There’s a riveting scene in the classic World War II adventure film, The Guns of Navarone (1961), where the Allied commando leader played by Gregory Peck is devastated to learn the pretty Greek freedom fighter (Gia Scala) he has fallen for (spoiler alert) is a traitor. “When we got here,” he tells her, “why didn’t you put in with us? You could’ve come with us! It was your only chance to get free of them!” The girl had made the wrong choice. Not only does the team have to kill her, they succeed in their mission to blow up two German super-cannons.

The status of the country today prompts many public and private entities to make a similar fateful choice — go woke and alienate conservatives or eschew ideology altogether and enjoy their continued patronage. The choice should be simple in that it is not between leftwing and rightwing activism but between any activism and neutrality. Traditionalists don’t need a company’s validation to continue patronizing it. They just don’t want their values assaulted by it. And yet almost every entity chooses to politicize on the progressive side — screw their deplorable, backward patrons.

Until this year, it may have been the cleverer decision. Marketers could earn virtue signaling points from their elite cronies and the media and endure their consumer base’s ineffectual protests while taking their money. Thus, they would toast their high ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) scores, which mean nothing in the real world, yet suffer zero profit loss, which does. But, as always, contempt for a group — in this case, their unvalued customers — led to total ignorance of them. The actors have failed to read the room.

A new Gallup Poll shows Americans are more conservative than they have been in a decade. The number of those identifying as conservative or very conservative spiked eight points in the past two years. Additionally, 38 percent say they are socially conservative or very conservative, only 29 percent identify as liberal. Yet the woke assault from on high continues.

I’ve written that the transgender agenda is a rainbow bridge too far for normal people because it forces them to, first, accept fantasy over reality, and then embrace the lie. They have to change even their language to describe a fractional minority as something they can never be — the opposite sex. The enforcers’ goal is not to protect the feelings of this nonexistent community but the compliance itself.

Michelle Obama let slip the plan in a 2008 presidential campaign speech for her husband. “Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” What progressives like the Obamas, the Democratic Party, and its corporate sycophants are finding out, much to their shock and awe, is that we regular folks love our traditions, our history, and our nation, and we’re not going to move. The other side will — or pay the price they have already begun to pay, $13 billion in the case of Target.

Take the Great American Pastime. For all its 200-year history, baseball has been a source of national pride far richer than the entire artificial gay pride movement. The L.A. Dodgers could have stuck to the stunningly right decision to ban a repulsive anti-Catholic freak show, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, from last Saturday’s Pride Night game. Then most of the fans would have tolerated the Pride Night against their better instincts, scoring another victory for the Left. But the Dodgers management couldn’t even do that. They rescinded their ban and welcomed the grotesque group, while thousands of Christians protested outside Dodger Stadium.

At a Friday Mass, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez condemned the ball club’s decision. “Religious freedom and the respect for the beliefs of others are hallmarks of our nation,” Gomez said. “When God is insulted, when the beliefs of any of our neighbors are ridiculed, it diminishes all of us.” The Christians may have stood outside the gate on Saturday, and the godless creeps within, but I believe the reverse will be true in a final higher judgment.

Then, there’s Fox News. Three years ago, when I wrote my “Fox News’ Media Suicide” piece that went viral with a boost by President Trump and Rush Limbaugh, I was reporting on the immediate past — their anti-Trump election coverage — not the future. But never have I seen such a blatant act of corporate seppuku as their April firing of Tucker Carlson. Talk about not reading the room.

“The women who run Fox,” as Carlson described Fox brass in his most recent Twitter-cast, of course realized he was their top ratings draw. What they couldn’t see was that he was the last, best link between old media, cable news, and new social media, most prominently, Twitter. They thought they could oust and replace Carlson as successfully as they had Bill O’Reilly. But the landscape had shifted since then, away from television to computer screens. And Carlson united the two. Without him, Fox News viewership is down almost 40 percent and a staggering 62 percent in the key demographic of young people he ritualistically drew. What could have provoked such self-destructive idiocy on their part? Connecting two dots may provide an answer.

Dot one: Shortly before his firing, Carlson had intensified his criticism of the transgender movement on his show. Speaking about Nashville, Tennessee Christian school murderess Audrey Hale, who identified as a man, Carlson said, “Transgenderists hate Christians above all, because Christians refused to join every other liar in our society and proclaim that transgenderists are gods with the power to change nature itself. For that refusal, that unwillingness to bow down and worship a false idol, in this case of transgenderism, they were murdered.”

Dot two: Last Thursday, Matt Walsh of the Daily Wireposted a long Twitter thread exposing the revolting degree of transgender immersion and indoctrination at Fox Corp, the parent company of Fox News. Walsh details how “Fox Corp is celebrating Pride by encouraging employees to read about ‘glory holes,’ supporting a group that gives sterilizing hormones to homeless youth, & deploying woke AI to monitor everyone.” And that’s only in the first of his 25 tweets. It gets uglier from there.

It is astonishing that fanatical employees would level their companies and entire mediums in the mad desire to bring us to our knees, and suppress the voices of reason, which are now the growing public. They could have thrown in with us. They made the wrong choice. Now they’re going down like the Guns of Navarone.