In Brief: Why Coke Went Woke
It’s become even more like a cynical, race-baiting, dishonest bully than it already had appeared.
Coca-Cola has, unfortunately, joined the woke mob, and along the way it also advocated flat-out racism. Quin Hillyer explains the evidence:
A new, quite believable Twitter feed about the beverage company makes it look even more like a cynical, race-baiting, dishonest bully than it already had appeared. About which, more in a moment.
First, I began my one-man Coke ban — not a “boycott,” because I didn’t agitate for others to join me — when Coke in early 2021 joined a number of other companies (several of which I also foreswore) in flat-out lying that the then-new voting law in Coke’s home state of Georgia would “make it harder for people to vote.” Rather than stand up for mild and reasonable efforts to protect the integrity of the balloting process, Coke joined the vicious rush to falsely portray the new law as a racially-motivated return to the era of Jim Crow. It helped poison national political discourse and probably harmed the economy of its home state.
Hillyer is perfectly realistic that one man declining to buy a product won’t make much difference. Conservatives don’t tend to be boycotters in any case. But what if…?
Anyway, the new Twitter thread comes largely courtesy of one Calley Means, now a crusader against the overuse of sugar additives and, in general, in favor of healthier food choices. Among a series of Means’s damning claims against Coke, perhaps the most trenchant is one in which he wrote: “Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding. I say Coke’s policies are evil because I saw inside the room. The first step in playbook was paying the NACCP + other civil rights groups to call opponents racist.”
And, Means wrote, it was quite explicit: “The conversations inside these rooms was depressingly transactional: ‘We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist.’”
That’s on top of the company requiring woke training programs for employees to “be less white,” even while trying to weasel out of blame.
Why? Because “to be less white is to be less” oppressive, arrogant, certain, and defensive, and “less ignorant,” too.
What this is, is racism. Pure and simple. And, yes, evil.
Hillyer concludes:
Unlike its claims in 1970s TV ads, Coke isn’t the “real thing,” but apparently the racist thing. And I wouldn’t like to buy the world a Coke, but a healthy, non-Coke-owned iced tea instead. Because the more Coke goes woke, the more I hope it goes broke.
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