Caught in the Funnel

One of the most ancient forms of trap in history is the “Funnel Trap.” If you look on the internet, you mostly find references to funnel fish traps, bug traps, and the “Fatal Funnel” so well known to anyone in Law Enforcement or trained in CQB. (For those of you that are neither, it refers to doorways and hallways, where you’re forced into a narrow point while the opposition can bring the attack from multiple axis. IE a place NOT TO BE, or if you must be, a place to get through as fast as possible.) But the Funnel Trap concept was used by our more primitive ancestors to capture and kill everything from buffalo down to mice. Our primitive leftists are using it to capture industries and organizations. That’s the discussion for today.

Dinner tonight is Ruben sandwiches, You know where the drinks are, and please don’t forget the tip jar where we collect for the mess. Let’s begin!

One of the bloggers I follow, Michael Smith @ the-nfl-isnt-just-entertaining-you? Was discussing the NFL and their choice of Halftime show for the Superbowl (SB). He posited that their choice was driven by the intent to drive societal change, and that the NFL is a “Cultural Institution,” with the power to drive change.

I beg to differ. I believe the NFL has “shot it’s wad.” to use an old black powder term. (Yes, I am aware that it also refers to another form of now being un-useful, but in the interest of keeping this PG, we’ll just use the black powder version.)

See, one of the traps that the left uses is a variation on that old traditional funnel trap. It goes like this:

“Hey, (enter institution’s name here) you know you’re leaving a shitload of money on the table?”

“WHAT? What you talkin’ about, Willis?”

“Yeah man, there’s this vast untapped customer base that you’re missing out on, because you’re too parochial, or too misogynistic, or too racist, or…”

(Now see, right here is where the trap is set. The truth of the matter is that the customer base they’re talking about is NOT vast.

One, it’s less than the number of leftists actually existent, because some of them are already part of the target’s customers.

Two, the number of leftists are far less than claimed. You can tell this by things like “75% of the DEMOCRATS support voter ID laws.” According to recent polls. The people that don’t are the hard-core liberal troops. So, a quarter of less than half, hence less than an eighth.

Three, those hard-core leftists wouldn’t be your customers ANYWAY, no matter what you do, no more than I am going to be a customer for Vegan Fake Meat, no matter how you spin it, or what shibboleths you say.)

Now, if the institution bites on something small, the hook is set, or rather the animal is walking down the funnel. At this point, they can still turn around, but they are starting down the path.

This looks like: “Oh, we’ll make sure to put an even number of (enter the chosen hook) in our ads, or on our show, or … This is things like “Hey, we should have a gay couple driving our car.” Or “Hey we need to use more Hispanics that don’t speak English in our (fill in blank)”

So far you haven’t pissed off your base enough to lose them. But they’re starting to notice that something feels a little off. Maybe your numbers even rise a little, as the few leftists who were on the fence about your institution go over and check it out.

Then the drive begins. Whisper campaigns that “Institution X is going woke.” (BTW, Whisper campaigns are as old as time, but in the Internet age, the Blogging age, they have taken on a whole new effectiveness. “Influencers” are the new Whisper Agents, and damn is it effective.) Combined with that, comes Whisper Campaigns that “You know, I would give them more of my money, if they would just drop their stance on Y.”

Now the walls are really closing in. It’s harder and harder to successfully turn around. What started as a simple U turn, has now become a 15-point turn. Your institution is now losing base customers. You might still be able to spin it around, but in the back of your mind you’re hearing “there’s a whole untapped market out there, if we can reach them, the guys we lost won’t matter.” That’s the Imp of Greed whispering in your ear.

Let’s take an example: Budweiser. They started by adding more girls, more Hispanics, maybe a Girl on Girl kiss in the ad. (Said the executive, “Come on, Girl/Girl porn sells like hotcakes, even with strait guys, no one will mind.”) A few customers started dropping away, but it was easy to blow that off with “Well changes in tastes, and the urbanization of America is effecting sales, we need to target the Urban Market HARDER.”

Then came the poison pill. Hiring a Pre-op Trannie who’s only famous for being a failure as a man, who now cosplays as a woman, and that at the parody Ad Absurdum level, to be their new spokesfag spokesperson. Overnight, they found themselves trapped. The walls had closed in to the point that they were not sure turning around was even possible. Heads rolled, but the damage was done. That was 2023. Here it is, three years later, and they’re still clawing desperately at the walls, trying to turn around. (Witness the Budweiser Clidesdale/Bald Eagle ad, Pre-released before the Superbowl and pushed like hell on social media etc. See it used to be, that the Budweiser Superbowl add was kept more secret than how many teens and pre-teens former Prince Andrew fucked on Epstein’s Island. Want to see it? You’re going to have to wait and watch the Bowl, or catch it afterwards. The hard push tells me two things. Budweiser is desperate, and they know the SB is no longer the draw it once was.)

Budweiser was NEVER going to be the beer of the woke crowd. If they drink beer at all, it’s some neck beard IPA probably THC infused, that tastes like it was filtered through Joe Stalin’s Jockstrap. But the Imp of Greed whispered in their minds, and they bought into the trap, because that bait looked so tasty.

In doing so, they lost their real market, the Good Ol Boy (and yes, quite a few Good Ol Girls too) who hit a corner bar, or drink off the tailgate or in the tractor. The folks that go to tractor pulls, NASCAR, bowling alleys and deer stands. Not the folks that go to the latest “reimagining of a classic, set in the modern day, and The Wicked Witch is the good guy and a lesbian, Dorthy is literally Hitler, and the strawman Scarecrow is Larry Correia himself.”

Just as another example, Jaguar sales dropped in half, in one year. The official story is that it’s because Jag decided to push E cars. Very few are willing to admit that it’s got more to do with this ad.

I actually watched the S/B this year, something I haven’t done since kneeling became a thing for the national anthem, followed by the addition of “the Black National Anthem.”

(Let me make something perfectly clear here, there is ONE national Anthem, and unless congress changes it, it is, was and will be, The Star-Spangled Banner. There is no separate nation called “Black” There’s a word for that, it’s called “succession.” We fought a war over it, maybe you heard?)

The only reason I watched, is one of the guys that’s going to help work the farm wanted to watch because the SheHawks were in it.

It’s telling that the VFW (let me say that again, the Veterans of Foreign Wars post, out here in the middle of Appalachia!) only had about twenty folks there for the game. (we accounted for three of the twenty.) Membership for this post is 120 members and over 600 Auxiliary members. I had a Masonic Lodge Stated meeting on Monday. The topic of the SB came up because a couple of the guys had heard of the Budweiser commercial. I was the only guy in the room that had seen the commercial or the game, and I didn’t volunteer that information.

The NFL is all the way into the catchment area of the trap at this point.

They started losing relevance with their repeated and continued attempts to broaden their international market, and their national market without giving service to their base. The VFW, the Masonic Lodge, Rural America, that was their base.

Now I need to point out here, neither of those organizations is “all white males.” Hell, about Twenty percent of the full members of the local VFW are women, that is to say gals that deployed to one of the war zones, in which we have had troops under fire. There’s a greater percentage of Black men than that. Yes, White men are the majority. It’s a damn slim majority, and once you get to the Auxiliary, White men are the minority. The Masonic Lodge? Yes, it is by definition men only. It is NOT white men only.

When Crapernick started his shenanigans, and when Tim Tebow and Husain Abdullah had little waring demonstrations of faith, the NFL was in the wide part of the funnel. They could have read the room, realized that they were starting to piss off their base, and turned around. Instead the Imp of Greed won the day, and they thought that chasing a new audience would more than make up for any small number of fans they lost.

BZZZZZZ Wrong.

As the charge toward max-woke continued, they rapidly found themselves stuck. They’d alienated so much of their base by that point, that turning around had become like turning a tractor trailer around on a two-lane road. Then, it became impossible, as more and more of their audience said, “Never again, they’re dead to me.”

Now they have no choice but to continue down the path, and it just keeps getting darker and scarier. The Fiasco with Bad Bunny, and the counter show by TPUSA that drew more audience than the actual show, that was the point at which they looked around and saw that getting out of the catchment basin was pretty much impossible.

The NFL of old is dead, it ain’t coming back. Just like MLB is no longer “the American Pass-time.” The days of the Second World War, when you could tell if the guy was really an American by asking “Who won for the World Series in 1937?” KNOWING that every American male would immediately answer ‘The Yankees.’” Hell probably three quarters of America couldn’t even tell you who played last year, much less who won.

There’s a lesson here, it’s an old lesson, it was originally a fable by an old Greek guy. Letting go of the Cheese in your mouth, to grab the cheese you see in the water is a losing strategy.

In other news, I was going to cover this last week but I had already gone long. Winny the Xi

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apparently is running another purge. The two most senior military officers just got removed “For suspected serious discipline and law violations.” (Beijing code for graft.) Since the entirety of West Taiwan’s government IS graft, that means they became un-useful for some reason. Now the idiots at POLITICO claim that this is an assurance that China won’t start a war for the short term future, because they need to train up a replacement set (one of the two removed, was the senior guy in the PRC ever to actually fight in combat, leading the war on Vietnam in 79.)

Who knows, they might even be right? Frankly though I doubt it. This feels more to me like Xi is getting rid of anyone who isn’t saying what he wants to hear. This of course leads down another funnel trap, the trap of “the Dictator’s Dilemma.” If you shoot the guys that tell you things you don’t want to hear, soon no one will tell you anything you don’t want to hear. Including things you NEED to hear.

OOPS.

I think Xi is in “Full speed ahead on the invasion of Taiwan, and anyone who says different needs to be re-educated” mode. That’s a problem, for everyone.

In the “why has the media been so silent about this?” Files (as if I didn’t know) Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, had a dude attempt to break in to his house with a pistol, to assassinate him, wearing a mask and gloves, back in AUGUST. The Police finally arrested him on January 22^nd. They had a Ringcam video of him, they knew his name, he had posted on Discord that he wanted to kill Russell Vought, and Trump, because he feared the take over of the nation by Nazis. Oh, but remember, the Right is the folks that need to turn down the rhetoric and lower the temperature.

I’ve been told repeatedly that “Well the right isn’t the only people with guns, so you better watch your step!” Yep I’m reminded of that every time there’s a school shooting, or an attempted assassination, or some other form of political violence. The trouble for the leftists? They suck at violence. It’s not that they’re not equipped, they’re just not good. (Thank the Gods)

This latest boob was Colin Demarco, a fan of Luigi Mangione, the dude that assassinated United Health Care Executive Brian Thompson.

Remember “Learn to code”? the call of the lefty in response to workers placed on the unemployment lines by the shutdown of factories, power plants, etc? Well it seems the flip side of that record is “Learn to make coffee.”

The Washington Post, that lovely little leftist rag that makes the NYT seem almost reasonable, just had to lay off a third of their workers, shut down their overseas reporting offices, their sports reporters, their ‘literature’ reporters (none of this was a great loss) and a bunch of their other stuff. Four of their head guys that got walking papers have opened up Starbucks branches.

You want a Venti`?

And finally, we have this report from UC Irvine: “Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that climate change is causing nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas and ozone-depleting substance, to break down in the atmosphere more quickly than previously thought, introducing significant uncertainty into climate projections for the rest of the 21st century.”

So, what a shocker, “Our models never accounted for this, and we have to reassess everything.” Gosh, it’s almost like we don’t really understand the way the environment is regulated, and someone was trying to sell fear and panic in pursuit of power… Naw, that couldn’t be, could it?

QOTD from the “wishful thinking files” “I would beat the shit out of him now if I could.” —Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Vice President JD Vance (Hell, Tampon, you couldn’t beat the shit out of Dillan Mulvaney.)

Yours in Service,

William Lehman