The "Pride" of Havel's Greengrocer

Analysis this years quieter LGBT Pride Month through the lens of 'The Power of the Powerless'

Hello, Endeavour here. In 1978, Vaclav Havel, a dissident in Communist Czechoslovakia who would go on to become Czechia’s first post-Communist president, wrote his famous the essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless’ on the nature of such regimes and how to undermine them. In his essay, he used an example of a greengrocer in Czechoslovakia who displayed a sign in his shop window featuring Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ rallying cry from the end of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the World, Unite!”.

Vaclav Havel

Havel said that displaying the sign is not a genuine profession of belief in communism on the part of the greengrocer, but rather a show of conformity to the ruling communist regime. He is incentivized to do so by the power structure. The sign shows that he is not a threat to the system. No one passing by his shop would take notice of the sign because such propaganda was ever-present in the Eastern Bloc. But if one day, the greengrocer took the sign down, people would notice its absence and begin to consider whether they themselves actually believed the ideology behind the slogan. In turn, they might decide that they no longer wish to display the slogan either.

According to Havel, this is the beginning of the regime’s grip on the minds of the individual beginning to weaken. I alluded to this essay at the beginning of my video ‘Postmodern Tyranny’ last year, but I was far from the first on the dissident right to examine it. Back in 2020, my buddy Morgoth made a video about the essay in which he suggested that the rainbow flag has become a symbol akin to the slogan ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ for the current globalist regime in the West.

That cursed rainbow flag is a symbol we’ve all become too familiar with over the past decade. It has evolved from simply being a symbol of the LGBT agenda to the banner of the broader globalist order. Not being quite woke enough, the flag has even been updated in recent years to include the colours of transgenderism and black and brown stripes to represent the anti-white agenda as well. It truly is a wretched emblem, representing all that is evil in the ruling elites and their ideology.

Over the past 20 years, this agenda has evolved from “Why not let gays marry? They’re just like the rest of us, but with a slight lisp and a great sense of fashion.” to “We’re going to feed your kids puberty blockers and force them to watch drag performances in public libraries. And if you try to stop us, you’re a terrorist.”

While the presence of the rainbow flag has become commonplace year-round across the West, this kind of messaging is turn up to eleven each year for LGBT Pride month in June. It has become tradition that each June, corporations engage in a woke pissing contest to outdo one another in their displays of politicized debauchery.

Pride Month 2018

But this year, things feel a little different. “Pride Month” comes this year off the heels of the recent controversies surrounding the brands Budweiser and Target who have seen significant backlash against their over-the-top and downright absurd campaigns shoving LGBT politics down the throats of consumers.

Over its history, Budweiser had become a cultural icon of Middle America and the White working class. So much so that the beer has often been mentioned in the lyrics of American country songs. But in April this year, the high-ups at Anheuser-Busch (the company which manufactures Budweiser) thought it would be a good idea to plaster the face of transgender TikToker Dylan Mulvaney on commemorative cans of Bud Light in an attempt to change their “fratty” brand image to something more “progressive”.

In May this year, the American retail giant Target launched their “Pride Collection” featuring such products as a “tuck-friendly” women’s swimsuit for Trans “women” who might need a little more space down there, the ‘Queer All Year’ wall calendar, or children’s books such as ‘Bye-Bye Binary’ or ‘The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish’. Like with Budweiser, this led to a consumer boycott of Target, pushing the company to remove the “Pride” themed section of their store.

While I remain sceptical of the theory of “Go woke, go broke.”, both Target and Anheuser-Busch have been hit hard financially by backlash against their brazen campaigns of perverse social conditioning. According the New York Post, as of the beginning of this month, Target and Anheuser-Busch have lost $13.8 billion and $27 billion in market value respectively.

This is the context in which this year’s sodomy month began, with two major American brands having pushed the rainbow envelope and having it backfire. Like every year, June kicked off with the now customary corporate offerings to the official religion of GLOBOHOMO, but it was noticeable dialled back from recent years. We had become accustomed to the Pride “festivities” being each year being even more flagrant and in-your-face than the year prior. But that seems to have changed this year.

It became a given that every major corporation would change their avatars on social media to an LGBT-themed rainbow variant of their logos for the month of June. But this year, according to the Twitter account World of Statistics, only six out of the top 40 most valuable companies in the world did so and none of the top 25. Neither Target nor Anheuser-Busch and all their official Budweiser Twitter accounts have donned the rainbow this year.

In fact, Anheuser-Busch and the official Twitter accounts for their brands Budweiser and Bud Light have gone radio silent since mid-April. As of the writing of this essay, the most recent tweet from the official Anheuser-Busch Twitter account remains their CEO’s open letter of apology for the Dylan Mulvaney controversy, dated April 14^th. The most recent tweet on Bud Light’s official Twitter page features the caption “TGIF?” along with a picture of a tranny-free can of Bud Light, dated April 15th.

That’s not all. There have been a number of corporate and governmental accounts who initially updated their avatars and banners in honour of “Pride” month only to quietly back pedal shortly after. Major League Baseball and the US Navy added the rainbow colours to their social media accounts on the 1^st of June only to remove them a day later. X-Box changed their avatar to a rainbow-themed variant on the 1^st but had reverted by June 4^th.

Going back to Havel’s greengrocer, it is not any counterpropaganda, but the distinct lack of the ever-present regime propaganda which gets an individual to first consider system and ideology behind it. The greengrocer doesn’t need to replace the ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ sign with anything at all. It is simply the absence of the sign that will get passers-by to think if they actually believe in the ideology behind the slogan.

There is a chance that this could be taking place this June for an unknown number of people across the West. Logging on to Twitter in June to find that Walmart is tweeting about National Cheese Day, not trying to convince you to castrate your son and turn him into your daughter is enough to make one stop and consider if they really want to give their money to the brands that are. All it takes is the lack of such propaganda to get you to remember the days when you associated the month of June with barbecues in the backyard, the kids getting out of school, and the start of summer. Not homosexuality.

The reduction of corporate “Pride” tributes has not gone unnoticed by those on the other side of the issue either. The shitlib Twitter account Anti-Fascist Turtle tweeted this gem.

While this individual is trying to uphold the ridiculous façade of rebellion, what really scares them is that the LGBT movement may have flown a bit too close to the sun. Maybe plastering the big ugly face of a man in a dress on the can of the America’s favourite beer might have be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The relentless corporate pandering they’ve received over the past decade might have reached its limit.

This isn’t to say that these mega corporations are any less woke this year than they were last year. They are still chalked full of true believers and power-hungry Machiavellians alike from top to bottom. As I pointed out in my recent video, the relentless push for “diversity and inclusion” in these corporations isn’t motivated by profit, but by progressive ideologues within the companies, the push for broader cultural change, and the goal of attaining a higher ESG rating. In prior years, the incentives were for corporations to be as woke as possible in the month of June. But those incentives have changed.

No rainbows in sight.

Anheuser-Busch finds themselves torn. On one side, they have the pressure from leftist activists, ideologically driven executives, and ESG ratings to be continue their woke messaging. On the other, they have the economic reality of their floundering share price and diminished customer base and the overall fatigue the public feels with such forceful social engineering. This doesn’t mean that they company has become based all of a sudden, but the incentives they are now under made it so that the tranny beer cans had to go.

There is a hot take going around that Pride Month this year is being toned down because wokeism is being rolled back in order to put people back to sleep and take pressure of the system. I reject this idea. There is genuine burnout in the population with woke politics being inserted into every aspect of life, even among some once dyed in the wool liberals. Companies need to grapple with that reality too.

Likewise, the genie can’t be put back into the bottle. Just like how the end of COVID didn’t send us back to 2019, companies not changing their avatars in June isn’t going to take us back to 2010 before all of this wokeness got out of control. The reality of life in the West is rapidly deteriorating and that can’t be placated by fewer rainbow flags on social media. This isn’t an ingenious 4D chess move by the establishment, but the momentum behind at least this aspect of their agenda running out of steam.

Furthermore, people follow ideas to their logical conclusions. The gay agenda lead directly to the trans agenda which is leading to even worse causes because they are all founded on the same premise. When you take the position that they don’t want transgenderism shoved in their face, there’s a good chance that you’ll begin to consider if you really want homosexuality shoved in your face either. From there, you can begin to ask yourself if you were really okay with it back in 2014 or if you just went along with it to avoid trouble. Politics moves on trajectories. The system cannot revert to a more stable point of time and freeze us there. If it is not gaining ground, it is losing ground.

However, it's important not to overstate this. LGBT Pride propaganda is still being churned out this month of June, but for the first time, it has been toned down a notch. By no means are we on the verge of a mass awakening across the West, but we could be seeing the momentum shift on this particular issue. The LGBT agenda isn’t over, but it may have peak. Only time will tell. This backtracking could plant the seeds of the process which Havel described in his essay.

Maybe a slightly less “fabulous” June this year will act as the greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia taking down the ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ sign in his shop window. And maybe for a number of people, it will give them the same pleasant feeling of a citizen in the Eastern Bloc being able to buy vegetables without being bashed over the head with communist propaganda.