One of the left’s little tricks for keeping everyone divided and at each other’s throats is by pressing on the things that make us different from one another, rather than the things that unite us.

You’re not ‘American’ to them, you’re hyphen-American. Because whatever your hyphen is can be used to peel you away from the group so that you see other Americans as ‘them’ and not ‘us’.

Divided people are easily manipulated. Secular America no longer has a calendar that marks time by religious feasts and seasons like Advent and Christmas or Lent and Easter. Now we mark time by which identity group we are celebrating… but those celebrations will never speak well of the group Secular Progressive Inquisitioners have deemed the political heretics and official scapegoats… call them deplorables, if you like.

That division tactic is cleverly disguised as pandering so that anyone who objects to that sort of emotional manipulation is automatically the bad guy in the conversation. It’s a dirty trick, but it works. (Stick around to the part after the memes for some thoughts about how we can resist attempts to  divide us.)

Corporations like Hershey’s learned long ago that it pays to join the pandering in exactly the same way that, in the Mafia’s heyday, it ‘paid’ for local shopkeepers to keep the local mafia enforcers happy. As Mafiosos with bricks or Molotovs were to the private shopkeepers, grifters like Jackson and Sharpton were to larger corporations.

Keep them happy and their attack dogs don’t chase away the ad money or customers with protests and smear campaigns.

This year, Hershey’s had to up its game to keep up with ever-shifting Progressive [im]moral goalposts. See if you can spot the change. Hint: it isn’t the pandering ‘CelebrateSHE’ slogan.

Here’s the video Hershey’s chose to use in an ad to celebrate women.

.@Hersheys is putting the face of a trans-“woman” on chocolate bar wrappers with “HerShe” highlighted in honor of international women’s day.
Hershey’s is erasing women. pic.twitter.com/JzRkAtwTdO

— Leftism (@LeftismForU) March 1, 2023

Many women weren’t feeling particularly ‘celebrated’ by this particular attempt at pandering.

#GoWokeGoBroke was trending, and when yours truly clicked on it, I was met with two stories in particular. This Hershey’s ad and another story about a Christian school that was shocked to learn that their donors dried up once they pledged their allegiance to that rainbow flag.

But back to the Hershey’s story… were the ladies feeling especially appreciated? Here are some screenshots.

It wasn’t just the ladies that weighed in, either.

We know why…

Turns out the mascot Hershey’s hired is exactly the kind of garbage human that literally wants to silence women that object to being erased. From his account:

A ‘Terf’ is any woman who doesn’t accept the latest faddish gender doctrine. And people who use the word ‘Terf’ without any sense of irony have a nasty little habit of getting into physical confrontations with women.

We used to have a special place in society for a man that uses his size to intimidate or harm women. Today, that place is … perhaps … having them featured in an ad campaign.

Don’t hold back. Tell us what you really think of this campaign…

And how are the markets reacting?

Something to think about when you see campaigns like this trying to divide us:

In moments like the days immediately after 9/11, for a few shining moments, we didn’t care about red and blue, so much as red, white, and blue.

People in flyover country and coastal elites were united in outrage over what had been done to Americans, not your particular favorite flavor of Americans. We briefly saw that coming together again when justice came due and the mood shifted in the 9th inning of a Mets-Phillies game when news filtered out that Osama Bin Laden was killed. For a moment, it was no longer the home team and visitors, it was “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A”.

Unity like that cannot be harnessed by political people with cynical agendas.

BUT, so long as we are splintered into our various tribes, political, racial, gender, sexual, religious/irreligious — whatever those tribes might be — we can be addressed as an ‘interest group’, manipulated with carrots and sticks, and told who the enemy we are supposed to hate might be.

How do we stay out of that trap? Don’t get sucked into the us-versus-them trap.

Focus on the ‘us’ that unites people and remember the lesson Jesus taught about loving your neighbor — even if your neighbor is one of those ‘low down dirty Samaritans’ that his audience hated so passionately.

If we do that, the cynical manipulators have no leverage over us.