Dick's Sporting Goods Has a Fever, and the Only Cure is Getting Woker and Going Broker

The Wall Street Journal notes that Dick's is "bucking" a national trend of retailers making gains in this booming, enyugening Trump-fueled economy, by losing 4% year-to-year among comparable stores.

Dick's blames this on Under Armour's decision to sell in more stores (I guess Dick's previously had a semi-exclusive deal with them?) and, of course, their decision to no longer sell guns, just because a weird-looking Messianic teenager with Hitler-black eyes told them to.

You can read the article on Archive.Is if you want, but that's the gist.

As Jesse Kelly wrote yesterday, "Uncomfortable as it may be for some of you, it is CRITICAL that conservatives stop using their dollars to fund the enemies of their liberty."

To repurpose a pet construction of Instapundit's: You may not be interested in the totalitarian leftist culture war, but the totalitarian leftist culture war is very much interested in you.

And refusing to fight it simply hands the left further victories and emboldens them further.

Many on the right have a completely fucked-up and ass-backwards way of looking at this fight. They believe it's wrong to pressure private businesses into pushing a political agenda. Well, so far, they're right. But then the next link in their chain of reasoning is If we ourselves don't pressure private businesses to push our political agenda, that means private businesses are free of noxious outside pressure to push a political agenda.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Spectacularly wrong. Incandescently wrong. Bubonically wrong.

Because of course private businesses are always under outside pressure to push a specific politics, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, and this has been going on for 40 or 50 years now.

That pressure, of course, comes from the left.

So refusing to fight the political war over corporate imposition of political norms and rules on society does not stop corporate imposition of political norms and rules on society.

It merely cedes the field entirely to the left.

Corporations have become the primary threat to American freedom of thought and speech in the last decade. This is precisely because they finally realized that the left would rake them over the coals if they did not comply with the left's demands, whereas they knew that pissing off the right was a zero-cost proposition, because all the right ever does is say stupid shit like "Corporations are people too, my friend" and press for corporate speech rights while treating citizen speech rights as a minor matter hardly worth the breath to mention.

Corporations are now political actors, nearly as political as media organizations, and pretending that this isn't so, dreaming of a Golden Age when corporations were either apolitical or even slightly rightist, doesn't change the actual facts.

As some very corporate conservatives are fond of saying: Facts don't care about your feelings. That you pine sentimentally for the days when Corporations Were Your Friends doesn't change the actual fact that corporations have been pressured by the left to be political enforcers for the left, and therefore have been turned into the left's agents, seeking to do you harm.

It doesn't necessarily require legislation to do something about this, which many Corporate Cons pretend it does so that they can screech "You can't just start passing laws to make corporations do what you want!!!"

Well, actually, the left has proven that is not even remotely true; they're always passing laws to threaten corporations and turn them into their semi-willing catspaws.

But laws and threats of laws aren't actually necessary; what is necessary, however, is for conservatives to apply perfectly-legal and perfectly-constitutional social and market pressure to corporations that have all but declared them Enemy.

If boycotts, either of the hard or soft variety (a "soft" boycott merely being an aversion to a particular corporation and a favoring of any reasonable competitor) are legal and part of one's own free speech arsenal -- and they are -- then why should the right refrain from them, when the left is using them to demolish the right?

We're not even talking about pressuring corporations to do our bidding here. We're talking about counter-pressure to offset pressure already being applied by the left, not to make corporations our own billion dollar publicly-traded antifa, but simply to warn them away from becoming that for the left.

But of course the Corporate Cons, who are by and large funded directly or indirectly by corporations and who are therefore paid to instruct conservatives to never challenge or criticize the corporations paying the Corporate Cons' rent, will always scream bloody murder about this, because, well, they're being paid to do so.

Meanwhile, big corporations are also stuffing the left's pockets full of lobbying money, too, but they never demand the left refrain from pressuring and threatening them.

They only make that demand of the right, because they know only the right is stupid enough to accede to such browbeating by those higher than themselves in the skull-fucked Conservative Hierarchy.

And that only the right has a leadership so thoroughly corrupted and perverted by corporate money that they will demand that other conservatives should never dare pressure a corporation, even one that's been converted into part of the left's political machinery.

While the left's leaders are busy dictating to the corporations what their roles shall be in the Corporate Wars, the right's leaders are busy dictating to their constituents and readership that they must never challenge the absolute freedom of a corporation to act as the Willing Executioners of the totalitarian left.

You know, many on the right -- including the corporate cons -- have long pointed out that, just from a Games Theory standpoint, black voters' nigh-absolute loyalty to the Democrat Party guarantees that they will be overlooked and taken for granted by the Democrat Party. If the Democrat Party knows that they have 90% of the black vote, and that is all but guaranteed, then the Democrat Party is free to pursue other blocs of voters, such as Hispanic immigrants', even if Hispanic immigrants' interests are contrary to blacks'.

In short: if one group's loyalty is absolute, and another group's loyalty is weaker, then it makes sense to sacrifice the interests of those whose loyalty is absolute to increase the loyalty of the groups whose loyalties are up for grabs.

Sounds plausible enough.

And yet these same people refuse to even exhibit the very small amount of Freedom of Imagination to speculate that possibly, maybe the exact same principles are in play as regards corporations.

Corporations know that corpservatives exist to serve the corps. Their loyalty, their absolute devotion to the cause of corporations is even more zealous and unquestioning than black voters to the Democrat Party.

Meanwhile, the left -- at least its political leadership -- is willing to do all sorts of favors for corporations, and protect corporations from the demands of their base.

But they're gonna want some favors from corporations for that.

And they're going to need corporations to appease the leftist base by becoming, effectively, leftist political proxies.

So between the left's and right's leadership -- one who makes demands on corporations and runs a protection racket for corporations depending on whether or not corporations pay the leftist street tax, and another collection of "leaders" who preach the Doctrine of Corporate Infallibility so long as corporations merely pay off the right political and thought leaders with donations and subsidies for their sinecures at corporate-controlled think tanks -- which is actually pursuing a more effective political strategy?

Well, if your strategy is to force corporations to grant political deliverables to your constituents, the left's strategy is more effective.

If your strategy is merely to get corporations to fund you, while you sell out the conservatives you supposedly represent to make sure your chair at the corporate think-tank remains plushly funded, then I guess the right's "leadership's" strategy is more effective.

For themselves.

But is it effective for the right, broadly? Or just the guys cashin' corporate checks?

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:41 PM

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