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Woke is headed for the deep sleep
A year ago, M&M (owned by Mars) launched a new marketing campaign.
It announced, “At Mars we believe that in the world we want tomorrow, society is inclusive. And, as one of our most iconic brands, M&M’S® is announcing a new global commitment to create a world where everyone feels they belong.”
A year later, M&M scrubbed that campaign. It dumped the anthropomorphic candies that have represented it on TV for 70 years in favor of hiring Maya Rudolph to pitch the product. They even put her face on them. They named her their Chief of Fun. They even changed the candy’s name to Ma&Ya’s because people stopped buying M&M candy because they were woke, not fun.
M&M was the most popular Halloween candy of 2021.
M&M was the fifth-most popular Halloween candy of 2022.
After customers balked, M&M dialed its inclusivity back to plain and peanut. Hershey does inclusion right. Its new ad shows a boy learning sign language just to impress a deaf girl. Smart lad.
Instead of just taking the L and moving on, lefties blame Tucker Carlson for the change because a few days ahead of the announcement, he dared criticize M&M’s “society is inclusive” campaign, which had knocked the candy from first to fifth place.
The Mary Sue ran a column, “Seriously? M&M Caves to Tucker Carlson’s Nonsense, Does Away With All Spokescandies.”
Lefties really do believe M&M saw a rant by Carlson and immediately signed a spokeswoman, put her likeness on its candies and filmed a Super Bowl commercial overnight. Such changes take months. But the power of Tucker Carlson is so chilling that to please him, Corporate America used its Time Machine to do focus groups and surveys to come up with a new marketing campaign.
The past year saw lefties take quite a few L’s on the woke front. They are not used to it. They react like a child being told no for the first time because that is exactly what happened.
The biggest L in the past 12 months came when Ron DeSantis made Disney, the world’s largest media conglomerate, back off on its opposition to a law in Florida that stops teachers from teaching about sex to kindergarteners and other prepubescent children.
That was in March. In April, the governor punished the company by snatching Disney World’s special exemption to local laws and taxes. In November, Disney replaced its CEO Bob Chapek with Bob Iger. Being woke had something to do with the change of Bobs. Disney stock fell 44% last year. Chapek could have weathered one of those storms, not both.
Maybe he and the spokescandies can go to a bar and drown their sorrows.
The woke are awakening to the fact that people are tired of their act. Politics is a pendulum. The swing back is knocking them out. Beth Kowitt of the Financial Review wrote, “The short-lived era of the woke CEO is already over.”
Kowitt said, “Research from Vanessa Burbano, a professor at Columbia Business School in New York, has found there is a ‘significant demotivating effect’ if an employer takes a stance an employee disagrees with, but no statistically motivating effect if the employee agrees.”
Customers are the same way. Bed Bath & Beyond dropped MyPillow to punish the conservative politics of Mike Lindell two years ago. Now BB&B is headed for bankruptcy court.
Kowitt said, “A report from Brunswick Group published in 2021 found that 63% of U.S. executives think companies should speak out on social issues, compared with just 36% of voters, with most saying companies are primarily doing it to look good.”
A few lefties get it. Woke is too much for Amanda Marcotte, and she is the one who wrote Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself.
In a column on December 27, 2022, she wrote, “A resolution for 2023: Time to say no to the ‘woke wars.’” Oh she got in pedestrian digs on conservatives and pretended to be a moderate. But a surrender is a surrender even if you just call it a withdrawal.
Andrew Breitbart said, “Politics is downstream from culture.”
The culture is a-changing. The woke are attacking the woke.
Christian Toto is one of the most consequential conservative critics of culture in America. His Hollywood in Toto blog is a pleasure to read. He has decried the woke and politically correct garbage churned out by Hollywood on TV and the movies for years. He has enjoyed the Schadenfreude of watching woke movies crash and burn at the box office. Woke is losing its target under-30 audience. They want to see Spider-Man, not Spider-Trans.
Toto wrote, “Liberal Media Wake Up to Horrors of Woke (But Is It Too Late?)
“NY Times, Atlantic, Variety fear Cancel Culture’s crushing impact on art.”
He asked, “Have reporters, who directly fueled Cancel Culture over the past few years, realized the error of their ways? Perhaps.”
Toto cited an Atlantic article, “Why was Jihad Rehab canceled? And who is behind the most serious charges leveled against the documentary?”
The film is about terrorists released from Gitmo who then undergo a yearlong program of de-radicalization in Saudi Arabia.
The Atlantic story said, “You have not seen it. You cannot see it, unless its director, a Californian named Meg Smaker, has sent you a copy, or you attended one of the few film festivals that agreed to show it and did not subsequently back out. In December, the film was considered one of 2022’s most compelling documentaries, and the chances were high that some streaming provider would be pushing it into your living room with great insistence right now.
“But in January, the Sundance Film Festival screened it, and some employees of the Sundance Institute, which operates alongside the festival, soon resigned in protest. Even before viewing it, they had criticized the film for a multitude of sins, including the exploitation of its subjects and cultural insensitivity. The film’s best-known financier, Abigail Disney, repudiated the film, and others who had seen it and admired it spoke up to denounce Smaker. Distributors and other festivals shunned it, and it is currently sitting mostly unviewed on Smaker’s hard drive in Oakland, California.”
Entitled heiress Abigail Disney helped finance it. She censored it. Her privilege. One of many privileges bestowed upon her at birth.
Elitists initially praised the film, but as the New York Times noted on September 25, 2022, “Sundance Liked Her Documentary on Terrorism, Until Muslim Critics Didn’t.”
That’s cold. Accuracy often is.
The story said, “Many Arab and Muslim filmmakers — who like others in the industry struggle for money and recognition — denounced Jihad Rehab as offering an all too familiar take. They say Ms. Smaker is the latest white documentarian to tell the story of Muslims through a lens of the war on terror. These documentary makers, they say, take their white, Western gaze and claim to film victims with empathy.”
Oh good grief. An all too familiar take? Of what? How many documentaries — or Broadway musicals and sitcoms for that matter — have there been about terrorists released from Gitmo? I somehow missed Hussein’s Heroes.
Toto is encouraged by the reporting on the cancellation of Jihad Rehab. He wrote, “Once again, a liberal news outlet not only called out Cancel Culture but framed its impact as detrimental to free expression. It’s the kind of narrative right-leaning sites routinely embrace, like the Daily Wire, The Federalist and Breitbart News.
“Mainstream journalists, by comparison, wouldn’t dare flirt with that point of view up until recently. They often take the opposite approach, suggesting these stories, and artists deserved cancellations.”
Self-censorship is the aim of these crybullies. They want to silence critics and control thoughts. I advise Muslims not to trust them because it was just a few years ago that liberals decried female genital mutilation. Now, they call it transgendering and promote the barbaric butchery of the baby-making parts of both boys and girls.
Someday, the cancelers of culture will turn against the T-girls and T-boys, just as they have turned against J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame and Cynthia Nixon. She is the feminist and lesbian actress from Sex and the City. When she dared to challenge Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2018, the feminists turned against her because he was the real champion of women. Right? Well, he did give New Yorkers their first woman governor — by resigning over what the British tabloids called sex pest allegations.
While silencing critics, the woke keep pushing the boundaries to force upon us their vision of a non-Christian, non-white America where everyone is LGBT.
HBO is airing Velma, a re-write of Scooby-Doo in which the bookish geek is now a South Asian-American bisexual. Daphne is an East Asian-American high school drug dealer with two mothers. Shaggy is biracial. Fred is just Fred only he now is stupid because he is a straight, white male.
Forbes magazine declared, “Velma Is Now Officially The Worst Show On TV.” The complaint is not because it is woke but because it is broke. The producers spent too much time checking off the list for diversity and not enough time on storyline and character development.
Forbes said, “The only thing Velma has managed to do well—and this is actually quite the achievement—is unite the entire internet for one brief moment. Conservatives, liberals, Scooby fans and non-fans alike all agree: Velma is a steaming pile of Scooby doo-doo.”
Check out the video, “Velma Gets Destroyed By The Audience As HBO Turns Off Comments.”
Of course, not everyone learns. HBO will give this bomb a second season.
And Ken Burns is still woke. He has a new documentary on the Holocaust. He blames America. Why not? To him, President Trump was Hitler, now DeSantis is. Everyone he doesn’t like is Hitler except Hitler.
Burns said in an interview to publicize his film, “The authoritarian playbook is being practiced in lots of different places. You know, if you’re an employee of the state of Florida and you just don’t agree with your governor and you’re fired, that’s out of the authoritarian playbook. People who are not authoritarians say, ‘Oh, you disagree with me? Let’s have a discussion. Let’s see whether there’s common ground.’ But Florida’s not doing that. It’s saying, ‘Disney, we’ve given you favorable treatment for so long. But you think that the LGBTQ community has equal rights? Well, we don’t. We’re going to take away those special privileges you have.’ I was just trying to call out this authoritarianism.”
That shows you how poor a documentarian he is nowadays. He makes up quotes and puts those words in people’s mouths just to bash them. Somehow taking away a special tax privilege from a company worth $200 billion puts us on the road to Holocaust 2.
His words also show Burns has all the depth of an ant’s bathtub and is light on his research.
The woman DeSantis fired was later pleaded guilty to illegally accessing the state’s computers, which she then manipulated to make it appear as if more people had covid than they did. She actually did what she falsely accused DeSantis of doing. She admitted to a felony. The judge fined her, gave her community service and ordered her to see a mental health professional once a month.
As for Burns’ whining about equal rights for LGBT, the law banned all teachers from talking about sex to little kids. As actor Kevin Sorbo tweeted, “Why is it considered harassment to talk about sex in the workplace but not to children at school?”
Burns aside, not every liberal has lost his mind.
Sarah Jones of New York magazine wrote on April 14, 2022, “The Woke Corporation Is Dead. Good.” Her column was about the hypocrisy of Amazon and Starbucks fighting unions while preaching the social justice claptrap.
Darryl Richardson, an Amazon worker, told her, “They don’t care about black lives. They’ve got flyers and pictures of Martin Luther King and black history in the hallways. They’re just trying to make it seem like they do care because the majority of the plant is black.”
But her kicker was this: “Earlier this month, the Intercept reported that Amazon was planning to ban certain words — including plantation, slave, and union — from a new internal messaging app.”
Maybe Amazon can hire Maya Rudolph to be in charge of employee relations. I hear she is fun.
But not as much fun as watching wokeness melt in their hands, not on our candy.
