There is a lot at stake in the upcoming 2020 election. If conservatives really want to impact culture in any meaningful way, they must hold their noses and take a page from the progressive left’s playbook. Boycotting isn’t nearly as effective as corporate marketing or putting your agenda up for sale. And everything is always for sale.

 

ithin a week of Alabama passing the controversial “heartbeat” legislation, filmmakers loudly virtue-signaled to one another and vowed to boycott the state. Actress Alyssa Milano, the de facto third wave feminist leader, put out a call for women not only to boycott all hetrosex until the heartbeat legislation, or the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, was overturned, but for producers, who often film in the state, to take their dollars elsewhere.

It may be easy for conservatives to scoff at Milano’s hysterical sex tactic, but her call for boycotting the state should sound very familiar to our ears. Progressives work hard at pushing the corporate world to respond to causes they champion, and it’s time for conservatives to start taking notes.

But it isn’t just progressives who employ economic sanctions to support causes they care about. Governments also have a long history of employing economic sanctions as a weapon against dangerous and rogue states, such as the recent doubling down on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The old adage that money talks is a powerful one because it’s true. But the progressive left has found the secret sauce to the lobbying recipe that has rendered right-leaning causes tasteless and unimaginative—corporate activism.

The relatively recent phenomena to weaponize corporations to promote progressive causes, including deplatforming conservatives from banking systems, may be far more organized and deeper than conservatives realize.

The tactic of using global brand names, recognizable and sometimes trusted by consumers not only gets their message out to a wider audience, but helps to create the illusion that their far left causes are more mainstream than they actually are.

Additionally, progressives are excellent at forming grassroots organizations and non-governmental organizations by using disparate legal entities and corporate and nonprofit talent, in this case by raiding corporate board rooms, to not just steamroll ideas they find offensive but to market their own agendas for them.

By pushing corporate board room talent to do their heavy lifting, progressive institutions are, quite literally, smoking the opposition. It’s a brilliant ploy. By using corporate executives and board members to employ their extensive marketing expertise from deep pockets to advance their agendas, the left has also made a marriage made in hell for the right.

And the trend is growing. In recent years we have seen an increased rise in corporate activism, from Nike choosing Colin Kaepernick to celebrate it’s 30-year “Just Do It” campaign anniversary to Gillette actually risking its own customer base and brand by depicting a male with lipstick as the new face of its razors and encouraging men “to be the best you can be.”

Chips Ahoy, owned by giant Nabisco, a subsidiary of Mondelēz International, chose to use a cross-dressing drag queen to honor mothers on Mother’s Day.

As in most industries, corporations are incestuous institutions, with chief executive officers and financial officers floating back and forth among a handful of large and powerful corporations. Top talent and brain power is routinely poached from what appear to be disparate industries. Take Christiana Smith Shi, for example.

Shi, a Standford graduate who also holds a masters from Harvard University’s School of Business, was once the Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of e-commerce for Nike, where she worked from 2010 to 2016. Shi now works for UPS but sits on the board of Nabisco, who just delivered a man posing as a woman to wish America happy Mother’s Day.

It would be naive to believe that Shi has not been heavily influenced by the activism-marketing ploys Nike used to increase its sales from $4 billion to $7.9 billion or from her elitist, east coast university cabals.

Activism is the newest marketing ploy these corporations are using to reach fickle young consumers who wish to believe their buying decisions are based on their environmental or economical principles.

We all know millennials have eschewed big corporations for mom and pop coffee shops, organic bakeries and sustainable shoes. And predictably, corporations and progressives, who already control the universities and media, held their noses and climbed into bed with the enemy in order to advance their goal of fundamentally changing America—and making a shit ton of money.

It really is a brilliant move by corporations such as Nike, who have a long history of working with activists to advance its own brand long before anyone ever heard of Colin Kaepernick. Nike doesn’t actually care about black equality, but rather seeks to enrich its shareholders by capitalizing on racial tensions and tapping into the marketing etho that corporations must believe in something to reach consumers rather than being the soulless corporate entities that they actually are.

In an article by Black Perspectives, writer E. James White, details Nike’s long history of working with activists, including Director Spike Lee, to monetize its ties with black athletes while still managing to appear altruistic.

Ironically, Nike employs marketing that shamelessly uses minority athletes and feminists to target fair-minded and naive millennials, yet continues to employ near slave labor in third world countries to produce its athletic wear. But that is just a pesky fact that doesn’t interfere too much with the optics its smoke-and-mirror marketing programs create.

It has mastered how to make young, politically ignorant consumers feel good about their product while simultaneously exploiting cheap overseas labor.

Just how far the sportswear industry has become entangled with progressive interests can be neatly illustrated when Greenpeace launched its Detox Challenge last summer, which targeted global brands including Nike and Adidas with the aim of stopping their suppliers from dumping toxic chemical waste into waterways around the world.

Within weeks, Nike produced a plan to go toxic-free by 2020 with similar plans announced in the same record-breaking time by Adidas and Puma.