(From Five Feet of Fury):
We’re talkin’ Chick-Fil-A!
The Chick-Fil-A boycott contained the seeds of its own destruction:
Successful sixties style boycotts need two ingredients:
The moral high ground and a product/service you, the boycotter, actually use.
Early civil rights leaders demanded that protesters wear their Sunday best and conduct themselves in a dignified manner, the better to win sympathy from average observers.
Needless to say, the online and public behavior of Chick-Fil-A boycotters was the opposite.
(I won’t get into the built-in problem on the launch pad, that not everyone believes that gays can ever have the “moral” high ground anyhow, due to the fact that they’re gay. We may find this attitude repellent but again, this is another flaw in this boycott’s very DNA.)
As well, for class reasons, the activists would never set foot in a Chick-Fil-A anyhow, so their boycott was a joke. It’s like Jews boycotting bacon.
Next: progressives live in the past. The sixties are over.
Once upon a time, they could declare an Age of Aquarius and Archie Bunker could only grumble impotently.
They still think their top down tactics like boycotts will succeed, and they still can, if they contain the two ingredients above.
This boycott was more like the underpants gnome business plan. Too many steps were missing; without laying the proper foundation, the boycott was fated to crumble.
Today, our side has (temporarily I think) access to two parallel media outlets: talk radio and social media. This allows us to mount effective counterattacks immediately.
(Imagine: with today’s technology, everyone could have found out what a dangerous fraud and pseudo-cult leader Cesar Chavez much faster, and the grape boycott could have fizzled sooner.)
Mike Huckabee launched Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day and set in for August 1 (an easy date to remember.)
Conservative/libertarian social media spread the word.
The result is well known by now.
As I said to Ezra off the air:
If Democrats can’t even pull off a good old fashioned lefty boycott anymore, how the hell do they expect to win an election?
(T-shirt via HollywoodLoser.com)