After the vacation
The best thing about being on vacation is that you get a break from our ugly politics. But you eventually have to go home and get caught back up on all the silliness that you missed; hence the following post-vacation observations:
■ The backlash against woke corporations isn’t about homophobia or hostility to transgender folks; it is about everyday Americans resisting the relentless politicization of so much of American life.
The hunch is that the reaction would have been just as fierce if Bud Light had decided to use anti-immigrant or anti-abortion figures rather than a transgender one in its marketing campaign; it is the obnoxious intrusion of politics that is being opposed, not particular political views or movements.
People want to be able to go to a ballgame, drink a beer or push a shopping cart through a department store without receiving political lectures from their self-appointed moral superiors. We are not children, and don’t need instruction on what to think about transgenderism and other subjects from whom we buy our fizzy drinks, deodorant, and toasters.
It isn’t that difficult for corporations to avoid stumbling into the culture wars. Indeed, it is their doing so that often makes them wars in the first place, and it isn’t difficult to avoid offending large swaths of the population otherwise known as your consumers. The backlash directed at the Dodgers, Target, Bud Light, etc. is merely a symptom; it is their political condescension and presumptuousness that is the cause.
Nobody who works for a corporation is prevented from expressing their political views or supporting particular causes on their own time and dime; all are free to vote as they please and even to run for public offices for which they are eligible.
None of that requires their employers embracing controversial political positions at the expense of their primary mission to sell products and services to consumers of all political persuasions.
■ In the space of just a few weeks Donald Trump somehow managed to trash the state of Florida (to which people are moving in droves, and to which his entire family also happened to have moved during Gov. Ron DeSantis’ term), condemn DeSantis for locking Florida down for so long (when it was opening up earlier and more fully that brought DeSantis to national attention and Trump who embraced lockdowns under the influence of Anthony Fauci), criticize DeSantis’ military record on none other than Memorial Day (despite DeSantis having been awarded the Bronze Star for service in Iraq and Trump having dodged the draft during Vietnam), and attacked DeSantis for having issued a statement of support back in 2017 for Trump’s nomination of Chris Wray to head the FBI (note the “Trump’s nomination” part).
This isn’t remotely the behavior of an adult, or even a sane person, raising the question of whether we are doomed in 2024 to have to choose between senility and sheer lunacy.
■ Trump’s incoherent and unhinged attacks upon DeSantis could backfire if they encourage Republican primary voters to take a closer look at the latter’s resume and note how favorably it compares to Trump’s: working-class origins, captain of the Yale baseball team, graduation with honors from Harvard Law, rise to rank of lieutenant commander in the Navy after volunteering for service following 9/11 (in the process forgoing lots of income from that law degree), three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, and then governor of one of the country’s largest states, followed by a landslide re-election that pushed that state firmly from the “purple” into the “red” column.
Not to forget DeSantis being obviously more psychologically stable and competent, much younger, more ideologically consistent and credible, and vastly more tethered to that thing called reality.
Along these lines, perhaps the funniest line yet uttered in campaign 2024 because it’s such a stunning testament to obliviousness in the pot and kettle sense came when Trump suggested that what DeSantis needs is “a personality transplant.”
■ Finally, the clear-cut winner of the always intense competition for dumbest political stunt of the year goes to the NAACP for issuing a travel advisory for the state of Florida on the grounds that it “is openly hostile toward African Americans.”
This would, of course, be news to the large number of African Americans who have moved to Florida in recent years—it was the fifth highest ranked state for net African American migration from 2010-2020 (Georgia, otherwise known as “Jim Crow on steroids,” was one of the four that did better).
Going further, a dissection of the numbers by John Fund and Wendell Cox in National Review noted that Florida has an African American unemployment rate of 3.4 percent, third lowest in the nation (California’s is 7.7 percent, New York’s 8.0 percent, and Illinois’ 10.5 percent), an African American home-ownership rate of 49 percent, eighth best in the nation (California’s is 35 percent and New York’s 34 percent), and is first in the nation in the number of African American-owned businesses (despite having a population barely half that of California).
So maybe the NAACP should issue a travel advisory for Illinois, New York or California instead, and then put itself out of its misery due to utter irrelevance and incurable stupidity.