https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FscUyMuf-Fo
... this is supposed to be a "smash"? That was the saddest tik-tok stunt I've ever seen, although to be fair I intentionally don't look at tik-tok stunts. I actually saw this while I was looking, and I thought, that couldn't possibly be what you mean.
By all means, if Target wants to take him to small claims court for the price of putting the cardboard flap back together and hanging it back up, I'm all for it. That's
not me being glib: that was indeed a crime, and a very stupid one, and the absolutely laughable way he swaggers while doing it is just icing on the cake, and a guy like that probably doesn't have the brain cells to learn a lesson in the first place but that doesn't mean you can't try.
But, no, I don't believe for a second that that played any part in Target's decision to take down the line we were talking about, because it will have taken an employee (at minimum wage, I imagine) five seconds to put the sign back up and only served to make Target look better and its opponents look like losers. I think it's really dishonest of you to describe this as "conservatives smashing up a display and the company responding by pulling it from their stores", which, at a minimum, seems to imply some broken glass or merchandise rendered unsaleable, or at the very least something that would still be noticeable twenty minutes later. This is a question of framing: if you had just said "at least one asshole doing petty damage to a cardboard sign for social media clout" and not tried to attribute the company's decision to it, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
Look. As to the rest of your post. I don't imagine that you or anyone could "own" me, and I find your (and others') attribution of political positions to me really bizarre, and I make it a point not to talk about my own personal shit, and I don't feel that I owe you any explanation of my understanding of 'freedom', even if being up at this hour tends to make me chatty. I've been pruning away at this paragraph since I posted it, because I have this natural impulse to keep explaining my view on the whole edgelord Satanism thing, but now you seem to be trying to tell me that "fighting for freedom" somehow necessitates believing that no product line should ever be cancelled for its designer actively alienating customers by pretending to be a devil worshipper, and I just can't really muster up the energy for this. It's not like we don't know that people pretend to Satanism for the very purpose to shock and upset the kind of people this did in fact shock and upset, and that corporations don't like it when people get shocked and upset on their dime. Yes, it's ridiculous that anyone actually believes in Satanism, but we all already knew that some people do. That doesn't have any bearing on anything to do with fighting for freedom.
The source of this argument was whether or not companies were pulling pride support. As far as any indicators show, pride merchandise continues to be a huge moneymaker in most of the country (and several others), and it won't go away as long as it is a huge moneymaker. I'd think that would be something to be happy about, especially at a time when you feel attacked in general. I don't understand the pushback here.