If this column reads a little discombobulated, it’s not you. It’s me.
I like to think of myself as man with his share of common sense. I’m old enough to know better, and I’ve been around the block a few times. My eyes are not ones over which the wool can usually be easily pulled.
And yet the world is making less and less sense. Let me give you a few examples.
Two weeks ago, 92-year-old Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch and 66-year-old Ann Lesley Smith got engaged, but this week they canceled the engagement.
If those crazy kids can’t make it, what chance do the rest of us have?
Chicago, having delivered itself from the scourge of Lightfoot, picked perhaps the only other far-left loon in Christendom who could be as bad as she was. (At least his name – Brandon – will be easy to remember, during the chaos to come.)
On a different topic, I’ve always thought that I’ve understood how marketing works. If you’ve got something to promote, you identify your target audience, learn everything you can about them, and create ads that appeal to their interests and beliefs.
For example, if you’re looking to draw eyeballs to the View, your target audience is going to be unemployable women with low-to-middling IQs and physical appearance, who will feel better about themselves as they watch women who look and sound even worse than they do.
If you’re pushing the Joy Reid show – may God have mercy on your soul – you’re looking for an audience of black folks and white liberals who share a deep-seated hatred of white folks, and America. And logic.
If you’re promoting the Stephen Colbert show, your target audience is… the family and both friends of Stephen Colbert.
That’s all logical, and it’s how the world used to work. But not any more.
In 2019, Gillette came out with a new ad campaign. Common sense would say that a razor maker – which sells a large majority of its products to men – would try to appeal to, you know…men.
Instead, Gillette found an ad director and agency with a reputation for hostile, feminist campaigns, and they produced a 90-second male-bashing meditation on “toxic masculinity.” It was a dog’s breakfast of every negative stereotype of males – bullies, homophobes, sexual harassers, mansplainers – and also included the shrill Ana Kasparian from Young Turks discussing sexual assault, followed by a split screen of a bunch of leftist MSM empty heads yowling on the topic.
It ended by transforming the previously well-known previous Gillette slogan (“The best a man can get”) into a scolding, sarcastic, “Is this the best a man can get?”
The ad was slickly made, but the message was clear to every male who watched it: “You’re all filthy, disgusting pigs, and you should be ashamed of yourselves. Now buy our razors, jerks!”
Guess how that worked?
The giant parent corporation Proctor and Gamble owns Gillette, and P&G did very well that year; all of their brands went up in value.
Except Gillette. Which reportedly lost $8 billion dollars. With a capital “B.”
So okay, that was colossally stupid, and everyone on Madison Avenue learned their lesson, and no one ever made such an idiotic, crap-on-your-customers ad again. The end.
HA! I kid.
Because many other morons kept making the same blindingly obvious mistake.
The NFL is watched by males, and the women with the good taste to love those men, and football. They are not racists, as you could infer from the fact that they watch a game played mostly by black Americans, and they hero-worship many of those black Americans.
(As a case in point, when my wife and I were ready to have kids, I suggested that if we had a son, his name should be either “Antonin Scalia Simpson,” or “Walter Payton Simpson.” My wife pointed out that we are not Italian, and little Antonin’s initials would spell “ass.” So Walter Payton it was. Until I had two daughters. And when I suggested “Walterina,” my wife gave me a single look that caused part of my body that is normally on the outside to migrate to the inside.)
(Perhaps I’ve said too much.)
Anyway, the brain trust at the NFL knew that their target audience was mostly regular guys. (Or as the MSM calls them, “predatory foot-soldiers of toxic masculinity and the patriarchy).”
So naturally, they started dressing the players partly in pink as part of an interminably long campaign to bring awareness to… wait for it… breast cancer! (You know, the same way the LPGA has made all their lady golfers wear black arm bands and talk endlessly about testicular cancer.)
Then they promoted a number of black players’ ill-informed protests against racism (Michael Brown never said, “Hands up don’t shoot!” before he got shot, because he was too busy assaulting a cop and trying to take his gun.), and cops, and America, and the national anthem.
All of this was led by Colin Kapernick, a quarterback so skilled that he was benched in favor of the immortal Blaine Gabbert. (For those of you who haven’t been to the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton, you’ve got to see the scale model of a football version of Mount Rushmore. From left to right, the images carved there are as follows: Marino, Montana, Brady and Gabbert.)
Luckily for the NFL, the male devotion to football is so strong that they could only dent the ratings, rather than kill them.
Similarly, hockey is a game so filled with alpha males that many fans buy a ticket to a fight, and are pleasantly surprised when a hockey game breaks out. So naturally, the geniuses at the NHL started having “Pride Nights” and making players wear warm-up jerseys with the gay rainbow, and reacted with shock when many players and teams resisted bringing sexual politics into hockey.
(I don’t follow hockey, but I see a potential compromise: if woke totalitarians won’t make hockey players wear gay pride junk, hockey fans won’t make gay porn stars and drag queens wear hockey jerseys and blacked-out teeth while they work.)
Speaking of drag queens, the Country Music Awards just featured a singer surrounded by a bunch of unattractive men in Liz Taylor’s old wardrobe. This wasn’t the Tony awards, or the Emmys, or the Grammys. It was the Country FREAKING Music Awards! The world has gone mad!
Some of you might have guessed what I’ve been leading up to: Bud Light just signed a deal to have Dylan Mulvaney become their spokesman.
If you don’t know who Mulvaney is, you’ve been spending your time more wisely than I have. He was a little-known actor and singer in several Broadway shows, and he once went on a game show, where he put on the most over-the-top, drama queen, super effeminate gay routine ever.
But a little over a year ago, Mulvaney found a way to transform himself from an unknown flamingly gay guy to a celebrity spokes-they by jumping on the transgender bandwagon. (Though that may be a circus wagon that just identifies as a bandwagon?)
He began a daily series of TikTok videos called “Days of Girlhood,” in which he documented each day that he’s been pretending to be a girl.
I’m not sure which is the most nauseating thing about his new career, though there are several serious contenders:
The President of the United States (RIP) gave this weirdo a public platform by meeting with him to discuss women’s issues.
It would be insane enough if Mulvaney was just pretending to be a woman, but he’s not; he’s pretending to be a flighty airheaded girl in her early teens. But the guy is 26!
(Try calling the women in their mid-20s at your work place a bunch of “girls,” and see if you escape with your groin un-kicked.)
I think the worst part is that the guy is doing a “woman-face” routine that is every bit as insulting to real women as the vaudeville black-face routines were to black people. He offensively mimics the worst stereotypes about women.
In his first video, “Day 1 of being a girl,” he said, “I’ve already cried three times, I wrote a scathing email that I did not send, I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and then, when someone asked me how I was, I said, ‘I’m fine,’ when I wasn’t fine. How’d I do, ladies?”
Well, you defined “femaleness” as being unstable and hysterical, unable to manage money, and emotionally stunted. So… great job, fella!
What can Anheuser-Busch be thinking? How many beer drinkers out there have been dying to drink Bud Light, if only it were pushed by a grown man with a fetish for acting like a teen girl?
And what has the world come to when the most sane response to an offensive commercial comes from Kid Rock, who blasted a case of Bud Light with an automatic weapon and said, “F**k Bud Light?”
(And just like that, I’m a big rap music fan.)
But rather than end on that down note, I’ll close with the undisputed Greatest Commercial Ever Made, which I guarantee you will love.
The story starts last March, when yet another razor company repeated the same mistake that Gillette made. After advertising on the Daily Wire’s great conservative podcast network for several years, Harry’s Razors dropped their sponsorship after received a single complaint from a mope who got offended when one DW host pointed out that men and women are different.
But dropping their sponsorship wasn’t enough for the hateful dopes at Harry’s – they had to issue a virtue signaling smear at DW. They “condemned” DW’s “hate speech,” and promised to “prevent any values misalignment” in the future.
So DW’s co-CEO and “god-king” Jeremy Boreing did what any fightin’ Appalachian-American like myself would do: he launched a feud!
Within several days, he had started a razor-selling business called Jeremy’s Razors. He cut the aforementioned greatest ever ad, started the website “ihateharrys.com,” and within 3 days in business, he’d sold 25,000 razor subscriptions, and had more Twitter followers (35K) than Harry’s had amassed in 10 years (32.5K).
He also put up a giant series of ads directly across from Harry’s company headquarters.
Seriously, you’ve got to watch the Jeremy’s Razors ad. It’s got everything that makes an ad great: flamethrowers, a reference to the guys who shot Bin Laden, great tongue-in-cheek humor, and Jeremy on a huge throne, wearing a crown and a fur cape, flanked by two models on one side and a bald eagle on the other.
And most importantly, a cigar-store Indian version of Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
So boycott Budweiser, watch that ad at least twice, think of me, and you’re welcome.
Now I’ve got to post this column, and then begin preparing myself for our church’s Tenebrae service, which I’ve written about in previous posts.
“Tenebrae” is Latin for “darkness.” The service takes place on Good Friday, and features a somber reading of scripture about the crucifixion, while a series of candles are extinguished along the way. It ends with a darkened church and a loud sound – “strepitus” – symbolizing the stone being rolled in place to seal Christ’s tomb.
Tonight’s service, coming halfway through the Biden administration and amidst our nation’s incipient unraveling, sadly fits my mood. “Democracy dies in Tenebrae,” and all that.
But tonight, I’m going to soak in some other, better words: “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.”
“Dr.” Jill Biden/Dylan “Woman-Face” Mulvaney, 2024!
Martin Simpson 