The right has this slogan “Get woke, go broke” but it is completely wrong. The slogan is basically a call for a boycott, to socially shun companies that promote “woke products”. Yet who practices social shunning, a feminine sanction? Well, the left. It is the leftist activist who says there needs to be a boycott of Diane’s luncheonette until 30% of the staff are black, just like 30% of the town’s population. The right is the side that says, “If you don’t like it, don’t go there. No need to make a fuss.” Similarly, if you just want to buy Exil motor oil but Exil motor oil now has a big rainbow LGBT flag on it, then who cares? The right is phlegmatic, not neurotic—it’s the neurotic person who would say, “OMG, I can’t bear to look at an LGBT flag on my motor oil. Do something.”
Hence right-wing people are never going to boycott anything, especially on ideological grounds, because they are too thick-skinned to care that much—they are not activists, that’s why they’re on the right. The very word “boycott” comes from the left: it originates in the 1880s, though the concept is hardly new, from a move by the Irish Land League to “boycott” Captain Charles Boycott. So this tactic comes from the left, from people who are against property; hence it cannot really be deployed by the right.
So why do rightists say it? Partly, it’s to rally people together—after all, you have to say something. Rightists also tend to threaten and menace people, mainly because they’re like a man who has reacted to an imposition: “Get clever with me one more time, buddy…” Even Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech was the ultimate version of this “caution”. Finally, I think “get woke” is whistling in the dark, the vain hope “woke companies” will go bust because the market will correct itself; and yet it is the state that makes them woke, and it never goes bust…