target pride
The concept of retail boycotts is far more often addressed among activists on the political left, primarily because they operate under the notion that they are the "underdogs" fighting against the system. In reality, the political left is the system. When almost every major corporation, every globalist foundation and every western government is funding and and enforcing your ideology, you are the oppressor, not the oppressed.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are finally learning that focusing solely on politics is a losing battle and that the "culture war" is in fact the most important issue of our era. It's sad that it took this long for the liberty minded to change strategies. This doesn't mean that they should give up on trying to put honest and sane leaders in government, it just means that relying on politicians is a gamble and taking direct action whenever possible is going to get better results.

In the past, leftists have tried to apply the mindset of strength in numbers to their own boycotts, almost always resulting in complete failure. A recent example would be the highly publicized effort by woke activists to boycott Harry Potter writer J.K. Rowling's media products. Rowling is a well known progressive who probably helped to create the very intersectional social justice movement that is now trying to burn her at the stake. But this is how these things usually go with Marxists - One day you are useful to them, the next day you are a threat to them and they're putting you up against a wall.

Leftists tend to rank individuals in terms of their "platforms," meaning a person's value to them is measured by their reach in legacy media and social media. When someone with extensive reach (which they believe is the same as influence) suddenly disagrees with one of their tenets, they become enraged and viciously attack. That person was just a tool they could use to spread their propaganda; that person is not allowed to have their own viewpoints.

Rowling committed the sin of sticking to her 2nd Wave feminist guns and declaring that only biological women can be women, defying the bizarre trans identity narrative. In turn she made the woke mob an enemy for life as they proceeded to burn Harry Potter books and demand she be "canceled" from any media outlet that might give her a microphone. This movement culminated in an attempt to push a mass boycott of Hogwarts Legacy, a newly released Harry Potter video game.

The boycott failed miserably, with the game hitting record sales. It was incredibly embarrassing for the political left, which often argues that cancel culture is "just the free market telling businesses what the majority wants." In reality, cancel culture is nothing more than a tiny minority of people extorting companies into removing content made by political opponents of the left.

This is why boycotts are a double-edged sword - If the tactic is even remotely successful, a group can use it to show they are the majority and gain influence over company policy. If they fall apart, though, then the group has just exposed themselves as a paper tiger with little to no power.

Leftist boycotts are often astroturf movements, puffed up and artificially inflated by social media noise and activist puppet accounts. Also, leftists tend to have far less spending money, which means they have no market power. On the other hand, conservatives are showing they do have extensive market power. Bud Light sales across the country have collapsed by 25%-30% after partnering with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney to market their beer. Cases of Bud Light are now priced for almost nothing as retailers can't even give the beer away.

Target has lost over $10 billion in market cap in 10 days after they tried to sell pride month merchandise promoting trans ideology to young children, made by a designer who is an apparent satanist. Leftists are so furious at the success of boycotts against these corporations that they are devolving into cry-bully mode. They now suggest that the boycotts are actually a form of economic terrorism:


The corporate media is engaging in full blown spin as they rush to demonize effective boycotts of woke propaganda, specifically trans propaganda. The message is a familiar one: "You must participate in the collective narrative. If you don't participate, this is the same as attacking society as a whole and that makes you a threat. Silence is violence. Voting with your wallet is violence. Doing anything we don't like is violence."

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is even getting in on the outrage, suggesting that it's "scary what's happening in the US," equating the push-back against the social justice agenda in the US with "attacks on 2SLGBTQI+ people" (whatever that means), as if freedom for them means compliance and submission for everyone else.


Target has moved many of its pride displays to the back of stores in an effort to avoid a Bud Light level crash in their sales, but has also recently doubled down on their social justice politics with claims that boycott supporters have "threatened" Target staff. They have provided no proof of these threats so far. Ironically, only leftist activists have used scare tactics against the company, including bomb threats, unless Target returns all of its child focused "Pride" merchandise displays to the front of stores.

Leftists argue that this amounts to censorship of LGBT products and businesses by conservatives, but of course it's the same tactic they've been trying to use for years. Conservatives just did it better. The free market gets to decide what businesses succeed and what businesses go bankrupt; companies are not owed customer loyalty or financial survival merely because they virtue signal.

Unlike progressive cancel culture which uses intimidation, stalking, doxxing and personalized targeting to frighten individuals and businesses into compliance, all conservatives have done is stop buying from particular corporations, and it's working. Whenever anti-woke efforts get good results, the goal of leftists is to then associate those efforts with some form of aggression.

Keep in mind that the mobilization of Americans against trans concepts and social justice politics never would have happened if activists and activist corporations had simply left children alone. But, they have decided to die on that hill instead and insist that your children are actually their children to indoctrinate as they please. The backlash is only going to get worse for leftists from here on.