Come one, come all to the ongoing tug-of-war between two Boomer memes!
The prize? 2/3 of US consumer dollars.
Politicians and businesses cower in fear of being accused of racism. As we saw during the George Floyd riots, a racism charge is perceived to be so serious that many businesses displayed BLM signs, like the blood of the Passover lamb, in the hope it would spare them from riot damage. Yet the recent boycott of Bud Light for “going woke” through their partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney cost their parent company Anheuser-Busch $27 billion.
Unless you’re brand-new to this blog, you know I’m all for withholding your hard-earned money from companies that hate you.
So I hate to be a wet blanket, but if you expand the graph, Busch’s parent company didn’t suffer that much from the boycott.
They took a much bigger and longer-lasting hit from the COVID lockdowns. A weird, self-inflicted wound by the Death Cult.
But that’s not to say that refraining from doing business with Cult-aligned megacorps is useless.
Indeed, the countercultural boycott trend appears to be bearing some fruit.
The Homeland Institute asked 796 respondents who are politically and demographically representative of white, non-Hispanic American voters about the strength of the charge of “racism” versus the charge of “wokeness.”[4]
- A major finding is that the number of people willing to pay a price to boycott a business that is accused of wokeness is not that far off from the number willing to do the same to a business that is accused of being racist.
- Another major finding is that among those who identified as Republicans, the accusation of being woke was almost twice as powerful as the charge of being racist.
Reading into the data that Conservatives are shaking off the spell of the Death Cult hex word “racism” may be premature optimism.
You’ll still find lots of Republicans on social media buying into GOPe memes like Magic Dirt Theory, Nation of Immigrants rhetoric, and “America is based on ideas” canards.
Then again, some of these numbers look promising.
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61.9% of respondents said they are less likely to support a business if it is accused of being racist.
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But only 41.8% said they would be willing to follow through with boycotting a business that is accused of being racist if they had to pay 10% more or drive an extra mile.
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43.7% said they are less likely to support a business if it is accused of being woke.
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But only 29.1% said they would be willing to follow through with boycotting a business that is accused of being woke if they had to pay 10% more or drive an extra mile.
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65.7% said they would be less likely to vote for a politician if that politician was accused of being racist.
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45.6% said they would be less likely to vote for a politician if that politician was accused of being woke.
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For Independent respondents, 65.5% said they would be less likely to vote for a politician accused of being racist compared to 41.3% of Independent respondents who said they would be less likely to vote for a politician accused of being woke.
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Surprisingly though, among Republican respondents 42.6% said they were less likely to vote for a politician accused of being racist, compared to 79% who said they were less likely to vote for a politician accused of being woke.
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Additionally, 7.2% of Republican respondents said they were more likely to vote for a politician who is accused of being racist.
Read the whole thing here.
On the whole, Conservatives are warming up to the idea of not giving remote material cooperation to grave intrinsic evil. But they won’t yet go the extra mile to avoid cooperating with people who hate them.
And I understand.
It’s a bit of a high curb to surmount.
Let me help you up your integrity and have fun while you’re at it.
Politics has moved far beyond the point of being obnoxious and stressful. It’s the worlds best live action comedy.
I’ll give credit where it’s due. Praise be to God people are slowly waking up and warming up to better practices. Going cold turkey on anything is usually less effective than small gradual steps. The future is in God’s hands as it always has been; He will separate wheat from chaff and I’m just trying to focus on not being chaff when the time comes.
Conservatives have had controlled opposition herding them towards the pop cult for a long time. The usual arguments are:
-Sure, the bosses might hate you, but a boycott will hurt the working class employees who are “natural Republicans.” (Sean Hannity loves this one.)
-Sure, a boycott WAS justified… at first. But the company put forth a miniscule olive branch in the form of a “traditional” commercial or something. So now we have to end the boycott, to reward good behavior and show that we can forgive.
-If you don’t spend all your time talking about the latest bit of woke crap, then you aren’t engaging with the culture! (See also why there’s always some excuse for not supporting conservative indie creators.)
The problem with conservatives is that their vision of entertainment has been hobbled by their own upbringing. They were taught wrong but don’t have the humility required to admit it, which is why they can’t gain any ground.
You have half of them supporting modern trash like incessantly talking about Star War and Cardi B-style subversive junk that no one other than a small percent of people pay attention to while talking up how it’s “real” conservative art. They want very badly to be popular with the cool kids, but will do nothing to earn it.
Meanwhile the other half lives in a cartoon world of warped 1950s tropes about entertainment that comes straight out of movies like Pleasantville, made by people who hate them. I had one of these types talk about how one of my short stories was nihilistic and depraved, completely misunderstanding the point because it wasn’t cardboard cutouts rehashing didactic clichés and slogans. All this because they were never taught how to approach art or entertainment from any frame deeper than Veggie Tales or Superbook.
As another example, I once had an argument on Twitter with one such gentleman who assured me that Robert E. Howard and HP Lovecraft could never be part of any western canon because they weren’t overtly Christian, even if not hostile to it. Once the subject of Mark Twain was brought up, someone who wrote some of the stupidest and hateful anti-Christian stories ever published, all of a sudden every excuse was made for why he must stay. And we all know this is because he was told Twain is Important and pulp trash is not, so he has to square the circle. There was no thought put into it.
The problem is that you are dealing with people who do not know how to engage entertainment and art outside of cultural bubble they sealed themselves in over half a century ago. Until that bubble is popped and they have to actually face the real world beyond their secret language, inability to interact with modern discourse, poisonous insular “entertainment” industries and social circles, and outdated clichés of bootstraps and firm handshakes, they will not only continue to lose but they will make themselves easy targets for their enemies as they allow them to gain more and more power over them.
I honestly don’t think anything will change until that bubble is finally popped. At this rate, however, I think it will be popped violently.
You’ve got their number, all right.
They affect cultural and moral sophistication as a fig leaf for basic consumerism.
I was just thinking about Twain’s nihilism yesterday, and on further reflection, I think one could make the argument that Lovecraft is very much Twain writing on the cosmic level. 🙂
Minor typo – “Magic Dirt Theory”, not “Magic Dirty Theory”.
Fixed
-“I have to send my kid to public school. I don’t worry about him because he will overcome his enemies and convert the kids there with his holiness.”
-“My kid will only listen to CCM music because the mainstream industry is too degenerate and that junk will negatively affect him.”
Same people.
Corporate Christianity was a mistake.
Amen brother