Woke is over, but not everyone has got the memo yet.
Keir Starmer will probably be the absolute last one to go. Hunched over in his bunker, spitting orders to a handful of desolate generals about a display on postcolonial history at a small Welsh museum.
And next to him will be Jaguar. The iconic company has chosen to ruin its logo, and release the most ill-judged advert since Bud Light decided what the hard-working American man would connect with was a mentally ill bloke pretending to be a little girl.
The ad is the kind of typical woke fare that we have endured for years, but which is now widely and aggressively hated by virtually everyone (at the time of writing it has 5.4k likes on X vs 40k replies, i.e., an extremely brutal ‘ratio’). Various gender non-conforming, mainly non-white people prance around in a manner Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada would tut at before instantly bankrupting the designer. No cars are featured.
Adverts are designed to tap into our psychology and emotions, and this certainly achieves that, though the feelings are predominantly anger and revulsion. We instantly read it as lecturing, anti-white and vaguely promoting gender surgery (one of the actors looks too much like the horrific photos we have seen of women who have been convinced to cut their breasts off). There’s also the added frustration that, even after the crushing defeat of woke that Trump’s victory partly represented, these companies continue with this kamikaze mission.
And it really does seem to be their mission. The Mail calls it “a radical electric rebrand that [Jaguar] concedes won’t appeal to the majority of its traditional customers”.
This ‘alienate your customers’ strategy seems like insanity to anyone who still believes companies are there only to make money. But as we now know, woke capitalism is about reinforcing the ideology of the Regime above all else. Destroying a beloved brand is just another sacrifice to the false god of Woke.
This isn’t necessarily a top-down directive, of course. As Auron McIntyre points out in his book The Total State (and my recent podcast), middle managers and ‘creatives’ at these corporations have their own goals, namely to pursue their own careers, which will inevitably mean transferring to other companies that also follow the same woke speech codes. Destroying the share price of their previous employer may not actually impact their career in the way that being caught with the ‘wrong’ views definitely would.
On that note, X has hit upon Santino Pietrosanti as the main culprit this time, much as Alissa Heinerscheid seemed to be to blame for the Bud Light fiasco. I have no idea if Pietrosanti is actually to blame, but he is described on Jaguar Land Rover’s website as “U.K. Brand Director”, and, as X has picked up on, was responsible for this incredibly woke speech at the Attitude Awards 2024.
Pietrosanti states that Jaguar is “committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive and unified culture that is representative not only of the people who use our products, but in a society in which we all live”.
Garbled syntax aside, the intention is clear: screw the customer, we have larger ideological goals.
Further proof of this mission could be found on X, where in response to one of the thousands of negative comments, Jaguar called the ad “a pivotal moment”, revealing it was immune to reality and very much high on its own supply. It also said it was a “declaration of intent”. That intent being, apparently, to destroy the company.
Elon Musk also weighed in, noting the lack of cars in the ad. While it was fun to see Elon violently ratio this woke garbage, oblique marketing is hardly new. I can live with a bit of pretension as long as it isn’t based on the assumption that I’m evil just for existing.
Still, car customers mainly want a cool looking car that performs well, so it would have been a good idea to put one in there, as this X user demonstrated by literally making a better ad (with far more likes) in minutes.
Woke is dead, I insist, and we are in the MAGA moment. But while the message has reached everywhere from John Lewis to Miss Universe (the former borrowing from C.S. Lewis’s magical wardrobe, the latter reverting to hot blonde girls) it will take a while to drain the swamp of woke self-satisfaction from every single company.
Their choice will be to adapt, or die in vain as woke martyrs.
This piece was first published on Nick Dixon’s Substack. You can subscribe here.
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Sadiq the LTN – Little Terrible Nuisance
Can’t scrap the lot though, can he? That would upset his C40 minders.
Lousy…
Restricting traffic in one area increases it in surrounding areas – only a conspiracy theorist would have predicted that. It’s almost as if the people using the roads all have very good reasons for doing so and are determined to make their journeys.
They should call it an STN…a slow traffic neighbourhood.
Since they like attributing individual deaths to motor vehicle pollution which people died because of these jams?
CORRECTION:
The only individual death ‘attributed to air pollution‘ in the entire world was based on unchallenged expert evidence: “Key witnesses to the Inquest, including Dr Claire Holman and Professor Sir Stephen Holgate, had expressed the need for setting health-based targets for air pollution reduction.”
With unchallenged expert evidence the Coroner has no choice but to accept it.
And the death was not “caused by” air pollution.
According to the Coroner, the death was caused by asthma. The child had extreme asthma.
So had the NHS investigated the causes of the child’s extreme asthma she and her family should have been rehoused away from the South Circular road in London:
“Ella died of asthma contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution.” “Ella’s mother “was not given information about the health risks of air pollution and its potential to exacerbate asthma”. The lack of information also possibly contributed to her death.”
So had the NHS investigated the causes of the child’s extreme asthma she and her family should have been rehoused away from the South Circular road in London.
And this does not seem to be correct: “Ella died of asthma contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution.”
A more accurate statement is “Ella died of asthma contributed to by exposure to air pollution which was excessive for someone with her particular extreme asthma.”
So when you read the ridiculous numbers of alleged air pollution deaths all based on ‘estimates’ none of them are real air pollution deaths but estimates based on the usual ‘modelling’ and epidemiology which we are all now so used to knowing we cannot trust.
The fact this is the only death worldwide attributed to air pollution should ring the alarm bells about citing this as evidence air pollution all by itself kills people.
It certainly used to when the main form of heating in london was open fires in people’s homes and the famous London ‘pea-souper’ fogs were part of daily life. But then we got legislation to clean everything up with smokeless fuels later followed by natural gas central heating.
Plus cars have catalytic converters to reduce emissions.
It has all gotten a lot better since the 1950s and earlier.
When I was young all the buildings in london were dark grey because they were covered in soot.
London now is unrecognisable. Take a look at some of the old movies on TV and check out the colour of the buildings compared to now.
One step back for the little tyrants. But they will now be planning how to turn it into a NTN …. no traffic neighbourhood.
Soon to be a “no-people-neighbourhood”.