Digital marketplace platform PublicSquare (PublicSq) CEO Michael Seifert told Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow that boycotting the woke “is important, but it’s incomplete” unless consumers “shift their spending somewhere else.”
“There are a lot of consumers around our country, in fact, we believe it’s actually over 100 million, that have felt ignored, neglected, antagonized,” Seifert told Marlow at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona.
“We felt really frustrated watching a decade of companies turning against me and my family’s values, trying to lecture us about progressive politics when I was just trying to buy a cup of coffee or engage in a regular consumer decision,” the PublicSq CEO added.
Consumers can download the PublicSq app on their smartphones via iPhone’s App Store and Android’s Google Play Store, or they can visit the desktop website here.
Seifert went on to say that with the creation of PublicSq, they “turned that frustration into a solution, because we didn’t want to just boycott, we wanted to actually put our money toward something positive.”
“I think that’s more powerful over the long run,” he said. “Boycotting is important, but it’s incomplete unless I shift my consumer spending somewhere else.”
Seifert explained that they started by creating a list of companies that shared their values, and later turned that list into “a digital marketplace” where “businesses can add themselves to the list by affirming a set of core values central to the list,” in order to create a “parallel economy ecosystem.”
“That way, consumers can know that they would have businesses they can feel confident supporting,” Seifert said.
“That idea was January 2021, and now in less than three years PublicSq has become the world’s largest marketplace of businesses that have not gone woke,” he added. “These are businesses that love the country, the constitution, and the values that it protects. We have over 75,000 business vendors now, well over 1 million and a half consumer members.”
The PublicSq CEO said that he believes this parallel economy will be the way of the future:
In the short term, there’s some of the culture war behaviors that are influencing the growth of the parallel economy. Bud Light comes out and does something, and we have alternatives. Target does something and we have alternatives.
We’ve seen this happen. This dichotomy of interests played out on the national stage that I think will continue to lead to these lightning strikes of growth for the parallel economy. I think over the long term, though, what we’re going to start to see happen is that it’s going to be a more ingrained, regular part of our life, and it’s going to become more self-sustaining and not so reliant on these lightning strike culture moments. It’ll just become a more regular fabric of a free market.
“Amazon will do what it does, and well exist as a fruitful competitor,” Seifert said. “Consumers will make a decision, not just based upon a cultural moment, but based upon a track record of consistent quality and a consistent valuing of the consumer.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
