Nike Boycott: A Miss or a Home Run?

Benji Lee
Benji Lee
Sep 5, 2018 · 6 min read

It seems that every other month we see conservatives and alt righters destroying their brand name products in a fit of righteous rage against the machine. We mock them, we quote tweet them and run up their numbers, but what if I told you we are doing exactly what they want us to do?

Some years ago, as early as 2011, a list called “Tactics for Effective Conservative Blogging” came out online. There is some level of confusion surrounding this list in regards to the creator. It is claimed it was created by the infamous Karl Rove, but to this day remains unproven, according to Snopes. While I am not going to list out the entirety of the list, as it is a decently long one, the basic essentials of the list are broken down into one statement: you don’t have to be right, you just have to make them look wrong while ensuring they will never want to provide this labor again.

Over the years, since I first started on social media in 2013, I’ve watched these tactics, which are the bread and butter today of alt right trolls get recycled in various different ways. Think of it as the soup stock of the alt right’s garbage stew. Very often, I see conservatives just be painfully and utterly wrong or even ridiculous and be treated to massive audiences as a result. I started thinking to myself about whether or not they are aware of how bad they look. And then I came to a realization.

At the end of the day, “Tactics for Effective Conservative Blogging” was about not speaking to the person they’re arguing with, but putting on a show for whoever may be scrolling through. Many alt right tactics are not about turning the person you are arguing with to your side, but rather keeping the argument so confusing and roundabout and focusing intently on the tiniest mistakes so that the average person simply scrolling through would think “that makes sense” and boom. There is another recruit.

It’s about big, bold statements that don’t have to make sense to someone critically analyzing the situation, but rather make sense to the casual scroller.

Now we get to the boycotts. Or, what the conservatives like to call boycotts, where they give the person they are boycotting their money. We saw it when they took baseball bats to their Keurigs, ordered drinks at Starbucks with Trump’s name on them, and now we’re seeing it when they’re burning perfectly good shoes and mutilating perfectly good socks to make a statement. This is what I am starting to call “Tactics for 2018 Conservative Blogging”.

2011 was a very different time for America and the world. Not even on a political scale. I’m talking strictly social media. In 2018, you can’t escape from a headline every month or so about a celebrity Twitter feud. In fact, you can’t really go more than 24 hours without a headline debunking something Donald Trump tweeted. Twitter is big, and it’s where a lot of the conversation takes place. There’s a lot of interconnecting things going on, a lot of talking happening, a lot of simply things just centered around the app.

There’s a culture of dragging on Twitter. If someone tweets something entirely nonsensical, nine times out of ten there is a quote tweet dragging them blowing up to 30k plus retweets within twenty four hours. I can’t say I haven’t dragged someone myself like this, although I have never reached more than 100 retweets on a drag. It can be so very satisfying to do it, I will admit. Lately, there’s been conversation going around about how we shouldn’t do that, and I am going to break down that discussion and add what little I have to it.

In a political and social climate with so much change and so much exposure, with such an open white supremacist in office, alt right trolls don’t need to really recruit anymore. Racists, homophobes, transphobes, misogynists, xenophobes … They’re all over this country. This planet, really. There aren’t a lot of people who aren’t radicalized in some way or another, whether they know it or not. We’re in a world where people are picking sides, and there aren’t many people who are still sitting on the fence. Everyone has an opinion, and in this climate no one has the luxury, in their mind, of not acting on that opinion. This is where I break down why these nonsensical tweets continue to pop up.

By and large, they are very much aware that these tweets make zero sense. They know it does absolutely nothing to give money to a company and then destroy your own private property. They even know it would better suit their means to give those shoes and socks away to homeless shelters so they can provide for the homeless vets they love to use as talking points. But here’s the thing: being charitable doesn’t make as much of a statement as performing a violent show of force to thousands, millions of viewers. They don’t care about logic and sense. They care about making a statement and reminding us: they don’t have to be right. They don’t want to be right, but they can still be powerful.

If you scroll through many of these viral tweets, you see all sorts of replies agreeing with them. You see conversations sparking up and trolls finding people to harass, using the very tactics I started with at the beginning of the thread. These viral posts that make zero sense are only catalysts for more conversation. A quote tweet that gets thousands of retweets only adds to the conversation and expands their influence. People that agree with it follow them, and now they have more people to network with, more followers to whip up into a frenzy, more people to recruit for alt right protests. It’s about quantity over quality.

And then comes the domino effect. Activists reply, regular people reply, trolls attack, and one more person trying to do what’s right, or just trying to mock someone gets worn down over the course of a day. They may not quit that day. Or the next day. Or the day after that. But it’s another wave on a cliff.

I’m not saying every tweet that gets quoted has that design in mind. Some people just may lack utter sense and self awareness. But in the end it produces the same result. Having a talking point that allows trolls to march on. I don’t know if there’s 4chan discussions about this. I don’t know if I just gave them more ideas.

I’m not saying don’t quote tweet and drag people, either. But I am saying to be aware that when you get thousands of retweets, it’s not just you that’s getting that exposure. And if you’re one of the smaller accounts like me: I’m not saying don’t argue, either. I’m saying you should definitely do some research into alt right tactics if you do and don’t let bad faith arguments burn you out. Block and move on. If their argument radicalizes someone else, that isn’t your fault. That’s what it’s designed to do. Other people’s choices are not your responsibility. If you get good enough at it, maybe you can learn to point out their tactics in the midst of the argument before you hit that nifty block button and go about your day.

Go ahead and laugh at the absurdity when you can, and ignore it when you can’t. Just be aware and don’t let them win. They’re playing the long game. We need to, too.

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