Silence doesn’t mean approval, nor does it mean acceptance.

Posted by Pointman on May 26, 2017 · 37 Comments 

If like me, you were taken aback if not totally astonished at some of the public displays of hysteria in the aftermath of Trump’s election victory, and then the even bigger ramp up of histrionics in the lead up to his inauguration day in late January of this year, you do have to wonder if there’s been some seismic shift in the definition of what would normally be considered as sane behaviour.

The facile answer to what’s happening would be we’re dealing with sore losers. If they keep protesting long enough like a child denied a candy bar at the checkout, their exhausted parents will finally just give in for some peace and quiet. The sixty-five million Americans who elected Trump will shrug their shoulders, capitulate and hand the presidency over to Hilary Clinton. Yeah, right, all the grownups know that one’ll never happen. No matter how hard they cry for the candy, they’re not going to get it.

Pushing that simile along a bit further, what is disturbing is that some of the people whipping up and leading that hysteria ever upwards are grownups who really should know better. In so many ways, it’s a dumb tactic which won’t actually achieve anything positive except for reputational damage to those in opposition to Trump.

Those people involved are a rag bag of various interests who share only one thing – they’re very definitely moving out of favour with that vast demographic of middle class and blue-collar America. It’s composed of slightly deranged groups from the unelectable fringes of politics, opportunist hooligans like the antifa movement, a Democrat Party that’s lost its way, people like Obama who’re sniffing around the edges of the Trump administration like a mangy dog and hoping for a third term comeback of an imagined Camelot by destabilising it, the embittered rump of the failed Clinton campaign and a selection of various Republican party dinosaurs on the way to extinction represented by the likes of Senator John McCain of Arizona.

He’s having to work very hard for that million dollar donation the Saudis made to his foundation, but that’s the downside of pay to play John. You’ve been bought and paid for, they own your ass, so now you have to bend over, grab your ankles and take one up the butt from them against the groundswell of your own party’s sentiment about things like fracking for oil, but Arabs are into that sort of thing anyway.

When you add in the subversive and arguably anti-American activities of certain well-heeled individuals such as George Soros, it all makes for a pretty foul witches brew. However, most of these people are establishment icons who wield a substantial amount of influence over the easily swayed and the weak-minded. The lend a certain parental authority to the sometimes infantile activities of their foot soldiers.

The whole mess is fronted up by a legacy media which itself has two major problems. The first is that increasingly people don’t believe a word they’re saying, which is the kiss of death for any organisation purporting to be an objective purveyor of news. The second one is more subtle but I believe will lead to the extinction of mainstream news in its present form.

It’s operating on an implicit imperative that it’s somehow taking up the fallen torch of resistance to Trump from a failed Democrat Party. By so obviously aligning themselves with one political party, it’s not only a further blow to their supposed impartiality but they’re also betting their future on a party that has completely detached itself from its electoral ground base. It’s busy flailing around in a wilderness of its own creation. The danger is the legacy media will go down with the Democrat Party.

We’ve had six months of this clamour, but my impression is that it’s starting to die down. Like all outbreaks of mass hysteria, which is what it is, it doesn’t have any lasting power simply because like all cathartic releases of frustration, it leaves one exhausted and becalmed in its wake.

There is a natural tendency for people to get sucked into episodes of mass hysterica but for some reason nowadays there is an increasing trend of organisations also getting actively involved in whatever political issues the hysterics are currently having mental breakdowns over.

This breaks one of the foundation rules for any business – never publicly align yourself with any political party since you risk alienating your customers who don’t like that party or its policies. If the dislike is strong, your customers will simply shop elsewhere.

Let’s run through a few examples of such self-inflicted wounds to the corporate bottom line.

The retail giant Target corp. has branches all across America and up until last year was the sort of safe and steady investment beloved of all fund managers. Not too exciting but it chugged along increasing earnings per share each quarter and formed a backbone holding of most managed and tracker portfolios.

It all started to go arse over tit in April of 2016 when it announced with a grand flourish that it was going to allow men who thought of themselves as women to use both the lady’s changing rooms as well as their toilets. Quite obviously – or it is to me – women weren’t particularly enamoured of the idea and expressed their dissatisfaction about it by simply shopping elsewhere. You really don’t need to be clutching an MBA from Harvard Business School to see that result.

Since the announcement, its stock price has nearly halved, the company is on every brokers strong sell list because they don’t think its price has bottomed yet and the company has had three successive quarters of plunging sales leading to a loss of $15 billion this year. The brand name damage is of course disastrous.

Just to add to their woes, a petition to boycott the store organised by the American Family Association has already comfortably passed 1.5 million signatures. I think a lot of people are taking the opportunity of slapping down hard an idea which they see as yet another creeping attack on basic family values. Whatever the intent of the move was, it’s proved to have been a complete disaster and definitely not offset by any putative uptick of transgender men clip clopping around their stores in Cuban heels.

If you look at the bottom of the page the boycott petition is on, you’ll see what former customers of Target knew would inevitably happen – a list of perverted sexual activities happening in the now genderless spaces of the department store.

After nearly a year of firing various managers and replacing them with a turn around crew, they still haven’t done the obvious thing of reversing their policy for fear of outraging the politically correct lobby, so the company is still in free fall, but after it’s hit the basement the corporate predators will swoop in and pick over its bones.

Another example is Starbucks which for reasons known only to itself, announced that in response to Trump’s banning Muslims from selected countries entering America, they would hire 10,000 refugees over the next five years. This didn’t go down very well with a significant portion of their customers who’d voted for Trump.

In response, Trump’s supporters started a boycott movement on social media which quickly resulted in the YouGov BrandIndex for consumer sentiment towards Starbucks falling by two-thirds. Stuff like that has a habit of working its way down to the bottom line, especially as the move attracted the anger of veterans who felt rightly or wrongly that cheap refugee labour would price them out of that service niche.

On the funny side, people started phoning ahead for the coffee for later pickup and giving the name Trump which would be written on the side of the paper cup as it would be for any customer. Needless to say, a certain amount of confusion ensued at pick up time because of the sudden increase in people named Trump. A few fights have broken out as well, with Starbuck’s staff refusing to write the hated name on the side of the cup. On the not so funny side if you’re in a mass market catering situation, such aggravation between customers and staff is hardly good for business.

The department store Neiman Marcus announced in February for pretty shabby reasons it would no longer be selling the fashion line designed by Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter. They felt they had lots of company since other retailers such as Nordstrom, Shoes.com and Belk were doing the same, but the suspicion was it was in response to a campaign to boycott companies which did any business with Trump or his family.

The thing is, Trump supporters tend to be in work and therefore tend to have money to spend in stores like Neiman Marcus. They responded in kind with their own boycott which wasn’t offset by the stores gaining the few dollars, if any, spent by the potless antifa visitors as they were trailed around the place by the local store detective.

After a month of plunging sales, Ivanka’s jewelry was suddenly back on sale in the stores and the blunder had been repaired. If I held equity in that company, I’d be asking some pointed questions at the next annual general meeting.

There are a number of other businesses such as Kellogs and Allstate insurance which needlessly poked their toe into turbulent political waters and are finding out out to their cost that a boycott is a two edged sword, and the sixty-five million people who voted for Trump are pretty steadfast in exercising their power to withhold their money.

Any company that publicly aligns itself with a certain type of politics or starts agitating in support of some fashionable but controversial issue has no business doing so. The point of business is to do good steady business, not to save the planet or drag their customers into the blinding light of what it perceives as being for their own good. Once a company starts moving in that direction, sell up and get out, because it never ends well.

All organisation have a basic raison d’etre, which if ignored by going off gallivanting to tilt at irrelevant windmills will imperil its very existence.

The same trend that’s bedevilled certain retailers is more than evident in higher education. In tertiary education you expect a certain amount of acting up from young people who in most cases are living away from home for the first time and indulging in a lot of off-syllabus activities safely out of sight of their parents, but there does have to be limits or at some point the sharp edges of reality outside the campus make themselves felt.

Mills College in Oakland, formerly a female only college, announced with great publicity that from now on it would be admitting transgender men who thought of themselves as female, though men of course would still be barred from applying. How the latter would do against a challenge in a civil court might be interesting. Anyway, this totally virtuous initiative obviously struck a chord with young women thinking of applying there, but unfortunately it was the wrong chord.

Within a year, a plunge in fresh applications never mind the enrolment numbers has forced the college to declare a financial state of emergency because of a 20% shortfall in its previously healthy budget of $57 million. The trustees’ response is to fire professors, teaching staff and administration staff without reversing the poor decision that wrecked their financial stability in the first place. A place of higher education without any teaching capacity is a novel approach to the challenge I suppose.

The University of Missouri, commonly called Mizzou, has been hitting the headlines for the last two years and for all the wrong reasons. The highlights include student occupations of campus buildings preventing their use, camp ins on college grounds accompanied by demands for wood and heaters which were supplied, demands for resignations of certain school staff which were duly tendered, hysteria over imagined sightings of the KKK, massive outrage over a swastika nobody ever saw that was supposed to have been made from turds, objecting to media coverage of the Paris terrorist atrocity when it should have been focused on them, and all of this led by the black son of millionaires on a good old ego trip as he single-handedly assumed the leadership mantle of the BLM on campus.

If you’re particularly interested, all the tedious details of Mizzou’s downfall are readily accessible on the internet, but I wouldn’t advise it unless you’ve absolutely nothing else to do. The amount of dreck I have to wade through for a few miserable paragraphs in an article is truly dreadful. Ain’t I good to you?

After all the fun and games on campus by the mini-me version of BLM and with all the attendant great publicity, enrolment numbers have plunged and consequently the university budget is now in crisis. The trustees are having to cut 400 jobs and increase tuition fees by 2.1% but that shouldn’t be a hardship to the students there whose Daddy is a millionaire. As for the rest, I wonder if it’s not just black lives that matter but poor ones too?

Not to be outdone, students at Berkeley recently held protests demanding safe spaces for transgenders and “people of color” by blocking entrances to campus facilities to white students, who wouldn’t be allowed into such safe spaces. Perhaps it was prompted by Harvard students organising a separate graduation ceremony for black students.

After all the battles and lives lost in the sixties to end segregation, here we are a half century later with it being reintroduced not by masked Klansmen, but by the spoilt grandchildren of the generation who thought they’d seen its back forever.

Berkeley, the original liberal home of student activism, is now a one party state where extremists of the left are welcomed as speakers with open arms while those of the right are greeted by rioting. By anyone’s definition, that’s called Fascism which I’ve no doubt will come back to bite their budget considerations.

Even sport is now tainted with these attention-seeking individuals who think they can ram their opinions down other people’s throats by doing a bit of virtue signalling at grossly inappropriate times just to become instant overnight heroes.

The American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided not to stand for the national anthem that precedes all major games, instead taking a knee to show solidarity with the BLM movement. A boycott was promptly called and attendance and viewing figures plunged by a quarter. Some other footballers around the NFL followed Kaepernick’s lead and attendances never mind viewing figures dived even further week on week.

It’s interesting to note that at one college football game where the powers that be decided to skip playing the national anthem before the game to pander to some people’s supposed sensitivities, the spectators at the match wouldn’t let it kick off until they themselves had sung the song.

For a sport that’d shown nothing but an unbroken rise in revenue year on year, the shock was profound. For the first time in its history, the NFL is having to pay back “shortfall” money to advertisers because of the drop off in viewers. From the viewpoint of the average fan, the disrespect being shown by the 49er’s quarterback and other NFL players following his lead, was basically anti-American, anti-police and anti-military.

The Miami Sheriff even declined to provide an escort for the 49ers to a game there since so many of their officers were ex-military who simply refused to do it. When Kaepernick and the others stand for the national anthem, they’ll get an escort to the stadium was his position on the matter.

Kaepernick was a third stringer quarterback who only got a shot at number one because of injuries to numbers one and two. At the end of season, his contract together with some others around the league who shared his flair to cause deep offense, was not renewed.

He’s currently looking for a spot in another team, but nobody will touch him with a barge pole. He pissed off a lot of fans, damaged the bottom line of a lot of businesses and that’s a crime they’ll never give him a chance to repeat. Only a fool gets bitten by the same dog twice.

This invasion of sports by politics accompanied by ignorant reporters hell-bent on uncovering its dark racist underbelly peaked when a reporter for Mediaite interpreted the umpire’s standard strikeout sign of three fingers out for a KKK signal and promptly dashed out a very indignant article entitled “Wait, What’s That KKK Sign Doing At The World Series Game?” Eventually someone had to tell the bloody magazine, never mind the idiot reporter and the story promptly disappeared.

There are similar politically correct lunacies invading other sports such as soccer. FIFA are considering banning the wearing of poppies on Remembrance Day, singing of certain nationalist anthems and even forbidding players from doing things like making the sign of the cross, which will really go down a storm on the still large enclaves of Christianity that still exist in Europe.

If you haven’t noticed it, the common denominator at work here is organisations of one stripe or another offering services to consumers without really asking them if they find the commodity acceptable, never mind being deeply objectionable in some instances. They’ve interpreted this silence in response to not actually asking their customers’ opinion as somehow conferring approval on their latest spiffing idea but the reality is far from it.

Their customers do object but rather than arguing against a wall of wrong but impregnable virtue, simply boycott the product and move their custom to other vendors. Their pennies go into the coffers of other businesses and the offending organisation battens down the hatches for a few bad quarters. It’s interesting to note that the DNC reported that April was its worst fundraising result since 2009. Make of that what you will …

You can do business or you can do political activism, but you can’t do both without running the risk of doing some serious damage to your bottom line.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Antifa, Boycott, Politics