Incredulous: leftwing reporter wonders ‘what the hell’ a ‘woke bank’ is
A huge shout out to Whizy Kim at Vox, who just inadvertently validated what conservatives have been saying all along: leftism begets catastrophe.
Andy Kessler of The Wall Street Journal recently speculated that maybe, just maybe, Silicon Valley Bank “may have been distracted by diversity demands.” (You can find the bank’s “wokesterly profile” by Monica Showalter here.)
That speculation was enough to send Vox writer Kim into a tizzy, and yesterday, the outlet released her article inquiring as to “what the hell” a “woke bank” was.
(I’d refer Ms. Kim to Showalter’s essay above, or Showalter’s latest, here.)
Kim dismissed the idea that “woke” policies could affect profits and sound financial decisions, declaring “woke” nothing more than the “favorite boogeyman” of conservatives; she even included a quote from an SVB patron who, in response to Kessler’s postulation said:
It’s just the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard….
But do I think tech or finance is getting too woke? No. I don’t think it’s woken up[.]
Although Kim’s 1,704-word exhibition of folly made for absurd comedy and good ammunition, one passage in particular stuck out:
It’s unlikely that the SVB board was ‘distracted’ by diversity and inclusion when, by Kessler’s own admission, the board was still mostly male and mostly white, indicating no real departure from the status quo in board rooms across the financial sector.
Stuck in such a limiting and myopic worldview, Kim swings for the “right” crowd, and completely misses.
Again, a thought I so often think: “I don’t get what they don’t get.”
I would consider myself within the target audience at which she directs her derision, so I feel comfortable saying that I’m pretty sure when conservatives warned of “wokeism” in the institutions, especially the financial ones, we weren’t talking about biological sex or skin color. There’s this really unique thing about conservatism and capitalism in particular where we value ideas that will yield profits rather than immutable human traits. Of course, Thomas Sowell put it most eloquently when he said:
Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.
‘Oh those stupid conservatives! They decry diversity, but the joke is on them! SVB is largely directed by White males! Yahtzee!’
The part that Kim is missing? The very crux of the argument constantly made by conservative thinkers? It’s the leftism that’s the problem. These executives who screwed the pooch are mostly White and male, but they’re White, leftist, males. Their bad ideas and terrible financial choices weren’t a symptom of their skin color or their chromosomes, but arose from arrogant ignorance and utter ineptitude.
To add to it, Kim states that the executive makeup of the SVB board room is “no real departure from the status quo” in the rest of the white-collar financial world…no wonder the economy and our pocketbooks are in such dire straits — leftism is a rancid weltanschauung that turns everything to steaming excrement.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.