Culture is King, and Values Create Culture

By Robin Itzler 

Editor's Note: This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors. Any cartoons appearing will have been added by me. If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free. RK 

If there was ever an issue where WE THE PEOPLE had control over the narrative, it would be men participating in girl’s and women’s sports.

Females must refuse to participate in competitions that include men. Period. (As in what FEMALES get once a month and trans women don’t.) Aren’t you tired of seeing these headlines:

1. Trans Runner Sparks Outrage as She Zips Past Female Athletes and Leaves Them in the Dust at High School Competition – New York Post; April 15, 2024
2. Transgender Sportswomen ‘At a Disadvantage’ Study Claims – The Telegraph; April 11, 2024
3. Female Athlete Injured by Transgender Player Slams Dem lawmakers Who Dismissed Dangers – Fox News; March 22, 2024 Trans Athlete Injures Multiple Girls, Forcing Team to Forfeit. Wither Thou, Feminism? – Heritage Foundation; March 5, 2024
4. Females Injured by Trans Athletes Reminder Why Title IX Exists – Daily Signal; February 22, 2024

Progressives can’t even write about the topic without incorporating their mentally ill bias. Read this opening paragraph from “New Study Bolsters Idea of Athletic Differences Between Men and Trans Women” by Jeré Longman in the New York Times:

A new study financed by the International Olympic Committee found that transgender female athletes showed greater handgrip strength — an indicator of overall muscle strength — but lower jumping ability, lung function and relative cardiovascular fitness compared with women whose gender was assigned female at birth.

“Assigned female at birth?” What claptrap is that? A person is born female or male. They aren’t assigned anything, but this is the Marxist Democrat view of things and will get much worse unless we win – and win big – in 2024.

Females of all ages in all sports should REFUSE TO COMPETE until organizers create a separate trans category. Then all the men who think they are women can swim, surf, bike, run and whatever else they want to do competing among themselves.  "We the People" can do something about this insanity!

Target Playing Conservatives For Fools!

In 2023, Conservatives had it with pride this, pride that from companies that want our dollars, but don’t want to show minimal respect for our Judeo-Christian values. Besides, why is an alien lifestyle celebrated for a full month while more important recognition (such as Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day) are celebrated for just ONE DAY?

Retail giant Target was among companies targeted, primarily because of its children’s pride promotions. It’s one thing if adults choose the mentally ill route, but quite another when it’s promoted to children who aren’t mature enough to understand the consequences of cutting off their breasts or penis.

Our letters, emails and phone calls had some impact. According to CNN, Target announced it will only offer pride-themed items in select stores and NOTHING for children. For the last decade, Target had sold pride crap in every one of its locations (2,000+ stores) across the United States. So, that is a bit of a win.

However, Conservatives should not celebrate yet!

What Target is doing is removing pride merchandise where Conservatives are likely to see it. The corporate giant is still into pride, just as they’ve always been, and will continue to:

Participate in local pride events nationwide. Target’s Pride+ Business Council will host “internal events” for team members. Continue to support alphabet organizations year-round, such as the Human Rights Campaign and Family Equality. Are Conservatives maintaining the Target boycott? Leftists will do anything and everything to push through their progressive agenda, while Conservatives are often only good for the short-term.

When the boycott started in May, Target’s share price nose-dived through June. But the international retailer ended 2023 with a 7.46 percent increase on its share price. It sure doesn’t sound like the boycott was very successful. Did you go back to shopping at Target?

To share your thoughts with Target CEO Brian Cornell: Email: press@target.com - Phone: 612 3046073 - Write: 1000 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403

Target is Being Sued By Shareholder

By Robin Itzler 

(From Robin's weekly e-mail newsletter, "Patriot Neighbors".  Subscribe for free by e-mailing her at robinitzler@aol.com)

Americans who buy stocks based on a company’s customer profile outlined in its legal and marketing material, only to see equity destroyed by foolish C-suite decisions, are applauding Brian Craig.

American First Legal filed a lawsuit on behalf of Craig on August 8 in U.S. district court in Fort Meyers, Florida, accusing Target CEO Brian Cornell, and Target’s board of directors of betraying their customers and shareholders with misleading representations about its environmental, social and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates. Did Target purposely ignore its known customer base to offer trans pride and other related merchandise (some geared for children) that would only appeal to a tiny market segment? The lawsuit alleges that decisions made by Target’s senior executives caused shareholders to lose billions of dollars.

Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel of American First Legal:

“Federal law requires publicly traded corporations to provide certain information to shareholders in their proxy statements that allow those shareholders to make informed decisions. 

“As alleged in our complaint, Target failed to execute its duty to its shareholders by making statements that led them to believe that political and social risks were being assessed — when in reality, the only thing Target's board and management cared about was how effectively they fulfilled the desires of various metrics advanced by left-wing 'stakeholders.'"

Daniel Greenfield Unleashed

By Sheer Coincidence, Biden’s DOJ Goes After Likely Senate Candidate - If you thought election interference was bad in 2016 and 2020, just wait.   In free societies, you just read the newspaper. In unfree ones, you understand that the meaning of one story can only be found by cross-cutting it with a seemingly unrelated story.............Sheer coincidence. And if you think it’s not, you’re a conspiracy theorist, election denier, DOJ denier and a spreader of disinformation who also needs to be investigated by the DOJ. While the Biden admin and the Dems have mixed feelings about Manchin, they really don’t want to lose the WV Senate seat especially since, unlike Georgia, they’re not just going to be able to get it back by focusing on demographics and minority voter turnout. And that seat would prove to be quite crucial in holding on to the Senate..........If you thought election interference was bad in 2016 and 2020, hang on to your horses, this is going to be the big one. .................

Cancel Culture Means Every Org Has Its Own Secret Police -  “We have an anonymous complaint we have to ask you about” Every now and then some lefty culture warrior will announce to the sound of terrified clapter that “cancel culture is just accountability.” Well yeah, so were the Spanish Inquisition, the Cheka, and the Gestapo. If you want to live in a system of political terror in which you constantly have to account to somebody… enjoy. Here’s the New York Times pondering that perhaps embedding a cancel culture secret police squad inside every single organization may not be as much fun as it sounds...........

Senator Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo Respond to FrontPageMag Expose of Anti-Israel Activist on Holocaust Museum Board  - “No one leading a group that wants to destroy the one Jewish state should be on the board of the Holocaust Museum.”...........Human Rights Watch has repeatedly and falsely accused Israel of “apartheid”. Its personnel have advocated for terrorists and for the murder of Jews, and even spread traditional blood libels. Senator Cotton responded to the FrontPageMag expose by tweeting that, “No one leading a group that wants to destroy the one Jewish state should be on the board of the Holocaust Museum. Another terrible pick from President Biden.”..............

 

The Second Irish Famine Will Be ‘Green’ - With kids going hungry, Gov wants to cull 10% of Ireland’s cattle for ‘climate targets’.  Environmentalism is just genocide misspelled. For Nuala O’Connor, a chef at a Barnardos centre in Dublin, food poverty in a young child is sometimes less about what they look like, and more about what they do. “Sometimes you just know by looking at them, that they are not getting what they need,” she said. “Then we have had children over time [who are] literally ravenous, literally taking it with their hands, they can’t get enough of it into their mouths and can’t get it in quick enough." Children are hungry. Time to get rid of the meat. Maybe if they’re hungry enough, they’ll eat more environmentally friendly bugs..................

Biden Admin Threatens North Korea: “The Door has Not Closed on Diplomacy” Kim is shaking in his boots.    I don’t know if the Biden administration set out to recreate that scene from Team America World Police, but it could hardly have done better with this ridiculous message to North Korea.............Really? The door has not closed on diplomacy..........

Cuomo Began Work on How He Beat Pandemic Book as the Dying Began “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic”.  I have always said that the former New York governor was a stone-cold sociopath, but this is still really something. And since Cuomo is trying to relaunch his career, it’s still unfortunately relevant.............If two pros were working on it on March 30, 2020, it would have gotten started earlier. How much earlier? Who knows. But Cuomo would have run it by his staff, by an agent and probably by a publisher or two...............

Half of All New German Citizens are Muslims There will not be a Germany in a generation.  This is what national suicide looks like...............  A rough calculation pegs the number of new citizens from Muslim countries at around 80,000 or half the 168,500 number of total citizens. This is fairly consistent with the 2021 numbers................

More Israelis Have Been Killed in 5 Months of Biden Than 2 Years of Trump Biden and the Democrats are funding the murder of Jews.  The Muslim terrorist campaign, funded by foreign aid from the United States, continues. The latest casualty is Meir Tamari...............Meir Tamari is the 20th victim of Islamic terrorism in Israel so far this year. That tops the combined number of Israeli deaths in all of 2019 and 2020 under Trump. At this rate, there will likely be more Israelis killed in 2023 than during the entire Trump administration.  As I wrote earlier this year, this is due to the Biden administration’s decision to provide political support and funding for the terrorists.

The Life of Brian Used to Offend Christians, Now It Offends Wokes “I want to be a woman. … It’s my right as a man”   Comedians who used to be considered heroes by liberals for offending the religious feelings of conservatives, if they lived long enough have become woke villains..........There was a time when Life of Brian offended Christians and Jews. That time was 1979..............Fast forward to 2023 and Life of Brian has to be censored to avoid offending the wokes over a joke that was originally mocking male leftist feminists that accidentally ended up ruthlessly deconstructing the political embrace of the transgender.movement and its senseless fight for the right of men to be women..........

The IRS Went Down to Georgia to Steal an Election - The Democrats were in a bind, falling behind and looking to make a steal. An estimated 3.5 million people voted in the Georgia Senate runoff election. State Voices, a leftist nonprofit, claimed that it had made 3 million voter contacts for the runoff. ProGeorgia, the local partner for State Voices, bragged of having conducted “31,000 face-to-face conversations, 10 million texts, and 133,000 phone conversations” and of registering “tens of thousands for the midterm election” so that “voters of color turned out in early voting at higher levels than their white counterparts”. Such an outcome was inherently partisan and could and only did benefit one particular party: the Democrats............And it could not have happened without the complicity of the IRS.........

The CEO Behind Target’s Corporate Culture War - CEO Brian Cornell has turned over the chain to criminals and perverts. 

[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]  

Target projects over $1 billion in losses due in large part to shoplifting. And that is its own fault.  Target CEO Brian Cornell responded to the BLM race riots with a memo claiming that, “the murder of George Floyd has unleashed the pent-up pain of years, as have the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.” Much of that pain was directed at robbing Target.  After a massive wave of arson and looting, targeted its own chain stores, Target doubled down on its Racial Equity Action and Change strategy. The Target Foundation was one of the signatories of the Philanthropic Collective to Combat Anti-Blackness & Realize Racial Justice statement attacking the criminal justice system...........Target’s decision to put woke politics over its customers and shareholders has been disastrous. Cornell claimed that Target’s “focus on diversity and inclusion and equity has fueled much of our growth over the last nine years.” In reality, it’s lost the company billions of dollars............

Memorial Day in a Divided Nation - And once more, we called each other brothers. It has been over 150 years since our nation’s last civil war. Time enough has passed that we have come to associate the holiday once known as Decoration Day with the graves of soldiers fallen on other continents far from home. It is important to honor our wartime dead. But Memorial Day has a powerful meaning that we have forgotten. It was the holiday that reunited our country after the Civil War. It began when Americans, from the North and the South, entered the cold gray stone fields of the dead, and decorated the graves of the fallen from the Grand Army of the Republic and the Confederacy with freshly cut flowers.........

Like the Rest of Us, Sen. Feinstein Isn’t Sure What Kamala is Doing as VP  - “What is she doing here?” Feinstein asked, according to the report. Democrats and their media claim that Sen. Jon Fetterman (D – Psych Ward) is absolutely fit to be in the Senate despite not being able to understand what anyone is saying and having to occasionally be institutionalized. Sometimes his handlers have to electroshock him, but he’s completely qualified. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D – One Party State) on the other hand is being pressured to retire so Gov. Newsom can oversee a deathmatch between black, Latino and Asian groups over who gets appointed to the sinecure because she is reportedly “out of it”. Since the same is true of Joe Biden, who’s running for a second term, the party is being accused of sexism for demanding that Feinstein, but not Fetterman or Biden, retire. But the latest leaked rumor about Feinstein’s incapacity, spread by Dem operatives and their media, seems to suggest that she might be the sanest member of her party............ 

My Take - Chuckling, now that's rich.  Her wondering what Kamala is doing there makes her the sanest member of the party. Ya just gotta see the humor in that. 

The CEO Behind Target’s Corporate Culture War

By Daniel Greenfield May 31, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Target projects over $1 billion in losses due in large part to shoplifting. And that is its own fault.

Target CEO Brian Cornell responded to the BLM race riots with a memo claiming that, “the murder of George Floyd has unleashed the pent-up pain of years, as have the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.” Much of that pain was directed at robbing Target.

After a massive wave of arson and looting, targeted its own chain stores, Target doubled down on its Racial Equity Action and Change strategy. The Target Foundation was one of the signatories of the Philanthropic Collective to Combat Anti-Blackness & Realize Racial Justice statement attacking the criminal justice system.

Target committed to racial quotas for its workforce and forced diversity and inclusion training on employees. Kiera Fernandez, Target’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion executive, warned that employees had to go along with the DEI agenda “to be a part of this company.”

Meanwhile people were being stabbed and shot at Target locations around the country.

A 9-year-old boy was among those stabbed by a homeless psycho with a butcher knife at a Los Angeles Target and a 17-year-old teen was shot and killed behind another store in the same city. A 19-year-old was shot and killed in a San Francisco Target parking lot. Earlier this year a gunman opened fire at an Omaha Target and a 23-year-old was shot and killed at a St. Paul Target store.

These are just a few of the crimes that have been committed in the vicinity of Target stores.

“The unfortunate fact is violent incidents are increasing at our stores and across the entire retail industry,” Cornell admitted, which is “putting significant pressure on our financial results.”

Rather than commit to law enforcement, Target chose to run away from it and championed anti-police and pro-crime radicals. This shortchanged shareholders, but was part of its larger commitment to leftist social agendas under the ESG umbrella.

In 2016, Target became the first major department store to allow men, who falsely claim to be women, to use changing rooms meant for women and girls.

Conservatives launched a boycott and Target suffered a 7% drop in sales. But the retail giant doubled down, declaring that, “we stand for equality and equity” and that we “welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.”

Target’s equity policy made it all too easy for a series of incidents in which men photographed, shot videos and otherwise spied on women and girls in dressing rooms and bathrooms. The perpetrators included a man recording underage girls.

Now Target has lost an estimated $10 billion in value after promoting “chest binders”. These dangerous and damaging pieces of equipment are meant to groom girls into identifying as boys. The chest binders were allegedly being sold in sizes as small as XS. The company also offered baby onesies and bibs promoting transgenderism.

Target removed some of the worst items from its shelves, but CEO Cornell apologized to “the LGBTQIA+ community” claiming that he was trying to “alleviate these threats to our team’s physical and psychological safety” while assuring sexual identity activists that he was worried how backing away from grooming kids would “impact you and your wellbeing and psychological safety.”

The most serious of the bomb threats came from an angry transgender activist who claimed to have placed bombs in five Ohio and Pennsylvania Target locations and warned, “we will continue to bomb your targets until you stop cowering and bring back your LGBT merchandise.”

Cornell showed little interest in the “physical and psychological safety” of Target employees when people were being shot and stabbed at its stores. Target stores have been regularly robbed, looted and burned without any sympathy for Target employees. And there’s been no support for female employees and customers forced to cope with men using their facilities.

Target’s decision to put woke politics over its customers and shareholders has been disastrous.

Cornell claimed that Target’s “focus on diversity and inclusion and equity has fueled much of our growth over the last nine years.” In reality, it’s lost the company billions of dollars.

Target has generated repeated boycotts because of its hostility to family values and its support for pro-crime groups has helped unleash a wave of lawless violence and thefts. The chain’s multi-billion dollar commitments to racial discrimination in its supply chain, staffing and philanthropy have fed a larger breakdown in trust and unity inside and outside its business.

The question is whether Target’s shareholders are tired of bleeding cash for DEI and ESG.

Target’s largest shareholders include ESG stalwarts like Vanguard and BlackRock. Unless the corporation feels a great deal of pain, Vanguard and BlackRock will keep on subsidizing Target’s social justice policies the way that they do with so many other major woke corporations. And what Vanguard and BlackRock want matters more than what individual shareholders do.

Last year, Target scrapped its retirement age and announced that Cornell, like Xi, would be staying on even as the stores were struggling, but there will be no change unless it begins at the top.

Cornell had taken the lead in pushing the new woke corporate mantras, and he has doubled down on arguing that “it’s the right thing for society, and it’s the great thing for our brand”.

ESG is based on this false linkage between leftist politics, “the right thing for society”, and sound business practices. State regulations and consumer boycotts are attacking ESG at the level of pure profit and loss. If ESG delivers losses, not profits, it will become unsustainable.

That is why the corporate culture war matters.

Good business and social agendas are incompatible. The Target boycott, like the Bud Light boycott and the battering that Disney has taken in Florida, has the opportunity to hammer that message home. And if that happens, Cornell’s job and much of Target’s wokeness will go with it.

CEO Brian Cornell has turned over Target to criminals and perverts. By putting agendas ahead of profits, he has hurt shareholders, damaged the brand and betrayed his responsibilities.

It’s time for him to go.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.