New terms have arisen among common-sense Americans as many leftists have ramped up social justice posturing and attacks on individual rights.
In entertainment, Youtube’s awesome “Doomcock” has spread the perfectly apt phrase, “Without respect, we reject,” exhorting people who want quality entertainment and are sick of SJW “wokeness” to stop giving their time, attention, and cash to corporations and entertainment figures who openly embrace rabid anti-male, reverse-racist, gender-trigger, collectivist nonsense that undermines good plots and meaningful, realistic characters.
Likewise, the phrase, “Get Woke, Go Broke,” has popped up among clear-minded folks, as virtue-signaling Western companies go out of business. In April, we saw the closing of the leftist-feminist Australian café that started charging an 18 percent “man tax” as a way to protest non-existent sexism in price differences between men’s and women’s products. We also saw people boycott Gillette and Burger King after both corporations decided to take thoughtless, baseless swipes at the character of most men and push the idea of the so-called “patriarchy.”
Now, the phenomenon appears to be at work at the cash registers of Dick’s Sporting Goods, which, in February of last year, instituted a permanent end to sales of AR-15s and “assault-style” firearms, ceased high-capacity magazine sales, and adopted a policy of no sales to people under 21 years of age.
If this private company had decided to do that without entering the political arena, one might scoff at their decision, but it was theirs to make, and we could walk away with differing opinions, as peaceful neighbors.
But Dick’s went further.
The Dick’s team also decided to lobby Washington for more unconstitutional attacks on the right to keep and bear arms.
But Dick’s couldn’t just leave it there. It had to institute a discriminatory age limit for long gun sales – something that is blatantly illegal to do – and then double down by hiring lobbyists to push an assault weapon ban. Dick’s deserves what’s happening to it.
Hey, Dick’s should be free to stupidly discriminate against people under 21 as well. They can exercise their rights to freely associate, and allow consumers to exercise theirs, and they can rise and fall based on their decisions to interact with people.
But to work for government statutes that would infringe on peoples’ rights is unacceptable. It’s “a bridge too far,” in military parlance.
And, yes, Dick’s is seeing the economic fallout.
As The Daily Caller explains:
Bloomberg.com is reporting that Dick’s itself estimates the price of its anti-gun advocacy at $150 million in lost sales in 2018, or almost 2% of the company’s annual revenue.
But Dick's CEO Edward Stack stands by the decision, saying the hit was worth it.
They’re not exactly broke, but they’ve seen such losses, they may have to start laying off employees.
And that should be a signal in the free market, a signal that “Getting Woke” leads to decreased sales, especially if the business isn’t just conducting free enterprise, but is, instead, working to undermine the rights of others.
Dick’s isn’t going out of business, but they’ve shown people the difference between peaceful market errors and aggressive political attacks. And people are responding.
Perhaps there’s a different form of awakening happening in the U.S., one that’s based on folks actually recognizing and respecting their neighbors' rights.
And perhaps we can expect more responses like this from freedom-loving people.
That’s up to us. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."