Oh no. Clarkson has decided to issue a lengthy and grovelling apology to the Woke Queen Meghan and her snivelling ‘spare’ sidekick, for the apparently heinous crime of a misjudged joke.
“I really am sorry,” says our farming friend. “All the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head.”
He has done this either to try to keep his Amazon show, or because he genuinely means it. Both are bad.
The latter is more simple. He is making the classic mistake of apologising to merciless ideologues with no mechanism for forgiveness, as well as a baying mob who will only be excited by this next whiff of fresh blood.
This approach can never work, as was confirmed immediately by H & M’s infuriatingly pompous statement, by way of reply:
While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr. Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his longstanding pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny.
Unless each of his other pieces were also written “in a hurry”, as he states, it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.
In other words, Clarkson must capitulate fully to woke norms, where everything is misogyny and all political opponents are ‘hateful‘, yet when they destroy someone it is simply a case of ‘consequences’ and ‘accountability’.
Never mind Harry’s hate towards his ginger nemesis Rebekah Brooks, or the many other targets in his book, the sequel to which could easily be called Overshared in Hate.
So that was a massive fail from Jezza. But chances are he knew that and was apologising simply to appease Amazon, which is a more complicated proposition.
Why would Amazon want to lose someone who is, ostensibly at least, one of their most bankable stars? Some on the left claim that the sole aim of corporations is to make money, and that, for instance, the existence of so many woke films is simply because executives believe that is the content that will maximise profits.
It is an obviously flawed premise, since woke movies consistently tank at the box office. What seems more likely to me is that corporations are now just as interested in social engineering and control as they are in profit. Much like the idiot child Justin Trudeau, they look to China with admiration. Presumably, this is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washingon Post: influence is now a greater currency than the rapidly diminishing dollar.
Some will stick with the simple dollars-and-sense argument and say Amazon suspects it’ll lose more subscriptions by backing Clarkson over Meghan. I find that unlikely. The issue was essentially buried. The Clarkson fans – who probably hate Meghan on at least a cellular level, if not deeper – would have continued to watch his farm show. And Meghan fans will continue to use Amazon for whatever it is they buy (perhaps a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince?).
No doubt there is pressure from the woke employees within the company to engage in these struggle sessions. Or maybe Bezos just wants to fit in at his dinner parties with the elites, enjoying his virtue points over a main course of synthetic meat and Adrenochrome.
The Telegraph, however, has come up with a more compelling argument on the financial side: apparently Clarkson’s numbers just aren’t cutting it on a global scale. According to this theory, the whole Meghan thing is just a convenient excuse for Amazon to send Clarkson to the knacker’s yard, while he can save face by claiming to be another victim of cancel culture. In our fallen world, this has a cynical ring of truth to it.
Then again, at the time of writing, ITV is now distancing itself from Clarkson too. Is Who Wants to be a Millionaire? also failing? Or is this a co-ordinated ‘Matrix attack’, like when Andrew Tate suddenly lost all his social media accounts in one day? At the rate this is escalating, I expect by the time of publishing Clarkson will be languishing in a Romanian jail under accusations of sex trafficking. I mean, who suddenly decides to run a ‘farm’ in middle-age with no prior experience? It all starts to make sense.
Whichever theory you go for, it all comes back to Meghan. Even if Amazon is just using her as the scapegoat, she is still suspiciously near the crime scene. Why did the furore die down, only to suddenly flare up again? This has Markle written all over it. Just as she got rid of Piers Morgan, she’s now taken another gammon scalp. Clarkson fantasised about her being paraded through the streets naked like Cersei, and now, as if to continue the Game of Thrones analogy that he failed to spell out for the slow kids, she will get her revenge by blowing up his career.
What is so disappointing is that Clarkson hasn’t even gone down fighting. By backing down from his slightly misjudged but clearly satirical column, he has taken a massive L. With the initial Twitter apology, the private Christmas apology, and the new, novella-length apology on Instagram, Clarkson is already three apologies in. Yet his Grand Apology Tour is, I suspect, only just beginning.
I for one hate it on a cellular level.
Stop Press: Allison Pearson in the Telegraph says she’d prefer a world full of Jeremy Clarksons than Meghan Markles.
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The big question for which I have yet to see a good explanation is why major corporations are so devoted to woke ideology, often at the expense of sales and profit.
Are they just captured from within like all our institutions?
Does it make financial sense because in this world of crony capitalism, they need to continue setting the rules for themselves and they can only happen if they are in hoc with the bureaucratic establishment?
I wonder exactly the same. Any answers on a postcard PLEASE.
Ask Larry Fink.
The major corporations and governments are now utterly intertwined. Milton Friedman once said that the trouble with big government is that the bigger it gets, the more big business runs it. There’s no way Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Procter and Gamble and other corporations will be allowed to go bust. Governments, investment banks such as BlackRock and supranational bodies such as the the EU and even the UN will protect them and keep them afloat.
In return, the corporations bring restrictions, censorship, state propaganda and unacceptable distortions to the market to the private sector in the knowledge that reneging on their fiduciary duties to their shareholders won’t cost them anything. The corporations become the thugs who go to small businesses demanding protection money. The likes of the WEF, which many major politicians and business leaders are part of, represent the glue tying these weird utopians together.
Schwab is right that we need a reset, but the reset involves purging the WEF and ‘stakeholder capitalism’ from the state and business.
The privatization of government itself is the logical conclusion of the small-state ideology. Granted, it absolutely doesn’t look like what the neoliberals where dreaming of but then, people have been trying to tell them that their theories don’t work in practice for 30 years or so and if they absolutely don’t want to listen (which they absolutely don’t), overlord Schwab, who’ll tell them that serfs have to be masked all the time so that they aren’t confused with their master, is all they deserve to get.
Ultimatively, if someone keeps drilling deeper and deeper into the bottom of ship, it will sink.
That about sums it up. Some American states are fighting back against Blackrock, Vanguard and other big investment banks who are forcing the ESG agenda US companies against their wishes. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/19-states-investigate-major-us-banks-pushing-esg-policies-killing-american-companies
In reality, it’s pretty much the opposite: The more the state is shrunken, the larger the parts of your life which are controlled by unaccountable private corporations becomes. That should really be obvious. Eg, it’s possible to privatize security and that’s where this crop of unpleasant security companies whose employees handle smaller-scale crimes as they see fit, employing violence in whichever way they like, comes from. But it’s not possible to make the problem go away. Whatever the state ceases doing will end up being handled by privately-owned service companies operating outside of the proper procedures of the political sphere.
Good question and I wish I knew.
Certainly the very large firms will have influence in mind.
I only know a couple of bosses of sizeable firms personally. One is a dyed in the will lefty and has been since forever so for him it’s personal and sincere. The other is a centrist who would probably find the more extreme woke positions distasteful and/or laughable, but wants to seem nice and wants his firm to seem nice and he supports stuff like encouraging applications from minorities etc. I think it’s just the way people think these days.
I think I read somewhere something about big investors like BlackRock and banks imposing ESG rules as part of the condition for getting loans/investments. It was only something I saw in passing, but it does make sense. The big funders are a small group and entwined with governments. Force people to throw away their petrol cars and gas ovens and buy all new electric versions – kerching. I recently saw a government framework agreement concerning the parcelling out of government work and quite a lot of the conditions went on about human rights, women rights, equality, blah blah blah – the companies seeking the work would have to submit proof of compliance with the conditions. These conditions undoubtedly also apply to permits and the like issued by public authorities. I don’t remember anything about competence, experience or skill, but I might have overlooked the 2 sentences dedicated to those minor details.
When getting the likes of Ginge and Whinge to jump on the outrage bandwagon, it helps in the current, intentional emotionally and socially destabilising movement that seems to be part and parcel – having people argue with each other non-stop over differences of opinion regarding usually trivial matters (like the Markle, dislike the Markle, who bloody cares), or spend time trying to figure out which of 101 genders they might be and how to reconcile climate activism with lots of plane travel and mobile phones means they don’t spend time looking behind the curtain.
As for Clarkson and Amazon – perhaps it’s in part related to Amazon’s announced cost cutting? While social credit points at the same time?
I like how Ginge and Whinge worked ‘conspiracy theories’ into their unforgiving (surely that is hateful?) reply. Apparently being rascist, fascist and Hitler are so 2021, the new slur is that you must be a conspiracy theorist. Little do they realise that more and more people know that that ‘slur’ is a badge to be worn with pride.
For Amazon, the answer is extremely simple: It’s not really corporation, more a privately-owned socialist state with a tax-like guaranteed income stream. The people controlling Amazon don’t have to care for making money. That’s automatic and taken for granted. The same is true for any of the other internet giants: They’re all de facto monopolies, ie, compared to them, their competitors are nothing but flies fighting over the waste the big guys don’t really care for. And hence, they’ve become political and not commercial entities and – a serious advantage – political entities not accountable to anyone and not very much affected by local laws.
Clarkson has, essentially, been doing the same thing since 1988, very successfully.
He has a following in Hollywood, the anti Mr & Mrs Sussex part, probably larger than one might immediately imagine. Given that, he can probably go on for another thirty years if he so wishes through one medium or another
His apologies will be, as was his sensationalist column, commercially motivated and so was the Sussex response, ‘PR department’ written all over it.
Everything, but everything, that comes out of ‘Sussex upon Montecito’ is looking for a dollar. That’s it. This whole country should put them in ‘Coventry’
Allison Pearson has it right in today’s DT:
‘Oh for God’s sake!’
Clarkson should say ‘Fine! Apology withdrawn! F*** you both, you Californian, druggie, Satanist, microbrain f***tards!’ or something similar!
This happened because it’s Clarkson and because he apologised. Nothing else. No nuances. Full stop. Apologising in this Maoist Hell scape is like surfing the Australian coast with a nose bleed. But instead of sharks, an army of screaming, blue haired, tongue pierced, joyless, vapid, pampered narcissistic drama students start tearing at your flesh.
If Marina Hyde from the Guardian had written this, the cultural bourgeoisie would have guffawed their soy milk expresso martinis down their shirts and got on with their lives.
Spot on. Rule One in dealing with woketards is never, but never, apologise. Ever.
As i’ve said many times the best thing to do with those two is to ignore them completely. They seek attention and indeed thrive of it, stop feeding the beast.
Never complain, never explain. Clarkson has really screwed up bowing down to the Marxist mob.
A four minute monologue by Andrew Lawrence on Youtube entitled ‘Jeremy Clarkson’s endless grovelling apology’ hits the nail on the head and is a splendid adjunct to this article.
Same here. He should never have apologised.
He should hold a “The World According to Clarkson” tour around the UK. It’ll be a sell-out.
Only if he could do it May when I will be in the uk not LOS.
It appears that the corporates are more bothered about this than the general population. I totally agree that Clarkson should not have backed down (having found himself in a rather foolish position in the first place). Clarkson probably isn’t big enough to take down H&M himself, but he is another of the ‘forlorn hope’ throwing himself against the guns, so that victory can be achieved by those behind them. It will come, and it will be stunning when it happens. Now Harry hasn’t got a secret left, I have the feeling that its only going one way…
The H&M reply was written by a pompous git, so far up their alimentary canal as to be totally unaware of their own self righteousness.
It would be better for all concerned if they focused their attention on their clothing stores.
A world full of Meghan Markles? I suppose that’s one way of depopulating the earth as most with any sense would top themselves.
What a wimp?