Let me start with this: I Stand With Tucker.
And you can too, right here: https://standwithtucker.com
Now.
It is 2015.
A founder of a now-prominent American movement is proudly photographed hugging Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
A year later, in 2016, the same movement celebrates the life of Cuba’s Fidel Castro at his death.
Also in 2016, this is reported of the movement in a study by the Frontier Center, a market research organization:
The Black Lives Matter movement is wholly against dissent and freedom of speech and their success rests upon the silencing of dissent.
Hmmm.
So if you are T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert, what to do?
Do you have T-Mobile embrace the group supporting the silencing of dissent and freedom of speech in America?
Do you lend T-Mobile’s backing to that same group, one of whose founders has happily posed with the Venezuelan dictator who now stands accused of the following by a legal panel from the Organization of American States?
As reported in Canada’s National Post by a member of the OAS panel, Canada’s former Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler (he a member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s party):
After hearing from victims, witnesses and experts on human rights crimes, the OAS panel found Maduro responsible for dozens of murders, thousands of extra-judicial executions, more than 12,000 cases of arbitrary detentions, more than 290 cases of torture, attacks against the judiciary, and a “state-sanctioned humanitarian crisis” affecting hundreds of thousands of people.
If you are T-Mobile CEO Sievert, do you have T-Mobile endorse a group that has issued this statement on the death of Castro? The statement is headed:
Lessons from Fidel: Black Lives Matter and the Transition of El Comandante
The BLM statement celebrating Castro says, in part, this:
We are feeling many things as we awaken to a world without Fidel Castro. There is an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety. Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante. And there are lessons that we must revisit and heed as we pick up the mantle in changing our world, as we aspire to build a world rooted in a vision of freedom and the peace that only comes with justice. It is the lessons that we take from Fidel.…
As Fidel ascends to the realm of the ancestors, we summon his guidance, strength, and power as we recommit ourselves to the struggle for universal freedom. Fidel Vive!
This is, of course, the very same Fidel who was the Cuban dictator of legendary brutality who executed thousands of political prisoners, engaged repeatedly in mass torture, funded terrorists around the world, brought the world to the brink of the first global nuclear war, and, oh yes, rounded up gay men and put them in concentration camps. Yes indeed, Fidel had a particularly dim view of gays, as noted here in the liberal Daily Beast, when he said this in an interview:
We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.
So with all of that, if you are T-Mobile’s CEO Mike Sievert, what to do? Why, withdraw T-Mobile’s sponsorship of Tucker Carlson’s show, tweeting this:
Bye-bye Tucker Carlson! #BlackLivesMatter.
And why? Because Tucker Carlson had the brass to say this the other night:
This may be a lot of things, this moment we are living through, but it is definitely not about black lives, and remember that when they come for you. And at this rate, they will.
Hello? When dealing with a group that believes in silencing dissent and free speech, supports notoriously murderous dictators, one of whom specifically targeted gays — the answer here from T-Mobile is to try and silence Tucker Carlson? For having the nerve to point out that this kind of mentality will, as history has recorded repeatedly, eventually come round to you?
Tucker’s so-called “controversial” statement is nothing more than the 21st-century version of these famous lines from Germany’s 1930s-era theologian and Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
And if T-Mobile has any doubt about how this works? T-Mobile, you should check in with Bronx deli owner Lucy Hosley, a black woman, who said this in her viral video, as reported in the New York Post:
“We’ve been here all night cleaning up. [They] tell me ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They’re lying,” said Lucy Hosley, 69, outside Valentine Deli in a video posted to YouTube Tuesday after the raid earlier that morning.
“You wanted to loot the store. You needed money. Get a job like I do. Stop stealing.”
In the video, debris and broken glass can be seen on the sidewalk outside the Valentine Avenue deli.
“You said Black Lives Matter — why don’t you choke me?” railed Hosley, who has co-owned the business for six years. “I’m black, look what you did to my store.”
“This is our neighborhood. We’re trying to build it up and you tear it down,” she added.
And as I also noted over in NewsBusters:
Then there was this building in New York — a mosque. As reported by CBS New York, the mosque was located over a grocery store — and both were gutted by fire and looting. Prayer services at the mosque were just about to end when all hell broke loose. Prayer books and everything else inside the building were destroyed. A heartbroken Smuglz Hussein, the president of the mosque, said: “We are helpless. We are in the street now.”
In other words? What happened to black store owner Lucy Hosley and mosque president Smuglz Hussein is the personification of what Tucker Carlson said the other night.
And the response from T-Mobile’s CEO Mike Sievert (who by the way is a three-time donor to the left-wing fundraising group Act Blue) is … to try and silence Tucker Carlson by removing T-Mobile’s ads? Really? Really? Talk about branding yourself.
So too was the response of sponsors Disney, Papa John’s, and Poshmark.
Enough. It is long, long, long past the time when Americans who believe in free speech and the right to dissent — and who, I might add, were outraged at the murder of George Floyd — begin to stand up. And stand up not just for Tucker Carlson’s free speech and right to dissent — letting his audience and his ratings be the judge — but stand up for the Lucy Hosleys and Smuglz Husseins of America and their right to run a business and worship in a mosque without having both of them destroyed by mobs.
A way to begin? Right here.
This is America. T-Mobile, Disney, Papa John’s, and Poshmark are entitled to do and say as they please. But so are their customers.
If there are T-Mobile customers out there who wish to Stand With Tucker and would like to express themselves directly to Mr. Sievert, per T-Mobile, he can be reached here:
T-Mobile:
General Customer Care & Technical Support
From the T-Mobile app, on a T-Mobile phone
From your T-Mobile phone: 611
Call: 1-800-937-8997
Questions and Comments
T-Mobile Customer Relations
PO Box 37380
Albuquerque, NM 87176-7380
And here is contact information for the others.
Papa John’s:
CEO Rob Lynch
Papa John’s Corporate Office | Headquarters
2002 Papa John’s Boulevard
Louisville, KY 40299
Phone: (502) 261-7272
Website: www.papajohns.com
Poshmark:
Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra
Poshmark HQ
203 Redwood Shores Pkwy, 8th Floor
Redwood City, CA 94065
Disney:
Bob Chapek
Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company
500 S. Buena Vista St.
Burbank, CA 91521
Phone: 407-934-7639
Enough is enough.
Stand With Tucker.
