A CULTURE-WAR RECKONING FOR CORPORATE AMERICA:

A headline in New York magazine laments, “Bud Light, Target, and a New Era of Corporate Caution.”

A new era of corporate caution? Don’t threaten me with a good time.

Imagine a beer company that just wanted to make good beer and sell it to you. Imagine if that company wanted to sell beer to everyone but didn’t feel that its job was to make you more accepting of transgender individuals, any more than it felt its job was to warn you about the national debt or teach you the value of standardized testing in public schools or warn you about North Korea’s intercontinental-missile program. Imagine a beer company that liked its existing customer base and didn’t feel a need to reeducate those customers and get them to give up their “fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor.”

Imagine an everything store like Target that wanted everyone to shop there, but that had the good sense to realize that partnering with a brand that had “Satanist-inspired merchandise” was not the way to win over shoppers in a country that is still roughly two-thirds Christian. (Also note that almost every faith has a devil figure, so there’s no reason to think non-Christian religious customers are big fans of Satanic branding, either.) You want to put rainbows and “PRIDE” on your merchandise, go right ahead. It’s a free country. But if you partner up with a “Satan Respects Pronouns”* designer, don’t be shocked when lots of people choose to shop elsewhere.

Entering into the culture war has become the Kobayashi Maru for Bud and Target. They’ve alienated conservatives badly, and now that their brands are politicized, they’re alienating the left by trying to get some distance between themselves and their mistakes. Naturally though, the media sees no enemies to the left: Media Hot on Threats Against Target, Until Alleged LGBT Bomb Threat.