When companies join the culture wars, they shouldn’t be surprised if the blowback hits their bottom lines.
When companies join the culture wars, they shouldn't be surprised if the blowback hits their bottom lines.
W arby Parker has decided to enter the culture war.
Warby Parker is going to lose.
Warby Parker, like many similar businesses, farms out part of its digital advertising to third-party firms that place ads on a variety of media platforms, usually driven by user data. One of Warby Parker’s ads cropped up on the Daily Wire, a conservative site founded by Ben Shapiro, and the usual progressive rage monkeys on Twitter did their usual cretinous thing, threatening to boycott the eyewear company.
Warby Parker, which already engages in a great deal of marketing by means of social-justice gilding, did its best impression of overcooked linguini and promised to make sure that its ads did not end up on the Daily Wire or other similar sites — meaning, of course, conservative ones — again. The lesson of corporate cowardice — from Google to the Atlantic — is that the easiest person in the world to bully is someone who is eager to be bullied.
This is happening against the background of a left-wing effort to try to organize a boycott of Texas-based businesses in retaliation for the Lone Star State’s having had the bad taste to pass a law that says you can butcher your children up until the sixth week of pregnancy, but must forgo medical feticide once a heartbeat can be detected — the ginned-up Twitter storm featured screenshots of the Daily Caller’s rather tame coverage of the boycott threat.
Texas is not, at the moment, very worried about that threat: If corporate progressives do not want to be in business with Texans, then Austin has 7,000 Apple employees whom many in that fair city would be perfectly content to see packed off back where they came from, even though we all know that once they are back in California they will still shop at Texas-based Whole Foods, fly on Texas-based American Airlines, etc. Personally, I am eager to watch them try to organize a boycott of Oracle and Sysco.
And if Elon Musk ever gets around to relocating Tesla to Texas. . . .
(You know you want to.)
Michael Jordan famously begged off talking about politics in public with an unusually honest explanation: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” They also buy reasonably priced eyewear.
And they buy it in Texas.
They buy eyewear — or have bought eyewear — at the Warby Parker store at NorthPark Center in Dallas, at the Warby Parker boutique in the Woodlands and Addison, at WestBend in Fort Worth, and at LegacyWest in Plano. Warby Parker co-CEO Neil Blumenthal rejoices in the Greenwich Village address at which he maintains a multimillion-dollar home decorated with Jeff Koons paintings (lefty posturing pays, kids), but a good chunk of his customer base lives elsewhere. So do his employees, and a great many potential investors — the company is planning an IPO. The ostracism-as-activism game looks like a low-cost publicity move, but it would look a little different if, say, 1,000 pro-life activists were camped out at the Warby Parker shop in Plano.
Conservatives historically are not very good at boycotts — boycotts do not sit easily with the conservative temperament, because boycotts are for people who are looking for new ways to complicate their lives. And, personally, I don’t want conservatives to get all boycott-y. We already have enough tedious and monomaniacal people in the world.
The problem is: L’appétit vient en mangeant. By rewarding this sort of petty suppression, Warby Parker encourages more of the same, contributing to a culture of fearful conformism and homogeneity. That it does so for self-serving reasons, rather than out of naivety, makes it culpable for that culture.
Not long ago, progressives would have recoiled in horror from the prospect of a political culture in which the limits of public discourse are policed by profit-seeking corporations deploying their capital toward narrowly partisan and ideological ends. But nothing makes a so-called liberal more comfortable with power than achieving a little bit of it. That is why the hysteria that once was the preserve of overwrought undergraduates has infected practically every corner of the public square, from corporate life to the media to technology companies. And, now, Warby Parker is inviting that mess into its stores.
Don’t be surprised when it shows up there.