--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Host (Noel King): The top song on iTunes chart.net today is Boycott Target by MAGA rapper Forgiato Blow, Feet Nick Natoli and Stoney Dude Bro. Target has aggrieved some conservative activists because June is Pride Month and the company is selling Pride merchandise, a thing it has done in order to make money for years.
--:-- Host (Noel King): Except previous years have not been 2023, a year in which Anheuser-Busch's King of Beers Light got in trouble with Kid Rock and Travis Tritt for partnering with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney to sell beer. A year in which Lego, Kohl's, and PetSmart are also facing boycott calls over their sales of Pride-related merch, such as PetSmart's Pride bikini for dogs and the rainbow lamb chop toy.
--:-- Host (Noel King): That's all coming up on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again. With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
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--:-- Host (Noel King): It's today explained I'm Noelle King. Companies have been making money by selling pride merchandise for so many years that it's difficult to find answers to questions like which company was first what year did they do it in this is just something that's done and it's 2023 and it is not that controversial but it's 2023 and so of course it's controversial.
--:-- Host (Noel King): Vox's Emily Stewart has been covering Target and Bud Light, two companies that conservative activists have targeted recently. Emily, can you start with Target?
--:-- Emily Stewart: So a lot of the controversy really appeared to center around misinformation and a rumor that Target was selling tuck-friendly bathing suits to children.
--:-- Emily Stewart: So I found an extra small swimsuit in the child section, says light binding effect on it. And then the bottoms in the kids section, keep in mind, say tuck-friendly construction. They're giving it to your kids.
--:-- Emily Stewart: This was not happening. These tuck-friendly bathing suits were on sale in adult sizes. They were not being marketed for children.
--:-- Emily Stewart: But as with so many things on the internet, the rumor started, rumor took off, and that had people really worked up.
--:-- Emily Stewart: What is a tuck-friendly bathing suit? It's basically a bathing suit. So if you are a trans woman, it would help you kind of conceal your genitalia and offer more coverage.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Okay, so retail giant Target, headquartered in Minnesota, is just not going to sell tuck-friendly kids' bathing suits. Like, I'm sorry, that's just not a thing that would happen.
--:-- Emily Stewart: How did a rumor like that get started? People are really kind of on the hunt for something to be mad about, specifically around trans issues.
--:-- Emily Stewart: It doesn't take long for these things to take off. Like even before the calls for a boycott around Target started, like I started to see this rumor show up in my Twitter feed, right?
--:-- Emily Stewart: Because it's somebody takes a picture and says, oh, you know, here is this tuck-friendly bathing suit that I found in the Target children's section being marketed to kids.
--:-- Emily Stewart: And that's really how this kind of took off. That there's one picture, there's a couple pictures going around, and then people start to believe it.
--:-- Emily Stewart: And I think the political context this year is quite different. You know, we've seen really a raft of anti-trans legislation across the country in many states.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Laws covering everything from sports to education to health care access. So you're seeing bills that are being proposed or passed that would require teachers to out students to their parents, bills that would prevent doctors from giving hormone therapy to trans youth, legislation that would prevent trans youth from being on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
--:-- Emily Stewart: So these... And to be clear, they're fired up about the T, the trans issues.
--:-- Emily Stewart: For a hint of what was going to happen here, we could go back to early April when there was a freakout over Bud Light.
--:-- Emily Stewart: So at the beginning of April, Bud Light sent a handful of cans of beer to a trans influencer named Dylan Mulvaney as part of a pretty run-of-the-mill marketing campaign.
--:-- Emily Stewart: This month I celebrated my day 365 a womanhood, and Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever, a can with my face on it. Check out my Instagram story to see how you can enjoy March Madness with Bud Light and maybe win some money too. Love ya! Cheers! Go team! Whatever team you love, I love too.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Okay. That being said, this really, really picked up traction on the right. There was a huge amount of backlash with, you know, I remember back to April, Kid Rock shot a bunch of cases of Bud Light.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Let me say something to all you and be as clear and concise as possible. A country singer named Travis Tritt said he was dropping Bud Light from his tour.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Writer, um, there was a lot of backlash and there were calls for a boycott and it really really really took off.
--:-- Emily Stewart: You know, I think that even I think back to early April, I kind of thought most boycotts don't really work.
--:-- Emily Stewart: There is still a lot of anger at Bud Light, they have seen a dip in sales, how this will last, who knows.
--:-- Emily Stewart: But it has hurt the company, and you know the company didn't handle it super well either.
--:-- Emily Stewart: They didn't really stick to their guns. They got a little bit nervous started putting out statements saying that they love America.
--:-- Emily Stewart: And so at this point, everybody mad at Bud Light. Like the right mad at Bud Light. And so are progressives who think that they kind of didn't stand up for their values.
--:-- Emily Stewart: When bigots are loudly announcing they don't like your beer because they are bigots, that is an opportunity for you to say, then our beer is not for you.
--:-- Emily Stewart: And the company took quite a bit of a hit, and they're a little bit nervous.
--:-- Emily Stewart: And so I think a lot of companies are probably a little bit nervous.
--:-- Emily Stewart: The Bud Light thing was kind of a win for activists. The company didn't handle it well. It appeared to waffle. It ended up with two executives being either sidelined or taking some time off.
--:-- Emily Stewart: And so it seems like the dust up over Bud Light and the way in which the company handled it led to a group of activists, conservative activists, looking for more Targets, and then they found one.
--:-- Emily Stewart: In Target. In Target, yes. It's obviously that pun. But yeah, basically, Target every year has a ton of Pride merchandise, as do many retailers.
--:-- Emily Stewart: And they started to roll out their Pride merchandise in May. And the right was on the hunt for another corporation to go after.
--:-- Emily Stewart: You know, I think seeing some of these activists, seeing the success that they had with Bud Light, they thought, oh, we can probably do this again.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Who is the they here? You know, I think you do see some people online, you know, big voices on, you know, on conservative Twitter and videos or whatever, but there are also customers showing up at Target stores and making a mess.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Earlier today, I was watching a video of a man who walked into a Target store filming himself and started to destroy some of the Pride merchandise and some of the signage.
--:-- Emily Stewart: There was another video of someone who'd gone into Target and was filming employees and kind of harassing them.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Hey, do you guys support the satanic Pride propaganda? I, yeah, both. You support it? Satan and Pride. You support Satan? Mm-hmm. What's God going to think of that? I don't believe in God. Wow. So you think... Did you need help with something? You support the... And so some of it is loud figures on the right, but some of it's customers that are showing up and harassing the stores and harassing the workers.
--:-- Emily Stewart: How does Target react? Like, what does the company say publicly?
--:-- Emily Stewart: So on May 24th, Target put out a statement saying that it would remove some items from its annual pride collection after it had experienced threats impacting our team members' sense of safety and the well-being while at work.
--:-- Emily Stewart: They haven't been super open about what they are pulling. And a lot of it has been them saying they're going to review what to leave out.
--:-- Emily Stewart: You know, I imagine it's store by store. But, you know, they're taking a look at it. And like I said, it's not like Pride is gone from Target and plenty of stores.
--:-- Emily Stewart: This stuff is on display. It's certainly being prominently featured on their website. But they're scaling back a little bit.
--:-- Emily Stewart: How big a deal is Pride for Target?
--:-- Emily Stewart: I have not been in a Target for a long time. I just don't live near one. And I'm wondering, like, once you're in the store, is the Pride stuff right at the front, or do you have to go to the back where, like, they keep the wrapping paper during Christmas?
--:-- Emily Stewart: Is it a point of Pride, the Pride merch? I had a source go into a Target last week to kind of check stuff out, and she said, you know, there really is Pride stuff all over.
--:-- Emily Stewart: There are shirts, there are tote bags, there are tarot cards. It's also featured pretty prominently on the website.
--:-- Emily Stewart: And I do think it's important to point out that pretty recently Target CEO Brian Cornell said on a podcast.
--:-- Emily Stewart: When your teams, your leadership represents the consumer you serve, I think good things happen. So I can see the benefits for our shareholders.
--:-- Emily Stewart: I know that focus on diversity and inclusion and equity has fueled much of our growth over the last nine years.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Target hasn't really been hiding that they pull out this kind of merchandise and that they want to sell to this demographic and that they want to sell rainbow stuff.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Do they cancel Pride entirely or is it just we're pulling X, Y and Z? Target still is doing Pride, but they are pulling certain items.
--:-- Emily Stewart: The retailer removing LGBTQ brand App Prowlin from their stores and website, whose products featured satanic themes.
--:-- Emily Stewart: Target also reportedly reviewing its adult collection of tuck-friendly swimsuits that allows trans people who have not had gender-affirming operations to conceal their private parts.
--:-- Emily Stewart: And in the South, you know, there has been reporting that some of the stores have moved some of the Pride merchandise to the back, so it's not as prominently featured.
--:-- Emily Stewart: You know, conservatives almost seem surprised that corporate pride is upon us once again.
--:-- Host (Noel King): Coming up after the break, think about it for a moment. Is it weird that we expect corporations to take positions on social issues as opposed to just selling us stuff and making money? That's ahead.
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--:-- Host (Noel King): Estar escuchando a Hoy Explicado. Today, Explained.
--:-- Host (Noel King): My name is Kyle Williams. I'm a senior editor at the Hedgehog Review, which is a quarterly journal of ideas and cultural analysis at the University of Virginia.
--:-- Host (Noel King): And I'm a historian. And you have a book coming out?
--:-- Kyle Williams: I do, yeah. It's called Taming the Octopus, The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation, which is a history of big business in the 20th century that's coming out early next year.
--:-- Host (Noel King): So I'm wrapping up copy edits and that kind of thing. Let's say tomorrow or next month Target does something wild or Bud Light does something wild.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Do you have to, like, make frantic edits?
--:-- Kyle Williams: I see what you mean. No, I mean, I think that the dynamics, and this is very much a historian kind of way of approaching the headlines, is that the dynamics that we're seeing play out are old dynamics.
--:-- Kyle Williams: I think they're intensifying. I think there are things that are new about the environment that we're in right now.
--:-- Kyle Williams: But the question that I'm asking in the book, and then I think the question that's kind of underlying all of these controversies is the question of what is the corporation? What is it good for? What is its purpose?
--:-- Kyle Williams: And those are, it turns out, very old questions that Americans have been wrestling with from generation to generation, I think.
--:-- Host (Noel King): All right. So let's start here today. Target's CEO, just about two weeks ago, did an interview on a podcast.
--:-- Host (Noel King): And he's kind of boasting to the podcast host that Target really focuses on diversity and inclusion.
--:-- Host (Noel King): And in fact, Target has made money because it focuses on diversity and inclusion.
--:-- Host (Noel King): And then about seven days later, Target says, oh, we're pulling some pride-related merchandise. We're not going to be so into diversity that we're unwilling to back down if we get some pushback from conservative activists.
--:-- Kyle Williams: I think that this kind of thing happens from time to time where a business will have to respond to its changing social and political environment.
--:-- Kyle Williams: It makes a judgment that it's going to offer products that are reflective of the changing cultural and social moment and then having to back down or respond to criticism.
--:-- Kyle Williams: I think what is really new in this moment, though, is that the conservative movement in the United States is changing.
--:-- Kyle Williams: The way the conservatives in the past have responded to big business being more welcoming and opening to progressive causes was to say, just focus on profits, stick to business, stay in your lane.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And I think that we're seeing a dynamic where that's changing quite a bit.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Now there are seeds to this response to Target and the conservative movement.
--:-- Kyle Williams: I think especially of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States launched a boycott of Disney in 1997 over the company's decision to provide health insurance benefits to same-sex couples.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Disney is not the Disney we knew in our childhood. Disney is not the same company. They've made some changes, and they have not been for the best.
--:-- Kyle Williams: That boycott was incredibly not successful, which is why almost no one remembers it.
--:-- Kyle Williams: In that moment, the conservative Baptists occupied a very minority position within the conservative movement.
--:-- Kyle Williams: But now I think we're seeing a moment in which those kinds of ways of responding to big business are reaching into the mainstream of the conservative movement.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida using his position within the movement to make big demands on big corporations, to reject what they're calling woke capitalism.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Now I think you're seeing this change within the movement where conservatives look at companies like a Chick-fil-A or a Hobby Lobby corporation.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And they're praising them not just for the profits that they make or the productivity margins that they have, but that they represent conservative cultural identities.
--:-- Kyle Williams: When did Americans start expecting more from companies than that companies would just sell them stuff?
--:-- Kyle Williams: Ever since the rise of corporate capitalism in the early 20th century, corporations have been doing their best to overcome the perception that they are a nameless, faceless bureaucracy.
--:-- Kyle Williams: They're just focused on making a buck. And the way that they've done that from the early 20th century, companies like Journal Electric and AT&T used advertisements.
--:-- Kyle Williams: They used spokespersons with homely personalities and art that reflected a kind of humanness.
--:-- Kyle Williams: They gave money to charities, and they paid for public works, and they contributed to communities to show that they had a personality, that they have a corporate soul.
--:-- Kyle Williams: When compared to the way that business had been done in the United States before then, corporations were shockingly abstract, and they seemed dangerously powerful.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And so Americans have always had something of a love-hate relationship with big business.
--:-- Kyle Williams: You know, we support it and desire it for what it can do for us, for its productivity, for its efficiency.
--:-- Kyle Williams: But I think we're also a bit suspicious and sometimes intensely worried about the power that large corporations exercise.
--:-- Kyle Williams: You know, they have immense privileges and rights that allow them to become big and powerful.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And these legal and economic powers are given to corporations by states and they're inscribed in law.
--:-- Kyle Williams: But we often don't really have as much of a clear idea about what social responsibilities they should have.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And so I think what we're seeing here is an intensification of that fight over what big business really is for besides making money.
--:-- Kyle Williams: When did companies themselves begin to be aligned with the kind of inclusion that we think of a lot of companies as expressing today or as being aligned with today?
--:-- Kyle Williams: In order to understand the relationship that corporations have with progressive movements you really have to go back to the post era to the rise of the civil rights movement.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And the way that activists started to see that the object of their activism should not focus simply on Washington or on state legislatures and on law and public policy but on big business strategy.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And the way that this played out was that activists, James Peck and Barrett Rustin, are examples of civil rights activists in the 1950s that bought shares of the Greyhound bus company and demanded that they desegregate their bus lines.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies. And we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn.
--:-- Kyle Williams: They wanted to put shareholder resolutions to the floor of the shareholder meeting and demand that they make changes.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Those kinds of tactics got adopted in the wider civil rights movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Stoughton Lind, who I quote in my book, he said, why do we continue to demonstrate in Washington as if the core of the problem lay there?
--:-- Kyle Williams: And he encouraged fellow activists to lay siege to corporations, as he put it.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And so activists would buy up shares and they would go to the annual meetings of General Electric in 1970, 1971, and demand that they end discrimination practices in the workplace and demand that they have representation in car dealerships and demand that they mitigate the pollution that they've caused.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Civil rights, environmentalism, these are progressive causes. These are lefty issues, we might say.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Not carrying pride merchandise is a conservative issue. It's a conservative cause.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Does this mean the politics of the people doing the protesting have changed over time?
--:-- Kyle Williams: And in fact, maybe even changed us in the last year or two years?
--:-- Kyle Williams: I wouldn't say what's happened is that the protests have changed.
--:-- Kyle Williams: I think that we still see protests and activist movements and social movements and people calling on big business to support progressive causes.
--:-- Kyle Williams: But I think what we're seeing and what's new is this change in the conservative movement where conservatives aren't calling on big business as much simply to focus on profits.
--:-- Kyle Williams: Now, I think that's still there. That's still in the milieu. That's still a part of the movement.
--:-- Kyle Williams: But what you're saying is more of a vocal minority within the conservative movement that's saying what we want is corporations to take on and to represent conservative cultural identities.
--:-- Kyle Williams: What I hear you saying, and I think what I've experienced in my lifetime, you know, as somebody who became a consumer in the 90s, I understand the definition of corporate responsibility as it has existed to this point from the progressive point of view.
--:-- Kyle Williams: You don't pollute the river. You don't cut down the rainforest. You make sure that you are hiring people from diverse backgrounds.
--:-- Kyle Williams: When I hear corporate responsibility, that's where my brain goes.
--:-- Kyle Williams: What is the definition of corporate responsibility for conservatives? What are we seeing?
--:-- Kyle Williams: Conservatives haven't yet quite figured that out.
--:-- Kyle Williams: In some ways, I think that they're caught between a shareholder value, just focus on profits, just focus on business kind of response, and something else that's not quite articulated yet.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And it's articulated, as far as I've been able to see in being very critical of woke capitalism, or as they call it, or ESG, or DEI.
--:-- Kyle Williams: The Texas House passed Senate Bill 17 to prevent public colleges and universities in the state from having diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or policies.
--:-- Kyle Williams: I think that's one of the rhetorical problems that the cultural conservative movement is facing right now.
--:-- Kyle Williams: What is the positive vision that they have for big business?
--:-- Kyle Williams: And one response might be that they don't want businesses to be that big.
--:-- Kyle Williams: I'm sort of speculating. But I think the conservatives would say that they're standing for something that's very important, that they're articulating something that is positive.
--:-- Kyle Williams: But the way that it's worked out within the culture war in the last few years is it's been mostly activated in a negative way towards these controversial issues that have been coming up.
--:-- Kyle Williams: I see the moment that we're in as one where people are sorting out their political, economic, and personal identities.
--:-- Kyle Williams: We live in a moment of hyperpolitics where social psychologists and political scientists can tell you that the kind of beer that you drink, the place that you shop, is actually a pretty good predictor of how you're going to vote.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And people see more and more their economic lives being an expression of their political identity.
--:-- Kyle Williams: You know, the mantra of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 70s was that the personal is political.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And I think what we're seeing now is that it's not just that the personal is political, but the economic is political.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And the economic is also personal.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And those dynamics are playing out in the left and the right.
--:-- Kyle Williams: And I think that's going to pose significant problems for executives and other big business leaders, because what it means is that there's not an easy way out of these intense conflicts, these corporate culture wars.
--:-- Host (Noel King): Kyle Williams, he's a historian and editor of the Hedgehog Review at UVA.
--:-- Host (Noel King): Today's show was produced by Victoria Chamberlain and edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Host (Noel King): It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Michael Rayfield.
--:-- Host (Noel King): Welcome to our new executive producer, Miranda Kennedy.
--:-- Host (Noel King): I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
