Could Trump Reverse Engineer ESG and Use It for Good Instead of Evil?

With the death of the woke movement well underway and most mainstream discussion focused on DEI, it might be prudent to remind people where all the this Cultural Marxism came from. What was the original source? Well, these programs have been spreading like a plague into modern academia for decades, but the impetus for near-total takeover of the majority of our social institutions was the launch of ESG programs under the UN and an army of NGOs.

The majority of ESG related entities were, as we now know, funded by western governments using taxpayer dollars to fuel an astroturfed leftist revolution. As I noted in my article ‘Rothschild Admits ESG Failure As Globalists Shift To “Inclusive Capitalism” Agenda’, published in September of 2023:

“ESG was intended to be the tool that globalists and governments would use to force companies into the stakeholder capitalism model…

The goal was to incentivize corporations into bombarding the public with woke messaging 24/7. Every movie, every TV show, every book, every comic, every children’s cartoon, every commercial, every product, every major social media site, every employee handbook, every social interaction would be tainted with the poison of woke propaganda. There would be nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape the messaging. And it worked, for a little while…”

A couple years ago I argued that ESG was dying after the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates. There was an observable decline in financing for woke programs and propaganda across the board. In other words, there were a lot of NGOs and other entities that were receiving government funds and they were recycling those funds into far-left ESG, DEI, and CRT projects. When the central bank started hiking interest rates, the lending cost more and the money started to dry up.

The exposure of ESG by the alternative media and the strangled flow of cheap cash signaled the death knell of a decade long agenda to “wokify” the west. It was so exposed, in fact, that Lynn de Rothschild, a leader in ESG and the head of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, admitted the idea was sullied and needed to be changed or “re-branded”.

I don’t think many Americans realize just how pervasive the ESG agenda truly was. The recent exposure of USAID by Elon Musk and his DOGE team is shining a light on just a portion of it. For example, the USAID spending millions to prop up leftist propaganda machines like Politico (through ultra expensive “subscriptions”) is quite the eye opener, but what about the billions of dollars that went into ESG venture capital projects to fund dozens if not hundreds of liberal online media outlets, movies, TV shows, video games, woke advertising, etc. The extent of the influence was massive.

And, it is likely that most of the cash supporting this enormous social engineering project came from the Federal Reserve and the pockets of US taxpayers. We were paying for our own indoctrination and economic demise, and I’m sure the people behind USAID and other rogue institutions had a good laugh about that.

Of course, they aren’t laughing now. Now they’re out of a job. But is the damage already done? Is there no going back?

The excessive spending through ESG was not only designed to change western culture, it was also designed to hide glaring weaknesses in the current system. Since before the elections I have continued to warn that Trump’s greatest adversary is not the Democrats or the “deep state” or leftist activists; rather, his greatest adversary is the US economy. Trump has inherited a system in stark decline, but much of this data is unknown to the public at large.

The Biden Administration used creative accounting to hide much of the damage. They were unable to obscure the greater effects of stagflation on retail prices and the housing market, but the inherent weaknesses in the labor market, wages, GDP, energy markets, national debt and the US dollar are all less understood by the public.

The Biden Admin is gone but they have left a ticking time bomb behind; the data they were suppressing is about to be unleashed and Trump’s first year is going to look like a financial disaster unless he addresses the problem immediately.

I outlined this problem in detail in my article ‘Smoke And Mirrors: What Happens After Biden’s Economic Manipulations Disappear?”, published in September of 2024. In that essay I predicted Trump’s election win, but I also explained why the presidency could be booby trapped with an economic crash that is ultimately blamed on conservatives.

It’s important to keep in mind that as the truth is revealed there is always a chance the public (and the investment world) will panic. A lot of alternative economists, myself included, have discussed the possibility that if the truth about our economy was ever made widely known, the entire global edifice might come crashing down from the weight of the revelation. If people knew how much corruption and fraud was a part of our daily lives, our economy and our national framework, what would happen?

It’s not enough to simply draw the curtain and unveil the ugliness underneath, a solution must also be offered. The answer might actually come from the very ESG projects that were designed to destroy the US in the first place.

ESG was drawing its money from unprecedented debt spending and taxpayer dollars. That’s not going to work for obvious reasons. However, Trump’s tariff measures may hold the key. In other words, make corporations and importers pay for the rejuvenation of domestic production and perhaps even breath new life into an America-based cultural renaissance.

The original NAFTA agreement (and similar policies) removing most trade barriers between the US, Mexico and Canada was an incredible betrayal of the US economy by a coalition of Neo-Cons and Democrats, facilitated in 1992 by George H.W. Bush who was obsessed with globalization.

Bush (and others in government) wanted a European Union-like arrangement in North America, a supranational body that would eventually dissolve borders and operate as a single economic and social entity. NAFTA didn’t go into effect until 1994, but then President Bill Clinton certainly ran with it. Within six years US manufacturing jobs and industry collapsed.

Any return of tariffs is consistently demonized as a trigger for financial catastrophe (much like any attempt to freeze the debt ceiling is portrayed as the end of the world by Democrats). The example of Herbert Hoover and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs is always brought up in comparison to Donald Trump’s policies.

The establishment has already tried to blame Trump for the existing stagflation problem. Even though the crisis broke out under Joe Biden’s presidency, they still tried to scapegoat Trump and conservatives for the event. Luckily it didn’t stick, but it might this time if Trump isn’t careful.

For now it appears that Trump is using tariffs as short term leverage to force countries to correct geopolitical imbalances (like the illegal immigration issue). This is the best use of tariffs under the current conditions, and so far Mexico and Canada have folded quickly. That said, lesser long term tariffs will be needed to correct longer term trade imbalances and the US just doesn’t have the industrial base anymore to do that effectively.

If the president hopes to stop the avalanche of national debt and money printing while also freeing the common American worker from the tyranny of the income tax, he’s going to need an expertly established tariff system in place along with revamped manufacturing to prevent high inflation.

Tariffs will ultimately require the US to become a producer nation again. But how can this be accomplished quickly? I would suggest, as mentioned above, that Trump implement an ESG-like program which is designed to partially subsidize businesses that establish new manufacturing on US soil. I think this program could also be used to offer grants or low cost funding to cultural projects with a pro-western stance. And, it could all be funded through a percentage of revenues from the Trump tariffs instead of through income taxes.

In other words, make corporations and importers pay for the rebuilding of the US economy and the American culture that they tried to destroy over the past ten years.

Would this action represent government interference in the free market? Well, yes and no. Let’s not pretend like there’s a market for anti-western propaganda and woke corporations. The past several years have proven that consumers don’t want what the woke movement is selling. The government would simply be subsidizing the parts of the economy that US consumers actually WANT to survive.

In the end, if we’re going to reverse the damage done to America by the ESG coup and corrupt institutions like USAID, we need to follow the laws of physics – Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. They used ESG for evil, and we’ll use ESG (or something similar) for good. I can’t imagine a better way to incentivize a manufacturing boom and a cultural boom in the US and avoid a stagflationary death spiral all at the same time.