President Barack Obama comments on Katy Perry’s shoes while greeting the singer and her grandmother, Ann Hudson, at Doolittle Park in Las Vegas, Nev., Oct. 24, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Is there a connection between shrinking profits and being vocally progressive? Damian Reilly makes the case in Spectator USA about the “gap between what people think and what they believe they are meant to think,” as Douglas Murray puts it. A silent protest against political correctness seems to be occurring within “the privacy of places.” That is, those places where consumers make choices.
Get Woke, Go Broke
- Eminem: Eminem, for instance, was not so long ago one of America’s biggest stars, but since Trump’s election he’s fetishized his objection to the president to the point that it has come, bizarrely, to define him. Result: flop city. His Revival album, put out a year ago, shifted just 270,000 copies on release, a far cry from the 1.76 million sold on release by the Marshall Mathers LP in 2000, or the 800,000 of his previous album, Marshall Mathers LP2, released in 2013.
- Katy Perry & HRC: Katy Perry, who threw her lot in with Hillary Clinton during the presidential election campaign and has since yielded to no one when it comes to being right on, saw her Witnessalbum fail badly (180,000 copies on release). ‘The public didn’t react the way I expected… which broke my heart,’ she has since complained.
- CNN: From the moment Trump said he would run for president, the news channel seemed to lose its mind, eschewing any claim to journalistic impartiality to become the kind of splenetic 24/7 anti-Trump propaganda machine we recognize today. Predictably, ratings have tanked. According to Adweek, in September CNN ratings were down 41 percent compared to the same time a year ago – meaning the channel had slipped behind cartoon broadcaster Nickelodeon in terms of its ability to pull in viewers.
- Hollywood: The public, it seems, has grown heartily sick of enriching cosseted actors by paying to watch them in films that seem more about preaching than plot, or of swallowing their uniformly liberal claptrap diatribes, often about inequality, broadcast direct from awards ceremonies held in the very epicenter of luxury and privilege.
- Nike: Making the face of its latest advertising campaign the maverick quarterback Colin Kaepernick – scourge of the right for his refusal to stand during the American national anthem – looked a big gamble when it was unveiled on September 4. Three weeks later that gamble seemed vindicated when Nike’s share price hit an all time high of $85.55. But today the American sports apparel manufacturer’s stock is down some 16 percent from that peak, trading about ten dollars lower that it was pre-Kaepernick.
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