Elle Purnell of the Federalist reacts to a key element of the recent Super Bowl.
With a couple of exceptions, most notably from the NFL itself, the ads for Super Bowl LIX tried their best to charm viewers with feel-good schmaltz. A “Country Roads” singalong, Harrison Ford driving a Jeep, Glen Powell driving a Ram truck — even Bud Light went all in on white guys with Shane Gillis and his grass-cutting smoker.
The most “woke” of the bunch was the NFL’s unsubtle dig at football-playing high school men, which is undeniably a weird demographic for the league to target with disgust. The message was that men are keeping girlbosses everywhere from playing flag football, which is not the greatest threat women’s sports have faced in recent years, to say the least. (Nike’s ad about oppression in women’s sports was similarly tone-deaf.) …
… The vibe shift is obvious, sure. But it reeks of the plea for “amnesty” after corporate America and the Biden administration forced people out of their jobs, schools, and communities in the name of Covid. Mistakes were made, they admitted, but now that we’ve decided not to round up the unvaccinated and put them in camps, can’t we let bygones be bygones?
Four years before this year’s rah-rah USA commercial, Jeep collaborated with lefty Bruce Springsteen to lecture Americans about their political division. Springsteen, who had called the first Trump presidency a “f—ing nightmare,” suggested that, with Biden recently in charge, we could suddenly all become the “ReUnited States of America.” The connection to Jeep sales wasn’t clear, but the political message was: If you don’t like the Biden regime’s radical overreach or the suspicious circumstances by which it came to power, you’re the problem.
Watching Harrison Ford talk about freedom, while a touch cheesy, is certainly an improvement. But corporate America doesn’t suddenly love conservatives — they’re just looking out for their bottom line.
