"Media Equality Project" Urges Boycotts of Advertisers of Progressive TV, to Fight Fire With Fire

It's about time.

Actually, it's way beyond time.

Let me clarify:

The tactic being objected to -- and I didn't make this clear yesterday -- is the tactic created by the left called a "secondary boycott."

None of you can "boycott" Rachel Maddow -- you're already not watching her, and you enjoy not watching her, and you recommend not watching her to all of your friends.

Well, leftists realized that about Rush Limbaugh -- you can't boycott that which you already don't use -- and so invented the tactic of telling advertisers: Stop advertising on his show or we will boycott you.

That's the "secondary" part of the boycott: You're not boycotting the primary target. Which is obviously your right. You're now conducting political campaigns against businesses to make them stop advertising, and get the show taken off the air entirely.

This is why Cars Dot Com and USAA boycotted Hannity -- because the losers of this movement decided to start pressuring the advertisers to stop advertising there.

This is what I mean by "constant political campaigns being run against people not actually running for any office." These are actual political campaign style efforts -- with websites, donor buttons, etc. -- being run not just during campaign season, and not just against an office-seeker, but 24 hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, against just about anybody.

Note that the fringe actors who do this shit do so to raise money. They're fringe, and they're not going to be hired by actual political campaigns, for the most part.

But they have to make money, don't they?

So they just decided to invent their own political campaign which is not time-limited as ordinary campaigns are, and just buckrake endlessly to get this or that person silenced.

And they've had some success.

Even where they don't succeed outright, they make themselves permanent residents of your mind: Because they've taught you to fear them.

This is what I'm objecting to -- I understand that there will be politics in politics, but I don't want fundraising political campaigns constantly running against anyone the left doesn't like making all of lives, every single day, every single hour, part of and endless and ugly War of All Against All just so some energetic obsessives can make a dime and feel powerful.

And while I object to this sort of thing on a visceral level, I say the Media Equality Project is exactly right -- the only way out is the way through.

If you want peace, you must start using this sort of tactic against the left.

If Rachel Maddow starts losing advertisers -- if you make it clear to her advertisers you will permanently boycott them if you see their ads on her conspiracy-mongering show -- then you'll suddenly see the rest of the mainstream media decry this (obviously) anti-free-speech, permanent-politicization-of-mundane-business-decisions tactic.

But the left will only declare a tactic out of bounds when it's used against them.

Just like they were in favor of incitements to political assassination when the President was Bush, then against such things when the president was Obama, and now, again, kind of okay with it when the president is Trump.

The idea of a secondary boycott -- of making ourselves such loathsome, spiritually empty bullies that we'll threaten strangers to harm their business just for the mundane transaction of buying some ad time to reach a customer -- is disgusting to me, but if we do not return fire with our own fire, it will go on forever, and always directed only at us.

And I can't abide that.

A Buzzfeed "reporter" seems to be actively promoting the Hannity boycott.

Apparently completely oblivious to the fact that Buzzfeed's economic health, and whatever pittance she gets paid by Buzzfeed, relies largely on advertising income.

And Buzzfeed says a lot of offensive things -- or at least things we can make ourselves to pretend to be offended by, if they're insisting on doing that themselves.

We can bleed?

So can you motherfuckers.

If Hannity should be boycotted for promoting conspiracy theories, then so should Rachel Maddow, who was (and is) the number one conduit for spreading unhinged leftist conspiracy theories into the mainstream.

Remember "the FED" murder theory she vigorously promoted, a murder of a federal employee she insinuated was carried out by Right Wing Murderers.

It was a suicide.

Remember the "Yfrog hack" of Anthony Weiner's account that came from a fringe leftwing blog? Which network anchor "mainstreamed" that absurd fiction? Rachel Maddow.

It's just one conspiracy theory after another with this lunatic, and yet none of her fellow Guild Members -- not even the Great Teller of Non-Partisan Truths Jake Tapper, who's Johnny-on-the-Spot about naming and shaming conspiracy-peddlers so long as they're on the right -- ever has a damn thing to say about Maddow's never-ending carnival of conspiracy theories.

If peddling conspiracy theories is objectively bad -- not just depending on which tea is pushing them, but bad as an objective, non-partisan fact -- then why does Rachel Maddow keep doing it, why has she never been called out for her past conspiracy theories, and why does the alleged Scourge of Conspiracy Theories Jake Tapper never seem to notice them?

So if this is just about #FakeNews and being #AntiConspiracyTheory as an objective, nonpartisan matter, why does the Queen of Conspiracies have a permanent pass to just keep on mainstreaming fringe conspiracy theories?

As a commenter said, quoting Stonewall Jackson: If this be the medicine they want, let them have a bellyfull of it.

The only way to end the fire is to become the fire.

At least for a while.

Until the arsonists have been burned enough to put away their matches.

posted by Ace at 07:12 PM

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