The stories of Glenn Beck boycotts have been picking up steam. Companies boycotting Beck – for his anti-Obama remarks – are CVS, Travelocity, Best Buy, GEICO, ConAgra, Radio Shack, Men’s Wearhouse, State Farm, Proctor & Gamble, Sargento, Wal-Mart, and the bailed-out GMAC Financial Services. Wal-Mart, following its support of government-run health care for the purpose of hurting its competitors, is now firmly in the regime camp. There’s some amazing stuff on the DailyDish regarding this boycott. Conor Clarke says:
As you probably know, Fox host Glenn Beck has been losing lots of advertisers — about 20 so far, including Wal-Mart, CVS and GEICO — for calling Barack Obama a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” I clicked around to see what people on the right were saying about the donnybrook, and found this page from RedState.org, which appears to be organizing a counter boycott, or is at least offering the sinister warning that “there will be repercussions from our side if [these companies] are so willing to become pawns of the left.”
…And yet I cannot help but think there is a crucial difference between GEICO’s decision to drop Glenn Beck and RedState’s decision to drop GEICO. The difference is this: Wal-Mart has a good reason to boycott Beck, because Beck actually did something idiotic and indefensible. It simply is not true that Obama is a racist. And what’s this business about “the white culture,” anyway? Tell us a bit more about that, Glenn.
RedState does not have a similarly reasonable claim — or a substantive argument at all — unless they are seriously interested in defending what Beck said on the merits. (Are they? Is anyone? Let’s have that argument, pretty please.) The argument for boycotting the boycotters should be more than “free speech is awesome,” since the right to free speech doesn’t guarantee you the right to massive corporate underwriting.
Hey Conor, free speech is sure awesome when, on the left, any resistance to oppressive and unwanted socialist government programs is deemed, without proof, question, or logic, to be “racism” on the part of a bunch of white (and black) people who are said to be resisting because they despise the fact that a black man is president. Any and all resistance to the federal government’s horde of new policies, programs, and attempts at socialization are all said to be based in “racist attitudes” from white folks in white hoods. (These are many of the same people that voted for the president.)
As this story reports, a black political organization, Color of Change (“changing the color of democracy”), is behind the boycott. What is so special about this organization? The American Spectator spells it out. Over time, Beck has taken several jabs at Van Jones, Obama’s (black) Green Czar, just as he has at all of the regime’s Czars, as well as the whole concept of the government’s unelected, unaccountable Czars. Jones is an avowed Communist, by the way, which makes him a special target for Beck. The Spectator reports:
Jones is a founding board member of Color of Change, but Color of Change doesn’t want you to know that. Maybe having an avowed America-hating radical on the group’s board is bad public relations.
The group deleted references to Jones on its “about” page. That page used to say, “James Rucker and Van Jones came together in the wake of [Hurricane] Katrina to use the organizing power of the Internet to give Black Americans and our allies a renewed and strengthened political voice.”
But now it doesn’t.
Read the rest of the Spectator story.
