Corporate Cowardice, Government Surveillance, and the Creeping Fascism
Matt Smith: Doug, I’ve failed to keep up with the constant firehose of news—or more accurately, disinformation and noise—so I don’t have a long list today. But I know there were a few things that caught your attention.
Doug Casey: Well, it’s not that I’ve researched them. They are things that I’ve absorbed almost by osmosis. News items float like a layer of scum on the cesspool of media. However, a couple of things have risen to the top and were drawn to my attention.
Number one, there’s a very cute actress named Sydney Sweeney —blonde, blue-eyed, shapely. She was contracted by American Eagle to model their denim. She was featured in ads emphasizing her assets. The copy was, “Our jeans are good genes”, a pun on jeans as in blue jeans and genes as in genetic makeup.
The interesting thing is that it caused the stock of the company—American Eagle—to go from $10 to $12 overnight. It became a meme stock because of the ads that it ran.
It was a relief, finally, to see a good-looking white girl peddling jeans. I thought they’d been banned.
Matt Smith: Reminded me of something straight out of the 1990s.
Doug Casey: It was great. Now, you’d think any corporate management with half a brain would say, “Wait a minute, the market likes this approach. It helped our stock price, and maybe people will actually buy our jeans because they want to look like Sydney Sweeney.”
But no. What did they do? Defying logic, they pulled the ad because the usual suspects—leftists, Wokesters, and other psychological criminals—started howling, “Oh, this is racist, sexist, Nazi-adjacent, blah, blah, blah.” And they pulled the ad.
Lau Vegys, who writes Crisis Investing for us, did a very nice article about this (LINK).
It turns out that when DEI was popular a few years ago, the gutless corporate whores at American Eagle ran an ad featuring a morbidly obese black woman who looked like a whale, a rhino, or a hippo got stuffed into a pair of their jeans.
I mean, what’s the matter with these people? Who wants to emulate somebody that physically degraded?
I despise corporate America for all kinds of reasons—but not least because they’re stupid and self-destructive.
Matt Smith: And completely spineless.
They found something that worked—it literally added 20% to the company’s market cap overnight—and they still caved. The stock’s now come down a bit from the peak. It’s still above where it started, but it’s drifting back down… around $11.25 last I looked.
Doug Casey: I think the stock is headed way down, because the market will realize that these people are stupid, dishonest, weak—and cowardly.
Matt Smith: You’d think profit motive would eventually kick in, but most of these executives are comfortable. They’re raking in big salaries, sitting on boards, collecting stock options. They’re not trying to win—they’re trying not to lose. No guts, no conviction.
Doug Casey: I think the managements of almost all corporations are like that. Other than founding entrepreneurs, who are in a different breed of cat, the people who rise to the top climb the corporate ladder by backslapping and backstabbing, not by being productive and creative.
Matt Smith: Their goal is to avoid mistakes, which means avoiding risk, which means avoiding value creation. The whole system rewards mediocrity.
Doug Casey: They’re basically bureaucrats. The people running large corporations could just as easily work for the government. We have a revolving door between big corporations and the government. They’re the same damn people.
It makes sense on every level. Government drones, corporate ladder-climbers—the same people.
Matt Smith: And we’re watching that convergence accelerate. The corporate state is merging with the actual state. It’s not theoretical anymore—it’s just happening.
Doug Casey: It’s further reason to believe that we’re watching the continuing collapse of Western civilization.
Matt Smith: Sure looks that way. But it was still refreshing—briefly—to see something authentic sneak through.
Doug Casey: An ad featuring a healthy, good-looking girl who— unbelievably—was white with blue eyes on top of it all. Oh, can’t have that. Better strike that.
Matt Smith: Hopefully she’s not straight. That would really be the final straw—white, blonde, and straight.
Doug Casey: I’ll conjecture that she’s straight because there’s no hint of purple hair, hostility, or craziness about her in those pictures.
Matt Smith: Another thing I know was on your radar: the “success” of the tariffs. Lutnick’s saying they’re pulling in $700 billion a year if you annualize it.
Doug Casey: And he’s presenting this as a good thing. But it’s not. If he’s right, these tariffs will bring in $700 billion a year to the enemy, the State. But I don’t think he’ll be nearly as right as he thinks. The tariffs will severely reduce economic activity and prosperity. Giving the State more power, more assets—which have been extracted from the American people—is destructive.
He’s selling that as a
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
