Okay, the McDonald’s anti-Trump tweet—”You are actually a disgusting excuse of a President and we would love to have @BarackObama back, also you have tiny hands”—seems to have been a hack job. McDonald’s, upon taking the insult down from Twitter after 20 minutes and more than 1,000 likes and retweets, tweeted the following: “Based on our investigation, we have determined that our Twitter account was hacked by an external source.”
But what was interesting was that it was a hack job that was almost plausible as an official corporate stance toward the 45th president. Gizmodo‘s William Turton exulted: “For one glorious tweet McDonald’s was woke.”
That’s because America’s mega-corporations, when obliged to take political positions these days, nearly always side with . . . the agitated and agitating left. Let’s take a few recent examples:
–Cereal giant Kellogg. The cornflake satrapy pulled its ads from the pro-Trump news website Breitbart just weeks after Trump’s election in November 2016, declaring that Breitbart wasn’t “aligned with our values as a company.” CNN reported:
–Desperately fleeing Ivanka. Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Shoes.com, Belk, Jet, Shopstyle, and Gilt dropped Trump’s elder daughter’s fashion and jewelry line after anti-Trump activist Shannon Coulter organized #GrabYourWallet, a call to boycott retail outlets carrying Ivanka merch. Nordstrom dutifully issued an unctuous diversity-centric press release that could have been written by the Southern Poverty Law Center:
–Starbucks standoff. Right after Trump issued his first executive order on January 27 limiting non-citizen entry from seven terrorism-afflicted Muslim-majority countries, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz issued a fiery letter vowing to hire 10,000 refugees from 75 countries over the next five years. He wrote:
Schultz also pledged his company’s continued support for the Obama administration’s deportation delays for minors entering America illegally—and also for Obamacare, which most Republicans would like to get rid of.
–Facebook face-off. The social medium’s multibillionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg was among the first to slam Trump’s immigration order. He wrote in a tweet:
Lest you think that America’s corporate giants are merely reacting negatively to the flamboyant Trump, consider the following: When the Indiana legislature in 2015 passed a religious-freedom statute modeled after the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and protecting the right of, say, Indiana caterers not to have to service same-sex wedding receptions, the CEOs of nine major corporations, including Eli Lilly, Anthem, and Dow AgroSciences, demanded a watering-down of the law. In 2012 Rush Limbaugh disparaged free-contraception activist Sandra Fluke on his radio talk show. Succumbing to pressure from feminists, the online florist ProFlowers promptly pulled its advertising from Limbaugh, stating that his comments “do not reflect our values as a company.”
It’s supposed to be a commonplace that corporate America skews conservative. The Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling, in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, that corporations, like individuals, have a First Amendment right to spend politically as a form of free speech has been a rallying cry of protest for the anti-business left ever since. Those leftists ought to think twice. Corporate America, its sensors ever-alert to the merest whiff of threatened boycott or negative image in the liberal media, is their friend. It’s not surprising that McDonald’s, even briefly via a hack, got counted among the companies whose “values” invariably trend progressive.
