The latest foray into this is from Starbucks. A recent ad from the Seattle coffee giant shows a husband and wife waiting at a Starbucks for their adult son to arrive. The two seem tense, the husband tensest of all, while the wife looks at him with a mix of imploring and pity. The husband calls his son, and the man's face and his male name are visible on the iPhone screen.
If you've got any ad savvy at all, it's clear what's coming next. When their son does arrive, he is outwardly feminine presenting, and trans. He adjusts his red dress with a sweetheart neckline, removes his purse, and sits across from his father.
The next moment is the tearjerker, where the son tells the father how much he is valued and loved, with the undercurrent of "despite everything," and it's clear that the father has overcome some great hurdle by agreeing to meet with the son at all, in what is surprisingly a very clear Starbucks.
The message of the ad is give up your beliefs and the beliefs of your culture, accept your trans kid, and of course drink more Starbucks coffee. This is the message of so many American brands as they export not only their products to the global marketplace, but a collection of values and ideas that appear to be representative of Western values, but are really a conglomeration of corporatist progressive talking points delivered at the sharp end of a coffee grinder.
The only problem is that the world does not want the woke, progressive ideology the US is pushing. #BoycottStarbucks began trending on Twitter, and Indian social media users also spoke out against it, just Americans began speaking out against Bud Light following their attempt to lure in new drinkers by partnering with trans TikToker Dylan Mulvaney, who lounged in a bath, in pearls and bikini, swilling from the can of beer with his face emblazoned upon it.
Americans don't want this virtue signaling nonsense and neither do Indians, that's plainly clear. But while companies are exporting woke nonsense in advertising, the United Nations and the United States are linking their vast international funding with the perpetration of woke ideology, including requirements for abortion and gender ideology.
In 2019 I attended the UN Commission on the Status of Women. As women stood up to speak about their concerns for what they saw as the growing erasure of women under rapidly moving gender ideology that threatened to take over the language women used to describe themselves, women's access to healthcare, sports, and safe, sex-segregated spaces, a woman who spoke about the condition of women in Kenya was particularly striking to me.
Ann Mutave Kioko, the regional campaigns manager for CitizenGO in Africa, member of the board of Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops Family Life Commission, and a co-founder of Africa Organization for Families, spoke about the United Nations and US push for abortion access for women in her nation. Kioko said that Kenyan women want access to food, electricity, good schools, clean water, accessible hospitals, and proper plumbing. But what she said the UN and the US were pushing with their funding was abortion and hormonal birth control.
"Every girl has a right to life from conception to natural death," Kioko said, expressing the values of many of her countrywomen, on whose behalf she was speaking. Instead of providing these requested basics, Kioko said that the UN was actually distributing pamphlets on abortion and hormonal birth control to Kenyan schools, sexualizing children without parental consent or even their awareness. This is, at this point and regrettably, commonplace in the US, but for Kioko, these were values that were neither shared nor wanted by Kenyan women.
She expressed her concern that the UN and the US were distributing values, a relativist morality that advocates for sexual pleasure without responsibility, and that these top-down approaches and false equivalencies were not effective solutions, but instead were hindering the progress for women and girls in her village and others across Kenya.
All of this–the push for abortion, gender ideology, corporatist woke and relativist values– are part of the new colonization by the West. No longer armed with bibles and the urge to convert people to the eternal salvation of Jesus Christ, the push now is to convert people into gender ideology, an anti-racism that elevates oppression and victimization, abortion as "care," a belief that nuclear families are problematic, among other looming dictates.
The woke ideologues, for lack of a better term, likely view those in Kioko's Kenyan village who do not look to disrupt family creation, as well as citizens in India, across Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and other locales the Christian missionaries would have seen as backward, as do their contemporary woke brethren, as backwards.
There are values that it is worthwhile for the US to export–freedom, liberty, individual rights, equality under the law, due process–but not gender ideology, abortion, or the destruction of families.
