Another influencer down
Gosh you don’t say.
Doritos has fired a transgender activist who appeared in one of its promotional videos after being alerted to her sickening old tweets, including one where she wrote about doing ‘depraved things’ to a 12-year-old.
Hello? Doritos? Are you new around here? What did you expect? Claiming to be trans is itself a warning flag. It doesn’t necessarily signal sexual abuse of children, but it does signal a narcissistic demand for attention. It does signal Trouble or Nuisance or Tiresome Dude Who Won’t Shut Up About Himself & Will Do Anything For Attention.
Also what’s with the fake “she” and “her”? Trans women are men; that’s what “trans” means.
Many took issue with the brand partnership and made reference to Bud Light’s disastrous partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney – which saw Budweiser lose $1.4 billion in sales as a result of a conservative boycott.
Oh well. Lie down with trans influencers, get up with a $1.4 billion loss.
It still amazes me that Corporations with significant PR and HR resources, plus outside advisers, manage to to deals with internet personalities seemingly without checking what they’ve said on the internet to get noticed in the first place. Just incompetent.
And the “movement” itself is completely dependent upon lies and bullying.
I believe that those tied to social media and specializing in it have an inflated idea of its power and importance. Sure, it has power and can be important, but like “the trans umbrella” it is a conglomeration of a huge number of small markets, identities, interest groups, etc that all just happen to use a particular set of devices and tools to gather and share bits of information, much of which is smoke and mirrors. The “Age of Information” or “The Knowledge Economy” can only go so far. It will never replace the material world in which people have to eat, live, work and die. The basic needs and requirements of humanity will still be there, even when the power goes out; people will always need real stuff.
Outside of its own supportive bubble, I believe there’s much less interest, support, and tolerance of all things trans than its proponents and allies would like. Thus the decidedly top down excersize in social engineering we’ve found ourselves inhabiting for the last few years. It only works with lies and bullying, it only succeeds through institutional capture. Its basic tenets, practices, and principles must be hidden or euphemized, because the more learn about it the less support it retains. It’s an inherently incoherent and unstable ideology that is at risk from blowing apart from its internal inconsistencies and implosion from the pressure of external critique and resistance. We’ve all seen the amount of social control and conditioning it takes to keep the lies going and the truth hidden. Ultimately, it’s a losing game, because the truth is always there, and it doesn’t have to do anything but exist. I
n the short term, however, there are plenty of governments and corporations ready to ride the flaming bandwagon, who will repeat the lies and do the bullying. They’ve become invested in protecting this toxic stew, alternating between carrot and stick, enforcing and cajoling. Surprisingly, they can still be genuinely taken aback at times by resustance, not realizing, in their own bloated self-righteousness, how poorly they’ve read the room and counted on the supposed “virtue” and “justice” of the trans cause to gloss over its fundamental nastiness (see “Lies and bullying” above). It may very well be that the “trans” moment has reached its high water mark, and that there will be more and stronger pushback against the inroads that genderism has made in public policy and institutions. As more and more corporations discover for themselves that aligning themselves with transactivism is not the moneymaker their social media interns had led them to believe, fewer my take the bait. If it’s turning people off your beer and corn chips, and causing you loss of political support, what’s the point? You might stay the course out of bloody-minded stubborness and unwillingness to abandon sunk costs, but this is self-defeating. Trans activism has used them, and they’ve gotten nothing out of the bargain. Not much of a return on what they might have thought was an easy buy into trendy, social cachet. And trans activism isn’t done with them. As pushback and calls for weeding out trans privileges grow, transactivists will complain more and more about the “rollback” of their “rights,” while being unable or unwilling to articulate what exactly those “rights” are, never having had to explain or justify them beyond the base emotional blackmail they employed to secure them in the fist place. They will call on their allies to hold up their end of the toxic bargains they’d struck. Having grown accustomed to command and obedience, these squatters will not cede their stolen places easily or quietly.
I’m wondering if another reason behind the shoddy vetting by PR and HR in cases like this ia a combination of a naive reluctance to look too closely at those people who are supposed to be “the poor, marinalized, vulnerable underdogs” who are supposedly “the good guys,” and a taboo against performing any such investigation in the first place, given the apparent belief that this victimized minority deserves a much wider latitude in its “self expression,” an attitude that seems to be in evidence when trans activists and their allies are not called to task by their own side for smears, threats and violence.
I’m not sure extending the Bud Lite analogy to Doritos is apt; in that particular case they were trying to net new customers but chose an influencer that was kryptonite to right-wingers (their primary market), so a boycott there would be effective in a way that boycotts usually aren’t. PepsiCo or Yum Brands (dunno what FritoLay is these days) isn’t nearly as vulnerable but no one likes nonces and they tend not to distinguish between paedophiles and hebephiles/ephebophiles.
So yeah, poor vetting vs. alienating the bulk of your customer base is a difference of degree.