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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Culture war refresh. Many people are familiar with the Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney controversy. About a week afterwards people on this website noted there wasn’t a large impact on the stock price of InBev, Bud’s parent company,

Well, InBev is now down about 10% from when the whole Bud Light - Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship. Bud light revenue is still down materially. At the same time, other major alcohol companies appear flat or up materially. Therefore, it seems the boycott has had real negative impact on InBev.

Does this mark the start of the right finding it’s muscle or is this a dead cat bounce?

Fresh WSJ Bud Light Delenda Est Update on the front page this morning.

Bud Light sales losses continue, though they have slowed, holding steady around -28%. Coors and Miller's Lite offerings are showing more modest gains of around +16%, two weeks ago it was Bud down 15% and Coors and Miller both up 15%. I don't know what the proportion of sales is between the three light beers, but the change does indicate that some sales have been fully lost from the generic mass light beers to craft offerings or to other brewers (Yuengling! America's Oldest Brewery!) or to other alcohol categories entirely.

AB Inbev is offering hazard pay bonuses of $500 to wholesaler employees and delivery drivers who faced customer abuse for driving a Bud Light branded truck.

AB intends to triple Ad Spend for the rest of the year, a cost of millions, to try to unring the bell.

Numerous ad execs have been axed or shuffled, the whole marketing department is now under sharper observation and approval from the C Suite.

Congress is launching a (kinda bad faith) investigation into whether the Mulvaney ad violated rules about marketing to minors. Which could keep the issue alive for much longer, and lead to fines.

In yet another episode of NEVER EVER APOLOGIZE, AB now faces significant backlash to their efforts to fold to the boycott, with the LGBTQWERTY+ community they originally tried to target feeling abandoned when AB pulled back. It's better to never get involved, but if you do, never ever apologize, ride it out. No one likes a coward.

On balance the boycott seems to have significant teeth, with AB suffering major losses as a result of the boycott, and planning major spending to counter it. How big a loss do we need to see before other corporations start treating the issue as toxic? What's your over/under?

Bud Light Delenda Est, drink Yuengling or local.

you really ought to post this to the new thread. It's a substantive update, worthy of a top-level post.

I thought about it, but I posted practically the same thing two weeks ago, also from a WSJ article. The changes have been a further 7% drop in sales, the congressional investigation, and confirming the ad spend. I don't want to turn into a broken record on this one, just following the story. If you have an interesting reaction to it, feel free to post your own top level with any of this context.

I think it's neither. Bud Light was a special case where significant percentage of consumers were in the anti-audience for the message, and the alternatives were readily available. For most products, either the first (like the movies, for example) or the second (like the sports - you can't just switch to another NBA on the next shelf really) is not true. So, it kinda was a perfect situation for a successful strike, but this kind of situation wouldn't present itself too often, and so far most of other woke megacorps are as woke as ever. So it's a tactical win in a skirmish with favorable conditions, which says little about the outcome of the war. It's surely nice to get a win once in a while, but don't order the champagne just yet.

It's surely nice to get a win once in a while, but don't order the champagne just yet.

It is important precedent, remember that very idea of right wing boycott was seen as joke, and rightly so.

Now it is important to do not give up, do not be bought and appeased by patriotic veteran beer, it is important to continue until Anheuser-Busch is driven to bankruptcy.

It is not about some shitty beer, it is about making an example and sending a message.

it is important to continue until Anheuser-Busch is driven to bankruptcy.

I would say it's probably more important to have realistic goals.

The history of Progressivism argues otherwise. Moderate goals are for moderate people. Extremists make history.

Extremists die in ditches. The strong, the canny and the lucky make history.

The number of extremists that have achieved success and changed the world are far outnumbered by those that achieve nothing and usually end up lining the inside of a mass grave. The Paris Commune did not fail due to a lack of extreme beliefs, it failed because extremists are by their very nature terrible at making the kind of compromises you need to make in order to advance your goals.

Extremists die in ditches.

Or, in this case, face a dearth of choices when it comes to mass-market beer in non-metro areas?

The number of extremists that have achieved success and changed the world are far outnumbered by those that achieve nothing and usually end up lining the inside of a mass grave.

And yet of the people who have made significant and immediate changes to the world, extremists significantly outperform their percentage of the population, which is the correct way to assess the question. Strength, cunning and luck are of course of overwhelming importance as well, but all three together do not change the world if the person possessing them is quite comfortable with the way things are.

I suppose the synthesis here is "extremists tend to make history by subjecting themselves to a high attrition rate and building their legacies on piles of corpses--whether theirs or their enemies'."

EDIT: As to the overall discussion of moderate change vs. extremist drives, I think we rarely do see modest goals being strived for and accomplished, whether that's because they're so modest as to be virtually-inconsequential (like, say, de-bloating some middleware for a specific IT solution or spending a few hundred thousand on a beautifying project for a city square), we just fail to notice them when they do happen (e.g. important bills for digital speech and copyright getting passed without much media outcry), or because some "modest" goals are actually not-so-modest and require outsized amounts of effort to achieve (like, say, housing reform). And if you have to shoot for the stars just to land on the Moon, why not pledge to reach the edge of the Universe while you're taking off the limiters?

And yet of the people who have made significant and immediate changes to the world, people who wish to make significant and immediate change significantly outperform their percentage of the population

In other news, new research finds that people most likely to complete marathons are those that wish to run marathons. In all seriousness, this isn't an argument in favour of extremism. Of course extremists are the most likely to achieve extreme goals, the only alternative candidates are those whose hands are forced by circumstance and those who unintentionally stumble into it.

Strength, cunning and luck are of course of overwhelming importance as well, but all three together do not change the world if the person possessing them is quite comfortable with the way things are.

This is again true, but also not particularly useful. If you have all the virtures of someone capable of shaping the world around you to your liking and you happen to like things the way they are, then you're going to deploy your virtues in pursuit of that end rather than in direct opposition to it.

It seems to me that the point you're driving at, is the importance of strength of will, or of conviction to your goals. This is definitely a quality common among extremists and it is an important part of managing to stick with difficult goals like shaping the world to match your vision, but your odds of success are a lot better if you also happen to have those other virtues as well. The idea that strength of will alone is enough to achieve your goals seems historically fairly common among those who are at a severe disadvantage in other areas, but cannot accept their disadvantageous position. Imperial Japan springs to mind as an immediate example and look how well that worked out for them.

Loop it back to Anheuser-Busch.

The reason Anheuser-Busch being boycotted is that they got dragged into the culture war. The reason they got dragged into the culture war is that an infinitesimally-small fraction of the population adopted extreme values, and have dedicated significant portions of their lives pursuing what would have, five or six years ago, been seen as an absurdly quixotic quest to fundamentally rewrite significant portions of our social reality, based on a manifestly self-contradictory ideology that turns self-mutilation into a sacrament.

These people are winning. They have taken massive strides toward achieving a goal that was not within a million miles of realistic. They have achieved a level of social dominance such that people who disagree with their ideology in public do so at the risk of their friendships and jobs, a level that frequently gives them social cover on behavior others would be crucified for.

This ad happened because extremists persevered in their extremism. Had they set reasonable goals, none of this would be happening.

The boycott, likewise, is a product of extremism. Taking 10% off the valuation of one of the larger corporations in the world is not a reasonable response to offense over a social media stunt. There's a million reasonable arguments for why this is silliness, and people should move on with their own business, touch grass, get a life, stop being mad at people on the internet. They could do that, A-B's stock would recover, the sun would rise tomorrow... and the thing that enraged them would continue to spread. While they act reasonably, extremists on the other side do not.

The boycott has not worked as well as it has because the people engaging in it have a reasonable goal. It is working because they have an unreasonable goal, an extreme goal: to punish a multinational corporation for siding with their enemies, to hurt that corporation as bad as they possibly can. Peer-to-peer, headless, truly grassroots activism is very hard in the best of circumstances, which this is not; any attempt at a boycott has to overcome a myriad of truly fearsome obstacles, and it is the unreasonableness of the goal that provides much of the motive energy. No one is going to switch their beer order in order to secure a "reasonable" goal, like a meaningless PR-speak non-apology on twitter. They are going to change their beer order because they think it might make a difference, and that means the outcome needs to be significant. The goal is not to get AB to apologize for what they did, but to ensure that neither A-B nor their competitors ever do it again.

There is every incentive to adopt an extreme goal: It motivates the grassroots, makes their hopes plausible, gives them a clear goal, an unambiguous goal, a distant goal to strive for, rather than prematurely declaring victory and giving up. Making the goal reasonable achieves little to nothing; there's no organization to preserve here, no resources to allocate, no credibility to be lost. A-B will probably not go bankrupt, but failing to make that happen will not cause a drop in fervor to the grassroots, since no one is actually expecting that to happen. It's not a "reasonable" goal, is it? On the other hand, if it did happen, that would be a win for the record books, and it certainly won't happen if they try for anything less. So why not swing for the fences?

John Brown didn't, in the end, try to organize a sewing circle. What he did was to make a serious attempt at personally murdering half a country. In doing so, he probably had a greater influence on achieving unrivaled supremacy for his values and on shaping the next two centuries than any other single human, and by a wide margin.

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It's one heck of a ditch Stalin has. Mao too.

I am not sure this will bankrupt AB InBev - it is a very big corp that is extremely hard to bankrupt, but if it can be seriously hurt, it could be a useful lesson to others, that actions have consequences.

Yeah. AB InBev could completely lose Bud Light and still remain a going concern. It'd be a nontrivial hit, and a victory for the Right...but I think they're too damn big for a boycott to take them out of business. Companies have made larger gaffes before and survived - like the CEO openly stating that their products were shit. The last time I'm aware of a boycott really hurting a company was the Civil Rights era. Maybe divestment in South Africa counts.

Light beer seems like the type of product that you would never switch once you've made a choice. Once you pick Bud Light in your early 20s, you just stick with it for the rest of your life. So it's a choice that people rarely re-examine and the brand benefits a lot from inertia. I don't think conservatives are going to be upset forever about Bud Light, but getting them to switch back seems like it will be an uphill battle.

It’s also something you order at restaurants and bars where you have a choice and the choice is publicly known. If I’m in a bar in Mississippi and I’m ordering a beer with my buddies, there’s an element of peer pressure. The controversy over Mulvaney means that especially in conservative circles, ordering a Bud Light is going to be something people pay attention to. It’s the tranny beer. You don’t support that do you?

And I think this is why a lot of boycotts fail. If you can privately cross the line, then a lot of people do. All the people who are concerned about Amazon abusing workers still order from them because the social pressure of potentially being seen ordering from Amazon isn’t there.

To be clear, a lot of the bud light drop in sales was through liquor stores and grocery retail.

The people who, for whatever reason, wanted to drink bud light, now buy something else to drink a six pack of at home where no one is watching.

Being at the liquor store isn't being alone.

If you're in a small town, you may very well know the person who works the cash register.

The sociology of the small town south, at least(that is, a large portion of the population claims not to drink, and 95% of them do anyways) should be a mitigating factor on that because liquor store employees are de facto sworn to secrecy anyways- pastor Jimbob drinking bud light isn’t that much bigger of a reputational hit than him drinking Michelob ultra or coors light or whatever.

I have no experience with this: are the contracts for bars and restaurants and other venues flexible enough to see sales drops in one month or less?

If the contracts are long term, you wouldn't see any drop in wholesale on AB's end until the contract is up, even if the consumers have stopped drinking it.

At bars/restaurants, a driver comes around once a week and restocks as necessary, entering the data on a handheld. So granular to weekly at the distributor level.

Most likely, sales data is sampled from a selection of retailers almost real-time and statisticified by paid analysts.

Keeping in mind, I'm familiar with this second-hand due to family working for Miller at one point, which is a different company, but...

Local sales - to grocery stores, gas stations, and the like - are effectively handled by sales reps who manage them. Once stocked, the stock in question(IE, Beer) is basically one and done and can only be removed from the store in question by being sold.

So, thanks to this PR kerfuffle, you've got alot of beer that's basically sitting around in stores not doing anything that the stores in question can't get rid off and the sales reps can't replace with other things that would sell.

Plus, you've got local stores thinking to themselves 'Do I really want to deal with this?' when it comes time to see what's going to get prominence in their liquor area and who's going to get permission to do those stupid, big displays for when the game day comes along.

All these metrics are tracked by software. (And this was several years ago, keep in mind, who knows what they're doing now). If stores are under-performing, the head distribution offices know about it. Often times, what's stocked in choosen through a combination of the sales rep and what the local store manager allows. Which means this can get messed up and stores can under-perform very easily, because you've got stock sitting there no one wants to buy and you can't stock what's being sold more because you have limited shelf space you're allowed and this crap that won't move is just sitting there and you can't do anything with it...

I haven't talked to anyone in the business in a long time, but if I had to guess, there's alot of people that are very, very cranky right now.

So, to answer your question; Yes, I have a feeling they instantly saw a tank in sales and are quietly panicking, because the guys who've got skin in the game are probably screaming their heads off, from the sales reps to the distribution centers.

I do think the cost of boycotting bud light is low therefore making it more susceptible to boycotts.

The boycott worked this time because Bud Light is completely interchangeable with other products and they attacked their core audience. For the same reasons, the Gillette boycott had a real impact.

Other companies, like Disney or Apple, can get away with woke signalling because their business has a moat.

What was the Gillette thing about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Men_Can_Be

"The Best Men Can Be" was a corporate social responsibility advertising campaign from the safety razor and personal care brand Gillette of Procter & Gamble. The campaign launched on January 13, 2019, with the digital release of a short film entitled We Believe: The Best Men Can Be, which played upon the previous slogan ("The Best a Man Can Get") to address negative behavior among men, including bullying, sexism, sexual misconduct, and toxic masculinity. The campaign includes a three-year commitment by Gillette to make donations to organizations that "[help men] achieve their personal best".[1]

The initial short film was the subject of controversy. While it was praised by some, such as Bernice King, and defended by others, such as Mona Charen, it was generally received negatively by various online commentators, particularly males and conservatives, becoming one of the most disliked videos on YouTube.

Wish I could find the ad itself. Gillette appears to have scrubbed it. It was pretty offensive to men, if I remember.

Here it is from Gillette's official account: https://youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

Thanks. I wonder why this wasn't the first result when I searched Google? It's getting harder and harder to find things these days.

Google search is almost entirely SEO blogspam for me in the last year. I've started using Yandex.

It was pretty offensive to men, if I remember.

It was, and I swore off Gillette for life as a result. Doesn't really matter since P&G owns so much.

There's value in changing brands as a result of controversy, even if the company getting your money remains the same.

If Gillette sales suddenly dip by 50% and Braun picks up those sales, even if P&G ends up with the same number of sales, there are a bunch of factories that are going to be retooled or closed, a bunch of people that are going to be hired and fired or moved to different divisions that may have offices in different areas. Those are costs, and those are visible events among the executives of the company. To say nothing of the cost of running the ad in the first place: while marketing has some issues with showing its actual effects, the underlying theory is you increase your sales.

Yes, it's technically possible for them to just repeatedly bait and switch you: once you're established with Braun they do something exactly as controversial. But what then? You're not going back to Gillette. Maybe there's a third P&G brand that makes razors that you go to, but sooner or later you'll move outside P&G's ecosystem for your razor, unless they're spending even more money to set up new brands as fast as they collapse. Maybe you still buy their shampoo, but it's not like there's a binary "yes they're our customer/no they're not our customer" thing here where once you buy one P&G product they've won. They want your shampoo money and your razor money and your lotion money and every other bit of money they can get from you, and insofar as you move away from that that's a failure of their profit-seeking goals.

It probably won't bankrupt them as a company, but that's probably an unrealistic goal in the first place. What it will do is send a clear signal "hey, doing this thing that you thought would make you money is instead costing you money", and that's both attainable and effective for changing behavior.

I also permanently switched away from Gillette. It was a pretty easy choice since I'm also saving a lot of money. I'm sure I still consume a ton of P&G products though.

My guess is that that was seen as less important, because the people who use a product are not necessarily the same as the people who buy a product. This is most evident in marketing to children, but even for adults, there are a lot of households where the wife does the grocery shopping. Thus sometimes you get ads for men's products that are targeted at women - the Old Spice commercial is probably the most famous example.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gillette's theory was that it's an ad for women, who buy shaving cream for their husbands or male relatives.

I've long that that they realized they had lost their king of the shaving market position to cheap Chinese razors (like dollar shave club) and their best bet was to lock up a smaller but hopefully loyal core of customers.

Perhaps I'm out of touch on this one, I'm pretty price sensitive on razors, I bought a case of razors from the company that supplied DSC for less than a pack of refills from Gillette cost at the time and I'm still not half through with them a decade later.

Perhaps I'm out of touch on this one, I'm pretty price sensitive on razors, I bought a case of razors from the company that supplied DSC for less than a pack of refills from Gillette cost at the time and I'm still not half through with them a decade later.

The razor wars are so confusing to me because I'm out of touch in the other direction. I'm 0% price sensitive on razors, I bought a pack of Gillette refills like maybe two years ago? I don't get much facial hair, and my hair is very soft and fine, so I can use the same cartridge for months at a time. I find the whole discount-razor universe incredibly confusing, like, who worries that razors are too expensive? I spend like $40 every 3 years.

I assume that for someone with more/thicker/coarser facial hair it's a different animal.

I find the whole discount-razor universe incredibly confusing, like, who worries that razors are too expensive?

You don't until you do. I only started using a safety razor as opposed to disposable for body hair cause I randomly saw a suggestion that it'd be cheaper in the long run. It was a negligible amount of money in the short run yet/so I still tried it out.

Now it's my go-to.

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You can see it here. (It's kind of weird that the Guardian has a video which is just Gillette's video, but it has 4.4 million views, so they're probably making some money off of it)

Did this ad come out before or after YouTube hid dislikes? Any way to see the ratio on the original ad?

Youtube started hiding dislikes in November of 2021, so this was before. There are plugins that will let you see the dislikes on a video, since they're only hidden, but are still there.

Thanks for the tip.

Nowhere near as skewed as I was expecting, although this isn't the original ad.

Watched it again. What a trainwreck. Can you even imagine the shit storm that a gender-flipped version of this would launch?

Big culture war battle from the antediluvian year of 2019.

New Gillette ad shows father helping transgender son to shave

I thought it was the toxic masulinity ad?

It definitely was.

I wonder about Disney. I have no idea how many people are like me, but all they've done is motivate me to stop watching TV and movies, period. They've motivated me to not let my kid watch TV, period. If they own all the media, I stop consuming all the media.

Instead I've been woodworking. My wife has been gardening. My daughter has been getting super creative with art supplies, crafts, playing pretend and running around outside. We're probably all better off with less consoomer media, regardless of the fact that Disney has been pushing an odious agenda. If anything I should thank Disney for becoming so awful it finally got me to touch grass more.

To be clear, the Disney boycott is also hurting them, they just haven’t acknowledged it.

Is it a boycott, or is it just that they're putting out shitty products that people are wising up to and no longer want to pay for? Though wokeness plays a (significant) part in them being awful, many of their recent works would have still been completely awful regardless of the messaging.

This is a reasonable counterpoint, but it seems like they’d been making terrible products for years and only started suffering with the boycotts.

Or it takes a while to degrade a brand.

The MCU had a lot of good will to burn through post-Endgame. The Sequel Trilogy...not as much but even then it started at $2 billion with an incredibly unoriginal work and still ended up at $1 billion for an awful final installment in a cursed trilogy.

The MCU was legitimately great. The problem is that the main story ended with Endgame.

Problem? I'm thankful every day Endgame gave me a perfect place to get off the consoomer train I'd found myself trapped on since my early 20's when Robert Downy Jr swept us off our feet.

Are they severable? if you remove the girlbossing, male dumbification, mary sueisms, "deconstruction" and forced diversity, you don't get quantitively, but qualitatively different products.

It's hard to sever, that's for sure. But there are aspects of many modern Disney films that are bad regardless of those stuff. Rise of Skywalker wasn't helped by Rey continuing to be a Mary Sue, but the entire plot point of Palpatine somehow returning and bizarre plot contrivances like the dagger shape matching up to the Death Star ruins (just one example among many) by themselves were enough to make the film awful. Doctor Strange 2 wasn't helped by Doctor Strange being a supporting character to his own film, but the utter lack of internal logic and bizarre plot contrivances by themselves were enough to make the film awful. I've heard Peter Pan and Wendy is quite woke, but also it's been heavily criticized for awful acting, awful color grading and set design for Neverland, and awful combat choreography. Perhaps a lack of focus on the messaging would have allowed Disney to put some more focus on these other technical and fundamental script writing aspects, so I agree that it's hard to sever, but at the least, these films didn't seem to have some salvageable, worthy core that would have been fine but for the woke messaging.

Their films with less woke messaging don't seem to be particularly better, either. The Lion King remake did make a lot of money, but arguably that was riding the coattails of the original masterpiece, and it did turn off a lot of fans for being a near-shot-for-shot remake but with a lot of the soul ripped out due to the hyperrealistic style and bad voice acting. We'll see with the upcoming prequel CGI film about Mufasa if this was a one of those "fool me once/fool me twice" situations, I suppose. The Pinocchio remake has been criticized for missing the point of the original story, making the titular puppet a complete goody two-shoes from the beginning who is passively pushed into bad situations rather than making bad decisions, along with the lying-causing-nose-to-grow being used to help him get out of a sticky situation rather than punishing him. I heard that film had some woke messaging with some casting choices, but those weren't the downfall of the film, from what I understand.

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And they didn't really establish how they could be sure he was really gone, either! What's to stop Palpatine showing up again? In the EU series the heroes used various tactics to establish how he was capable of resurrecting and then how they could defeat him.

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Yeah, but several of those things aren’t gendered. Mary Sues, despite the name, are universal, as is deconstruction. I have faith in Disney’s ability to dumb down a story using those two alone.

Mary Sues aren't gendered at the core, but end up gendered in woke works because writing the female characters as having few limits and as being stopped by external oppression rather than internal flaws is encouraged by wokeness.

the term does have gendered forms (Mary Sue/Gary Stu), and one might argue that some of the specific tendencies are also gendered...

I mean, on the one hand you're quibbling over the different between the product being terrible, or being terrible and offensive.

On the other hand, we're all being gaslit about the product being terrible or offensive, and everyone who doesn't like the product is accused of being all the "-ists". They keep trying to guilt us into continuing to consoom.

I keep imagining it like some terrible MLM pitch, where some awkward, kind of aggressive, and frankly desperate salesman is making his pitch. He puts his foot in his mouth about men, so a few men get up to leave. Maybe he says something bafflingly retarded as a persuasive speech. Like "Women have always been the primary victims of war." As they walk out the door, he starts shouting at them angrily that they are missing the opportunity of a lifetime. They'll be on the wrong side of history! But it's so aggressive the a bunch more men are off put by it and leave too, and maybe a few women. When the last one leaves, he turns to the women, and the men with little enough self respect to stay, and doubles down instead, going "Fucking men, am I right?"

I think this phenomenon happens because many marketers take their ideology seriously. Based on my own experience as a believer in its predecessor ideology, woke ideology is both moralizing and totalizing (AFAICT, it's only gotten worse since I quit around a decade ago), so it has answers to questions of "right" and "wrong" in every possible context. The point of making a film isn't to convince the audience to give you money in exchange for entertainment, it's to make the world a better place by subtly manipulating the audience through social messaging (if they did otherwise, since everything is political, their works would, by default, have messaging that reinforces and upholds the current oppressive status quo). And if the audience dislikes that, that means that they are morally wrong, and it isn't our job to convince them, it's their job to see the rightness of our ideology and come around to it. And we'll bully and verbally abuse them until they do so.

I think a lot of the decision makers in media, likely including in Disney, have experience in seeing this work very well - very very well - in sociopolitical contexts. Often they might have been subject to such "marketing" themselves which led them to becoming true believers. I've seen and experienced this directly plenty, again, for the predecessor ideology. And they might be inferring that they can use similar "marketing" in a commercial context. I don't think I've seen it have much actual success there, though; in sociopolitical contexts, bullying and coercion is the norm and can get good results; in commercial ones, people tend to just walk away instead of handing you money in the face of bullying, and you can't legally coerce them.

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3rd wave feminism/identity politics/SJW. Arguably it's just the same ideology just with less time in the oven and less widespread acceptance.

Isn't the standard dismissal of that Disney+ subscriber numbers dropping because they no longer bundle HBO in India and dropped one of the major cricket channels?

To be clear, their movie release revenue has also dropped a lot more than their competition.

I would mostly blame it on oversaturation and a reversion to the mean after Endgame (how long could they have kept it up?) but some of the newer Disney+ products definitely feel more "woke". This speech is the apotheosis of a particularly "woke" view of politics. I think he actually literally said "do better".

Perhaps it's them targeting segments of the market in a more granular way than you could with Avengers. But obviously there aren't silos so people - the hardcore MCU fans who'd want to watch everything, which I'd bet lean more male - see that stuff and may get turned off even more.

The day after the Daily Wire made some sort of indication they were going to develop kids programming, I bought an annual membership. I've only watched a DW movie/show a couple times since then, but I've renewed the membership once already. It doesn't matter that they don't even have any kids programming yet, I want to encourage them to make it.

Angel Studios has three kids shows, one for the preschool age and two that are probably TV-Y7. They aren't religious in nature, one teaches civics from a right wing stance, but the other two are non-political. They just don't include anything that would have been objectionable to a Republican 20 years ago. These shows are free to watch, but new episodes are crowdsourced (so if you want to see what happens next, pay up!)

There aren't many options, but the Right is starting to wage the culture war, in the sense of changing the culture kids are exposed to.

Disney plus includes shows and movies from more than 15 years ago. If a parent controls the remote, they can show their kids more wholesome programming. There's even ways to block specific shows in the parental controls. A truly dedicated culture warring parent could probably manually block all new shows every morning.

These shows are free to watch, but new episodes are crowdsourced (so if you want to see what happens next, pay up!)

Do you mean crowdfunded, or are they soliciting scripts from random people?

You're correct, I meant crowdfunded. Though they also have a system to submit projects for funding and distribution.

Given that Catholics made the Dodgers disinvite the Sisterhood of Eternal Indulgence for Pride Night, it seems the right is finding its feet.

Please, it is the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But they are rather sui generis, since they aren't just a gay* rights group, but clearly ridicule Catholicism.

*They have been around since before T was added to LGBT, and perhaps before the B was added.

deleted

I’d heard of them because I was a commercial(trade redacted) who had to do a job where the client was a gay S&M club. They were setting up for swastika night at the time as I recall, but even seeing representatives of them at the time they seemed like some kind of bondage thing as much as a drag group(then again, swastika night).

swastika night

Is that when they do gangbangs and orgies while sieg hailing?

"govern me harder, daddy"

TBH, I was both morbidly curious and glad I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.

Indeed, the dodgers are still doing pride night. Just without the sisters of perpetual indulgence.

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