tents for drug addled zombies bent double in hallucinogenic stupors while menacing youths waved giant machetes amid the haze of dope that permeated the air. Suddenly, a howling gang of looters burst from a moribund department store, arms full of Nike sneakers only to make their getaway past a row of multicoloured ‘Be Kind’ posters pasted over old advertisements. The city was completely lawless as the police had been defunded and were only permitted to observe the chaos as they drove past impotently in their garish rainbow liveries. I ran indoors to escape the madness but every TV programme warned me of some impending doom I was partly responsible for, or berated me for being overly privileged. I switched to the Disney channel in the hope of some family-friendly entertainment but all I could find was Ms Marvel a film about a Muslim teen superhero or She-Hulk: the adventures of a bright green man-bashing lawyer.

You guessed it. I awoke I in a sweat only to realise it was in fact all reality, if a somewhat cartoon version. 

French miserabilists, Foucault and Derrida, must be looking down on us, smiling knowingly. The virus they unleashed upon us, catalysed by university academics with gargantuan shoulder chips, has infected the West to the point that phrases such as ‘cultural appropriation’ ‘diversity is our strength’ ‘systemic racism’ ‘toxic masculinity’ ‘my truth’ and ‘cancel culture’ have slipped neatly into our daily lexicon. We know how we got here: In short, the rich West tormented with guilt and privilege has embraced every stupid idea that promised to punish it a little in some vain attempt to level the playing field. A kind of reset I suppose.

Well, tides turn and like some divine intervention things are shifting much faster and more graphically than I could ever have predicted. A year ago, if I’d suggested that Mark Zuckerberg would be sacking his DEI department and replacing Nick Clegg with UFC CEO Dana White you’d have thought I’d lost my mind. That’s like a remake of Bambi with King Kong as the lead part ffs. His Joe Rogan podcast was nothing short of a religious confessional and is deeply significant. Sporting a gold medallion and 70s perm, Zuck chatted enthusiastically about martial arts and how masculine aggression and energy is a good thing for business. A damascene conversion if ever there was one. And there’s certainly lots of evidence that points to testosterone levels being directly linked to entrepreneurship in both men and women. Yes folks, testosterone has had a rough time of it lately but, like perms and medallions, it seems to be coming back into fashion.

In the last few weeks alone we’ve witnessed super-activist AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) dropping pronouns from her bio, and a multitude of mega-corporations including Google, Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s, Ford, John Deere, Harley Davidson, Jack Daniel’s, Molson Coors, Lowe’s and Toyota backing away from, or at least loosening, their DEI policies. Trudeau has resigned, Pope Francis had the epiphany that much of the news we rely on is fake and dare I mention that the very breeding ground of much of this woke culture is currently battling fires of Biblical proportions. You couldn’t make it up.

Meanwhile, here in cowering Britain our awakening won’t arrive for another four or five years, but arrive it will. 

Over the last decade I’ve noticed how the companies I work with have changed. In meetings and brainstorms I can sense that people are scared to speak out, challenge ideas or simply tell the truth. Primed to take offence at every opportunity they appear visibly terrified of suggesting something that might not be ‘inclusive’. It’s as if our businesses are inadvertently mirroring the technocratic model of government: sticking firmly to the narrative and ignoring or censuring contrarian ideas. Our entrepreneurial sprit has become diminished amid of fog of pessimism and a storm of acronyms (ESG, DEI, CRT). Moral relativism and identity politics have pushed us to the brink.

So when you read that Starmer is contemplating turning pub landlords into Maoist informants don’t get too upset. See it as the swan song of tyranny: the last vestiges of a technocratic authoritarianism that failed us. As it always does. The backlash is sure to be beautiful.

Let’s hope that in 2025, like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, this soul destroying, business despising culture war comes to an end and we finally get to escape from Progressiville. 

Happy new year!

Howard Saunders is a writer, speaker and The Retail Futurist

howard@22and5.com

theretailfuturist.com

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  Howard Saunders   Jan 16, 2025   Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More

BEYOND THE MELTDOWN

Since November 6th some of my closest friends have been looking decidedly glum. A few of the angrier ones have even stopped tweeting on X as if to teach Elon Musk a lesson. I’m sure he’s gutted. In TikTok-land there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of women shaving their heads and announcing a four year long sex strike as part of the 4B movement. But social media rants have one thing in common: they require carefully placed phones on mini tripods and editing before these ‘impromptu’ blood curdling outbursts can be published. Outrage has to be pretty professional these days.

Over on CNN and MSNBC they simply cannot believe how out of touch they are with their populous. Surely, it can only have been Russian propaganda that misled their people so badly. As leaders of the outraged community the mainstream media’s response has been to double down on the Hitler! rhetoric. The response from the demos was to switch off. 

According to Newsweek “CNN’s coverage of the historic election was co-anchored by presenters Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper, with 5.1 million viewers tuning in to watch the network’s linear TV coverage of the night, a 44% decline in total viewers compared with the 2020 election” while MSNBC’s viewing figures have plunged by 54% since that fateful night.

This is payback for the culture of lies they built for us over the last decade. The culture of lies that told us again and again that Biden was cognitively at his best ever…until he wasn’t and they hooked him away like a pantomime baddie. The same culture of lies that told us Kamala was the most articulate and ‘joyful’ candidate, that the vaccines were safe and effective, that masks protected us, that the climate emergency is our greatest threat and increasing taxes will help make it go away, that inflation is down, that DEI and ESG make businesses more profitable, that children are often born in the wrong bodies, that humans can flip sexes (even though there are 98 new ones now)…the list of lies is endless and ever increasing.

But it’s all fake. Just like the vloggers setting up their phones and carefully editing their outrage, it’s all faux. It’s not with hindsight that we know Harris was a faux candidate pushed into the role when Biden went gaga. Everyone knew she was a puppet of the big state but kept schtum for the greater good. I’ve yet to meet anyone who thought she would really be in charge if she won. We lied to ourselves in the hope that it would eventually become the truth.

History will show that our culture of lies was turbo charged by the pandemic. We’ve just lived through a kind of post lockdown lunacy that saw: men boxing women, children identifying as wolves, gender affirming mastectomies, violent riots labelled ‘mostly peaceful’, male rapists in female prisons, nonsensical pronouns, cancel culture, maths and literacy called racist, language police, taking the knee, Facebook and Twitter colluding with the FBI, statue toppling, history rewriting, Nazis on every street corner and an epidemic of children born in the wrong body.

Perhaps more worrying, beneath these more memorable lowlights there grew a sinister culture of guilt that permeated every aspect of society. Guilt that warned us off eating meat, going on holiday, driving, flying, bathing, keeping warm, wishing for a better standard of living, buying and consuming almost everything, including gas, petrol, diesel, fashion and, of course, plastic. This was devastating for retail, a sector that was forced to juggle with the hypocrisy of sustainability at the same time as importing endless quantities of stuff we don’t need on diesel powered cargo ships. We cannot blame them for this. It’s what we demanded of them, after all. But all this hypocrisy, all this faux virtue signalling, all the lying to ourselves for the greater good has left the western world in a constant state of unease.

Then on the morning of November 6th, like an hysterical blonde in a 1940s film noir, we found ourselves on the receiving end of a sharp, politically incorrect slap across our pretty chops. Instantly, the smug smiles were wiped off the faces of Colbert, Kimmel, Degeneres and their like. It was also a much overdue slap across the face of the faux-journalists, the professional delusionists, the gender-provocateurs, the autogynephiliacs (Google it) and the normalcy deniers. Most significantly perhaps, it was a timely wake up call for stars like Clooney, Beyonce, Cardi B, J Lo, Swift, Oprah and Eminem who pocketed millions for endorsements that turned out to be completely and utterly valueless. (Paid for, incidentally by ten dollar donations from the middle classes. This is Robin Hood in a very warped parallel universe indeed.) Faux celebrity endorsement is well and truly dead.

The tide has turned.

Deny it if you must, but America is poised to race ahead of sclerotic, over regulated Europe as never before. The billionaire bulls have taken over the china shop and they will smash regulation and slash the parasitic NGOs, the lobbyists and the tax-bloated layers of hidden government that have held back growth for so long. They will cut taxes, reintroduce world fairs and build rocket ships to Mars. Compare that to our bureaucratic managed decline. Just imagine how small Sir Keir will look standing on his tired old wobbly platform of tax and spend in order to piss it away on net zero and Ed’s twenty billion pound ‘dream catcher’ (Thanks to Tim Stanley for that analogy)

Elon puts it beautifully: it’s no longer about the right versus the left. It’s the expansionists versus the extinctionists now.

In the short term we can expect the left to double down on its extinctionist policies. Europe’s leaders will be keener than ever to punish us with pay per mile and other punitive initiatives, taxes and regulations for the greater good. But in a few years it will simply look and feel out of sync with the leader of the western world. There’s even a chance that Germany can pull itself away from its suicidal trajectory. My guess, for that is my job after all, is that within three years if you or your business are still proponents of preferred pronouns you will be seen as an outlier, clinging onto the post lockdown years. It’s not that we’ll hate you, far from it, it’s that we’ll feel sorry for you like we do for those weirdos that still insist on wearing masks on the underground.

Already in the US, Target has brought back Merry Christmas signs to replace the Happy Holidays nonsense. Boots’ new Christmas ad looks old fashioned and unnecessarily guilty. Jaguar’s ridiculously woke rebranding has sparked a mighty social media piss-take. Guilt is finally in retreat. I believe there will be a cultural race back to sanity led by brands keen to tear off their hair shirts and grow once again. 

Ultimately, what the extinctionists fear the most is not that the new Hitler is planning the next holocaust. No, their worst nightmare is that Trump and his X men will actually succeed in boosting the prosperity and morale of the deplorables. That’s when we’ll see some genuine outrage.

Merry Christmas.

Howard Saunders is a writer, speaker & Retail Futurist 

howard@22and5.com

Join me on X  @retailfuturist  for proof that we’re all going to hell in a handcart, but having fun on route.

  Howard Saunders   Nov 22, 2024   Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More