Imagine you’re an executive at The North Face, which is ostensibly an outdoor recreation company. It’s June of 2023, several years after the moral panic over BLM and George Floyd has subsided. You’ve run a few gender-bending advertisements for Pride Month to keep your overlords at Blackrock happy. Everything is normal. Everything is fine, you think.
Then one weekday, at 3:00 a.m., one of your “brand ambassadors” — someone you’re paying to represent your company to millions of people all over the world — suddenly freaks out on social media. He says he’s just been subjected to a flagrant act of white supremacy at a bar in Bozeman, Montana. He claims the culprit is a guy named John Talbot, who works at an apparel company called Outdoor Research. And then, to explain exactly what he’s talking about, your brand ambassador, whose name is Manoah Ainuu, uploads this footage to Instagram. Watch:
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