Tag Archives: woke

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Daily Broadside | It’s Not Easy to Avoid Woke Companies; They’re Everywhere Now

A couple of quick hits before the main topic. In 1985 I saw Tina Turner perform at Wembley Arena in London. She died yesterday at the age of 83. Never a big fan of her music but she was a rock icon from my youth and it was a moment.

Ron DeSantis (pronounced, by Ron himself, as “DeeSantis”, not “DehSantis”) has officially joined the presidential race. As I wrote yesterday, I’d vote for him or Trump if either were the Republican nominee. Anyone other than Resident Flounder, or whomever the Democrats shove to the front.

Meanwhile, after the Bud Light fiasco, which is still ongoing, it’s come to light in rapid succession that a number of other brands across other categories are also diving deeply into LBGTQ+ promotions. Nike, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Mattel, Delta, Ben & Jerry’s, Converse, Coors, Google, NFL, Pepsi, Patagonia, Gillette, and now, Target — and many, many others — have embraced the LBGTQ+ agenda as proud supporters.

The latest, Target, is facing strong backlash for selling women’s bathing suits with “tuckable” space for men who pretend to be women.

Target has recently come under fire for its efforts to pander to the transgender community. Target stores nationwide recently unveiled their “Pride collection,” featuring a range of merchandise and clothing with trans-friendly slogans and books pushing radical leftist gender ideology. What makes this particularly troubling is the clothes, merchandise, and books are not exclusively aimed at adults but also young children and babies. They aren’t tucked away in a hard to find section either; these displays are prominently showcased at the front of Target stores.

Target, you may know already, has been pandering to the LGBTQ community for years. However, in the aftermath of the Bud Light controversy, Target started receiving enough backlash that the company held an emergency meeting last week. Several store locations, primarily in rural southern areas, have now been instructed to relocate and downsize their Pride sections—specifically to avoid a “Bud Light situation.”

“I think given the current situation with Bud Light, the company is terrified of a Bud Light situation,” a Target insider told Fox News Digital.

They should be terrified. But the truth is that a lot of these companies think this is a good business stratetgy, including Target’s CEO, Brian Cornell.

“I think those are just good business decisions, and it’s the right thing for society, and it’s the great thing for our brand,” Cornell said. “The things we’ve done from a DE&I [diversity, equity, and inclusion] standpoint, it’s adding value.”

He added, “It’s helping us drive sales, it’s building greater engagement with both our teams and our guests, and those are just the right things for our business today.”

That it’s a “great thing for [the] brand” is debatable and I can tell you that it is not “the right thing for society.” I’m with John Hinderaker over at Power Line who is also puzzled by the enthusastic embrace of radical sexual politics by our corporate class.

But “trans” clothing is not exactly the path to mass market success. How many women’s swimsuits with extra crotch room is Target going to sell? Six or seven?

More recently, leaks from Target indicate that the company is scrambling to contain the tsunami of disgust that its “Pride” campaign has generated.

More broadly, Hinderaker asks the question I’ve been asking: Why?

So, what is going on here? I don’t get it. We obviously are not dealing with traditional assumptions about corporate behavior. These companies are not appealing to a substantial customer segment. They evidently don’t mind incurring the puzzlement, if not wrath, of much of their customer base. They can’t possibly be profit maximizing, as economists tell us they do, and ought to do.

Some say that companies are being dominated by left-leaning HR and marketing departments. Maybe so. But HR departments don’t make decisions of this sort, and the normal assumption is that marketing departments are trying to market. That is, to maximize sales. These days, that doesn’t seem to be the case. And the worst offenders are often CEOs who have been hired as PR face men, not nuts and bolts managers.

He doesn’t get it, and neither do I. But something I recently read (and I can’t find it) said that big business needs loans, and loans come from banks. Banks are owned by larger entities that are big enough to withhold loans from companies that are not sufficiently “woke.” I have no idea if it’s true, but it sounds plausible.

So the suggestion is that companies prove their woke cred so they will be eligible for bank loans when they need them. Of course, many companies don’t need bank loans and are self-sufficient, which leaves the question, again: why?

With the number of big brand names embracing radical leftist gender nonsense, it may be difficult to boycott them all. Difficult, but not impossible. I’ve said it before, but we live with such abundance that we’ve been lulled into thinking that many of our “wants” are somehow “needs.” The truth is that we have very few non-negotiable needs. All we need is a little food, water, air and shelter. Maybe some clothes and transportation. Everything else is discretionary.

But living in a consumer culture, we are in the habit of mistaking wants for needs. Once we get that straightened out, it should be a no brainer to boycott Target and its merchandise. It shouldn’t be hard to ignore Bud Light. You really can do without a daily Starbucks.

Am I suggesting that you boycott them all? Yes — but I’m a realist. It will be hard to avoid conducting monetary transactions with companies that support woke ideologies in some form or another. Perhaps you simply be selective when you have the opportunity. I no longer buy Gillette razors, even though I had no complaints about the blades themselves (other than the cost!). But when they led with their “Toxic Masculinity” ad in 2019, thousands of men stopped buying their blades and it hurt their bottom line.

As Hinderaker says, leaving the gigantic companies presents an opportunity to support the little guys.

It is noteworthy that it is big business–Budweiser, Target, Nike and so on–that goes off the deep end. It is highly unlikely that the small businesses in your town are jumping on the “trans” bandwagon, or other leftist fads. They still care about their customers, and their owners are not so rich as to scorn profit. 

Once you’ve boycotted the big guys, shop local.

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Daily Broadside | Dictionaries Are Like Canaries in the Coal Mine

Daily Verse | Hebrews 4:13
Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight.

Thursday’s Reading: Hebrews 5-7

Thursday and we’re quickly losing time to get the Christmas shopping done. If you want to officially track Santa this year, NORAD can help.

You may remember earlier this year that I bought an old copy of Webster’s Secondary School Dictionary and posted pictures of the definitions of what a woman and a female were in 1913. I then compared those to the online Merriam-Webster’s dictionary definitions, where we learned that Webster’s had caved and expanded their definition of “female” to include “… a gender identity that is the opposite of male …”

Apparently not wanting to be left out of the virtue-signaling taking the world by storm, the online Cambridge Dictionary has gone a step further and has added inclusive definitions of a man and a woman.

The Cambridge Dictionary recently updated its definitions of “man” and “woman” to include people whose gender identity doesn’t correspond with their biological sex.

The definition of “man” in the online version includes a second meaning: “an adult who lives and identifies as male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”

It didn’t occur to me at the time of my previous post to check on the word “man” and “male,” so I’ve just taken a look at Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary to compare it to Cambridge’s. The first two are Cambridge’s, the next two are Merriam-Webster’s.

Merriam-Webster gets credit for keeping the definition of “man” rational.

The Cambridge Dictionary also updated their definition of “woman” which Christopher Rufo called attention to.

Note, too, that the definition includes a plural pronoun (they) as opposed to “she.” As Rufo says, “Notice that the dictionary writers say ‘*they* may have been.’ They couldn’t bring themselves to write ‘she may have been,’ because they know they’re lying. That’s the tell,” he tweeted.”

This is how a society is overthrown. Not all at once but little by little, changes persisting like waves against the shoreline until the erosion undermines your house and it collapses around you.

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Daily Broadside | You Embarrassed Us. Now You’ve Embarrassed Yourselves.

Daily Verse | Ecclesiastes 10:2
The heart of the wise inclines to the right,
but the heart of the fool to the left.

Happy Thursday! It’s all downhill from here to the weekend.

Our US women’s soccer team (USWNT) got shut out by Sweden 3-0 in their opening match of the 2020 Olympics the other day. They came into the game with a 44-game winning streak stretching back to January 2019, and are arguably the favorites to win gold.

All my kids played soccer, so there was a time when I enjoyed watching the national women’s team play and followed their games. But not any more. In fact, I don’t actually care whether they win or not and I probably don’t have to tell you why. But I will.

They’ve become woke.

Just like a lot of other sports — the NFL, NBA and MLB, to name the most prominent — women’s soccer has been infected with cultural Marxism in the guise of ‘social justice.’

The U.S. women’s soccer team was among the squads on Wednesday to kneel before their matches in protest of racism, discrimination and inequality as the Olympics officially got underway.

A “protest of racism, discrimination and inequality.” In other words, they’re kneeling in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, the radical leftist group founded by self-identified Marxists. That alone is reason enough to ignore them.

But there’s more. The purple-haired Karen known as Megan Rapinoe has complained non-stop about the women’s team’s pay as compared to the men’s team’s pay. She even testified in front of Congress about the so-called “pay gap.”

“If it can happen to us and it can happen to me with the brightest lights shining on us at all times, it can and it does happen to every person who is marginalized by gender,” Rapinoe said. “But we don’t have to wait. We don’t have to continue to be patient for decades on end.”

The only problem is that while the raw numbers show a gap — “a women’s national soccer team player earns a base salary of $3,600 per game while a men’s player earns $5,000″ — women actually make more than men as a percentage of the revenue the sport brings in.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “USSF also says the men’s team generates more revenue. The women’s team generated $101.3 million over the course of 238 games between 2009 and 2019 while the men generated $185.7 million over 191 games, according to the federation.” In an article at The Federalist, John Glynn agrees.

One of the major factors that separate men’s sports and women’s is a not so little thing called revenue. To put it bluntly, female soccer players, just like female basketball players and female hockey players, are paid less because their respective sports make less. The total prize money for the Women’s World Cup in France this July was $30 million; the total prize money for the men’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar will be $440 million.

This gap is criminal, right? It’s not. When viewed objectively—based on how much money each competition generates—women actually make more than men. How so?

Well, there is a sizable difference in the revenue available to pay the male and female teams. According to Mike Oznian, a writer for Forbes, the 2015 Women’s World Cup “brought in almost $73 million, of which the players got 13%. The 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion, of which 9% went to the players.”

Last year, the men’s World Cup in Russia generated more than $6 billion in revenue; the participating teams shared about $400 million. That is less than 7 percent of overall revenue. Meanwhile, the 2019 Women’s World Cup made somewhere in the region of $131 million, doling out $30 million, well more than 20 percent of collected revenue, to the participating teams. It seems a pay gap does exist, after all.

The women’s soccer team has some exceptional players and has been the most successful women’s team to ever compete. So many of the women are stars in their own right, like Julie Ertz, Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Christen Press and, yes, even Megan Rapinoe—and they’ve won four Women’s World Cup titles, four Olympic gold medals and eight CONCACAF Gold Cups. The U.S. men’s team boasts no such record.

So, yes, the US Women’s National Team is a powerhouse in women’s soccer, but the fact remains that they don’t generate the revenue that the men’s team does. That fact seems lost on them because it doesn’t stop them from complaining about it on their international platform.

It’s a disgrace.

A few years ago in response to LeBron James’s remarks about President Trump, Laura Ingraham told him to “shut up and dribble.” No one wants to hear athletes make political comments because sports was an event that brought us all together, no matter your politics.

Same with women’s soccer. Their whining and complaining about pay and being “marginalized by gender” ruins the sport for so many of us. Maybe instead of virtue-signaling and insulting your country and its people, you could stop ignorantly embarrassing yourselves and concentrate on doing the one thing you are being paid for: winning soccer games.