Yesterday, responding to my update about Disney’s big reorganization, an alert reader linked a recent Substack by El Gato Malo, a solid, reliable member of Team Reality, who opined that woke philosophy was finally dying, collapsing under the weight of its own irrationality and unpopularity.

Gato’s comments were provoked by a CEO Daily headline reading, “Tech Layoffs Are Disproportionately Hitting HR and DEI Teams. That Could Spell Trouble For Companies.” Poor DEI teams. Gato also contrasted Musk taking charge at Twitter and Bob Iger’s noisy return to Disney with the Washington Post’s obnoxious woke affirmative-action hire, Taylor Lorenz, whose personal Substack blew up on the launch pad this summer; nobody wanted to read it, apparently.

By way of explanation for woke’s fatal illness, Gato mused that woke is failing because it doesn’t make sense and cannot be defended. He explained, “the outlandish webs of special pleading required to hold these rube-goldberg philosophical contraptions together cannot stand up to even rudimentary scrutiny or interrogation.”

I agree with Gato, but for different reasons. I disagree that logic has anything to do with it. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that a large number of our fellow citizens don’t NEED a rational explanation for things, not even for life-and-death decisions. Give them a media-recognized authority and they’re happy to say whatever they’re told to say, wear whatever they’re told to wear, and inject whatever they’re told to inject.

These folks will defend the irrational, deny the obvious, and steadfastly refuse to listen to anything that challenges what they’ve been told by “officials.” As long as the government is pushing woke, they’ll be woke. It’s that simple. Something else is undermining woke, something more powerful than devotion to authority, and it is allowing things like the rise of free Twitter.

I think it’s the bad economy.

Wokeness is a luxury. While the rising tide of Trump’s economy was lifting ALL corporations, everyone was profitable, and so they were competed for big investor bucks using loopy “ESG” scores and woke signaling. But after two relentless years of Biden economics, supply chain problems, tumultuous domestic politics, and a hot proxy war, profits are tumbling. The problems were hidden under a government money drop for a while, but that part is over.

People won’t invest in companies that lose money, not for long, no matter how high their stupid ESG scores are. And at some point, the data begins to show an obvious correlation between poor financial performance and high ESG scores. In other words, we’ve almost reached the point that companies with high ESG scores can be assumed to be less profitable.

Plummeting profits trigger panic. And when a company is in crisis management mode, like Twitter or Disney, there’s no extra time for employees to attend weekly DEI training and there’s no extra money to staff useless, bloated Diversity Teams.

On an individual level, it’s easy to be woke while your parents (or the government) are funding your “college experience” and paying your share of the rent. But when the economy tightens up, and the river of money slows to a trickle, and suddenly you can’t afford the basics anymore, you’ll have to — and I know this is going to frighten some young people, I’m sorry — but you’ll have to get a JOB. Maybe two jobs.

And then you won’t have time to attend BLM rallies or protest statues or play at being a domestic terrorist. You’ll be bagging groceries and paying taxes instead. Try that for a while and see how liberal you are.

“Go woke, go broke.” It really is that simple. Money is what makes the world go around, and always has, since the first native polished a shell. Big woke corporations like Disney either thought ESG was really a thing now, or they were just going along with it, to stay out of the left’s crosshairs.

Think of it like this. Imagine a morbidly obese clown — that’s wokeness — riding a unicycle and tootling a horn. For a while, the unicycle can bear the clown’s obscene weight. But if you poke a hole in the tire while the clown isn’t looking, it’s only a matter of time before that clown isn’t riding the unicycle so much as rolling down the hill.

In other words, there’s a bright side to our economic problems. The economic problems will create different — better — incentives. Among other things, those incentives will require focusing on important stuff and not delusional philosophies like wokeness. We’re going to have a reset, all right, it just won’t be the reset they were planning on.

That fat, woke clown is coming down.