Bill Maher noted how Democrats are in danger of going the way of other “ghost brands” like Sears and Playboy.
“A ghost brand, that’s a company or a store that like Sears still exists, but only as a pathetic shell of its former self.”
“I fear the Democratic party is at risk of becoming a ghost brand too. Like Sears, it used to be mighty and ascendant and popular. Sears once accounted for 1% of the entire American economy and 41% of the appliance market and built the country’s tallest tower. Democrats once controlled Congress and the Supreme Court, or were at least competitive.”
“The Democrats have their lowest rating in 35 years. 63% unfavorable. What happened? I don’t know.” This is a lie. Maher knows that social justice is killing the Democrat Party, he just doesn’t want to say it.
“What happened to Sears? It used to be synonymous with the American Dream because it kept faith with what the customer wanted.” This is a reductio ad absurdum, as the American Dreams mean a whole lot more than the ability to buy decent material goods.
“Did we love Sears? No. But that was besides the point. You just went. It was like an Avatar movie that sold tools. It used to be where your family bought everything from school clothes to appliances to your family Christmas portrait.”
“Sears used to have 3,500 stores and now it has five.”
“Same thing happened to Playboy, except in silk pajamas and a captain’s hat.”
“For for 66 years, Playboy magazine was also a fact of American life. Sears sold your father a mattress and Playboy was what he hid under it.”
“Plus real journalism. You could read an interview with Carter while enjoying photos of bush.”
“But but then it started messing around with the formula. Like the Democratic Party, Playboy decided they didn’t need straight men anymore. They put transgender women and gay men on the cover and predictably sales, like their subscribers penises, collapsed.”
“The staff began using terms like intersectionality, sex positivity, and privileging. And in response, Playboy readers use terms like, ‘No thanks, get the fuck out of here, and buy-bye.'”
Cracker Barrel analogy snipped.
“It reminded me of when Chuck Schumer said in 2016 that for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’re going to pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philly, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Yeah, how’d that work out?”
“But at least Cracker Barrel had the sense to immediately say, ‘Oh sorry.’ and put the sling blades back on the wall. Democrats don’t seem to be doing that. They still seem to want to be that upscale store that impresses celebrities.”
Description of how Barney’s went from a solid discount clothing store to a wannabe upscale failure snipped.
“And I’m not making this up just because it’s Halloween, but after Barney’s closed for good in 2020, it became, yes, a Spirit Halloween.”
“I’m just saying Democrats need to get their shit together, because America needs two political parties, not one party and one Halloween store.”
What’s doing in the Democrats is what did in Playboy: Intersectionality, transgenderism, supporting illegal aliens over American citizens, and the entire post-modern social justice woke-mind-virus zoo. They went from seeing blue collar workers as the backbone of the party to seeing them as icky carriers of hetronormative toxic masculinity, patriarchy and white privilege. Donald Trump, alone of all the 2016 Republican presidential candidates, saw those same voters as a key ingredient into making Republicans into America’s natural majority party.
But unlike Sears or Playboy, there’s a limit to how much the free market can correct a self-destructive ideology. The woke are absolutely sure of their unshakable virtue, and seizing and maintaining control of the Democrat Party is far more important to them than pleasing mere voters. Social Justice Democrats believe they’re on “the right side of history,” and like Tareyton smokers, they’d rather fight than switch. Or, as poor Charlie Kirk found out, they’d rather kill the “Nazis” that oppose their policies than consider the possibility that they’re wrong.
Texas Democrats went through a similar struggle in the 1960s through 1990s. Liberals knew that if they were ever to take control of the party, they would have to drive conservatives out of the Party, so they convinced conservatives they had to leave the Democrats and vote in Republican primaries, as documented in Wayne Thorburn’s Red State. This they accomplished, but somehow seemed to think Texans would just continue voting Democrats in year after year.
And that’s why Democrats haven’t elected anyone statewide in Texas in over 30 years.
Come Tuesday, New York City Democrats will quite likely elect a Jew-hating communist rather than consider the possibility that their ideas are not just wrong, but evil. And thus the party will take yet another lurch toward electoral ghost brand irrelevance.
And they’re a whole lot less popular and innovative than Spirit Halloween…
Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner has died at age 91.
Conservatives will decry Hefner for debasing the culture while libertarians will celebrate his role in unleashing the sexual revolution, but neither view is particularly accurate. Pornography predated Playboy by decades, and various cultural and technological forces (not least of which was the widespread adoption of the automobile, ensuring people could decamp to less restrictive environs at will) were always going to bring about the sexual revolution. Hefner was a canny businessman who understood that he could marry nude pictures of women to an upscale lifestyle magazine. The business model worked, and for many years Playboy paid writers some of the top rates in the field.
Those same cultural and technological forces were also going to render Playboy obsolete, as the profit centers in the skin trade quickly moved first to video and then to the Internet.
Today, most attacks on pornography seem to come from the anti-sex feminist left than the religious right.
Hefner lived long enough to see himself transformed into a media icon, and for his flagship magazine to become culturally irrelevant.
Steyn also went to a Trump rally, and discovered how Trump is wowing crowds as an un-politician. “He moved the meter on the ‘war on women’, too. Mrs Clinton pulled out the card, and Trump flung it right back in her face with her sleazy sociopath of a husband’s four decades of abuse against vulnerable women.”
The puzzling thing about the democrats’ push on gun control: Why gun control, and why now? “Unpopular as it is, gun control may be as good as they’ve got.”
Really, Jeb Bush’s path to victory requires Lindsay Graham’s endorsement? I’m sure in much the same way the Houston Texan’s plans involved Brian Hoyer leading them to the Superbowl…
The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.
You know, if you’re a sitting Texas Supreme Court Justice running for reelection, it’s probably not going to help you win Texas Republican voters if you do robocalling demonizing Michael Quinn Sullivan. Especially when the call goes to Michael Quinn Sullivan. (Hat tip: Push Junction.)