#BoycottTheBoycotters — it’s Jim Crow when merchants boycott customers

#BoycottTheBoycottersExactly two months ago, I put up my first post arguing that consumers shouldn’t stop at boycotting Kellogg’s, which said that Breitbart’s support for Donald Trump was so awful they were going to stop advertising there. Instead, I argued, consumers should also boycott all of the purveyors of goods or services, not just Kellogg’s, who refused to advertise at Breitbart’s. When I started this campaign, which I called #BoycottTheBoycotters, 193 companies had pledged to do everything within their power to ensure that their goods and services would no longer appear at Breitbart. In intervening two months, another 743 companies have agreed that you are so awful because you support Trump that they don’t want you to buy their goods and services.

If you think about it, the last time that Americans merchants decreed that certain people were so awful merchants couldn’t be expected to sell to or serve them was during the Jim Crow era. Blacks were not welcome in hotels, at restaurants, in markets, on buses, in movie theaters, or any other places that Southern racists — or weak-minded people bullied by Southern racists — determined should be “whites only.” Sixty years later, we have almost one thousand companies announcing loud and clear that half the American population is so evil and hate-filled that they, like those Southern blacks, must be denied access to the marketplace.

I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty darn offensive. I don’t want to give my money to people who think I’m so evil that they won’t even touch my money.

But you know what? It’s bigger than that. I’m damn tired of a world in which Democrats keep trying to fix every one into little boxes. During the Democrats’ racism heyday, from Andrew Jackson’s ferocious support for slavery to the South’s efforts to marginalize and economically destroy blacks, Democrats consistently broke people down into derogatory racial groups. Heck,they even devised derogatory sub-racial groups. It’s only been fifty years since Democrats were as offended by “mulattos” and “quadroons” as they were by full-blooded “nigras.”

Back in the day, Democrats destroyed people by labeling them and then isolating them from the marketplace and the body politic. With the Civil Rights movement, they tried a new, more subtle strategy. Rather than labeling people and impugning the people labeled, they label people, and then assure those same labeled people that only Democrats care about them. Having co-opted these stratified little groups, kind of like a wife beater simultaneously bullies and cajoles his wife, they then proceed to impugn and isolate everyone else.

Now, rather than boycotting blacks, the Democrats tell blacks that they, the Democrats, are the only ones who love the blacks — a love they show by immuring them in Democrat-run ghettos and promising them that this abuse is love — and then encourage the blacks (and Hispanics, and Asians, and LGBTQRSTUV’s, and women) to isolate everyone else. The results are surprisingly similar to those of Jim Crow:  minorities are labeled, marginalized (except in election years) and economically destroyed.

With the Left, it’s always divide and destroy. It is the antithesis of America’s constitutional promise and the dangerous balkanization of a nation.

Democrats have escalated their label and marginalize tactic this year by going to merchants with a combination of threats and promises: The promise, to weak-minded merchants, is that the Left will love those merchants if the merchants send out appropriate virtue signals on command. The threat is that, if the merchants do not virtue signal, the Left will destroy them economically.

Frightened, or weak-minded, merchants might want to look at what happened to Marvel and DC comics before they yield to the Left’s demands. You see, in the past few years, Marvel and DC succumbed to the SJWs’ insistence that they repackage their product to shill for SJW causes. Having done so, they discovered that, while SJWs are great at bullying, they didn’t actually buy comic books. Those view who might have bought the new, PC comics still didn’t do so in sufficient numbers to offset the old, stalwart customers who either withdrew in disgust when they found politics invading their pleasant fantasy worlds or who found these sensitive, politically-correct, victim-category superheroes boring.

Here’s what I want from merchants: I want them to advertise their product and services, not their politics. And I especially do not want them to announce loud and clear that roughly 50% of Americans are so evil that their money is no longer good.

It’s one thing to refuse service to someone who is an imminent threat or who walks into a Jewish restaurant in full Nazi regalia. It’s another thing to insist that a President whose politics hark all the way back to 1995 or so (the Bill Clinton heyday) is so evil that anyone who votes for him needs to be isolated and destroyed — which is precisely what they’re saying when they refuse to advertise at outlets directed at YOU the conservative voter, or YOU the Trump Democrat, or YOU the person who just likes to read a broad range of things.

Anyway, here’s that list of 936 retailers, cities, service providers, and educational institutions that have announced that you are a bad person. They’re not even sending you to the back of the bus. They’re kicking you off. The merchants in red are the ones who have signed on in just the last four days. (And no, I’m not surprised to see 84 Lumber on the list.) Click on list to open it in another screen, and then click on it again to enlarge it.

boycott-the-boycotters-2-8-17

Alternatively, you can see the same chart here, in searchable format so you can determine whether you would like to boycott a particular business that has decided you are beyond the pale.

And one more thing: Can anyone tell me why I’m not getting more traction with this? Why are Trump supporters completely unaffected by the fact that all of these institutions, some of which are pretty big with wide reach, are effectively saying “Whatev….”

In the same vein, while Leftists are thrilled and boasting about the fact that one store after another is dropping Ivanka’s products in response to Progressive pressure over her father’s mainstream American politics (politically Obama was the American outlier, not Trump), Republicans and other conservatives are saying “meh.” Is it going to be “meh” when your insurance company is targeted or when there’s a sign in your grocery store saying “Republicans not welcome here”?

When do you get irritated and start fighting back? Really. I want to know. I’m coming at it from a difficult angle. I believe it’s laudable to save your money for merchants who have the marketplace wisdom to sell their product, not insult their customer.

Is anybody listening? Does anybody care?

Photo by twicepix