BONUS: Conservatives vs. Pride Month

Michael. Peter.
What do you know about the backlash to corporate pride? All I know is that it will be refreshing to have a pride month that is exhausting, but not because of the gays. You texted earlier this week and said that you wanted to do a bonus episode on the target backlash and like the institution of corporate pride in general.
Yeah. And my initial gut instinct was, I don't know if I trust Peter to talk about corporate pride.
I don't know if I want, I don't know if I need like the straights weighing in. You handle the pride.
I'll handle the corporate. And then I realized that this is how members of other groups feel like when we cover issues.
This is this is how like women feel when we talk about like the love languages on the show. They're like, oh, I don't know about Mike and Peter.
Thank you for giving me a window of empathy this week, Peter. That's when you realized that you were wrong because we can speak for women.
We can. And I can speak for all LGBT people.
Exactly. Just summarize this debate for us, Peter.
I plan to just sit quietly and let you talk and just wait for you to fuck up. Everybody listen up.
Yeah, exactly. A straight man is talking.
So tell us about the genesis of this episode, Peter. Why did you want to cover this?

Well, I was bearing witness to some of the backlash against Bud Light.

Your truth. You were living your truth.

And it sort of struck my brain that it was more transparent than what we've seen in the past.

In the sense that it was more transparent than what we've seen in the past in the sense that there was almost no veneer of like a reasonable position. Yeah.
The entire display was the result of conservatives saying, hey, we hate trans people. Yeah.
And then corporations reacting to that with something like sympathy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I thought that was unique. It felt like an evolution of the sort of conservative backlash we've seen.
Yeah. And I thought it was an evolution maybe worth talking about, given that it is taking place in the context of like a wave of anti-trans legislation across the country, for example.
And also the way that this has spilled over into the broader like LGB community, right? Like it started out as like explicitly anti-trans and a lot of people were warning about like they're going to come for same-sex marriage next. They're going to come for like other groups, right? Yeah.
And the response you got was like, I don't know. You know, there's a there's a real tricky debate about like youth sports and these surgeries they're doing on kids, blah, blah, blah.
And then now this stuff, like they're freaking out about like greeting cards for same-sex couples. And it's just like, oh, OK, they're just freaking out about like the existence of gay people now.
Right. Well, I also think that an element of this is that part of like the conservative political strategy right now is to just be deeply unpleasant in public spaces like school board meetings.
Right. That's why they turn them into completely insane spectacle that no one else wants to be a part of.
Everyone else leaves and they assume positions of power within school boards. This feels like a similar sort of thing.
They are making themselves so obnoxious in public that companies are put into a weird position, right? Where it's like, well, I don't want to give in to these people necessarily, but dealing with them is so bad that maybe we should. So why don't you walk us through the Bud Light explosion? I feel like this was kind of the beginning of it this year.
And then I'll talk us through Target. Yeah.
Before we talk about the incident from April, we need to get to know Dylan Mulvaney, a 26-year-old trans influencer. She used to be a Broadway performer.

She was in Book of Mormon for a bit. She is huge on TikTok.
Right now, she has something like 10 million followers on TikTok, over a million on Instagram. I had no idea she was that famous.
Almost all of her current popularity came within the last year or so. She came out as a trans woman and posted a tongue-in-cheek clip titled,

Day One of Being a Girl. It gets popular.
She expands it into a series that chronicles her transition. A lot of jokes, a lot of serious commentary.
And by the end of 2022, she is obscenely popular, just sort of skyrockets to social media fame. In October, there is a presidential forum where various prominent figures on social media talk to Joe Biden.
And Dylan spoke with him about trans rights for a few minutes. This puts her on the right wing radar.
Yeah, of course. Also, right wing pundits and politicians, including Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, respond with like their standard round of right wing vitriol.
Some of it is directed at Biden's comments, which were, you know, just accepting that trans people are real, basically, and saying they deserve rights. But then they start digging through Dylan's TikToks and mocking them.
There's a video where Dylan talks about having a potentially visible penis as a trans woman.

Senator Blackburn does a tweet saying left wing lunatics want to make this absurdity normal.

Oh, my God.

Marjorie Taylor Greene weighs in.

Lots of vile shit is being said. And then, you know, they get distracted by the next shiny object and move on.

I love how like the right wing panics are always about like some random sophomore at Oberlin said something arguably over the top about a sandwich. And this is like two sitting congressmen.
It's not just that. It's like the entire fucking media apparatus.
Right. Oh, yeah.
There's just a clear line between like the lowest, most vile right wing social media types.

And then Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz and whoever. Right.
Yeah, it's wild. So as influencers are want to do, Dylan is also doing like promotional sponsorships with various brands.
So in March, she posts this on Instagram Reels. I'll send it to you.
Since deleted, but I managed to find what I think is not a homophobic YouTube channel that has it. Nice.
I've never actually seen it. Well, it is harrowing.
Brace yourself. Hi.
Impressive carrying skills, right? I got some Bud Lights for us. So, I kept hearing about this thing called March Madness, and I thought we were all just having a hectic month.
But it turns out it has something to do with sports. And I'm not sure exactly which sport, but either way, it's a cause to celebrate.
This month, I celebrated my Day 365 of Womanhood, and Bud Lights sent me possibly the best gift ever, a can with my face on it. Check out my Instagram story to see how you can enjoy March Madness with Bud Light and maybe win some money too.
Love ya. Now, I imagine that you need a moment to compose yourself after watching this clear symbol of the downfall of Western civilization.
God, it's so bleak how these like huge blow ups come from just the most boring, random shit. It's like I'm getting a dumb hashtag sponsored deal.
Right. There's no reason to notice this kind of thing unless right wingers just decide to freak out about it.
So let's be clear before we move on about what this is,

because part of what fueled the right-wing reaction

was misinformation around the situation.

Yeah, of course.

According to Anheuser-Busch,

the scope of this partnership was exactly one post.

This was not a TV commercial.

Bud Light was just paying to get Dylan

to do some quick promotion on social media.

She receives this can with her face on it. That can is not for sale anywhere.
It's like a commemorative thing that they sent her. Yeah, it was a thing that they sent her.
They have sent it to other sponsorship partners. They sent it to her for being a partner and because she was celebrating one year officially out as a woman.
This is like one level above those people that'll have like, soccer mom tripped at Disney World 2017, like printed on t-shirts. Yeah, right.
And like they wear the t-shirts, but like they're not, the t-shirts are not being sold anywhere. They screen printed her image on a can and send it to her basically.
Yeah. These companies just have like, I think they cast the net very wide for these kind of influencer sponsorships.
There's everybody.

They probably have Christian influencers.

They probably did this too.

100%.

It's not particularly ideological, these things.

No, no, no.

Everybody with more than 100,000 followers send them some free shit and give them $1,000.

Yeah.

Part of the initial Bud Light response was to be like, we do hundreds of these partnerships.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So some right winger somewhere, presumably, is scrolling through her Insta and they freak out. Right.
Yeah. Ben Shapiro says, quote, well, folks, our culture has now decided men are women and women are men.
And you must be forced to consume products that say so. Forced to consume products is a fascinating phrase.
That's right. Mandatory.
$3 will be removed from your paycheck every week and a beer will be sent to your house. And then you get waterboarded with trans Bud Light.
Kid Rock posts a video of him shooting a case of Bud Light with an AR-15. Of course.
Right wing politicians and celebrities and pundits all get in on Fox News is talking about it. Budweiser factories are receiving bomb threats.
They call for a boycott. Boycott commences.
Sales drop for Budweiser and Bud Light in early April. In mid-April, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch puts out a statement titled,

Our Responsibility to America.

Jesus Christ.

It is maybe the worst statement I have ever read.

Hell yeah.

Not just because it is completely morally and substantively hollow,

but because it might as well be designed to just piss everyone off.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because if you throw a trans person under the bus,

you then get the backlash from progressives.

So what they're trying to do is thread the needle between we don't want to piss off the right wing psychos, but we also don't want to piss off like the 90 percent of the country that like really has no problem with this. Right.
It includes the choice line, quote, we never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. Oh, my God.
We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer. The rest of the statement is just like mealy mouth bullshit.
At one point they referenced like American values and they talk about like freedom and hard work. Yeah, just throw a bald eagle in there.
The bald eagle screech is like playing in the background. I mean, the direct parallel is just like, what if an ad had a black person? Yeah, exactly.
And then the right wing freaked out. Yeah.
And Anheuser-Busch was like, look, we don't want to be part of a conversation that divides people. We're trying to stay out of all these politics.
From now on, it's whites only. This is like what we talked about before we recorded of like how difficult it is to talk about this because it's so just one dimensionally bigoted, like the actual backlash.
Like there's no laundered version of this argument that is like, well, if you look at it this way, it's actually like they raised some good points. It's literally just like a trans person was visible.
The only sort of like angle here that they have is that she has done some activism, right? Like the fact that she's talked to Joe Biden is sometimes referenced. But like, really, she's just a trans influencer.
Yeah, she's just a famous trans person. Now, what's interesting about this boycott is that usually boycotts lose energy very quickly.
Yeah. You know, remember like the Kerrig boycott from a few years ago or like the Goya boycott of 2020? Barely.
Yeah. These things come and go.
There is research showing that boycotts just tend not to work. The boycotters lose energy and focus.
Often the publicity creates brand awareness that like counteracts any decline in sales. This one appears to be different.

For nearly two months now, Bud Light and Budweiser sales have fallen relative to the previous year's sales.

And the decline has mostly increased over time.

Now hovering around 25% for Bud Light in particular, which is a massive decrease, obviously. I don't think we really know why this boycott has been much more effective than the usual boycott.
I would imagine that you can chalk it up to a couple of things. First of all, Bud Light is essentially a commodity.
It is cheap swill, meaning it's very easily replaced by competitors like Miller and Coors. And in fact, some preliminary sales data seems to show that that's where the sales went, right? For the 25% decrease in Bud Light, there was a corresponding increase across the other two brands.
Yeah, they're in the rack next to each other. You're like, fuck it.
I've been hearing that Bud Light is woke. I'm just going to pick the other beer.
Right, right. It's the easiest boycott in the world to stick with.
And then also there was like a very intentional campaign by prominent right wingers to sustain the outrage with the conscious knowledge that the right is generally outnumbered, but they could get what they want in the market by sort of aggressively targeting individual companies. Yeah.
coordinate and focus our effort, we can bully the marketplace. Yeah.
Right. By being the more obnoxious side, by being the more organized side.
Yeah. I highlighted that quote, too, where he said, like, we can't boycott every like woke company, but we can highlight one and make a big example out of them.
Right. And they've essentially by zeroing in on this one company, every other consumer brand is looking at this being like, oh, fuck, we don't want to be next.
Right. Anheuser-Busch puts two marketing executives responsible for the promotion on leave.
One of them is Alyssa Heinerscheid, who was hired, I think, in 2022 just to freshen up the brand. Right-wingers locate a podcast interview with her from March where she said she was hired with a mandate to evolve the brand and that she wanted to bring an image of inclusivity to what she called a traditionally fratty and kind of out of touch brand.
Oh no, this poor woman. Now, I want to talk about the sort of like business angle here.
Bud Light and its peers are a shrinking portion of the alcohol market, right? For the past like 20 years, we've seen the rise of like craft beer. Last few years, we've seen hard seltzer take a massive share of the market.
So if you're sitting on Bud Light, a brand pivot is a very natural move, right? It makes total sense. You need to sort of redirect your energy because you are shrinking.
On the other hand, the plurality of your customers are probably white, male, middle-aged. The brand has always been marketed to them.
And so this becomes sort of like an affirmation of everything they feared when they saw the Dylan Mulvaney promo, right? Like the culture is slipping out of their hands. And these are people that are still very upset by the black elves that they had to move through on their television screens.
Very difficult for these folks. Heinerscheid receives some weird targeted harassment, of course.
People dig up photos of her from her college days where she's at parties. And they're like, oh, so now you don't like frat parties, huh? Jesus Christ.
That was on Fox News, dude. Yeah, the anti-fandom.
Like, yeah, you got her. Yeah, wow.
She's now 39, by the way. So like, this is like 20-year-old fucking...
Huge hypocrisy. She attended frat parties and then made an offhand comment about frattiness 20 years later.
I don't even know that we know that they were frat parties, but I would have met like, yeah, of course you went to frat parties. I went to frat parties.
Frats are fucking stupid, but I also went to frat parties in college. Because that's where the parties are.
Yeah, exactly. So Dylan, for her part, drops off of social media for a bit.

She comes back in late April with a quick message where she says things like, quote,

what I'm struggling to understand is the need to dehumanize and to be cruel.

I just don't think that's right.

Yeah.

Which is very nice and also sort of like borderline naive in a nice way, like a pure soul.

Yeah.

Dehumanizing is the whole point, Dylan.ylan yeah it's always so bleak when people

just make these like basic statements of humanity of just like right please don't try to murder me it's like i don't know there's a real debate to be had here yeah there's such a purity in the response where it was like i don't think everyone should be trying to kill me i don't know know that I need to die. And the media is like, the controversy swirls.
Now, again, the boycott has sort of continued. In May, Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn called for a probe into the sponsorship, claiming that Dylan's audience skews young.
So they are like arguing that this might be tantamount to marketing alcohol to children. Oh, my God.
They managed to like work in like a weird grooming angle. Right.
And in general, like the right wing response at the ground level has just been wild, like just naked transphobia. A lot of people commenting about Dylan's like affect, saying that she acts young girlish and that's like mocking women.
Oh, my God. Which A, only exists as a critique if you reject the concept that she is a woman.
Yeah. But B, is misunderstanding what's happening here.
Dylan's annoying girlish affect is because she's a theater kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly. They don't get it.
I mean, look, I have been around theater kids for long enough that I immediately clocked this. Yeah.
And then people were like, she's mocking women. I was like, no, you don't get it.
You don't get it. And you're going to have to watch a lot of productions before you do.
There's so much to say about this stuff, about like the hypocrisy of, quote unquote, free market conservatives losing their minds because like the free market is working as intended, right? Like companies are trying to appeal to new audiences or the hypocrisy of like the people that melted down about cancel culture for fucking years and are now like very obviously engaging in an effort to cancel a person and a company. But it's like it's just so fucking obvious.
It's so obvious to make these points. It's like it's boring to listen to.
Yeah. What we were talking about earlier is sort of my takeaway.
The fact that like there is really nothing more to the outrage than the fact that Dylan is trans. Right.
There's no nuance beyond that. The right just wants the takeaway to be don't do business with trans people.
Yeah. And it's so nakedly built upon unfiltered discrimination that it feels like surreal to witness the media coverage.
Yeah. Because the media keeps referring to like a controversy.
Yeah. Without really spelling out that the entire controversy is that Bud Light partnered with a trans person.
Yeah. And these people hate trans people.
Right. Especially true, by the way, because a lot of the coverage comes from financial media, because this is like a business story to a degree.
Right. So like, just to give you the tiniest slice, Yahoo Finance's latest story said, quote, driven by backlash from an advertising campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light sales have now declined for six weeks.
Now, if you are in the business media, that is presumably the full story. Right.
There's a New York Times article about one of these meta articles about like what's going on at Target and Bud Light and stuff. And the headline is brands embracing Pride Month confront a volatile political climate.
Jesus. It's not a climate.
It's almost like if you're a journalist covering this, you have two choices. One is you just like use this neutral terminology or two is like you really dig in.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I think a lot of them are probably just like, oh, I'm not going to deal with this. Right.
I'm not going to try to write the article that explains what's happening here because it's too much. Right.
And that sort of like willingness to go along with it is a huge problem in a society where fascists are ascendant. Yeah.
Again, if this were just the right being like, hey, let's get mad. They did a partnership with a black person.
I would think that people within the media would be a little more primed to call it what it is. Maybe that's me being naive, but it feels like the media's response to this and their willingness to describe it in neutral terms is an indicator that they are not ready to defend trans rights.
Yeah. Period.
I think the problem is that the reality, if you describe it in sober terms, sounds partisan. Sounds right.
If you describe like we are now in like year three of a wave of essentially terrorist actions and like local agitating against progressive change. Right.
This I think it really started with the anti-vaxxers, but we've had people taking over school boards. I mean, we had a fucking anti-queer fucking mass shooting.
You know, we had the Buffalo shooting, which was like straightforwardly white supremacist. We've had other mass shootings that were like explicitly white supremacist.
We've had all kinds of other like threats against black colleges. We've had these children's gender clinics being shut down sometimes for days on end because the threats are so overwhelming.
If you describe this as part of like, oh, yeah, right wing violence and like threats and intimidation are like really ascendant in this country. And this is like a major like suddenly obvious trend.
It sounds bad, but it's just objectively the reality. Like, right, I read an ADL report that pointed out that like every extremist act of murder in 2022 was right wing terror.
And like, there's various other reports, like there's one from the New America Foundation that tracks every single incident of terrorist violence since 9-11, and one death is attributed to the far left and 150 deaths are attributed to far right violence.

Right. You know, I mentioned their strategy of being intolerable to be around.
Right. Part of that, though, is that sort of implication that there is a willingness to engage in extreme violence among a decent chunk of these people.
When they go and start knocking over pride displays at Target, the Target worker doesn't know whether they're dealing with the 99% of them that are just ready to knock over a pride display or the 1% that's ready to pull out a gun and shoot you if you try to stop them. Totally.
Should we talk about Target? I did a lot of like social media sleuthing. Let's talk about Target.
So in early May, Target announces its 2023 pride collection. The only media I could find about the actual announcement and like when they started putting this on shelves was from left wing gay media making fun of it because like ultimately it's Target.
So one of the things they're selling is a t-shirt that says live laugh lesbian. People are like Target what are you doing? Good lord.
there's a coffee mug that says gender fluid there's a candle that is allegedly pronoun scented i don't know what that means this is unnecessary because candles are already gay exactly we don't need you to go this far we got it already guys vanilla wasn't enough. So for the first like two weeks of May, this just like sits there.
It sits there on the Internet. It sits there in stores.
The earliest viral post that I could see about this was from this account called fucking Gays Against Groomers. Hell yeah.
Have you heard of these ghouls? Good luck, Gays Against Groomers. I'm sure I'm sure they will never put you against the wall i'm comforted by the fact that no matter how much these fucking people hate themselves i hate them more so this account is the first one i saw where they basically amplify these videos that i believe had been bouncing around for a while at that point where essentially random people go into target and are like look at like, look at what they're selling to your kids.
And it's like someone who's sort of cosplaying as like a concerned parent or someone who's like, I'm just worried about indoctrination or whatever. Right, right.
They post a couple of these videos and there's a couple of like blips in right wing media. So on May 11th, there's a Daily Wire story called Target releases latest pride collection complete with kids books and rainbow items for babies.
OK. What is very interesting about like the sort of following two weeks.
And I think this has kind of been memory hold, like when this goes public. But the early days of this freak out are like very straightforwardly a satanic panic.
Most of these videos where random people walk into Target stores and like lose their minds are based around the fact that they're allegedly selling satanic merchandise. Right.
So I don't know if you came across this, but I'm going to send you a article from the National Review. Far right laundromat, the National Review.
Slash the most prominent rag in all of conservatism. Exactly.
Like the respectable conservatives. Okay.
Right? Oh, fuck yeah, dude. Okay.
It's so good. So read the headline in the first couple of paragraphs.
The headline is Target Partners with Satanist Brand to Create items for pride collection. Satanist brand.
A real thing. A real thing that exists.
Why are there so many fucking pop up ads on National Review? It's like something about conservatism. They can't help themselves.
It's like NFTs and like buying gold and like it's really low rent ads, too. And it's the ones that like move across your screen.
So they try to trick you when you're trying to hit the X into hitting the fucking ad itself. I know.
God. All right.
Target has contracted with Abprolin, a clothing brand that sells Satanist merchandise, some of which glorifies violence, to create products for its pride collection. While Target does not sell Abpralin's Satanist-inspired products, the retail giant approached Abpralin less than a year ago to design pride-related merchandise, according to the brand's social media post.
At one point, Target sold three Abpralin items. A messenger bag saying, We belong everywhere across trans flag colors.
A tote bag with a message too queer for here beneath a UFO and a cure transphobia, not trans people sweatshirt. Only the sweatshirt remains for sale.
It's unclear why the other two items no longer appear on the Target website. Rich texts.
The lurking mystery is what exactly the affiliation between this brand and Satanism actually is because it's not entirely clear. Of course, the products that they actually sell from this brand are relatively harmless.
I feel like the most masterpiece clause in this thing is, well, Target does not sell Abpullen's Satanist inspired product, comma. Right, they're not selling them.
Conservatives can't accept that corporate pride is pinkwashing bullshit to sell merchandise. They believe that it is materially important.
And because that is such an obvious fiction, they have to sort of craft a narrative where the corporations are sort of like Illuminati-esque figures. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They are right before our eyes, shaking hands with people who worship Satan and eat babies. That exact dynamic also applies to their conception of Satanism.
The entire reason they're mad about this is that this brand, Abprolan, which is basically just one dude named Eric in the UK, this like trans guy who's a designer. He also sells pins that say Satan respects pronouns.
So it's just tongue in cheek bullshit. It's very obviously a fucking joke.
It's like it's like a satire of what like the church lady would say. Right.
It's like, did you know Satan respects pronouns? Right. One of the things that drives me the most fucking bananas about conservative Christians is that they don't understand that Satan is a Christian deity.
Right. To believe in Satan, you have to think the Bible is true.
People who reject Christianity are atheists. Right.
They're not Satanists. It doesn't make sense to believe in the Bible, but then side with the bad guy.
I can't remember if it was like a Twitter post or Tumblr post or something like that, but there was once a post somewhere that was like, the Bible is just God's side of the story. Like, I want to hear what Satan has to say.
That's the both sides of them we need. It's true.
The sort of like aggressively evangelical types have always been super easy to troll with this sort of shit because they cannot comprehend or don't care to differentiate between a person who is trolling and says they like Satan and someone who is actually a Satan worshiper. To them, it doesn't matter whether you are a trans guy named Eric creating a joke pin or like the witches in The Witch, huddled nude around a campfire floating in the air through the power of Satan.
Like that is the same thing to them. It's also very funny to me that they're pretending that they don't agree with the phrase Satan respects pronouns.
You guys hate respecting pronouns. The fact that Satan would be a pronoun guy kind of makes sense.
And then like the right wing media kicks into gear around this. So Tom Cotton tweets out a photo of the Satan respects pronouns pin with something along the lines of like Target is indoctrinating our youth, blah, blah, blah.
And of course, this all gets like warped together with this idea that Target is actually selling the Satan respects pronouns pin. Right, right, right.
To be honest, I would not give a shit if Target was selling that pin. But it's a very deliberate effort on the part of right wing media.
It's also Target would not sell that pin. No, of course not.
They need something more than just, look, they're supporting gay people. Yeah.
But the goal of this effort is, is to imply that all of this is part of a top down effort by liberal elites to corrupt our children, to groom our children, that a pride display at Target is two degrees of separation away from pedophilia. And you can also see the QAnonification of conservatism in this too, where it's like they're kind of trying to imply that somehow by buying like a cute t-shirt for a kid, this is like too queer for here with a UFO on it.
That somehow like, no, no, no, that's not just a cute t-shirt. It's actually like low-key Satanist.
They also do do this extremely try hard thing where they try to link this merchandise to

like glorifying violence.

So later in the National Review post, they say the company they're talking about this

allegedly satanic company.

The company sells clothing designs showing the phrases we bash back with a heart shaped

mace in the trans flag colors, transphobe collector with a skull

and homophobe headrest with skulls beside a pastel guillotine.

Absolutely based.

And it's like they're obviously jokes.

The We Bash Back thing is like a very well-known slogan from people who used to go around

neighborhoods looking for gay bashers and like protecting gay people.

They would like walk around with baseball bats. And this is like an actual like thing of like, you're going to gay bash us.
We're going to fucking gay bash bash you. So like, that's just like a throwback, like actual thing.
Also, it's cool. I know.
I mean, it's also really cool. But it's also very funny to me when conservatives are like, this glorifies a culture of violence.
It's a culture of self-defense against you. You fucking freaks.
Exactly. You guys are the ones glorifying fucking violence constantly.
And like there's already been like a wave of death threats about this shit. Like who's glorifying violence here? Look, there are tons of like tongue in cheek death threats and threats of violence and like lefty social media.
And if you look at right wing social media, it's not tongue in cheek. Oh, yeah.

You know, I actually have like complaints about how lefties handle death threats and stuff, because I do think it's funny to joke about like Henry Kissinger dying. I feel like the most magical times on the Internet in the last like five years were the weekend when Pokemon Go came out and the night that Trump announced he had COVID.
Dude, that night. Ding dong, like ring the bells, rejoicing.
I think I once tweeted that that night on Twitter was like the closest we got to all like being in a stadium together doing the Seven Nation Army chant. I remember texting my family the next day.
And my family are not a bunch of like irony poisoned lefties like me. They're just normal liberals.
And I was like, did you hear the good news? And they were like, we heard the great news. Like Xanadu, it's possible.
We can't have a better world. Everyone was vibing, dude.
I don't know. I'm not someone who defends the use of like jokes about violence as anything other than catharsis, which I think is what it is and why people use it.

And also like, whatever, people are going to joke around about this kind of stuff.

Yeah.

I have no problem like making some jokes and like tittering when other people joke about like Donald Trump dying of COVID.

But also like if somebody were to assassinate a political leader on the right, I would also

be able to be like, oh, I don't know that this is like a great direction. Which political leader, though? But so I really think that it's important to note that this whole target freak out began as like psychos saying psycho shit about Satanism.
Very Bush Jr. era.
Yeah. Conservative grassroots shit.
And then eventually, of course, they add this thing about like indoctrinating kids. So they find out that Target is selling some like pride related swimsuits for girls.
But then elsewhere in the store, Target also sells swimsuits that have, quote, tuck friendly construction.

OK.

Did you follow this? I like caught this out of the corner of my eye and was like, no, I'm not engaging. You know, you get a product on the shelf.
You know, they have like a little brochure that's like attached to it. And it's like, oh, it wicks away moisture and it's like 70 percent polyester.
And it does some kind of like extra marketing stuff. One of the things that is sometimes included in these little marketing pamphlets that are included in clothing now is like it's tuck friendly construction, which means it has a little bit of extra fabric in the crotch so that if you're a trans woman who has a penis, it like makes it a little bit easier for you to tuck down there.
These swimming suits are not sold to children. This is not like a major component of the marketing.
I actually searched on their website. You can like barely find this sort of advertised or prominently displayed.
It's just like, here's a little extra piece of information. In the same way, like, hey, don't dry this on high.
Yeah. Like it's like an extra little piece of marketing, right? Right.
And so because conservatives are all just like melting down about like things existing, they then pretend that these tuck-friendly swimsuits are being sold to children. Which honestly, even if that was true, I don't know that I would give a shit.
Like, whatever. I don't know.
Tags on clothes say all kinds of things. And like, some kids are trans.
Like, whatever. I don't, I don't, it's really not that big of a deal.
But of course, it's like, they can't respond to the world as it is, right? Everything needs to be this like heightened version of it, right? So it's like, oh, they're selling trans swimsuits to kids. And there's all these videos, including one from the Heritage Foundation, another sort of quote unquote respectable conservative institution where people go in and there's very sort of deliberate editing that goes on to make it look like these little tags on the swimsuits are on the kids' swimsuits.
So they sort of cut away from the kids' swimsuits to like a close-up of her hands. And she's like, now this has tuck-friendly construction.
Right. And you're like, right, but you're in a different part of the store.
What if a kid is eight lines deep on the tag of this adult bathing suit? Exactly. And they see this.
They never say this outright, but I feel like it's very similar to when I was like a really

little kid, I would go into my parents' bathroom for whatever and I would see my mom's like

multivitamins for women.

And like in my little kid brain, I would be like, oh, if I took those, they would like

turn me into a woman.

Like that's how I understood those pills,

even though it's just like, you know, vitamin C and like riboflavin or whatever. And I feel like it's telling that they never really describe like the mechanism by which this is harmful to kids.
It's like a little bit of extra cloth in the crotch. And like, I think that they think that this will like turn your kid trans if they wear this swimsuit.
Like, I don't actually know what they're mad about. There's a weird part of the conservative, like anti-trans, anti-LGBT movement that is like basically predicated around like loose associations in your mind between children and sexuality and genitalia.
Yeah. And like creating a sense that these things are intermingling more than they should.
But without any real like coherence, because like if you're a child at Target, they sell adult underwear. Yeah.
Right. And if you're wandering over to the adult section you can see a lady in a bra yeah you can see a guy in briefs yeah being loosely present in the world you will see this stuff no one cares but if you threw a fucking rainbow on that they would say it was grooming yeah it's also very funny because rainbows are like sold to children in all kinds of contexts that aren't particularly gay.
Like kids just like rainbows. You can sell rainbows to kids, but there needs to be text on it that says like if it's a boy's shirt with a rainbow, like I will fuck girls when I grow up.
Live, laugh, heteronormative. Straight child.
That's that's like conservative target is just like little shirts for toddler boys that are like yeah i like pussy penetrative sex with a vagina but then okay i don't know if you saw this with the bud light stuff but there's a fascinating wave in conservative media so the early reports are just like target is selling pride merch and then around the first one I found was May 23rd in Fox. The framing is like pretending to be meta.
It'll be like Target faces backlash over Pride collection. And it's like, right, you guys did the backlash.
Like the Daily Wire, which is the earliest article that I could find being like, look at what's in their Pride collection, then has an article two weeks later that is like, Target really riled up conservatives with its pride collection. It's you.
You did that. And now you're reporting on the thing that you did.
Right. So this Fox News article from May 23rd, it's something we saw in the GameStop bonus episode that we did where it's all about how Target is panicking.
Yeah. So the headline is Target holds emergency meeting over LGBTQ merchandise in some stores to avoid Bud Light situation.
And like they have some sort of insider who works at Target who says like the executives are really concerned about this backlash. And like they had a meeting to discuss their response.
Right. And like that's the whole story.
It's like, yeah, Target has noticed this. Yeah.
And it's like trying to come up with a response to this, which like, yes, you know, it's a consumer facing company. It's facing consumer backlash.
Like people are going to get on the phone and be like, what should we do about this?

One of the things that neutral coverage about this stuff does, especially in the business media context, is sort of imply, if not outright state that they have like made a business misstep.

Yeah. in the business media context, is sort of imply, if not outright state, that they have like made a business misstep without explaining what they mean, which is like, yeah, marketing things to gay people is a business mistake now, right? Partnering with a trans person is a business mistake.
They can't say that shit out loud, but you can sort of gesture to the situation and be like, yeah, so obviously Target has made some sort of error here because how else can business media process corporate controversy? How else can business media process a sales decline? Something must have gone wrong. It's a way of talking about this just like, again, straightforwardly bigoted and deranged pushback as like somehow you're making an objective statement.
You're like, well, you know, there's this backlash going on. We're not going to say whether it has any merit or not.
But of course, they throw in these little things that are like very obviously meant to like rile up the reader. So the Fox News article, it's sort of giving an overview of like, what's this controversy all about? And it says, Target Pride merchandise includes female style swimsuits that can be used to tuck male genitalia.
Some products are also labeled as thoughtfully fit on multiple body types and gender expressions. Pride merchandise also includes onesies and rompers for newborn babies, a variety of adult clothing with slogans such as super queer, party supplies, home decor, multiple books, and a grow at your own pace saucer platter.
Yeah. And it's like none of this stuff is bad, but it's just describing it in these sort of like intonation that's supposed to make you like, oh my God, like rompers for babies.
Right. Babies could wear anything as a romper and they're not going to be affected by it because babies can't read.
There is like a cottage industry that I've never really seen any complaints about of like loosely or even like very offensive things written on clothing for infants. Yeah.
Because it's not for the infant. Yeah, of course.
Seeing something offensive written across a baby is inherently funny. Yeah.
But they have this sort of like express or implied narrative that like this is being directed at children. Yeah.
And then they list off 20 relatively inoffensive things. And in a vacuum, you would never think anything of them if you're a normal functioning human being.
But when you read all of them together, you're supposed to get the impression that like something is going on here. There is an effort to shift the culture in some way or something like that.

And again, it's basically just like marketing boilerplate. Like they're selling clothes that

say thoughtfully fit on multiple body types and gender expressions. Oh, fuck no.
Whoa. Like fat

kids might have swimsuits. Oh my God.
Or like my kids experimenting with their gender. Like what kind of swimsuit should I get them? I'll get them like a relatively sort of unisex one.
Now, every tag should say fits beautifully on a traditionally structured white body. Exactly.
Like thin white children. Like, I don't know.
Maybe you think that's like an annoying thing to have on a tag. But also like these are mostly just marketing efforts, right? This is again, something that gay people have complained about every fucking pride month since literally the day after Stonewall.
It's like, yeah, this is on some level cynical, on some level earnest marketing efforts to a group. Like people are more concerned with sort of gender expression now.
And like, there's been much more talk of like body positivity, et cetera, in the last 10 years. And so like companies are marketing to that.
Here's a product that sort of matches your values. This is just normal capitalism shit.
Here's the thing is like, I've now been within like high level HR circles of corporations. And so I feel like I have some vision into this.
There are in almost every corporation, the true believers in like DEI and inclusivity in the product, et cetera, et cetera. But everything they do gets filtered through a sales guy, someone who is revenue focused.
And what that means at the end of the day is if our culture had gotten more homophobic over the last 10 years, rather than drastically less homophobic, corporations wouldn't be doing this. If we had gotten more fat phobic as a society, there wouldn't be more options for fat people in clothing sections.
It is plain as day. I actually think that one aspect of this that is maybe undercovered is the extent to which a lot of this is done also for employee retention.
I know that in the 1990s, when all the sweatshop boycotts of Nike were happening, they never really affected sales, but they affected Nike's ability to hire and retain employees. Yeah.
If you're trying to get a job in like corporate America and one company has a reputation for sweatshops and the other doesn't, you're not going to go work for the sweatshop company. And so Nike kind of made this like big marketing effort and like actually genuinely worked on like improving its working conditions in Indonesia, mainly as a result of internal pressure.
Mike spoke with the Nike CEO about their efforts to...

They're trying to do better.

Actually, they're unfairly maligned.

You're wrong about Nike.

I'm going back to my roots.

They're fine.

The Nike is good episode

of You're Wrong About.

Sarah, get on it.

But really, I mean, like,

a lot of this is internal marketing

and external marketing.

This is the thing is that, like,

there are three reactions to, like like corporate DEI if you're an

employee.

One is like the weird true believer who mistakenly thinks that the company is actually trying

to do good in this world.

Yeah.

Two is the cynic who is like, oh, what a bunch of fucking bullshit.

Whether or not the cynic believes it, they realize that the company does not. And so it doesn't really matter.
And then three is the right wing nut job who is losing their mind because they believe that it's authentic and genuine and ironically has sort of aligned themselves with the person in category one, right?

The suckers who believe that it's real are on like opposite sides of the political spectrum to some degree. And then you have like the sort of cynical mass of people across the spectrum who are just like, obviously, this is bullshit.
And therefore, I roll my eyes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Whether or not the ultimate message of it is something you believe in. So, I mean, nearly everyone I have worked with my entire life and been friends with has been roughly politically aligned with me to some degree, at least on like things like diversity, sexual harassment, et cetera.
And yet almost all of them would roll their eyes at like corporate sexual harassment training because everyone knows that it comes from a place of inauthenticity. Yeah.
And is a product of the company trying to cover its ass more than anything else. Yeah.
This kind of gets to my overall thoughts on corporate pride, which I repeat every single year, is that I think fundamentally like it's surface level, it's bullshit. But also I would rather live in a country with it than without it.
Right. Right.
Like I don't weep over the fact that Target is no longer going to have a pride display. But like if companies do not feel safe having cheesy pride displays, that's a sign of like a country going backwards.
What are they doing with their pride displays? Because I've heard people say they're getting rid of them. I've heard people saying they're moving them to the back of the store.
Like what's going on? So I went to my local Target and I chatted with a couple of employees. I didn't like say I'm a journalist or doing a podcast or whatever.
I was just like, what's going on? Wow. This is fucking boots on the ground journalism from Mike Hobbs.
I embedded at the local Target. Went to the nearest diner and asked them about their experience at Target.
So according to the employees at my local store, one of them I talked to was opening and she came in and just like all the swimsuits were gone from the pride displays. And they didn't like announce this.
There wasn't like a conversation within the company about it. They were just kind of gone.
My read on the situation is that Target executives were looking at all of this happening and wanted to like quietly get rid of this stuff and like tamp it down. But obviously they didn't want to do it publicly because then you get the backlash from LGBT people.
Right. Yeah.
So my read is that they wanted to like quietly remove the satanic stuff, quietly remove the swimsuits. And then like maybe the right wing psychos will calm down.
Yeah, no, that'll work for sure. But then Fox News sniffed them out, right? Fox News runs this piece about like, here's an emergency meeting and they're thinking of taking things off the shelf.
And of course, they contact Target for like a statement. And once all of this stuff kind of goes public, the company is scrambling behind the scenes, then they have to like say something publicly.
So the day after the Fox News article runs, we get a statement from Target, which says, for more than a decade, Target has offered an assortment of products aimed at celebrating Pride Month. Since introducing this year's collection, we've experienced threats impacting our team members' sense of safety and well-being while at work.
Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior. Our focus now is on moving forward with our continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA plus community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year.
To be fair, this feels somewhat authentic, at least compared to the Bud Light statement, because it seems like what they're saying is like, yeah, our corporate

position is that we stand by the LGBT community, but also our employees are being threatened and

we can't just idly stand by and let that happen. Right.
We're going to acquiesce to some of these

demands or these implicit demands because we're concerned about employee safety.

Yeah, but also it's a friend of the show, Parker Malloy, wrote a really good post on this about, you know, Target is like the 10th company that has done something like very low level, superficial, pro queer and then faced huge right wing backlash and then pulled it back. And her point was like, this is worse for us than if you just hadn't done it in the first place.
Right. Because what we see happening is basically like you're capitulating to terrorists.
Right. So we've now had bomb threats against targets in nine states.
A lot of the stores have had to be evacuated. There's been various viral videos of people like tearing down displays, shouting at the people who work at the stores.
One of the things that like makes me so fucking mad about all this shit from like the anti-vaxxers to this stuff is how like, it's always like the frontline retail employees making like minimum wage who have to fucking deal with this stuff. And so on some level, like morally speaking, I can get why the executives were like, we're just going to get people out of harm's way.
I also feel like they're using this somewhat as an excuse, right? When like, if they were really concerned about their employees, you know, there's other things that they could do. And like, yeah, I don't think working conditions for Target employees are like all that great.
That's why I want to see Target employees armed. And if a Republican enters the store, they're allowed to shoot.
Republicans have defended profiling for years to like stop Muslims in airports. So like, that's true.
Sorry, man, MAGA hat, you're not getting in. Honestly, sounds like a more reliable predictor of commotion.
Seriously. Than anything we've done with the TSA.
Seriously. So we're seeing these corporations sort of try to reckon with a world where you can't abandon LGBT people and allies because they have a lot of support and make up the majority of the country.
But you also have to cater to this loud, violent, aggressive minority. And I think the actual lesson for companies is cross your fingers and hope you don't get selected.

And you I don't know if you saw this in your research, Peter, but they've already moved

on to Kohl's, which also apparently has pride displays.

They're going after the North Face because they did an Instagram partnership something

something with a drag queen named Patty Gonia, which is pretty good. It's funny to do a partnership with like one of your competitor company name.
Maybe they thought they were like co-opting. Yeah.
We will take away Patagonia's greatest drag queen ally. But then, you know, I mean, earlier this year we had the Hershey's thing.
Hershey's did a marketing campaign that included some trans people and conservatives meltdown. There was Lego.
They went lego yeah yeah because they were gonna have like black lego figures and like people with

disabilities that's another one where you're like you guys it's really revealing of the whole

project even though all legos are gender fluid there's no genitals pop a little wig on that guy

and that's a gal now well also what's what's interesting to this people have been talking a

lot in the last couple years about like moving the overton window right if you say like the

Thank you. pop a little wig on that guy.
And that's a gal now. Well, also, what's what's interesting to this, people have been talking a lot in the last couple of years about like moving the Overton window.
Right. If you say like the leftmost position, the median political position then kind of moves to the left is the idea.
Right. To me, what all of this represents is like the Overton window shifting to the right.
Yeah. There was a period where it was like very possible for companies to make like normie ass statements of support for LGBT people.
It basically is just a proxy indicator for like mainstream acceptance. And I think that's why it's always so fraught for actual gay people, because there's always the question like, well, do we want mainstream acceptance or do we want to change the mainstream? Yeah.
But then losing mainstream acceptance feels really bad. Like it feels bad.
Like, this is one the first episodes I've researched for the show where like I really did not feel good reading about this Target stuff. Yeah.
I felt the same way. It's like Target, but also like I want the dumb like United Airlines float at Pride.
Not because I think United Airlines gives a shit, but like it just means that it's not controversial to support gay people. It feels like a metric of progress more than a good in and of itself.
Yeah, exactly. In a vacuum, we shouldn't care about these empty gestures at all, but we're not in a vacuum.
Yeah. Right.
This is the product of an ascendant reactionary movement that is increasingly hateful, increasingly aggressive, increasingly violent. And the corporations backing down so quickly in some of these cases is a reminder that these institutions that have pretended to stand with the LGBT community for a decade now will very readily side with the fascists when the chips are down.
Easily. I have this other maybe half-baked thought, but I think that what's interesting about the conservative tactic here is that they get the causation backwards, right? Corporate pride is the aesthetic output of a society that is more broadly accepting of LGBT people, right? Conservatives lost the fight over broad social tolerance of LGBT people, or at least LGB people, And now they're attacking the aesthetic outgrowths of that social tolerance.
I think in general, people on the right are sort of blind to the difference between aesthetics and material politics because their politics are so aesthetic. They don't want anything other than to feel like they are firmly atop the social hierarchy.
I think it was Walter Benjamin who said that fascism is the aestheticization of politics, right? The fascist public is being given a channel to express their frustrations without any material political benefit accruing to themselves. Right.
So for LGBT people, it's a material fight because you can't separate the Bud Light drama, the target drama from anti-trans bills in state legislatures, for example. But for conservatives, it's purely aesthetic.
They have nothing material to gain here. It's about the validation of their social status.
It's also, to me, there's also like a huge media component of this too, that in the 2010s after Obergefell, we had a lot of takes that are like, OK, gay marriage is kind of off the table. Conservatives have kind of dropped gay marriage, anti-gay stuff as a fight.
Like you'd even see essays in like the National Review and various other conservative publications about like, well, you know, the gay thing turns out it's actually really not that big of a deal, right? But then the minute the far right becomes emboldened to go after gay people, the center right immediately capitulates and immediately starts laundering this into, like, well, there's actually some concerns, right? So the Media Matters for America had a piece about how Jonah Goldberg went on CNN when all this stuff was happening and being like, well, you know, there's some real concerns about like trans youth and like surgical procedures. And it's like, these are people that are saying that the products are satanic.
These are fucking psychos. And you're going on and be like, well, wait a minute.
What if the psychos have a point? Right. I also think there's a big thing with kind of transphobia itself, too, that like the J Rowling wing of like the quote unquote gender critical movement, their argument is always like, well, we're not an anti trans movement.
We're not transphobes. Right.
We just have reasonable concerns about like same sex spaces and reasonable concerns about kids. And then this stuff happens that, again, straightforward bigotry and they're not pushing back.
No one on their side is like, hey, I am actually concerned about the surgical procedures, but these people are fucking weirdos. They're not doing that, which should call into question everything else they are saying about their alleged reasonable concerns about like, well, trans kids and the surgical procedures.
It's become very obvious that they are part of, you know, you can never say what anybody's individual motivations are, but they are in league with open right wing bigots who are aiming to turn back both trans rights and LGBT rights and really, you know, broader progressive gains more generally. Right.
They are in league with these people. They're just like, oh, yeah, yeah, it turns out, you know, maybe there's some fascists like doing death threats on target.
But like, I don't know why we should ever like give that any attention. Anyway, here's a whole eight episode podcast series about the fucking witch trials of J.K.
Rowling. Right.
Right. And about how like trans people were mean to her on the Internet.
It's like, well, is anyone mean on the Internet right now? Right. Your dedication to fucking civility on the Internet.
Anyone else you want to aim that IERAT?ire at no okay yeah i mean it's a from the right it's never a real demand for civility it's a demand for complacency that's what they actually want can we end with a quiz peter i'm gonna send you a quote and you have to guess where it's from a lot of pressure after i fucking knocked that math stuff out of the park a couple episodes again. I know it's a problem.
You peaked too early. Yeah.
This is about a culture of violence taking over the left. Okay.
Now that some students, professors, and activists are labeling their opponents' words as violence, they give themselves permission to engage in ideologically motivated physical violence. As an essay in the Berkeley Student Newspaper argued,

the rationale is that physically violent actions used to shut down speech that is deemed hateful are, quote, not acts of violence, but rather acts of self-defense. This kind of identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us versus them thinking.
It prepares students for battle, not for learning.

Where's your finance, Peter?

So I am going to enter my mind space here and say that this is Barry Weiss. Ooh.
Is that right? This is from The Coddling of the American Mind. Fuck.
Fuck. Once a week, I will test whether you actually read the books for this podcast.
Okay. The us versus them thinking I thought was you baiting me.
Fuck. damn, I can't believe I swung and missed on that shit.
You're two for three, Peter, with the math ones. Fucked up my whole day.
There's another element of moderate complacency here, right? Where for years now, we've been told that there's like a spirit of authoritarianism and a culture of violence on the left, right? And it's always about to spill over into violence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is a core argument to the entire cancel culture panic that it's not about cancel culture. It's a slippery slope to these college students, people on the left engaging in violence much more, right? And yet, now that people are using actual violence, actual threats, nothing, no outcry from the moderates, right? They are still writing these same fucking pieces.
They're like, you got to watch out for the left. All of the right wing complaints of authoritarianism and extremism coming from the left are justified in abstract terms, right? Like Glenn Greenwald has been talking about left left-wing authoritarianism for a couple of years.
And all he means is like the enforcement of cultural norms by Twitter users. Or like linguistic shifts.
Right. We're using this word when we used to say that word.
Okay. Right.
The idea that like these lefty impulses are driven by this greater evil that if we leave it unchecked, we will eventually see. Right.
Right. But it's all to be seen.
Yeah. Because they have not been able to actually articulate a material complaint about leftist authoritarianism or violence.
All they've been able to do is point towards these really abstract concepts and label that authoritarian or violent. Whereas the authoritarianism of the right and the violence of the right is objectively measurable to a much larger degree.
The people who are not engaging in violence are about to start at any time. The people currently engaging in violence are about to stop.
And we shouldn't worry. If we're talking about a culture of violence, it is clear that we do have a huge problem with that in the United States.
But it is one dimensionally straightforwardly coming from the right. We don't have anything like that on the left at all okay real now it got real quiet we have nothing to end with yeah um you need to you need to end us on a joke peter i know you're tired and you're sleepy i have two forms of tired one is when i'm in my prime joke form my my brain can be occasionally reduced to only jokes and it can also be reduced to no jokes.

As your podcast co-host, I just want joke Peter.

I don't want to hear your thoughts on Pride. I just want your little quips today.
That's what I need from you. I tweeted – I skeeted yesterday about – I'm using it – about gay men at Pride.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've always had this sort of thought that so many complaints about like kink at pride and like complaints about degenerate behavior in general in the homosexual community are actually just complaints about men.
You know, what's actually happening. And I think I've told this to you before, like what's actually happening is you're just seeing the behavior of men unfiltered by the presence of women in their lives to tell them to stop.
I'm glad we finally got to the part where you're problematic, Peter. I'm just, I'm trying to get my, my, um, uh, latent homophobia flowing just to, just to hit the edges of that perfect joke.
That was a, that was a good ski. I, your ski was so good.
I saved it and send it to friends of mine that aren't on blue sky it says i have it in my little folder it says if your child sees some gays being hypersexual and gross at pride you need to sit them down and explain the cold hard reality that all men are like this well i've always i i have i always had this sort of thought that so much of what manifests as homophobia. Be careful.
Is actually discrimination against the behavior of men. The justified discrimination.
Justified. Because, yeah, a lot of people are like, oh, you think that gay people are, you know, disgusting and hypersexual and that's actually your homophobia.
And the other side of that is like, well, yes, but it's actually what that really is a complaint about is the behavior of men. I'm so against the patriarchy that I hate gay men.
All I'm saying is that you can woke yourself into being homophobic again. I think that's it.
I think we got it, Peter. That was good.

Glad you woke up at the end.

This is what gets me animated.

Thinking of ways to be problematic

while layering a woke enough justification on top of it

that our listeners are like,