In her first episode of Pride month, Jen Psaki zeroed in Sunday on the number of boycotts and the wider social media blowback companies from Target to Kohl’s to Bud Light to the Los Angeles Dodgers are facing for their public support of the LGBTQ community.
“You may have noticed Republicans really like to pitch themselves as the ‘pro-business, anti-cancel culture party — but they have a big carve-out for businesses that openly promote LGBTQ+ rights,” Psaki said, joking that when it comes to Target’s highly contested in-store Pride displays, it’s not “as if the rainbow’s going to bite” you.
The MSNBC host of “Inside With Jen Psaki” opened the segment by breaking down how the above brands are “all facing outrage from the Right for their LGBTQ+ partnerships and merchandise” and that a minority of vocal, Republican shoppers have “melted down over a trans woman receiving a personalized beer can. They nearly lost their minds over the sale of Pride flags on kids’ clothing and the fit of some swimwear. That’s what’s animated these right-wing boycotts. But all of this outrage and these boycotts from the wing of the pro-business party is actually hurting the bottom line for some of these companies — and Fox News can’t get enough of it somehow.”
Psaki then aired a string of Fox News commentators — among them Harris Faulkner, Brian Kilmeade and Laura Ingraham — stoking the fire against the inclusive campaigns, including one commentator saying that stores’ Pride displays make her “afraid to go shopping.”
“My favorite there is the rainbow clothing makes her afraid to go shopping, as if the rainbow’s going to bite her or something,” Psaki said after the Fox News clips play out. “But ‘go woke, go broke’ — that is what you heard over and over again. You know what that means? If you embrace the LGBTQ+ community, we will try to bankrupt you. Guys, I mean, I go to Target just like many of you all the time, and if I see things I don’t wanna buy for myself or my kids, I just walk around, it’s fine. No rainbow flags biting me.”
Psaki then posed that the reason we’re seeing such pushback on Pride campaigns this year over others (Target, for instance, has been running elaborate displays for the better part of a decade, while in 2019 Bud Light sold rainbow beer cans in bars “across the country”) is because it’s a Hail Mary in the “culture war.”
“So why the amplified outrage in this moment? What’s different? It isn’t the businesses, it is the modern-day American Right desperately trying to draw new battle lines in their culture war. They’re searching for them,” she said. “For more than a year, the hard right and its media allies have whipped themselves up into a moral panic to the point now that they are enthusiastically rolling back LGBTQ+ rights and regularly using language like indoctrination, grooming, and sexualization to talk about inclusion and the LGBTQ community. It has become such a race to the bottom to decry diversity, equity and inclusion that they are running out of things to be outraged about — they can’t find them, they’re on a search.”
Watch MSNBC’s “Inside With Jen Psaki” segment in the video above.
