Credit Cards

Recently we cancelled two of our credit cards.  One with First National of Omaha was tied to Best Western hotels and motels and offered points on stays at members of that chain.  It was not the card associated with the NRA.  However when First National decided to stop issuing the cards tied to the NRA, we decided to stop doing business with them.  The other was a card from Bank of America that we had had for thirty years.  We decided to cancel it when Bank of America announced it would deny credit to manufacturers of civilian firearms that leftist politicians and their allies in the media disapproved of.

I generally do not like boycotting or favoring a business because of its owners’ or executives’ political, philosophical, or religious opinions.  I prefer to make decisions on the basis of the quality and value of the goods or services offered.  However I believe these were cases where it was appropriate to make an exception.   

The behavior of the leftists in claiming all gun owners were complicit in the actions of a murderous madman and demanding that the rights of innocent people be abrogated because of the actions of that madman was not merely wrong but disgustingly and dangerously so. The attacks on the NRA and its members were despicable. The stampede by those in the traditional media was no less repellent for being completely predictable.

By their actions First National of Omaha and Bank of America joined in the attacks and ran with the stampede. I do not know if they did so cravenly under pressure (or what they thought was pressure) or cynically to try to gain favor somewhere.  It seems very unlikely the decisions were matters of principle, since the fact that criminals sometimes use guns to kill people was well known before the shooting in Florida and should not have been news to them.   

The leftists seem to want a (so far mainly metaphorical) knife fight. They are quite willing to put pressure on businesses to get things want, and they often succeed. We need to make it clear to the those  running businesses that there is a cost to caving in to the leftists and  insulting and attacking the rest of us.  It’s not a nice thing to have to do, but this is not a nice situation. 

Intimidation

While looking at a news site this morning,  I noticed that a movie star is being castigated on social media as an “ableist” for her kind tweet wishing Stephen Hawking to rest in peace and saying he is now free of physical constraints.  This  is unimportant in itself.  Anyone taking offense from her comment or not recognizing that being crippled is indeed constraining likely suffers from another sort of disability – being a fool. The movie star will either properly  ignore or laugh off the criticism or cave in and tweet some sort of craven apology. However it and the fact that it made national news are a fine illustration of something that is worth noticing.  Lacking the political power they had when Obama was in office, leftists are working, often successfully,  at getting their way and enforcing their orthodoxy  through intimidation.

Intimidation can be a powerful tool that can be used to gain obedience from people over whom the intimidators have no actual power.  It works well on people who are unsure of themselves or guilt ridden and works especially well on moral cowards. On a good deal of evidence this last group apparently  includes a large percentage of executives in big corporations.

A  recent example is the rush by companies to end relationships with the NRA after a deranged criminal shot several students at a school in Florida.  The NRA stands for exactly the same principles and policies after the shooting as it had for years before it. The fact that criminals sometimes use guns to shoot several people at once was well known.  The millions of  members of the NRA are as desirable a target for marketing as they were earlier.  Yet the executives of many companies  joined the stampede, not because of anything of substance but seemingly only because they were scared – scared by a log rolling blitz in the traditional media and a few tweets and emails, many probably fake. This behavior is not unusual.

There are a couple of things people who care about the country can do.  They can speak their minds fearlessly,  refuse to accept undeserved guilt, and either ignore would  be enforcers of the canons of political correctness or tell them to go to hell, depending on situation.  They can also take advantage of the cowardice of  executives by putting the same sort of pressure on them through social media and other means that the leftists are doing. (I cancelled a credit card with First National of Omaha over their behavior on the NRA and told them why in writing.) That does not come naturally to those who are used to minding their own business and letting others mind theirs, but the leftists picked this fight and its rules.