Grounds For Separation: Starbucks Knuckles Under In Blaming The Help
It may come as a surprise to you, but the greatest threat to North American civilization lies, not with Russians or Iranians, but with the baristas of Starbucks. As the father of a former barista, I was indeed shocked to learn that a culture of evil existed amidst the ventes and espresso shots of the ever-so-progressive caffeine shops of Starbucks.
But Tuesday, the owners of the Starbucks coffee chain, burdened by evidence of this subversion of “unconscious bias” in their employees, shut down all 8000 or so shops in America and Canada for the afternoon in order to re-arrange the attitudes of its charges regarding race, privilege and bathroom etiquette. Here’s what they heard .
Puts the grovel back in macchiato, no?
The cause of this purging is an incident of such proportion that Bernie Sanders must be spinning in his grave. He’s not dead? Well, he seems kinda’ dead. In any event, this Pol Pot moment was caused by an incident in Philadelphia where the manager of a Starbucks summoned police to evict a few people he thought were loitering in his store to use the bathroom.
Like many commercial establishments, Starbucks makes the not-unreasonable request that if you want to use their bathroom you need to be a client. When these visitors insisted on using the loo— and then sitting in the seats without a purchase— the manager called the cops. A bit of an overreach, but who knows? The manager might have felt obliged to enforce company policy.
No big whoop. Did I mention that the interlopers were black? Ah. Big whoop. Faster than you could say Grande Americano with soy milk, the agents of outrage were at the gates of Starbucks. Which is funny if you think of it. Starbucks is so green, so left, so earnest that it farts the Internationale. Yet here it was, the demon seed of Trump intolerance.
Instead of acknowledging a local problem that would be addressed, Starbucks did what it thinks is a rational thing. They saw a teaching moment for all the frustrated actors and poets who work in their stores. Actually, they saw a chance to blame employees, not their own pretentious selves. And so we had the Guilt-In where baristas were given the correct protocols on how to feel guilty about their privilege and micro-aggressions and mansplainin’.
Starbucks also announced that they will make their washrooms free to anyone, and you can settle into their cushions without buying a drop of coffee. Good luck with that.
Well, that’s an exception, I hear you say. Nay, nay. These days Corporate America and Canada can’t abase themselves enough to please the culture warriors who’ve graduated from mugging college presidents to putting the boots into the ribs of business. (Apropos of nothing: what's with progressives and bathroom access? Bad potty experience as children?)
Even as the coffee grounds were settling at Starbucks, young David Hogg— who’s graduated from Parkland-High-School-sorta’-victim to Trotsky in training— was writhing on the floor of a Publix grocery store in Florida, wailing like a banshee about the store’s political contributions to the NRA.
Instead of asking for clean-up on aisle three, Publix instead acquiesced to the tantrum in the cereals section. They hastily announced they’d discontinue political contributions in the future. Chalk up another scalp —is that cultural appropriation?— for the marriage of kabuki theatre with bare-knuckles intimidation.
Here in the land of maple syrup and moose, where Justin Trudeau is the highly ethical prime minister of “people-kind”, the Liberal Party line continues to push for a world without gender specific terms. If you feel inclined to use terms such as father or mother in your communications with the government you will be deemed an untouchable. Ditto Mr. or Mrs.
Ironically it was this sort of pronoun bun fight that catapulted professor Jordan B. Peterson to worldwide attention. Peterson rejected the Starbucks Capitulation Strategy when ordered to communicate with impressionable undergrads in a baffling range of terms that sound like they were unearthed from low German of the Visigoth era.
If you think this education-camp bullying is an isolated incident take a trip to Britain where police have incarcerated a “controversial” nationalist figure named Tommy Robinson. His crime? Filming the suspects outside a court in a scheme where young women were groomed as sex slaves for gangs in Britain. Well, how’s that a crime? The men were Muslim. And Robinson had been told to cease and desist.
So Robinson was arrested, charged and sentenced within five hours. with the proviso that the news of his incarceration not be reported by anyone in Britain. Big footing the media. (The blanket ban has since been lifted but Robinson is still in jail.) Robinson and his English Defence League are as subtle as a hammer, but in the land of Magna Carta, isn’t free speech cherished?
Not if you brush up against the Narrative.
In case anyone is of the impression that the progressives will not do the same to you when you get in the way of their plans, please consider that we’ve been down this road before. It didn’t end well. The enforcers of Truth are not avuncular figures like Sanders. They are like Stalin and Castro and Mao. If you crash their party they will crush you.
You can oppose them now or see them later. Having been their friend in the past will do you no good. You’ve been warned. Now enjoy your java fix.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy.is the host of the podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin on his website is Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand will be available this fall.