Readers who regularly partake of our abundant offerings at weeklystandard.com will have to forgive us for shamelessly ripping off what follows from our colleague Jonathan V. Last’s online update last week of the latest p.c. doings at the Lego Group, which we thought was too piquant not to share with magazine readers.
Lego, in case you haven’t heard, has decided to pull all its advertising in London’s Daily Mail. That paper has been targeted by an activist group called Stop Funding Hate, whose latest campaign is to shame companies into not advertising in three British papers: the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Express.
And what, you might ask, is the “hate” being spread by the three targeted newspapers? All three are skeptical of the left’s open-borders immigration policy. That’s it. That’s the “hate.”
Not that we should be surprised that the Lego Group is willing to be mau-maued. They’ve been invested in liberal virtue signaling for a long time. In 2014, the company discontinued selling Lego sets with the Shell Oil logo in them, over opposition to Arctic drilling. This year they’re marketing a mini-fig of a stay-at-home hipster dad with a high-powered corporate wife. Like good Scandinavians, the Lego folks want you to know they have all the right opinions.
Not that it’s ever enough. In 2013 they were attacked by activist groups for a Star Wars model of Jabba the Hutt’s palace that was deemed insensitive to Muslims. In 2014 they introduced a figure in a wheelchair—and were criticized because the figure in the wheelchair was an older man and not a young child, thereby reinforcing ageist stereotypes and denying disabled children a role model. The same year the company debuted a set featuring women as super-smart scientists. Professional feminists were not placated. Here’s one in the Guardian attacking the Lego Lady Scientist set:
You cannot make this up. In the end, what the Lego-Daily Mail story tells us is that the left has learned a great lesson from the gay marriage movement. Same-sex marriage activists won the day by convincing people that opposition to a drastic, undemocratic change in public policy was simple “hate.” The transgender project took this line and ran with it; opposing the redefinition of gender so that men can use women’s locker rooms and boys can compete on girls’ sports teams has been branded as “hate,” too. We cannot be far from the moment when favoring an increase in interest rates by the Federal Reserve will also be deemed “hate,” if the professional left opposes it.
At the end of the day, groups such as Stop Funding Hate aren’t actually trying to use market forces to create social change. They’re using intimidation to bully businesses in the hopes that the public will get the message, too. By branding policy disagreement as hatred, they’re destroying the civility that is the lubricant of all healthy civil societies. And however well meaning its gesture, the Lego Group contributes to this breakdown of civility by going along. ¨
