Georgia can’t catch a break from the culture wars. First condemned and canceled by woke Hollywood celebrities years ago, Republican Governor Brian Kemp and his state have found themselves under siege by a new enemy: corporate America. As events throughout last week revealed the left’s absurd falsehoods and bad-faith arguments about Georgia’s new voting law, the last thing anyone expected was for corporations to pander to the woke mob like never before and put their own hypocrisy on full display.
As individual corporations -- such as Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Merck & Co. -- and various banks, sports teams, and media giants have come out in full force against Georgia’s law, a curious paradox has arisen. Immediately, influential figures on the right took to social media to express their outrage over the pandering to woke cancel culture taking place within corporate America. Almost immediately, Senate Republicans and even former President Donald Trump urged followers to boycott Major League Baseball, Coke, and Delta for their financial pullouts from the Peach State. One outrage led to another, and the power of the Twitter echo chamber took hold.
After Republican backlash to the corporate woke scolding began trending, left-wing activists dogpiled on the drama in droves. They pointed out the hypocrisy of Republicans decrying cancel culture while threatening to employ it themselves against corporations, pointing at examples like the boycott of Nike by the right as evidence of conservatives employing cancel culture for their own purposes. To an extent, it is hard to disagree. Cumbersome as it may be to see corporations bend to the whims of left-wing activists, boycotts by the left and the right against the businesses and entities backing the opposite side demonstrate both sides are prepared to live out their political beliefs.
History has already shown that boycott campaigns have a mixed track record. Gillette’s “The Best Men Can Be” social-justice advertising campaign in 2019 led to calls to boycott the company and a multibillion-dollar loss by the end of the year. On the other hand, the boycott against Nike after its partnership with Colin Kaepernick went public resulted in burnt Nike shoes and an all-time high in the company’s stock price after surpassing sales expectations later that quarter. As the saying goes, all is fair in love and war.
If corporations want to chastise Georgia for their misinterpretations of legislation, let them be. There is nothing more hypocritical than groups of people refusing to live their politics, whether from coastal elite liberal technocrats, woke corporations, or young left-wing activists on Twitter. Is the debate about “reverse cancel culture” coming from the right valid but absurd? Leftists love to profess that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Let’s see if they hold on to those views when the Georgia legislature rightly starts to reflect its own values and follows through with removing tax breaks from the cowering corporations tut-tutting and pushing their boycott message against the state.
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