I don’t generally approve of “gotchas,” but you have to love this.
After Walmart’s CEO piously announced that his chain aims to never offend a single customer and was thus banning everything with a Confederate flag in it, on it, or around it, Chuck Netzhammer went to a Walmart in Louisiana and requested a cake decorated with the taboo flag’s image. He was refused. Then he asked to have a cake decorated with the ISIS battle flag. Walmart happily obliged! After all, who’s offended by ISIS?
Netzhammer then posted a video memorializing Walmart’s hypocrisy, saying on it that the Islamic State “is beheading Christians, selling little girls into slavery and is currently a terrorist org at war with the United States — but you can’t buy the General Lee toy car …?”
Yup, that’s about the size of it.
A Walmart spokesman quickly sent an email to The Daily Caller, which broke the story, insisting that the employee who accepted the ISIS flag did not recognize what it was or what it stood for. “Our local store made a mistake. The cake in the video should not have been made and we apologize.” Baloney, and apology not accepted. If Walmart is going to take ridiculous, censorious, grandstanding positions and pander shamelessly to rampaging political correctness mobs, it should be held to the absurd and impossible standard it set for itself.
What’s the policy, Walmart? Are your associates trained to decide what is free speech that your store will refuse to allow customers to express, or aren’t they? If Walmart employees are now to be cultural watchdogs, you need to pay them more. Meanwhile, I look forward to Walmart, lawyers and Social Justice Warriors explaining why a store can’t refuse to make a gay wedding cake on religious grounds, but can refuse to make a radical Islam cake, or, if it can’t, how a cake featuring a piece of American history that the individual requesting the cake may appreciate for completely innocent and reasonable reasons is more offensive than a cake featuring the flag adopted by terrorists. Oh, wait: is it because black lives matter but Christian lives don’t?
Come on, Walmart, let’s see you wiggle out of this like the wormy company you are.
Gotcha!
Ethics Alarms 
Amazon is on the hook here, too. You can find ISIS flags for sale on their website.
Good!
Addendum to previous post: God! What are my wife’s previous employers thinking?
Somehow your last two blog posts have merged into one news story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y6qTLf0AI4
Last THREE posts now: CNN botched it. The flag celebrated dildos, not ISIS…
And trolled ISIS better than any ISIS trolling I’ve seen so far.
If only it was a Confederate ISIS dildo flag…
It only the Civil War was fought over dildos…
It’s being re-fought now BY dildos. Time for the South to launch a counterattack.
Christian lives don’t Jack. Or at least they soon won’t.
Boy, everyone’s so gloomy this weekend here. Snap out of it!
No gloom here. Just a realist whose pretty good at sensing the seasons.
order the cake with a large white space then pick up some red, blue frosting & make your own stars & bars right there at the bakery counter !
I’d wager that 99% of Walmart employees couldn’t identify the ISIS flag but could correctly identify that two male plastic dolls on a wedding cake would be for a gay wedding or the Confederate flag (Dukes of Hazzard at a minimum).
This is a gotcha of the worst kind. The target was a bakery worker at a Walmart, not the owner of the bakery. I don’t care whether or not Walmart pulls its Confederacy line of products, but that decision was made at the corporate level, not by a minimum wage worker who was just trying to be helpful. Someone like the employee in question just stocks the shelves — and probably take little to no interest in the purchasing decisions that are made. This would have been an appropriate “gotcha” if someone had caught someone in management making this type of error.
But I think that’s part of the point, though: Walmart cannot ethically make the pronouncement it did, because it is literally impossible to not be engaged in some enterprise where they are not going to offend someone. I mean, it is literally impossible for ANYONE to not offend someone, sometime (something I am trying to teach my kid, incidentally). So, it doesn’t matter if their company representative, Joe Wageslave, is ignorant of what an ISIS flag looks like or not, it just matters that the company CEO pledged that his company would not offend anyone. It was a dumb, cynical and unethical thing to say, because he knew very well that it was not possible.
Look at the race of the majority of Walmart workers and you have the answer as to why his first request was denied.
“ISIS happens to be somebody who we’re fighting against right now who are killing our men and boys”
It would be treasonous to honor the flag of those who would attack and kill US soldiers.
I will start by first pointing out that Wal-Mart does not have an ethical duty to refuse to either offer Confederate flags or ISIS flags.
But once it picks and chooses the messages it wants to publish, the messages that they do publish can be imputed to them.
Where do you get THAT? A sign company isn’t deemed responsible for the messages its customers want to convey.
it is not if it takes all comers. But once it starts to pick and choose based on the message…