Make Kellogg’s Gr-rr-rr-rr-rreat Again, by Mark Steyn.
The website Breitbart … is sufficiently beyond the pale for Kellogg’s to announce that it is withdrawing its advertising from the site on the grounds that Breitbart does not reflect the company’s “values”. It is news to me that a cereal manufacturer has “values”, other than nutritional values listed down the side of the box – and, just to be pedantic about it, Kellogg’s does not really advertise on Breitbart at all: like most Internet advertisers, it has a general ad buy that turns up all over the place according to how many eyeballs each site has. So it’s having to spend money to create an algorithm which will detect when a Frosted Flakes or Rice Krispies banner is in danger of airing on Breitbart, and then prevent it from doing so. …
The real target here is not Breitbart so much as the incoming President of the United States, who has appointed Breitbart honcho Steve Bannon as a senior counselor. The losing side in the election wants to “de-normalize” Trump and his administration, by in effect de-legitimizing his voters and their electoral victory.
Boycotts for political reasons is a feature of the one party state that the left wants to create. From Ace of Spades:
The left is determined to pressure all corporations to join them in the culture war, and most corporate personnel — being largely socially liberal anyway, and viewing compliance with the left’s demands to be the path of least resistance — tend to sign up to be part of the Left’s Social Justice Army.
Ace quotes a Nissan spokesman, giving the right response:
[Nissan] places ads in a variety of sites in order to reach as many consumers as possible.
The placement of Nissan advertising is not intended to be a political commentary and there are no plans to change the advertising mix at this time.
I am not generally a fan of boycotts, but this, like so much else in our civic life, has been a one-way street. Executives at companies like Kellogg need to understand that ours is not a one-party state.
Back to Steyn:
I hate boycotts, too. I want to be free to reject Kellogg’s cereals because they suck rather than because buying them is a political act. But John Hinderaker’s right: This is a one-way street that leads to a de facto one-party state, or at any rate a one-party culture. …
America is a split nation politically. If the likes of Kellogg’s and Anheuser-Busch want to extend that split to beer and corn flakes, there won’t be a lot left. The damage is not just to their brands but to the kind of civil society that produces companies like theirs. If the left really cannot handle losing an election, why don’t they just cut to the chase and demand full-out civil war?
