Sports Illustrated is the latest casualty of an existential tug-of-war between political activism and commercial reality.
Sports Illustrated is reaping what it has sown.
Our statement on today’s mass layoffs at Sports Illustrated pic.twitter.com/tQjJdoHP4p
— Sports Illustrated Union (@si_union) January 19, 2024
The Sports Illustrated union has posted on ‘X’ that they are being hit with massive layoffs. It’s possible that everyone is getting the pink slip.
Ideas have consequences.
The activists dream of leveraging their positions in major brands to refashion a new world, even if they have to drag the rest of us there, kicking and screaming.
Commercial reality understands that giving your customers what they DON’T want is not a stable business model.
Sports Illustrated — especially their flagship ‘Swimsuit Issue’ became a proving grounds where those competing interests were pitted against one another, and the hypothesis of whether the public could be forced to accept what it doesn’t want could play out.
In defence of the activists, their own recent success with projects like LGBT activism and Drag Queen story hour gave them every reason to believe they were so powerful that they not only SERVE the demands of the public but that they themselves create the tastes that same public demands.
Body positivity and trans ideology found their place in the coveted Swimsuit issue, and Sports Illustrated made it clear that they were explicitly prioritizing the left’s political agenda above sports and above beautiful women in swimsuits.
StUnNiNg aNd BrAvE! Sports Illustrated Features Trans Model ON THE COVER Of The Swimsuit Issue https://t.co/SvZBlnW3Oc
— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) July 20, 2021
What could have possibly gone wrong? pic.twitter.com/aVvCLxVx63
— OnlyCrooksWearMasks (@ConmanProline) January 19, 2024
If you dared tell them they were wrong you would be punished for wrongthink.
Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that. https://t.co/rOASeeQvee
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) May 16, 2022
Canada came after Peterson’s licence to practice psychotherapy over his political views. This tweet was referenced in the complaint. None of his patients or colleagues had any complaint about how he conducted himself as a therapist. They just hated his politics, and demand he be re-educated over it.
No wonder Sports Illustrated thought this gambit would work. They learned it is possible to cower the public into silence. That power can even be stretched to the point of shielding yourself from negative criticism.
It’s a lot harder to bully them into buying something they hate.
Even if the public was cut off from the ability of giving the kind of negative customer feedback that has always served as an early warning sign for companies to adapt or die, the customers still had one more way they could tell SI what they thought of this new agenda.
Customers can vote with their wallets.
As layoffs at Sports Illustrated are imminent — possibly wiping out the entire staff — the experiment has come to its natural conclusion.
Sports Illustrated goes broke after tilting at ideological windmills. In the end, Jordan Peterson had the last laugh.
Once again the maxim is proven that ‘the customer is always right’.
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