People seem to confuse these two things often. Those who are not shopping at Target right now or are no longer drinking Bud Light, most of them anyway, are not boycotting. Rather, they are withholding business.

Let me be clear; these are not the same thing. Boycotting is a tool of leverage, it is organized and designed to change the behavior of the entity you are boycotting. It is a form of legal blackmail in a way. Do this thing or stop doing that thing, and we will buy from you again. Boycotts are like strikes by a union; they can be called off, and the workers sent back to the line.

In general, boycotts are a tool used almost exclusively by the left. Why wouldn’t they be, the left loves to “organize”, the left loves power and the left loves bureaucracy. The left is also full of followers, after all, they are progressive and above all collectivists. So when a central authority (generally the media) tell them, “Orangeman Bad”, they all repeat “Orangeman Bad”. When the TV tells them “get your vaccination and wear a mask”, they comply and shout violently at those who do not.

We have all seen this play out heavily over the past 6 years, it is so clear now it can’t be denied. If you deny this at all, I suggest you head back to your nice pasture and graze on forbs and clovers. The left is a group of followers, the right is more like a groups of prides of cats, they follow too, they just don’t follow en masse. They are less collectivist and less organized and less bureaucratic. They don’t do boycotts. Don’t get me wrong, some special triggered little right-wingers call for them, it is just the right en masse does not follow, and they are not ordered to do it (passively aggressively) by the media.

Let’s go back to striking workers as an analogy and it should make what is happening right now more clear. In a strike, the union bosses gin up anger in the workers, they threaten the company; if the company caves, the union bosses are heroes. If the company does not cave, with no real sacrifice themselves, the union bosses call a strike. Obedient workers leave the lines and carry signs, chant, or just go home and binge Netflix. One day then the bosses on both sides reach an agreement. The workers go back to the line. The cycle continues. Keep in mind we are talking boycotts here not “cancel culture” which is where individuals are attacked vs. companies.

Now think of a company that has no union workers, no strikes of the above type are really possible. But this company really does start messing over their people. People start to quit, the company may or may not fix the problem at first. But the people who quit are not on strike (not a boycott) they just find another job. They are by and large NEVER coming back to work at the previous company. It isn’t a negotiation, it is simply withholding labor from the entity. If the company is really stupid and keeps doubling down on their stupid behavior, more people leave. In time the company may find it can’t hire people fast enough.

Employees start looking around as the best of them always leave first. The ones who are the most marketable, the smart ones, they have options. It starts to look like rats swimming off a ship at sea, the writing is on the wall, the ship is going down. Panic sets in and everyone heads for the door. The company may or may not recover but it wasn’t a strike, it wasn’t a walk out, it was a walk away.

In the current woke world, people feel their children are being attacked, it is about as low as you can go to attack a child. So when they put a transsexual influencer on a beer can, for a beer brand that screams “American Values” of the working man, well, it becomes a “walk away”. I think my feelings about this are well known, but my feelings about such things are not relevant to this article. This is simply a technical analysis. This is what is happening with brands right now like Target, Bud Light and Disney. People are walking away, they are not demanding a change in behavior. When a person attempts to harm your child, you are a fool if you let them back into your home, are you not?

Most parents love their children more than their own lives. Once this became to them an attack on their children, their grandchildren, the little kids next-door, their nieces and nephews, etc. it was no longer a subject of negotiation. Of course, the problem for these folks is almost every major brand is part of this movement at this point. We won’t get into why today, just accept that they are. If you doubt that a group of pride marchers carrying a Raytheon Banner https://www.instagram.com/p/CtZ2MKprLtU/ should end your doubts. We are talking Raytheon who sells weapons to nations like Saudi Arabia who brutally executes gay people in their own nation.

This leaves those on the right with very little choice. It is either buy nothing from any major corporation, computers, phones, cars, door knobs, food, etc. You get it right? Yes, you can “buy local” on some things or make your own on others but in the end, modern life is really great because of a global distribution system. If you audit your home right now, there are likely materials in it from more than 50 countries, and it was all brought there by corporations.

So the right has made a decision, as individuals that is also collective. They have made it both consciously and subconsciously. The conscious part is for example Bud Light. The guy that stops for a 6 pack a few times a week on the way home from some tough type of construction work or something like that, is never buying Bud again, ever. It is done, it is a conscious personal decision. The subconscious part though is he is doing this selectively not across the board. The pick-up truck he drives is likely made by a “woke company” too. The smartphone playing streaming country music in the truck is too, as is the signal coming to the phone.

He can’t stop using everything. So what the right is doing is choosing to abstain from the ones who commit the most in his face attacks on what he sees as his values. Yes, Miller sponsored a gay pride parade in Denver, (if he even knows this) but they didn’t stick it in his face. He’ll get the Miller Light today, then continue to drive his F150, use his iPhone, and pay his AT&T bill. But he is not going to Target ever, he is not buying Bud and if someone else does something he sees equal again, he will not walk out, rather walk away.

This is sadly not a winning strategy. InBev owns Bud and has 100s of brands, most of the guys like this will end up with another brand owned by InBev, their money is going to the same place, the same people, in the end, they just don’t care. They just want what most sane people want, to be left the heck alone. So the people and companies that won’t leave them alone, they avoid. They are the line worker who is in

one plant without a union that gets fed up and quits, they get a job at another factory that on the back end is owned by the same parent company. But they have better pay, better hours, a better boss, and better conditions. His paychecks end up in the bank on time, so he simply goes on with life.

These market effects of the right again are not boycotts. They are not designed to change behavior in a negotiation and no central authority calls for them. The media doesn’t encourage the right or hold them up as heroes when they stop buying from any given company. The right doesn’t in general obey central authority anyway, it is better to use reverse psychology upon the right to steer behavior, but that is a subject for another day.