It’s Pride Month! and that can only mean one thing: at the risk of beating a dead horse, I want to revisit, again, the idea of abandoning Target and any other commercial enterprise that supports the Marxist (read: communist) induced destruction of American culture and history. I’m motivated to stay on the topic not only because of more reading I’ve done, but by the outing of other major brands that have jumped on the sexual deviancy bandwagon, including department store Kohl’s, the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, and Chick-Fil-A (as I mentioned in yesterday’s post).
Carina Benton writes in The American Spectator that conservatives don’t have what it takes to win the culture war. The sub-head of her article reads, “The conservative movement is incapable of fighting, much less winning, an unprecedented revolution against Western civilization.“
We’re in the throes of an unprecedented winner-takes-all revolution against Western civilization. Since the objective of worldwide communism, cunningly rebranded in recent decades as “globalism,” was always the full communization of the United States, this is no surprise. The real shock for many on the right is that the conservative movement is ipso facto incapable of fighting, much less crushing, this rebellion.
This assumes, of course, that the “culture war” is still winnable. If it is, it’s going to be a long climb.
She goes on to say that what we need is not conservatives, but counter-revolutionaries. She explains:
A decade earlier, [Whittaker] Chambers met with Gen. Walter Krivitsky, a former senior Soviet military intelligence officer and a fellow Communist Party fugitive. They shared their perspectives on communism and agreed that the forces of history in the postmodern era “can be grasped only as the interaction of revolution and counterrevolution.” When a totalitarian, pseudo-messianic ideology like communism seeks the radical remaking of governments, societies, economies, history, culture, families, and the individual himself, there is no middle ground.
The problem, as Chambers saw it, is that counterrevolution has little to do with conservatism. The conservative seeks first to conserve what he is and what he has. He wants to be left alone and is largely uninterested in self-sacrifice. This is the head-in-sand strategy: If I ignore it long enough, it will probably just go away.
This statement threw me a little; part of “conserving” your way of life is to fight for it, and we just spent Monday memorializing the ultimate sacrifice that many thousands of Americans made to keep freedom alive here and in other places around the world. However, if you consider what’s happening just within our country, I think it’s accurate to describe conservatives as hoping that if they ignore developments long enough, “it will probably just go away.”
Spoiler alert: No it won’t.
The passive resistance of the conservative movement has been further diluted through its mésalliance with the my way, your way, anyway classical liberals, whose lack of a fixed moral compass is the ideological loophole communists exploited to gain a foothold in this country in the first place. The product of this union is the line-in-sand strategy: don’t force me to abandon my side and I’ll leave you alone on yours.
Both stratagems are futile against the violent and inexorable tides of communism. If he adopts the former, the conservative will be engulfed in the deluge. If he tries the latter, his position will be erased and redrawn to the point that he no longer recalls where he started.
Ms. Benton then goes on to contrast “a conservative” with “a counter-revolutionist,” including these two examples:
The conservative frankly can’t keep track of which companies he’s supposed to boycott. The counter-revolutionist has the names etched in his brain. He’ll happily forgo slave-labor merch from misogynistic brands like Nike and disposable junk designed by satanists for groomer retailers like Target.
The conservative won’t let politics get in the way of sports. The counter-revolutionist won’t offend God and scandalize his children by supporting leagues like the NHL and the MLB that venerate sodomy, adultery, and blasphemy.
Unfortunately, I can see myself in the “conservative” side of the comparison, but I’ve got the growing conviction of the counter-revolutionary side. In other words, she’s saying that those of us who consider ourselves “conservatives” need to take a stronger stand and draw a harder line against the attacks from the Left. I think my call to “abandon” Target moves me to the counter-revolutionary side of the equation.
But then add to that Tom Gilson’s article in The Stream, and I’m even more convinced that this is what we need to be doing.
Target stores, which put “Pride” garishly on display several days ago, got hit hard by a boycott over it. The market value of the company dropped $9 billion last week. As for me, I’ve decided I’m not boycotting them. I’m also not associating with them. At all. For a long time to come. That includes not shopping there.
Sounds like a boycott, you say? Of course it does. And if you’ve decided to boycott them, I support you in it. There’s a big difference in my mind, though. A boycott is an economic power maneuver, meant to force a company to change its mind or at least its policies. Target has already changed its policies, or so I’m told: The display is gone, or at least moved away from the front door. The boycott has already had some effect, in other words.
That’s well and good, as far as it goes. It doesn’t change what they revealed about themselves, though. They sold products designed by a woman appearing as if a man, who also designed a pastel pin with the words “homophobe headrest,” and a drawing of a guillotine. And a sweet little heart to go with it. Maybe she meant it as a joke? Sorry, but no. I can’t view it that charitably. With the kind of anger gay activists routinely aim at conservatives, there’s no room for that kind of “joking.”
In other words, Gilson has abandoned Target as a place to shop because of what they revealed about themselves as a company: they’re evil.
Finally, there’s this from John Hayward, as reported by MacAoidh at The Hayride. As always, I encourage you to read every article I’ve linked.
I’ve been shopping at Target forever, but I can’t go in there anymore. The moral hazard has become too great. I won’t tell the kids of the future that I was unwilling to change my shopping habits to stand up for them. I won’t be part of the deranged extremism Target is pushing.
I don’t think anyone should be mollified by little symbolic concessions Target makes in a desperate bid to avoid getting Bud Lighted. The extremists are still in control of the company. No heads have rolled. The company is signaling the fascists that its heart is still with them.
Nothing less than complete de-wokification should be accepted by disgusted consumers: executives named and fired, apologies given, enraged woke boycotts that fizzle because there just aren’t that many of them. You’ll know a company means it when the Woke howl with outrage.
If companies want to be run by tiny bands of extremist lunatics, then let that be their customer base. Let competitors step in to pick up the customer base they’ve chosen to abandon. We’ll compare balance sheets at year-end and see which is the wiser business model.
Whoa, I could’ve written that! In fact, I’ve said the same thing (here): if companies want to cater to the LBGTQWERTY extremists, let that be their customer base. In fact, if you think about it logically, Target and Kohl’s and any other “woke” clothing stores shouldn’t be marketing infant onesies to members of the Alphabet Mob because gays, lesbians and trannies as a whole have very few children. What gives?
You may think those department stores are marketing baby clothes to normal men and women who marry and have children, but those onesies are better explained as part of a peace offering to the religion of woke extremism. Here’s the truth: Target isn’t trying to impress you; they’re trying to impress the woke gods and their financiers — State Street, Vanguard, and Blackrock.
It truly is a cult.
So again, I exhort all of you to join me in being a counter-revolutionary and abandoning those commercial enterprises that are actively destroying our country and, more importantly, mocking the God of creation. Just know that it won’t be easy, as MacAoidh reminds us:
So disentangling yourself from the machine, in an effort not to feed it or ideally to teach it a lesson, is going to be difficult.
It’ll take commitment that the machine is betting you won’t make.
Dumping Major League Baseball, or the NFL, or Target, or Bud Light, or Disney, might very well make your life less fun to lead. It will probably make for more inconvenience. It’s not what you’re likely used to.
Except you’ve got to be as committed to your point of view as the wokesters are to theirs. Either that, or we won’t win this fight.
Buy local, and buy small. Avoid doing business with large corporations altogether, and especially with publicly traded corporations. The publics are the companies yoked to radical agendas like ESG and DEI, and they’re largely under the control of institutional investors like Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street. Those big investment houses will backstop a stock to keep it from collapse, so long as the recipient of such generosity plays ball with the social agenda.
It’s why I’ve been making the point that you can do without a lot of things. As I’ve said, “Here’s the reality: there are only a few things that we really “need.” Food. Water. Clothing. A roof over our heads. Almost everything else is discretionary. Start with those things, then wean yourself off of indiscriminate consumer spending. Then, be very specific about the companies you purchase from.”
Choose to make the sacrifice now or it may be a bigger one you’ll be forced to make later.
Would it be possible to do a piece identifying strategies to avoid the Vanguards, Blackrocks etc. when it comes to where your 401K’s, IRA, etc. are invested? I’m all for the ban/boycotts but get more nervous if it involves what I live on. Thanks Dave
Dick Campbell
Hi Dick! Great question. Would love to have time to do a deep dive on these three mega investment houses. Here’s a place to start though: https://www.thefirsttv.com/watch/the-communist-infiltration-of-american-corporations/. It’s short, but James Lindsay sketches out some initial ideas on how we might fight back. I think I’ll promote this video in tomorrow’s post.