How to Ruin the Super Bowl?

Could be that the tanking Super Bowl ratings did not merely reflect the quality of the football game? Could it be that America tuned out to the game because they were tired of being preached at by “woke” advertising professionals? Was the game hijacked by propagandists?

Somehow or other advertisers-- burning with righteous zeal at the defeat of a woman who owed her mediocre political career to her ability to enable her husband’s sexual harassment and assaults-- decided that instead of selling products, they would use their Super Bowl time to propagandize the higher truths that they and only they can see clearly. Think about it: all of this garbage is being foisted on us in the name of Hillary Clinton. 

You have to wonder how American corporations expect to compete if their marketing and advertising professionals care more about social justice than about making profits.

The Red State blog offers the hypothesis.

The boring game may not have been the only thing causing people to tune out. The Super Bowl was rife with social justice messaging, including the airing of the sexist, anti-male Gillette commercial. The new Handmaid’s Tale trailer, which mocked Reagan’s “It’s Morning In America” ad, also took a swipe at the religious right.

An anti-male ad for Gillette products, a large number of which are used by men. There, that will get their attention. And then another paranoid fantasy attacking Ronald Reagan and the religious right. You see, Anglo-American civilization, the one that has led the march toward women’s rights and that has done better than any other at offering women opportunities, is being tarred as a vast right wing conspiracy to oppress women. Whoever thought of this nonsense should learn how to think. Rest assured that when faced with cultures that systematically oppress women, the woke feminists who bow down to the Handmaid’s Tale will run for cover and claim that multiculturalism will not allow them to criticize female genital mutilation and Muslim rape culture.

The Daily Caller offers some other examples of preachy ads:

Super Bowl advertisers used the massive platform to lecture Americans on a number of topics — from using clean energy and respecting the media to the proper treatment of mermaids in the age of #MeToo.

CBS, the network that hosted the big game, promoted “girl power” with an ad about girls playing football — and sponsor Budweiser took the time to note that the world-famous St. Louis-based company is now brewing its signature beers with wind power.

Ah yes, girls playing football. Why don’t we have a national campaign to overcome the blatant sexism of the NFL? I propose that next year all NFL teams will have women playing on each and every down, on both sides of the ball, in a number proportional to their representation in the nation.  Will people tune in to co-ed professional football? It will probably depend on the outfits. But, hey, we must fight sexism everywhere, don’t you think?

As for the silliness about proclamations about girl power, haven’t these woke ad persons figured out that we have already had five decades of people intoning about strong empowered women. The result was nominating the nation’s enabler in chief for the presidency, an incompetent fraud who owed her career to her last name. And haven’t they figured out that the #MeToo movement, which flooded the media with images of women as weak, ineffectual, harassed, abused, assaulted victims told us that words do not have magical powers. Saying that women are strong and empowered does not make them strong and empowered. It makes them weaker and more vulnerable.

But, what good would these executives be if they could not double down on stupid.

Speaking of female empowerment, the dating site Bumble is pounding the drums for more female self-assertion and even leaning in. It missed the moment when Michelle Obama famously and correctly declared the leaning in doesn’t work. But, why let the verdict of experience get in the way of your zealotry?

The story comes from CBS News:

The Austin-based dating app, Bumble, is creating a buzz this year with its 2019 Super Bowl ad focusing on female empowerment.

It’s part of a new partnership with tennis mogul Serena Williams who calls on women “to make the first move” in going after what they want.

The commercial starts with Williams saying, "The world tells you to wait, that waiting is polite, but if I waited to be invited in, I never would have stood out."

And also:

I think we're all super excited to have representation here,” said Alex Williamson, Chief Brand Officer at Bumble.

Since the dating app’s launch, more than 750 million first moves have been made by women, but Williamson wants it to go beyond that.

"As women, we're constantly told to wait or what to do or who to be and really the choice is yours,” Williamson told CBS Austin. “The societal pressure that's placed on you, you're able to step out of that in any moment of your life."

Apparently, it is true that women are more likely to make the first move on a date. It is also true that more and more women are having sex on their first dates. And then, these same women cannot understand why men do not respect them. Or why men assume as a default position that today’s women are happy to give it away for free.

As I said, doubling down on stupid.

And then there were the righteous ads about how we should all understand each other… The message dates to the mid-1960s, it appeared in a song by a group called the Youngbloods. It was insipid then. It is insipid now. It was addressed to teenagers then. It is addressed to overgrown teenagers now.

Google advertised its translation feature with an ad focused mainly on how the ability to understand each other can bring people closer together. The image it showed when talking about how some language can be hurtful or divisive — police officers in riot gear at a protest — did not go unnoticed.

And then, there was an ad about the importance of a free press. It was offered up by Jeff Bezos through his Washington Post. You might ask how Bezos feels about the free press that exposed some of his recent dalliances, but that would be impolite.

The Daily Caller summarizes the Post ad:

The Washington Post topped them all, however, taking out a multi-million dollar spot to talk about the importance of a free press. Featuring several journalists who have been killed for doing their jobs — including WaPo’s own reporter Jamal Khashoggi — it painted journalists as unbiased sources of information necessary to secure the freedoms Americans enjoy every day.

The ad, narrated by actor Tom Hanks, was a sore spot for several who got wind of it before it aired. Given the current climate in media and the fact that a number of outlets have recently faced layoffs, some felt that the choice to take out an ad — particularly one that was so expensive — was “in poor taste.”

So, the press is dying, because it does not report the news any more. It has become a propaganda organ, promoting leftist propaganda. The general public has responded by tuning it out. As for providing information, former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson recently pointed out that the Times, the gold standard in American dailies, has taken to slanting and distorting the news to make the Trump administration look bad. They have become the propaganda arm of the Resistance, thus compromising their responsibility to report the news in an unbiased fashion.

So, if you want to ruin the Super Bowl and turn the nation off to professional football, use the occasion to run mindless propaganda designed to offend as many viewers as possible. There, that will improve the cultural climate... don't you think?