British supermarket bends the knee to ONE transgender activist & gets ads slashed. Who’s safe from these woke super-soldiers?
Lurking behind an anonymous profile picture is a hidden power capable of bringing the UK’s biggest corporations to their knees. Meet the transgender campaigner, the woke world’s arbiter of all that is right and moral.
‘Stop Funding Hate’ is a social media campaign dedicated to driving advertisers from conservative newspapers and media outlets. When the group noticed ads for Co-op – Britain’s fifth-largest supermarket chain – in The Spectator last week, it manned battle stations and pressed the retailer to cut its ties with the “toxic and inflammatory” conservative magazine.
Also on rt.com The feeling’s mutual: Co-op and The Spectator cancel each other over ‘transphobia’ ad rowBut nobody listened, and the group’s tweets went unheard for several days. Enter the transgender campaigner, a woman by the name of ‘Lisa’ with a couple hundred followers and pronouns in her bio. When Lisa spoke, Co-op listened, promising the enraged transsexual that they’d demand change from The Spectator, or pull their ads from its filthy, transphobic pages.
Hey @coopuk as a trans person I was please to see your adverts featuring a trans women and celebrating diversity, I visited your stores as a result, but why bother if your going to turn around ignore your members wishes and place adverts and fund transphobia in the spectator. https://t.co/LWDyauaJbK
— Lisa 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 🧜🏻♀️ 🧜🏻♂️ (@Lisa_Fajita) August 30, 2020
As it turned out, Spectator editor Andrew Neil beat the store to it, declaring Co-op permanently banned from advertising in the magazine again. “The Spectator cannot work with advertisers who seek to use their commercial clout to stifle debate,” read a subsequent tweet from the magazine’s official Twitter account, along with a link to its apparently offensive articles on the transgender debate.
Sorry to lose the Co-op, but The Spectator cannot work with advertisers who seek to use their commercial clout to stifle debate. Read our coverage of the transgender debate here: https://t.co/NXYpCArayS
— The Spectator (@spectator) September 4, 2020
Twitter is full of no-name accounts screaming into the void. The impotent rage of the proletariat is on full display under every tweet by Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, or any other politician or public figure with a following and a household name. Yet these accounts are usually ignored, left to fling insults into the abyss.
Transgender activists are seemingly different. Just what is it about the phrase “as a trans person” that commands obedience? After all, one griping twitter user would be easy for Co-op to ignore, but instead she drove the supermarket to take on a conservative magazine that clearly wasn’t going to bend the knee. There was no incentive for Co-op to fight Lisa’s fight, but by the sheer power of her outrage she pushed the company into committing financial seppuku and denying itself valuable exposure.
That’s some powerful wizardry.
It’s also not the first time that transsexuals have wielded influence above their small numbers (transgender people account for 0.3 percent of the EU population). In the US they got a literary agent fired from her job last month for tweeting “pronouns suck.” Twitter itself suspended ‘Father Ted’ writer Graham Linehan earlier this summer for tweeting “men aren’t women.” They’ve also succeeded in forcing male rapists into female prisons, bullying schoolgirls into changing rooms and toilets with boys, and suing beauticians into waxing their (male) genitals. Even the nonexistent transgender murder “epidemic” has been memed into an international ‘Day of Remembrance.’
Also on rt.com If even this super-woke yoga studio falls victim to today’s cancel culture, where will it all end?It’s worth taking a step back here for some perspective. These people only have cultural clout because the managers and higher-ups at corporations like Co-op bend to them. Whether out of genuine desire to do the right thing, or fear of offending the woke mob, the Co-op team decided to elevate Lisa from internet ranter to a force for change, regardless of the hit to their finances.
But it’s also worth considering the logical end-point of all of this. The left and right, liberals and conservatives, already read different magazines, watch different news channels, and congregate in different social media bubbles. Thanks to the efforts of transgender campaigners and those who kowtow to them, the supermarket aisle is the newest front in the neverending culture war.
If these people are further enabled, right-wing opinion itself will one day become verboten.
Also on rt.com Trans activists have turned the word ‘CIS’ into a slur to rainbow-bash whoever they want – and get away with itImagine a bank refusing to service customers who’ve made “transphobic” tweets. It’s not so far away. Paypal, Visa and Mastercard already refuse to do business with “right wing extremists,” and the constantly changing definition of extremism means that an off-color joke today might be grounds for excommunication from polite society tomorrow.
Imagine a supermarket refusing entry to transphobes. Imagine Amazon denying you delivery because Alexa heard you say the word “tranny.” Imagine not being able to book an uber if you think that “pronouns suck.” Uber has already asked those who “tolerate racism” to delete its app. Transgender skeptics might be next to be shunned.
And if dystopia is your thing, imagine a world where these people get into government and fully pursue their uncompromising agenda. To quote infamous right-wing podcaster ‘Bronze Age Pervert’: “Imagine lesbian mulatta commissars with young Martin Sheen face and haircut manning the future Bergen-Belsens, installations that will span tens of miles.”
Perhaps the idea of trans tyrants and their genderfluid gestapo is a bit far-fetched. Perhaps more companies and media outlets will take a leaf out of The Spectator’s book and tell woke corporations where to shove it. However, saying no to the righteously furious is a difficult thing to do, even when you’re a supermarket with a 10 billion-pound yearly revenue, and they’re a faceless Twitter account screaming at nothing.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.