A note before this one. The clip I’m responding to comes from a reaction video I otherwise want nothing to do with, built around unverified abuse allegations against a real person and dressed up in the kind of language I’m not going to reproduce here. I’m not endorsing that video, I’m not fact checking its central drama, and I’m not interested in re-litigating it. One sentence in the middle of it is worth pulling out and answering on its own, because it’s a real argument, made in bad company, and it deserves a response sharper than the company it kept. (video stem: watch?v=3yJZ99tjdrk)

Here’s the full passage, worth quoting in whole because the shorthand version going around online loses the actual structure of the claim. “This is like what I was saying before about how woke ideology would not be possible without capitalism. Like if you look at, for example, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, all of the countries that really aren’t very capitalist. None of them are woke. They’re not even remotely close to being woke. Look, capitalism enables wokeness. If you didn’t have capitalism, none of this garbage would be happening. It would have never even been allowed to happen.”

That’s a real claim with a real structure. Capitalism, he’s saying, is a necessary condition. Take it away and the entire apparatus of trans rights, DEI, identity politics, all of it, stops being possible. His evidence is three countries that supposedly prove it by their absence.

Start with the evidence, because it falls apart before the argument even gets going. Saudi Arabia is not a country that lacks capitalism. Saudi Aramco is a publicly traded oil company worth well over a trillion dollars, the kingdom runs on private wealth accumulation, foreign investment, and a sovereign wealth fund buying up stakes in video game companies and English football clubs. China abandoned its command economy decades ago and now runs one of the largest markets on earth, with a stock exchange, a real estate sector that nearly took down the global economy in 2021, and more billionaires than most capitalist democracies can produce. Two of his three examples are capitalist economies. The claim doesn’t survive its own citations.

What Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia actually share isn’t an absence of markets. It’s an absence of the right to organize against the state. All three jail journalists. All three ban independent labor unions. All three criminalize or heavily restrict religious minorities, feminist organizing, and opposition press alongside anything resembling LGBTQ visibility. If you wanted to isolate the variable that predicts whether a country has space for identity-based movements, it isn’t whether people can own property or start a business. It’s whether people are allowed to assemble, publish, and organize without the state deciding the outcome in advance. That’s not an economic system. That’s a civil liberty, and it’s one authoritarian states of every economic stripe have gone out of their way to eliminate.

The cleanest way to see this is a case his own argument requires him to explain and can’t. Cuba is not a capitalist economy by any definition anyone uses. It’s a one-party socialist state with a command economy, a government that has spent sixty years defining itself in explicit opposition to markets. In September 2022, Cuba held a national referendum on a new Family Code, and it passed by a two to one margin, legalizing same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, and surrogacy, with the government campaigning for it. That happened without capitalism. It happened with the opposite of capitalism, actively pushing for the outcome he says capitalism alone makes possible. If capitalism is the necessary ingredient, Cuba shouldn’t exist as a counterexample. It does.

None of this means capitalism is innocent in the story of how identity politics gets marketed, diluted, and sold back to people as a rainbow logo every June. That’s a different critique and it’s one worth making. But “capitalism enables wokeness” and “capitalism successfully commodifies wokeness” are not the same claim, and only one of them survives contact with a map. The first one is what he said. The second one is the argument he could have made if he’d looked at his own examples for longer than it took to name them.

There’s a smaller point sitting inside the larger one, and I want to name it before I let this go. Watch enough of this genre and a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with capitalism enabling or not enabling wokeness. It’s the mix, inside the same fifteen minutes, of prurient fascination with the details of someone’s transition and open contempt for the person going through it. The photo gets paused and zoomed. The nail polish gets narrated like evidence. The pronouns get mocked in one breath and the audience gets told to feel bad for the kid in the next, as if concern and cruelty were the same gesture. All of it is content, timed and cut for watch time, produced by people who will then turn around and blame capitalism for making any of this culturally possible, while capitalism is the exact thing paying their electric bill for staring and sneering at a stranger’s life in sixty second increments. Nobody making that video is proving capitalism enables wokeness. They’re proving capitalism enables them, specifically, to monetize someone else’s body and be paid for the privilege of hating it out loud. That’s not a footnote. That’s probably a small book on its own.