Photo via Gage Skidmore/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
April 5, 2021, 11:16 am
Republicans, far-right pundits, and Trump supporters everywhere have declared Coca-Cola to be canceled after months of claiming that everything from really old racist children’s books to plastic toy potatoes had been done in by what they call “cancel culture.”
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This time, instead of declaring something was “canceled” by the left because the company independently decided to make a minor change to their product, they are calling for the active cancelation of Coke by declaring boycotts.
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Now they’re out there bragging about not drinking a soda.
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These conservatives are mad because Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey spoke out against the sweeping voter suppression bill recently passed by Republicans in the state of Georgia in response to Trump losing the presidency and both their senate candidates losing to progressive Democrats. They have also come down on Delta Airlines and Major League Baseball for the same reason.
“We want to be crystal clear and state unambiguously that we are disappointed in the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation,” said Quincey in a company announcement.
“Additionally, our focus is now on supporting federal legislation that protects voting access and addresses voter suppression across the country,” he added. “We all have a duty to protect everyone’s right to vote and we will continue to stand up for what is right in Georgia and across the U.S.”
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Companies like Coca-Cola are responding to the draconian anti-voting measures in the bill, one of which makes it a crime to provide someone who has been standing in line to vote, which Georgia voters sometimes do for hours because the state has slashed the number of voting locations to a fraction of what they once were, with water.
After Governor Brian Kemp signed the bill into the wall under a painting of a slave plantation (while a Black woman was arrested for knocking on his door), pro-voting folks overwhelmingly panned it, with Joe Biden calling the legislation “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”
Studies have been piling on evidence for years that anti-voting bills like this disproportionately affect working-class voters and voters of color, both groups that tend to vote Democrat in much higher numbers.
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Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee got so mad at Coca-Cola for being against this that he brought China into it for some reason and renamed the product “Woke-A-Cola.”
This was around the same time Huckabee declared his intentions, however futile, to “‘identify’ as Chinese.”
Even Donald Trump, known for being such a habitual drinker of Diet Coke that he had a special button installed on the resolute desk to summon a butler with one on a silver platter (literally) any time he wanted, has joined in the boycott threats.
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“Boycott baseball and all of the woke companies that are interfering with Free and Fair Elections,” he said in a statement. “Are you listening Coke, Delta, and all!”
Others have declared that they will now be drinking Pepsi, evidently forgetting the time they canceled this competing soda brand over the false claim that CEO Indra Nooyi said Trump fans could “take their business elsewhere” in 2016. Even after it was clear that the quote was a fake, they continued their “boycott” because she had dared to acknowledge that some of her employees were upset and felt unsafe over the 2016 election results.
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Either way, we’re sure that conservatives will find some form of soda to drink if they can just stop canceling everything is sight like they claim the other side does.
*First Published: April 5, 2021, 11:16 am
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