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One criticism I've seen of right-wing boycotts are that they don't actually know how to do them. It's argued that the people in question just destroy those things publicly and then need to go buy new ones, meaning it doesn't actually cause any financial harm. Would you say that this is an accurate criticism? It seems like in this case, the people in question understood that only financial incentives would work.
I think that's a more general critique of right-wing protest efforts.
It helps that beer is a high volume consumer good with high replaceability. If 20% of Keurig owners swear of Keurig, Keurig might not feel much sting for years, since you don't replace them very often. If 20% of Bud drinkers swear off Bud, you're going to notice immediately.
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I've seen this thrown around more as low-effort jabs on Twitter than a serious argument, and in multiple directions, e.g. pointing out people burning Harry Potter books or replacing the covers with Rowling's name removed, to protest Rowling's anti-trans-activist stance. The low-effort jabs tend to be responses to similarly low-effort posts where someone shows a video of themselves shooting the product in their backyard or whatever, which I don't think were meant as serious demonstrations of boycott, but rather as virtue signalling.
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My criticism has been moreso that, especially in the case of media, there is no Red-Tribe workforce that can produce a top-tier product. You just can't make a Marvel blockbuster without Blue Tribe workers. Ditto Tech, Finance, etc. Corporations will always pick satisfying their workforce over satisfying a portion of their customer base, without Blue Tribe creatives Disney is nothing, without hard Red Tribe customers Disney might lose 20% of sales.
I'm not aware of what boycotts you are discussing where Red Tribers destroyed items publicly that then needed to be rebought. Can you give me an example?
I know I’ve seen examples of shooting/burning merchandise from the Kaepernick days. Presumably some of those were followed by getting different 49ers jerseys for the next season, and per the usual culture war rules of engagement, those were the ones getting blasted on Twitter.
I would be skeptical that it was ever a general trend.
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HBomberGuy has a video in which he documents a case where people who watch Sean Hannity demonstrated their anger with Keurig's decision to back out of showing ads during his show. This was in response to Hannity supposedly defending Roy Moore. He shows videos that were posted of people destroying their coffee machines.
Or is this a case where there was no intention to ever boycott, just a few people getting angry?
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That's true. Buit on the other hand, there are works that are more woke and less woke, and it is possible for reds to exert pressure in the direction of less wokeness even if it's impossible to find works that have absolutely no woke content at all. (Edit: Except in anime, actually.)
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