Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke Speaks Out Against Woke Capitalism.
Business Insider reports that the CEO of the e-commerce platform Shopify, Tobi Lütke, recently sent a letter to the entire staff reasserting the company’s commitment to competitive enterprise and rejecting calls for it to embrace social activism. In an age when woke politics are increasingly infecting corporate America, he wanted to “remind everyone that we are a business,” and, “more importantly, a hugely ambitious one.”
“We are trying to create a world class product that gives superpowers to the merchants that we are obsessed over,” Lütke wrote. “Everything Shopify does is to accomplish this, and everyone at Shopify should be able to describe how their job, through a series of direct or indirect steps, furthers this mission.”
“Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family,” he continued. “The very idea is preposterous. You are born into a family. You never choose it, and they can’t un-family you. The dangers of ‘family thinking’ are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go. Shopify is a team, not a family.”
“We cannot solve every societal problem here,” Lütke warns. “Shopify’s worldview is well documented—we believe in liberal values and equality of opportunity. Sometimes we see opportunities to help nudge these causes forward. We do this because this directly helps our business and our merchants and not because of some moralistic overreach.”
Related: Woke Capitalism: Hit Back Twice as Hard.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: ‘Woke’ Values Boomerang on Coca-Cola.
A new poll by Rasmussen Reports finds that by a 3–1 margin, respondents oppose major businesses taking a highly visible role in influencing politics. That may explain why Rasmussen found that 37 percent of Americans are less likely to buy Coca-Cola products in the wake of all these headlines.
Last month, Senator Rand Paul and former president Donald Trump called for a boycott of Coca-Cola products over its role in fighting a new Georgia election-integrity bill. Legal groups denounced Bradley Gayton, Coca-Cola’s general counsel and an architect of its “woke” strategy, for ordering at least 30 percent of the company’s outside legal billings go to “diverse attorneys, and of such amounts at least half will be from Black attorneys.”
The headaches proved to be too much. As Dan McLaughlin reported on NRO last month, Coca-Cola was conspicuously absent from a list of companies that had met to discuss sanctions against Georgia. “It’s time to find common ground,” the company said in a statement. “In the end, we all want the same thing — free and fair elections.” Within days, it was announced that Gayton was leaving his post to become a “strategic consultant.” His replacement said the firm was “taking a pause” on controversial diversity initiatives.
Related: Woke Capitalism: Hit Back Twice as Hard. Consumers Research “have issued a set of 30-second spots calling out corporate virtue signalers like Nike, Woka-Cola, and American Airlines for their blatant hypocrisy and woke grandstanding. I like how they name names (the CEOs).” Videos at link.
More from Kurt Schlichter: People Are Getting Tired of Woke Nonsense.
We may have reached peak woke recently when some doctor got in a Twitter huff because a peasant of pallor did not detect the MD lurking within her, and this is a very good thing. This kind of foolishness will help us sooner consign wokeness to the fiery dumpster of history. The moral bankruptcy of wokeness should lead to its demise, but the abject stupidity of it might just kill it off first.
Now, the tale is as tiresome as you can imagine – apparently a “middle aged white woman” heir to Bull Connor – who was a Democrat – dared to ask the finicky physician if Her Medical Majesty worked at the store they were both shopping in and thereby assumed that Dr. Brittani James was a mere retail worker. I know, right?
No, it could not have been an innocent mistake – Occam’s Razor is racist too, apparently. Instead, this was clearly a hate crime that harkened back to the olden days, when bands of hooded Democrats with torches would ride the countryside, terrorizing black folks by asking them if they could supersize the Klansmen’s happy meals. Move over, Harriet Tubman, Fussy James has a real tale of racial oppression to tell. I bet a movie chronicling her trauma would win Best Picture; acting legend Nick Searcy could appear as the therapist who helps her move past the pain.
Related: To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are.
h/t Ed Driscoll