This week I thought we'd talk about the world of American companies dicovering that going woke makes you go broke. It was recently the 4th of July and for several decades the most popular beer in the US was Budweiser, until this year when it didn't even make the top 10. This is all due to that Dylan Mulvaney nonsense where they rebranded the blue collar beer to specifically appeal to men who are also keen to advertise their love for transvesticism. The irony really is that they could have appealed to both sets of people if they'd used an old pic of Eric Idle dressed up and stuck some Monty Python quotes on the tins. Nonetheless this stuff is all the rage right now and despite the company losing tens of billions of dollars in less than 6 months, this month also saw Unilever let the Ben & Jerry brand announce that Mount Rushmore was a disgrace and that huge swathes of the mid west should be handed over to native tribes, which I guess is easy seeing as how none of that tribal land is located in upstate Vermont (where Ben & Jerry live) or Palo Alto. It has the intellectual integrity of me deciding to boycott nicoise salad or refuse to purchase ladies shoes.

More recently Natwest decided to cash in on both The Ashes as well as diversity by putting up a billboard saying "Cricket has no boundaries" It literally has boundaries. That's how you score points! More scarily, there was the issue that Coutts bank is a subsidiary of Natwest and Nigel Farage had his bank account closed. The bank put out a press statement claiming he didn't have enough money in it although this turned out to be a complete fabrication after a dossier was leaked, revealing that they just didn't like his anti-EU politics. This is one of these stories where you really have to argue it by asking what if it was someone else, if Jeremy Corbyn for instance had his electricity cut off all winter because none of the energy companies wanted to have him listed as a customer due to his views on renationalising the grid.

Other examples in recent years have been Gillette dropping their tagline "The Best a Man Can Get" before the accountants realised that most of their customers had a y-chromosome, or perhaps the removal of the Uncle Ben's Rice branding, which I still think was over an argument with the writers of Spiderman: Uncle Ben being a major character in that story, and not actually asian the last time I checked. One of the leading causes of the recent Titanic accident was the decision by the company to get rid of former royal navy staff-members because they were all white blokes in their 50s with far too much knowledge about submarine safety and nowhere near enough knowledge of useful things like the plight of North African migrants.

And yet despite this woke smokescreen, a woke-screen, the attitude is entirely duplicitous. Disney might be putting out films with homosexual characters but they re-film and reedit scenes when the films are sold to anywhere outside of the US or Europe. The Apple CEO Tim Cook will go on record about the appalling attitude to LGBT people in China, but he'll also manufacture more than 95% of Apple products there whilst occasionally putting out some rainbow themed social media posts. At a national level the US is even worse, pushing one set of morals domestically and another overseas. A good case in point could be Joe Biden who has gone on from playing that Banjo player in Deliverance to being President. A few years ago he said that the US had to reduce its carbon footprint and went on record saying that Saudi Arabia would "pay the price" for its poor human rights record before begging them to increase oil production. Of course, in reality they sided with Russia, cut production, bumped prices and and Biden voted to "impose consequences" before China brokered a deal, involving Iran as well as numerous human rights abuses. More recently the Saudis bought out the PGA golf tour, leaving those on the left to wonder whether they preferred traditional golf tournaments organised by Donald Trump or those organised by a country where putting a rainbow bumper sticker on your car is literally punishable by execution. The situation is so beyond parody at this stage that I'm genuinely waiting to see the Saudi's use of crucification being spun as an olive branch to Christians and a demonstration of the kingdom's religious tolerance and modernisation. Certainly that would be far less ridiculous than say Disney releasing Mary Poppins where the nanny is white and therefore evil, or whatever nonsense the house of mouse next has planned. Currently there is a version of Snow White being made where the character named after her skin as white as snow is played by a Colombian and the 7 Dwarves look like a pride rally in New York and are regular size, apparently because Peter Dinklage didn't understand that the dwarves in the story were the magical species from German folklore and not people afflicted by dwarfism. Who would have thought that Pinnochio telling lies would turn out to be more honest than the corporation itself.