We wrote to the CEO of a company with which we intended to do business asking why the company had stopped stocking the My Pillow products.  Our question was simple: was this a business decision or a political decision?  To our surprise, the CEO himself wrote back to us explaining that it was a business decision, adding that Mike Lindell did this to himself.  The CEO wasn't being obnoxious, and I didn't take it that way.  However, what he said was illuminating for what he inadvertently revealed about woke corporations in America.

I fit into the late-middle-aged demographic, so I'm old enough to remember when companies marketed their goods and services.  They boasted that theirs was the best soup, soap, soda, or whatever else.  If they sold services, their employees were the best accountants, contractors, architects, plumbers, or whatever else their employees did.  Old-fashioned virtue-signaling, if it can be called that, was about the virtue of a company's goods and services.

Over the years, corporate advertising kept up with social trends.  By the late 1960s, soft drink companies were promising Americans that "cool" people drank their products.  Advertising graphics reflected Max Factor's psychedelic designs.  By the mid-1970s, every woman in an advertisement looked like an extra for Annie Hall or Charlie's Angels.  Men had long hair, then short hair, then mustaches, and they always dressed as if they were going to a disco or golfing.  But always, the pitch was about the product.

In the last decade, and with accelerating speed since Trump was elected, corporations are no longer interested in selling their products.  Instead, they are interested in selling their politics and will do so regardless of the damage that does to the bottom line.  Shareholders are being told that social responsibility trumps returns on investment.

That's how we've ended up with corporations making it their corporate policy to fight against a Georgia law requiring people to show ID when they vote — just as they need ID when they fly on those corporations' planes, enter those corporations' home offices, get employment with those corporations, etc.  We're inundated with corporations, as their official corporate policy, lecturing us endlessly about race, sex, Third Wave feminism, immigration, and the agenda items on the leftist checklist.

And of course, it's the corporations aggressively pushing these agenda items through advertising, tweets, in-house training (remember Coke's "try to be less white"?), overtly political displays on athletic fields, and official pronouncements from on high (as with all those CEOs speaking ex cathedra for the corporation about Georgia's election laws).

That gets me to my interaction with the CEO we queried about his company's decision to drop My Pillow from its inventory.  I'm not going to name the corporation or the CEO because he was very nice, and I don't want him to get heat from left or right.  (Also, don't assume "his" gender just because I used the grammatically correct pronoun to refer to an unidentified person of either sex.)  Here's his email:

Thank you. It is a business we do when we discontinue any supplier. *** If My Pillow stayed out of politics they may save the brand. Sales decline equals discontinued products. All the best. (Emphasis mine.)

I appreciated that the CEO of a large corporation took the time to answer our email.  As you can see, he made it clear that removing My Pillow from the shelves was a purely business decision.  His customers weren't buying My Pillow products because they disagree with Mike Lindell's politics.  I can't argue with that.  I would do the same were I in his shoes.

Where he and I part ways is that last throwaway comment that My Pillow, the corporate entity, should have stayed out of politics.  In fact, unlike all those virtue-signaling leftist companies, My Pillow never got into politics.  Mike Lindell, the CEO, did, but if you watch his commercials or visit his website (and yes, he is the face of the company), they're solely about how good his products are.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but I think My Pillow's business model is strikingly different from what we're getting from the left.  On one side, we have a company that stays in its lane, although it has a CEO who freely exercises his First Amendment rights.  On the other side, we have a wall of corporations that see their products as almost secondary to their political proselytizing.  The moment you buy that product, you're putting your imprimatur on the company's politics.

If a company is going to sell politics as its primary product, its sales should rise and fall depending on how people view those politics.  However, if a company is going to sell a product divorced from a specific individual's political views, its sales should rise and fall depending on the product's merits.  And mind you, we're not talking neo-Nazi views.  We're talking "half of America" views.

I'm going to continue shopping at the CEO's company because he made an honest business decision (and because I like what his company sells).  But I'm going to disagree with him about the blurred lines between individual and corporate politics in 21st-century America.  And I'm going to continue boycotting all those leftist companies that have substituted politics for products.

Image: My Pillow advertisement.  YouTube screen grab.

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