Overturned shelves, assaulted sellers, call for a boycott… The Target chain of stores, which offers a range of products in honor of Pride month, is the target of a hate campaign.
“They have a date with Satanists, Target targets children!”, chants American rapper Forgiato Blow. his piece Boycott Target, published on May 25 on its YouTube channel, climbed in a few days to the first place of the most listened titles on iTunes. He attacks the Target chain of stores and its range of products in honor of the LGBT community.
Each year, in June, Target decorates its stores with the colors of Pride month and offers specific products: a cup with the inscription “gender fluid”, a non-gendered swimsuit, or even t-shirts for children wearing the words “Bien Proud” (“Very Proud”). But in recent days, the initiative has provoked an outpouring of hatred from the most conservative fringe of the country.
“Where’s the straight section? T-shirts that say ‘Proud to be straight!'” asks a young woman to a saleswoman, before posting the video on social networks.
On another post, a man holds up a t-shirt and says, “I’ll buy it and burn it!”
In some Target stores, shelves were overturned, salespeople attacked. Conservative media have been engulfed in the controversy, relaying a call for a boycott that is gaining momentum.
“Don’t buy from Target unless you’re gay or perverted”, launches an editorialist of the scurator information site The Daily Wire, Candace Owens. “It’s very simple for you, promise never to shop at Target again. There’s nothing at Target that you can’t find elsewhere.”
The objective of the boycott: “to make ‘Pride’ toxic for commerce, summarizes Matt Walsh, another columnist for the DailyWire, on Twitter. If they decide to force this bullshit into our sight, they need to know that they will pay the price.”
And the result is there. On May 24, Target said in a statement that it would remove “articles that elicited the most aggressive behavior.”
Deploring “threats affecting the safety and well-being of our employees” and an “unstable context”, the chain resolved to “make changes”.
Articles of the Abprallen brand, in particular, have been removed from the shelves. The designer of this brand, Erik Carnel, a trans man, was at the heart of critics, called a “satanic designer” by Candace Owens.
But this backpedal from Target was quick to spark passions in the opposing camp.
“We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” an angry Target client on social networks.
For his part, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Governor of California, criticized the channel for “sacrificing the LGBT+ community to extremists”.
Source: BFM TV
