Did you smash your Keurig machine this weekend, to protest the company pulling their ads off Sean Hannity’s show?

Then congratulations, you’re an idiot. You destroyed a piece of property worth hundreds of dollars to boycott a company that already has your money, in order to defend a conservative infotainment character who is, in turn, defending a man accused of preying on an underage girl.

https://twitter.com/TheRevBobLevy/status/929822511457558534

So good for you. You’re dumber than dirt, and got played by a conman pretending to be a radio personality.

If you have no idea what the boycott Keurig thing is all about, then congratulations also go to you, because you live a healthy, balanced existence where right wing demagogues can’t talk you into smashing your stuff.

Basically:

1. Roy Moore is an ultra-conservative judge in Alabama. He’s running for the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions being tapped to turn the Department of Justice into a modern-day slave hunting apparatus.
2. On Friday, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell story that also somehow wasn’t surprising at all: that in his younger days, Moore had a predilection for “dating” teenage girls. One of these girls was 14, and at least one other may have been plied with wine.
3. Moore denied the charges, calling them “fake news,” because that’s what we call stories that allege things we don’t like.
4. Many Republicans called on Moore to drop out of the race “if the allegations were true.” This served mostly to cover their ass, because Moore already said he wasn’t dropping out, and it’s likely these same Republicans will simply take his denials at face value and welcome his vote for tax cuts with open arms.
5. Naturally, Sean Hannity didn’t think Moore did anything wrong, and had a long interview with him where Moore basically danced around the idea of dating a 14 year old, while admitting he dated many “young ladies” but never without their parents’ permission. Because that would be rude.
6. Understandably thinking Hannity was laying a smokescreen for an accused pedophile, many other people demanded Hannity’s advertisers pull their products off his show.
7. Four companies did, including the one-cup coffee company Keurig.
8. Keurig-owning conservatives who don’t mind older men preying on 14-year-old girls found themselves in a bind, and resolved the issue by declaring their absolute loyalty to Hannity and destroying their coffee makers.
9. #BoycottKeurig went viral on Twitter. Sean Hannity even offered to buy hundreds of Keurigs and give them to his supporters to smash.
10. We’re all idiots and deserve to be wiped out by an asteroid.

It’s not clear how many people have actually done this, or if it’s just a few videos getting a ton of viral play, which got picked up by major media outlets because of just how stupid the people involved are.

The few videos that are circulating are from the usual rabidly pro-Trump, and anti-brain trolls that spam out thousands of tweets per day in support of their lord and master.

Beyond that, a big chunk of the posts under #BoycottKeurig have the unmistakable patina of Russian troll farms, what with their slapdash memes and being overstuffed full of hashtags.

Even so, it’s clear at least some people have done this. And these people are idiots.

For one, this is not the way boycotts work. A boycott means to avoid purchasing a product or using a service for political purposes, and in doing so, damaging the company’s finances and possibly forcing them to change their ways.

A boycott is NOT destroying something you’ve already bought to stick it to the company you bought it from.

If liberals wanted to stop buying handicrafts at Hobby Lobby to protest their anti-contraception stance, that’s a boycott. If liberals wanted to buy a bunch of handicrafts at Hobby Lobby and burn them all to protest their anti-contraception stance, that’s not a boycott. That’s idiocy.

The ridiculous drive to hurt Keurig by destroying already-purchased Keurig machines isn’t even the first conservative boycott a product by purchasing that product.

https://twitter.com/MichellePiper18/status/930073476282638337

Remember #BoycottStarbucks? That was the one from the beginning of this year when conservatives vowed to get back at the coffee giant for promising to hire 10,000 refugees. They bought Starbucks coffee and poured it down drains, which not only made Starbucks more money, but got liberals to counter the protest by going to Starbucks when ordinarily liberals don’t do that kind of thing.

Or remember a few months before that when conservatives vowed to #BoycottStarWars because ROGUE ONE was supposedly reshot to include anti-Trump scenes? Not only did those scenes never exist, but ROGUE ONE got free publicity that launched it to a massive box office that wasn’t affected in the slightest by the “boycott.”

Or when conservatives registered their outrage against the NFL by burning their already-paid for NFL gear? Yeah, that was a Swiss watch of a plan.

The point of these “boycotts” is not to hurt anyone’s bottom line, nor to cause social change. It’s to get cheap clicks and publicity. On that score, they work for the people who start the ball rolling. For the shmoes who destroy their Keurigs or dump the latte they just bought…not so much.

What’s actually working is the effort to damage conservative infotainers by hitting them were they hurt the most: their coffers.

Sean Hannity isn’t calling for people to smash Keurigs because he thinks it will hurt them. He’s scared shitless of more companies fleeing his show, and having to work a little harder to shill his lunacy to the rubes who lap it up.

And I’ll drink a big mug of steaming coffee to that.