"The bandwagon effect is a phenomenon whereby the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases the more that they have already been adopted by others. In other words, the bandwagon effect is characterized by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the proportion who have already done so. As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence." -- WikipediaSo now not only can I no longer find my favorite brand of ice cream because the people of Maine have decided the owner of that particular company is racist and every single store has cleaned out its stock and now presents empty shelves where that brand stood, but I won't be able to work out at my CrossFit gym because the CEO of that organization wrote a one-word tweet that has been deemed "insensitive" to the Black Lives Matter movement and so the gym must "disassociate" from the parent company that made it what it is today and caused its membership to swell.
Yesterday a friend of mine who has often described herself as "racist" and admits she still "has a problem" with black people, i.e. doesn't like them, due to having grown up among racism -- her grandmother owned a plantation and employed what she called 20 slaves -- made a big show of attending a rally to show her "solidarity" with the movement, of course posting it on her Instagram page.
It's not just the little people who are crowding onto this particular wagon. The editor of the Opinion Page at the New York Times was forced to resign a day after after publishing an article written by a Republican senator that some snowflakes construed as racist. OMG! Thankfully he quit before the furious staff members, all of them comfortably seated on the bandwagon, could stone him to death.
We'd better all hope that Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and Whole Foods, doesn't make a silly mistake and say something insensitive. Then where would we shop and get all our cool stuff?
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