The Patriot Post® · Woke Business Comes With a Cost

Conservatives are generally terrible at boycotts. That’s because, temperamentally, most conservatives have a live-and-let-live mindset. “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god,” said Thomas Jefferson. “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” We’ll argue our case, of course, but there’s no coercion involved over mere differences of opinion. Picking pockets (and sometimes breaking legs) in order to force other people to conform to certain ideological “norms” is the domain of today’s radical leftists.

Thus, it’s newsworthy when a conservative group effectively targets companies that have bowed the knee to leftists’ Baal.

That’s the case with Consumers’ Research, a conservative-leaning nonprofit, which launched a new political-style ad campaign this week hitting Coca-Cola, Nike, and American Airlines for various “woke” positions taken by those companies. Others could face scrutiny, too, and the group plans to spend perhaps $13 million on the national ad campaign.

Coca-Cola’s offenses include opposing election integrity in its home state of Georgia and training its employees to be “less white.” It’s already gotten a rude awakening with declining sales, and Consumers’ Research hits the company for both its lies about Georgia and its sizable contribution to our national pandemic of obesity.

Nike is infamous for its longstanding wokeness, typified by forking out a boatload of money for an ad campaign featuring failed ex-quarterback Colin “The Kneeler” Kaepernick, as well as outsourcing its production to areas of China suspected of using Uyghur slave labor.

As for American Airlines, Consumers’ Research and a lot of inquiring minds want to know: “Why is CEO Doug Parker trying to appease the radical left?” Well, there’s an answer: “To distract from billions in taxpayer bailouts, from his $10 million payday, from American’s record layoffs.” Oh, and by the way, American Airlines has opposed Texas’s voter ID law, all while — you guess it — requiring its passengers to present ID.

Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, says he’s using his group’s 91-year history of advocating for consumers in order to rightly oppose the fact that “increasingly, businesses were cozying up to woke politicians” in order to distract from product or service failures of their own. “This is phase one,” Hild added. “We’re putting these three companies on notice that consumers have had it, and they need to focus on serving their consumers and not woke politicians. Phase two — this is certainly not a unique phenomenon, and we’re going to put all corporate America on notice that this isn’t going to work anymore.”

Private businesses certainly have the right to engage in whatever political speech they like, just as private citizens do, but that speech sometimes comes with consequences. If these companies are determined to oppose everything American Patriots stand for while falsely characterizing us as racist bigots, maybe they don’t deserve our money.