The easily triggered snowflakes who flock to the safe space provided by Sean Hannity’s raving lunacy are now inflicting blunt force trauma on their coffee makers.
The assaults on Keurig machines started this weekend after the company said it would no longer advertise on the Fox News show. This was due to Hannity’s defence of Roy Moore, the cowboy hat-wearing, gun-waving, dead-eyed Senate candidate who abhors homosexuality, immigration, progress, clean air, equality, modernity, ethnic foods, kittens, the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law; he was twice rebuked as chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court for flouting court orders.
Moore embodies everything that is wrong with the far right in America. This was crystal clear even before last week, when the Washington Post published an investigation alleging the Christian extremist had sexual contact with teenage girls - one as young as 14 - when he was in his 30s. (It seems there are some asterisks in Moore’s interpretation of The Ten Commandments: “You shall not covet *excludes underage girls at the mall.”)
While some Republicans wisely distanced themselves from Moore, Hannity urged his fans to be cautious before jumping to conclusions, which is ironic because if jumping to conclusions were an Olympic sport, Hannity would need to rent out Carnegie Hall to store his gold medals.
But as we’ve seen repeatedly, Hannity’s outrage over sexual predation is selective. It only red lines in if the alleged perp is a member of the other political tribe. If the Post had found female victims who claimed Barack Obama had put the moves on them when they were in grade school, Hannity would be calling for the death penalty. But since this is Moore, a fellow traveller, Hannity shrugged and talked about due process and how nobody really knows what happened all those years ago.
It’s interesting how the religious right knows everything that happened when Jesus walked the earth but, once embroiled in scandal, gets fuzzy on anything before 2012. Oh, did I mention Hannity also apologized for implying the 14-year-old gave consent?
As you can imagine, his take on Moore angered many.
Some reached out to Fox’s sponsors. So this weekend, five companies - Keurig, Eloquii, 23 and Me, Nature’s Bounty and realtor.com - reportedly pulled ads from Hannity’s shoutfest.
In response, his fans vowed to counterpunch.
And that’s when they attacked their own Keurig machines.
Why the maker of single-serve coffee was chosen for rebuke from among the five companies is not clear, though it was probably for the sheer spectacle. I mean, you just can’t get the same money-shots by stomping on a genetic test or crushing a handful of vitamins. What were they supposed to do? Set fire to property listings?
Limited in outrage options, fans expressed solidarity with Hannity by going bananas on their small appliances. They recorded and shared videos in which they beat the living daylights out of their coffee makers. They bravely risked days of caffeine withdrawal to make a point that, in the end, amounted to comedy gold.
“Just so everyone knows, us deplorables are committed,” said one gruff fellow, putting down his phone and picking up a sledgehammer as his unsuspecting coffee maker sat in the driveway. “This is what I think of you, Keurig.”
And with that, he smashed the machine to smithereens, strewing bits of plastic and metal around his property. Another man killed his Keurig with a golf driver. Another guy murdered his Keurig by throwing it off a balcony.
If these single-pod brewers had artificial intelligence, hundreds of them would have spent the weekend wondering why a bunch of crazy humans were destroying them after already paying for them.
This was like protesting the high cost of gas by driving your car off a cliff.
And it’s not the first time a conservative protest has made zero sense.
Remember when Donald Trump supporters went after Starbucks by … buying more Starbucks? Or when they attacked Star Wars and inadvertently helped it gross over a billion dollars?
These chuckleheads keep targeting companies, products and cultural creations - Twitter, Amazon, Saturday Night Live, Budweiser (or as they spelled it, “Budwiser”), Hamilton, Froot Loops, Macy’s, eBay, Hawaii, CNN, Skittles, Dell, Pepsi, Oreos, Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft, Yelp, PayPal, Reddit - and then seem stunned when their boycott has the opposite effect due to what we might call a positive association with the negative blowback:
“Wait, Trump fans hate Ford? Honey, guess we’re getting a Taurus.”
This boomerang effect is now so great that Hannity fans have somehow managed to elevate Keurig in the eyes of liberal consumers who previously led the boycott calls over environmental concerns. Now, forget it: the tree-huggers are going to give a Keurig to everyone they know this Christmas.
In the long run, a boycott only works if you’re on the right side of history.
And if you’re a fan of Sean Hannity, that’s not the side you’re on. So there’s no point in destroying your own property.
You’ve already destroyed your own credibility.
Vinay Menon is a national affairs writer