Speaker 1: Welcome back to The David Pakman Show. I'm producer Pat Forde, filling in for David
today. He'll be back on Friday. Right wingers love to boycott brands nowadays. Typically,
they do so over the silliest of reasons, like they boycotted Nike a few years back over the brand
supporting Colin Kaepernick. They boycotted Keurig because Keurig decided to pull its advertising
from a Fox News program. They boycotted Starbucks because Starbucks decided to hire a bunch of
refugees in response to Donald Trump's travel ban. They boycotted the NFL and Twitter and
Coca-Cola and now Hershey's. Lately, the big one, though, has been Bud Light because the company had
the audacity, the temerity to make a specialty. Can that celebrated transgender influencer Dylan
Mulvaney. Of course, Disney has also been a big one because they've been butting heads
with Ron DeSantis over the Don't Say gay bill and other issues in Florida. It's an exhaustive list,
and it seems very difficult for conservatives to be able to keep track of all the different
companies they're supposed to be boycotting. But every time they hear about a new one,
they tell themselves, get woke, go broke. And this is the phrase they use to keep themselves
going and to make themselves feel as though their boycott is actually working. But the truth is that
many of these companies aren't actually feeling the supposed pain that these boycotts are supposed
to bring them. And this was highlighted in a recent piece from Rolling Stone. It turns out that
many of these companies are actually doing better than ever. So, for example, I mentioned Keurig.
Since the boycott happens, they've acquired Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, an $18.7 billion deal,
and the company's annual gross profits have swelled, reaching $7.3 billion in 2022. Another
example is United Airlines. United Airlines was targeted by right wingers because of all things
the airline decided to commit itself to having half of its new pilot trainees be either women
and or people of color. And since making that decision, since the boycott, the company
recently reported a fourth quarter 2022 profit of $843 million, which well beat Wall Street's
expectations. Carhart is another one. I didn't even know about this boycott. You'd think that
Carhartt would be a brand that conservatives would like because it's associated with these
rugged blue collar type jobs. But they did have a COVID vaccine requirement for employees,
and that sparked a boycott. Now, the company is private, so we don't know the profits and too
much about the numbers, but they did announce an investment of $4.65 million to expand its
Dearborn, Michigan, campus and its plans. It's planning on hiring 125 more workers at
an average wage of $43.22 per hour. So that is quite a good wage, if I do say so myself. Also,
Disney had a gross profit for 2022, which was $28 billion, a 27% increase from the previous year.
We're hearing that Nike outperformed expectations and had a fourth quarter of 2022 reaching over
$1,000,000,000. The NFL had a dip in recent years with the pandemic losing them some viewership. But
now the league is unbelievably prosperous and the individual teams are increasing in value. There's
record viewership among broadcast and streaming partners. There's soaring in-person attendance.
So what I'm getting at here is that these right wing boycotts aren't actually working. And these
companies who feel that they should send out an inclusive message or have a vaccine mandate or
pay their workers a living wage, things that the left likes to champion, they should feel as though
they have every day that they have the green light to do so, because, you know, it's working. And the
boycotts that they could generate aren't actually going anywhere. Part of this is the fact that
progressives and moderates outnumber conservatives in the United States by a wide margin. But I think
it's more so that people really just don't have the patience for these sorts of boycotts
and they forget about the boycotts after not that much time. It's just hard to keep track
of all of it. I mean, listen, all these different companies that I've mentions, it's what, you know,
at least ten, 12 and people are eventually are just going to get sick of it and lose track and
want to go back to buying the products that they like. And there's no reason really why
conservatives shouldn't like Nike and Starbucks and Carhartt and Keurig like everyone else does.
So it's just a big commitment that they're not even willing to follow through with. And
that's why we're seeing these boycotts really have no effect. And if they do
want to boycott companies for whatever reason they want to come up with, they can do that,
right? They have that right. They can start these mass media campaigns. They're free to do so. This
is the free markets that they claim to love so much. But it's time to stop pretending as though
these boycotts are having any sort of measurable effects. And it's certainly time sort of tired.
The phrase get woke, go broke, because there doesn't seem to be any merit to it at all.