From Pride week to Foreign Prejudice

Since Wendy’s crusade on Twitter in 2017 against enemies of their square burger and a subsequent rise to stardom that every brand online has since tried their hand at replicating that formula of corporate angst. As is to be expected, eventually larger and larger companies got into the funny internet arguing game, playing to strengths of their customers and establishing more casual facades than the white paint walls corpo hell normally offers. Often times, these companies will fly too close to the sun, the most recent example is the Harris-Walz ‘Midwest Princess’ camo hats that came out and solid out within 30 minutes of the announcement of Governor of Minnesota’s decision to be running as democrat VP nominee. While the hats were a commercial success, the story quickly devolved to discourse, were the hats plagiarized off those made by Chappel Roan? Roan does not think so, but even with her weighing in, the internet is divided as usual on the conversation. Both sides were at least to some degree united on one point, why the hell is a political campaign for the most important job in the world doing either selling a clone of a gay pop artist’s merch, or making a shitting appeal to gun owning rural Americans with a ‘cute’ hat?

Merch can often tell us a lot about a group. A phrase on a shirt is related to a specific in-joke, allowing a connection between fans in public if one were to see another with it. Or the quality of specific type of merch may also lend an outsider to get a better idea of who’s selling it. A good example of this I believe personally is the sort of thing that the studio A24 often sells after a movie release. Often times there your basic things such as a vinyl, or a Blu-ray which obviously make sense for the demographic of likely 20-year-olds or your cool dad. But every once and a while they will drop something incredibly unique. Something to wiggle your fingers at like a fat cop and say to yourself ‘don’t mind if I do’ even though you don’t get paid till next week. Stuff like their Midsommar incense temple (see below) or a thong for MaXXXine (I am not including that one you sick perv) give you a better sense as to the clientele. Weirdos in the best of ways.

I say this for good reason, I’m not just trying to show off cool merch which in its own right is a fun thing (love browsing shitty webstores at 3 am when I can’t sleep). I say it because holy fuck, do defense contractors miss the mark. From Boeing to Raytheon, from Texas Instruments to General Electric, not one of these groups either has made good looking merch nor tasteful ones either.

Let us start with arguably the most famous example and in truth the only one that even needs to be covered, the Lockheed Martin pride socks. These bad boys game out back during pride month of 2022 and I for one, do not know what the fuck they were thinking. To those reading who have not yet fully developed their frontal lobe, you might be thinking “what’s wrong with this? Lockheed is supporting a worthy cause by showing awareness and solidarity” and while some level that I likely inherited from my boomer father I might slightly understand where you’re coming from, it doesn’t mean you are at all correct. It is worth noting that Lockheed like many other major defense contractors (hereby referred to as DC) is largely supportive on a surface level of queer employees, going as far as paying fully for gender affirming surgery and other procedures such as laser hair removal, but if you peer beyond the curtain for even a second its obvious the only reason for that is because likely some of the most qualified and lucrative grads and possible employees are queer and you wouldn’t want to miss out on that! Worth mentioning too that the socks completely sold-out multiple times over, as well as a fidget spinner with the branding for Sikorsky (helicopter company who make the UH-60 Blackhawk among other tools for war).

And its not just Lockheed too. Boeing will gladly sell you either your dad’s poll shirt to merch from genuinely positive programs from the space race that in this very bizarre sense try and crawl at you from good will and nostalgia of an old NASA style hat, to drag you into buying one of a multitude of various military programs that either directly or indirectly kill people, just like those two whistle blowers! Gosh I love Boeing!

It is now worth asking, who in their right mind is either buying this, or is the target audience for it at least? Now this my friend is where the prejudice comes in. Introducing “Non-Credible Defense”, a Subreddit and community filled with the biggest losers you could imagine. I know for certain that at least some of you reading have heard of this and may well have been previously an avid frequenter or are one now. If you still are one, and not of a post-ironic sensibility, then go back and develop your lobe, shoo! NCD as a community are the type of people to be fully for the massacre of a people if it solely protects your “western rights” on a most surface of levels and get a blood lust out of it as well. These guys especially came to prevalence after the war in Ukraine kicked off, and are semi obviously very much sided with not the Ukrainians (which itself can be justifiably good position sometimes and VERY limited it seems every day) but with the people that supply them with arms, the good old U S of A and it’s pals in NATO. You would never see a NCD guy in a million years offering sympathy for support to the victims of the genocide in Gaza, never, but they’ll glad root for another 50 billion in military aid to Ukraine to and I quote “kill more Russian brutes”. That’s who’s buying this shit.

I think it comes as no surprise then that this deeply rotted from the inside group is emblematic as a whole of the root cause of so much suffering which they often times endorse. The lack luster make and quality of some pride socks from one of the richest groups in the world is so on the nose and breathes the same breath as the NCD, ‘progressive’ only in the most thinly veiled outward sense, too which even Harris’s still little hats fall into.