Author and radio host Mark Steyn offers support to Breitbart’s #DumpKelloggs boycott in his latest column, noting the danger posed to free speech and culture when corporations increasingly politicize every issue by siding with the left in order to silence or de-legitimize the left’s political opponents, which Steyn writes is the real aim of Kellogg’s actions.
Steyn at first takes aim at the Associated Press’ characterization of Breitbart in the wire service’s article about the Kellogg’s boycott, in which the AP writes: “Breitbart has been condemned for featuring racist, sexist and anti-Semitic content.”
From Mark Steyn:
AP doesn’t actually produce any evidence of “racist, sexist and anti-Semitic content”, which would require considerable journalistic effort on its part. Instead, it states blandly that the site has been “condemned” as such. “Condemned” used to be a term with legal meaning: A judge tells a convicted man that he is “condemned to hang”. But in this case Breitbart hasn’t been convicted of anything, merely labeled by its political opponents. Just like Reuters could “condemn” Associated Press for “featuring pedophile content“. If labeling is all it now takes.
And in fact the real target here is not Breitbart so much as the incoming President of the United States, who has appointed Breitbart honcho Steve Bannon as a senior counselor. The losing side in the election wants to “de-normalize” Trump and his administration, by in effect de-legitimizing his voters and their electoral victory.
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I hate boycotts, too. I want to be free to reject Kellogg’s cereals because they suck rather than because buying them is a political act. But John Hinderaker’s right: This is a one-way street that leads to a de facto one-party state, or at any rate a one-party culture. The left wants a world in which a discount furniture warehouse is free to advertise with Rachel Maddow but not Rush Limbaugh. And in pushing further and further down that path they make everything political, and render normal civic life all but impossible – to the point where the CEO of something as universal and unobjectionable as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes finds it easier to side with the losing side in a free election, and against half of his fellow citizens. So, if Kellogg’s wants to shrink the market for Frosted Flakes by 50 per cent, fine: let’s frost ’em out, until they understand that, in politicizing everything, they’re the flakes.
Read the rest here.
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