“Daily show” host Jon Stewart on Monday night put corporate America on blast for performative campaigns during pride as they try to use the rainbow to market themselves as companies with values.
Except many of them ― from Target to Budweiser ― quickly run away from those same values when faced with pressure from outraged voices on the right.
Stewart said the same thing happened with diversity campaigns, as companies launch feel-good publicity efforts in the media, then quietly cut back on DEI initiatives behind the scenes.
“They stand by their values,” he said. “Sometimes for a couple of months.”
Stewart had a special message just for those companies.
“Stop!” he said. “We don’t need any of this.”
He also said it’s just as performative when companies cave to conservative pressures.
“And by the way, for those on the right who wish corporations would just ditch the woke performances and go back to good old-fashioned patriotic values?” he said. “That’s all bullshit, too. For God’s sakes, SpaghettiOs told us not to forget Pearl Harbor.”
He urged Americans to tune it all out.
“Why are we allowing ourselves to get worked up over whether giant multinational corporations are pro-gay or have traditional American values?” he asked. “Because corporations have but one value: Shareholder value. That’s all they have.”
Budweiser, he noted, markets red, white and blue ― but is owned by a Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate. Dove, which has for years championed body positivity in its marketing, is owned by the same conglomerate that owns Axe body spray “and their decades-long commitment to fucking anything that moves.”
“There is nothing corporations do that is not in service of their bottom line,” he said. “Let’s stop pretending that a corporation can even be woke or un-woke or patriotic or unpatriotic.”
He said corporations should just “live their truth as the profit-seeking Patrick Bateman psychopaths they are” and shared an all-too-honest company for those companies to use.
