Target Pride

Stefan Padfield: Corporate America’s Radicalization Enabled by True Believers, Useful Idiots, Opportunists and Cowards

It’s been a few months since Target and Anheuser-Busch set billions of dollars of shareholders’ money on fire because someone convinced them pushing transgenderism on kids is “the right thing for society” — but you may still be trying to understand what went wrong at those companies in the first place. To provide some relevant perspective, consider the following.

Stefan Padfield

Stefan Padfield

First, note what Paul Kengor said about the Marxist roots of attacks on traditional family values:  “Marx and Engels… realized that you had to take down the most element things: God, private property, marriage and family.”

Second, note the following from The Nation: “Arguably the most infamous demand of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ is the ‘abolition of the family.’ … Radical queer politics … added … their critique … when activists challenged the heteronormativity of familial relations.”

Third, note that in “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,” Stephen Soukup relates the following about the indoctrination practices of Gyorgy Lukacs, “the deputy people’s commissar for education and culture in the new Hungarian Soviet Republic” of the 1910s:

“Special lectures were organized … to ‘instruct’ children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children (were) urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority.    Are you starting to sense a theme? If so, that’s arguably because you are seeing the specter haunting America right now — the specter of radical leftism. This specter’s ideological roots trace back to the specter of communism that haunted Europe and much of the rest of the world from the Bolshevik revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. Though tens of millions of people have been murdered, imprisoned and tortured under the banner of communist ‘equity’ — nonetheless today’s specter of radical leftism again promises utopian outcomes because we’ll finally have the ‘right’ experts in charge.”

But the specter of radical leftism today, just like the specter of communism that gave birth to it, is doomed to fail. It is doomed to fail because what it seeks is so contrary to human nature that only by concentrating all power of force into the state (or perhaps the right corporations) and terrorizing all who don’t comply can it force behaviors it deems socially just. This is true whether we are talking about demanding equality of outcomes in the face of natural individual differences, or demanding society ignore nature’s biological difference between men and women.

The believers in this radical leftism actively seek the complete destruction of all things that can divert a person’s loyalty from the God of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. With what can only be described as religious fervor, they assert unfalsifiable articles of faith about systemic racism, patriarchy, sexism and the ever-expanding list of intersectional identities oppressed by “Whiteness” or tradition. 

They expressly seek the destruction of traditional religion, traditional family and traditional capitalism (“stakeholder capitalism” is not capitalism).

The useful idiots in this revolution genuinely believe they are on the right side of history. They fail to realize that the ever-expanding circle of “oppressors” will inevitably swallow them. One example of this group may be the suburban moms who threw their support behind “antiracism” only to find that there is a direct line from the antiracism they were supporting to their daughters being forced to share locker rooms with biological males and their elementary schoolchildren being groomed for gender transformations behind their backs.

The opportunists include many corporate executives who — as Vivek Ramaswamy describes it in his book “Woke, Inc.” — saw an opportunity to avoid the pitchforks of Occupy Wall Street by exchanging support of wokeness for a redirection of the mob’s ire. Other corporate opportunists include the hucksters comprising the ESG industrial complex, pocketing profits from selling funds and services under the banner of “environmental, social and corporate governance.”

And finally, we have the cowards. They are afraid, and this is understandable. The cancel culture mob is no joke. It will try to destroy you. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that any cowards who failed to stand up to the radical leftist terrorists who preceded our current incarnation of the neo-Marxist mind virus would choose cowardice again.

Regardless, when the tide turns and the common sense of the common man inevitably prevails, all these types should expect to be held accountable for their role in the attacks on our country, our institutions and our children. Those who see the specter of radical leftism for what it is and who are willing to man the barricades against it are paying attention. While you won’t think of us as Santa Claus, we are keeping a list. The time to choose your side is now. Choose wisely.

Stefan Padfield is an associate at the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.