Jaguar Pushes the Woke Self-Destruct Button

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.