For all the conservative frustration over woke corporatism’s embrace of virtue signaling, it’s worth remembering that the real cost of companies posing black squares in honor of George Floyd and signs reading, “HATE HAS NO HOME HERE,” isn’t mere political correctness. Instead, we pay in literal bloodshed, as expertly evidenced in the microcosm of Nike’s prime puppet, Colin Kaepernick.
After decades of criticism for the use of sweatshops and occasionally child labor, Nike leveraged neoliberalism’s greatest weapon against change, the supposed moral facade known as virtue signaling. The sports brand, now the highest valued on the planet, signed Kaepernick, the ex-NFL player famous for kneeling for the national anthem and celebrating dictators like Che Guevera and convicted cop killers like Mumia Abu-Jamal, as their latest face with the slogan, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
It’s a pithy tagline, and one that perfectly highlights why Nike’s gambit is both so brilliant and evil. By signing Kaepernick and earning the favor of liberal elites, Nike had to sacrifice nothing, and the only thing that’s changed about its insistence in using sweatshops is that in Xinjiang, they’re graduated to slave labor, and that from Nike’s former woke critics, there’s suddenly silence.
And now, Nike, which is disproportionately favored by liberals over conservatives, according to consumer research, has joined a number of other nominally woke companies to lobby Congress to roll back crucial aspects of the proposed Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
“In the first three quarters of 2020, Nike spent $920,000 on in-house lobbying of Congress and other federal agencies,” the New York Times reports. “Disclosures do not break down expenditures by topic, but show Nike lobbied on matters including physical education grants, taxes and climate change, as well as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Nike also paid outside firms like Cornerstone Government Affairs, Ogilvy, Capitol Counsel, GrayRobinson, American Continental Group, DiNino Associates and Empire Consulting Group more than $400,000 this year to lobby on issues including the act.”
The few conservatives who did choose to boycott Nike over their Kaepernick deal were wrong for the same reason liberals boycotting Chick-fil-A over the founder’s personal religious views were. But consumers boycotting Nike and Congress legislating away their literal contribution to the Chinese Communist Party’s ethnic cleansing of the Uighurs are obviously corrUighurect, and the Kaepernick deal has provided Nike with enough of a woke facade that it actively makes both the effect of boycotts and passing meaningful legislation all the harder.
Nike earned left-wing plaudits for its campaign advertising its new athletic hijab. Will the same outlets that deemed Nike woke warriors now rightly call out their Islamophobia in practice. Or does a piece of fabric in a glossy pictorial matter more than the millions of Uighurs being raped, tortured, and killed by the CCP in concentration camps? And that is the true perversion of virtue signaling, giving corporations and public entities the sheer veneer of virtue to conceal their actual vices. It costs nothing to post and profit but literal bloodshed in Xinjiang.
If you think I’m wrong, let’s see what Kaepernick has to say about it and whether he’ll decide the lives of millions of Muslims are worth more than the millions of dollars he gets to pocket from the execrable Nike.
