Has the patriot economy’s moment finally arrived?

It’s Saturday. You just rolled out of your MyPillow Giza Dream sheets, spent a little extra time trimming your beard with your Jeremy’s Razor, and brewed yourself a fresh cup of MAGA Dark Roast COVFEFE. You call your best friend on your Patriot Mobile cellphone to shoot the breeze. Hell, it’s five o’clock somewhere. Go ahead and crack open an Ultra Right beer and waste away the afternoon.

Welcome to life in the patriot economy — the parallel economy being developed by conservative entrepreneurs and investors. Or at least an exaggerated version of it.

The idea of the patriot economy is fueled by two convictions. The first is that the right needs its own economic infrastructure so consumers aren’t forced to buy goods from “woke” corporations. The second is that conservatives need to insure against being shut out of the traditional economy.

The people involved in building this new marketplace often cite the pandemic as the kick they needed to get involved. The ability of large corporations to work in tandem with government forces to shutter their small-business competitors while making record profits from e-commerce proved their power beyond any doubt. And thanks to a whole host of other incentives, such as ESG scores, relentless activism from progressive groups and government pressure, these behemoths choose to wield that power to advance left-wing political causes.

With big business increasingly politicized in one direction, people who hold the “wrong opinions” feel that they face increasing risk of being frozen out of a lot of essential economic activity. During the pandemic, GoFundMe returned or seized millions of dollars that were meant to be donated to the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers protesting Canadian vaccine mandates. Some banks have refused to hold accounts for gun manufacturers or retailers or members of other so-called “vice” industries. Earlier this year, a religious freedom group alleged that JPMorgan had closed its bank account without warning, demanding it provide a list of donors in order to continue banking there. Tech platforms such as YouTube and Instagram have demonetized or removed profit-seeking content that is outside the mainstream. Attempts to sidestep the rules set out by some large companies have hit their own set of roadblocks. Alternative social media sites have been be pulled off web-hosting platforms or removed from app stores, which is what happened to Parler, the Twitter alternative founded in 2018. In short: it can be harder to earn and keep money if you’re a conservative. Hence the need for an alternative.

“Going to Florida is only going to insulate you so far if you get fined by PayPal or your bank takes away your account. You still live in Florida, but you can’t actually function in society,” explains Omeed Malik, an entrepreneur and investor who runs 1789 Capital, a fund that invests in new companies so they don’t have to accept ESG-driven capital funding. “So where are the private actors that are going to create parallel products that will resist the kind of tyranny we’re seeing? That’s the framework that I started looking at it through. I happen to be a financier. So I thought, ‘OK, I can use my skill set here.’

“As I look at the parallel economy as it relates to the kind of duplicative offerings, you really do need to completely redo the plumbing of the internet.”

1789 Capital is the “bottom-up” brother to presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s Strive Asset Management, which offers ETFs (exchange-traded funds) that maximize shareholder value as opposed to advancing certain political goals.

Malik is also the chairman and CEO of Colombier Acquisition Corp., a blank-check firm that agreed to merge with the popular shopping app PublicSq. to take it public.

“I believe PublicSq. is foundational to this parallel economy because it’s an exchange. It connects the buyers and sellers,” Malik says.

A “USA” chant broke out on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange when the company went up on the ticker on the day of its IPO.

“I think that the capital markets are in desperate need of democratization,” CEO Michael Seifert says of his decision to take PublicSq. public. “Just like people need options to shop in alignment with their values, they also need options to invest their money in alignment with their values.”

A few years ago, the mainstream media may have been correct when they mocked right-wing product lines as short-sighted and, frankly, crappy. Right-wing attempts to encourage customers to “shop their values” tended to start and end with overly politicized off-brand versions of America’s most popular products. But things have massively changed since then.

The Bud Light boycott following Anheuser-Busch’s advertising arrangement with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney was a watershed moment that showed the massive potential of the parallel economy. Bud Light is still experiencing stock drops after its betrayal of its customer base and recently laid off hundreds of workers. After the backlash, Modelo managed to snag Bud Light’s crown as the number-one-selling beer in America. Yuengling, America’s oldest brewer, saw sales rise by 25 percent. Americans, though, didn’t stop at shopping for different beers at the liquor store. They flocked to apps and websites that would help them discover new businesses that reflected their values… and sold good stuff.

“We have to create good products. These products can’t just be the right-leaning version of something, and therefore that makes it good and worth buying. We have to make sure that we’re pushing for quality, for excellence, for speed to market, for execution,” Seifert says.

Align US, which allows consumers to rate businesses, has 33,000 downloads and nearly 100,000 Facebook followers. 2nd Vote describes itself as a conservative watchdog for corporate activism and has developed its own ETF funds that prioritize shareholder returns over political activism. Even the venerable Consumers’ Research, a nonprofit that dates back to 1929, has started issuing Woke Alerts to warn customers of businesses that parrot left-wing messages.

PublicSq., which requires businesses to sign a pledge that they will abide by certain core values in order to be added to the app, is undoubtedly the biggest beneficiary of the consumer appetite for values-aligned businesses.

“The day after Bud Light did what they did, we had an 800 percent increase in searches for beer on the platform,” Seifert told me. The PublicSq. app exploded to second place on the App Store in the last week of May and now boasts over 1.1 million consumer members and over 55,000 business vendors.

PublicSq. was born from a list of local companies that Seifert and his wife wanted to support. The idea was extrapolated to create a Yelp-style database of businesses that agreed to abide by five core values: committing to freedom and truth, celebrating the sanctity of life, supporting small and local businesses, believing in American greatness, and agreeing that the Constitution is non-negotiable. Consumers who log on to PublicSq. can find any number of businesses across different industries, and can filter their options by the stores closest to them.

Soon, Seifert says, the app will be adding an Amazon-like ability to purchase products directly, as opposed to being redirected to external websites. PublicSq. intends to add other handy features, like in-app shipment tracking, price variability, and user rewards that the company is hopeful will eliminate any excuse a potential customer has to use other platforms.

And indeed, the brands are not all reactionary Eagle MAGA Patriot 1776 knock-offs. A scroll through its local businesses in Northern Virginia revealed well-reviewed real estate agents, home contractors, hardware stores, consulting firms, grocery stores, coffee shops, wealth management groups and photographers.

“If there’s literally no values-aligned alternatives in a certain industry niche, we will actually create that product,” Seifert explains. “We launched Every Life, a pro-life diaper and wipes company because, unfortunately, every single major diaper and wipes brand in the United States is vocally pro-abortion, which doesn’t make any economic sense, let alone, in my opinion, moral sense.

“That company is a wholly owned subsidiary of PublicSq. It’s basically a wholesome and ethical Procter and Gamble model.”

Malik agrees that alternative products need to be “just as good” as popular brands, but points out that sacrificing convenience or frugality in order to put pressure on anti-American mega-corporations is worth the burden.

“Everyone also has to really recognize that maybe you do, for once, have to give up a little bit of convenience in order to do something better for the country. And if it means paying an extra thirty cents so that it isn’t made by slaves in China, maybe we should all come together and just do that like other people went to war for this country. I think we could maybe do that as a sense of shared patriotism.”

This summer’s Bud Light and Target boycotts suggest consumers are already coming around to that message. Either way, Seifert and Malik are in it for the long haul. As are other successful parallel economy companies, like the Peter Thiel-backed video-sharing site Rumble, which went public last year, and GiveSendGo, which was founded back in 2014 due to alleged anti-Christian bias on GoFundMe and has become a favorite of online conservatives.

“People can sometimes just expect things to happen overnight and it’s really important not to be short-sighted and reactive or responsive to what’s happening in society,” Seifert says. “We need to be able to make sure that we’ve got a vision for what we want twenty years down the road, not just in response to the next Bud Light.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2023 World edition.