Join The Blue Men’s Group Girlcott Of South Carolina To Replace Lindsey Graham With Jaime Harrison

You know what a boycott is. But we already have enough negativity in our national discourse, and let’s face it: you probably weren’t going to be spending money on that thing you claim to be boycotting anyway (sorry Donald Trump nuts who don’t even live in New York who tried to boycott the Broadway run of Hamilton that was already sold out a year into the future). I guess by the logic of most boycotts, I’m waging a years-long boycott of the 95-plus percent of products in existence that I already don’t buy.

A “girlcott,” on the other hand, can be a more positive and more proactive way for a generalized group to have their voices heard through their pocketbooks. It seems the term may have first been widely used in 2005 in an effort by high school girls in Pennsylvania to protest Abercrombie & Fitch, as a descriptor simply for girls boycotting something (I’ll allow they definitely had the demographic paired up well with the boycotted product in that instance). But more recently, girlcott has been used to describe kind of the inverse of a boycott: going out and spending money on something purposefully to support and reward its source. Although she didn’t coin the term, author Stacy Malkan gets some credit for popularizing it in her book about the beauty industry. Malkan interviewed cancer researcher and author Dr. Devra Davis about using the word girlcott in her efforts to help people gradually replace the damaging products that seem to edge their way into all of our lives. “Boycotts mean saying no,” Davis explained. “Girlcotts mean yes.”

What a great concept. There are all kinds of worthy things one could apply it to. But, with this heinous election looming in just a couple weeks, I think there are a few obvious choices.

No, I’m not talking about Trump, for once. That’s too obvious, and too broad. But you know who it would be just fantastic to never have to hear from again? What about the guy who said this while stealing Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat:

I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.

… who then doubled down in 2018:

If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait till the next election.

… and who finally, in 2020, well after the primary process was over and just weeks from the general election, when it was his party getting to fill the Supreme Court seat, said “the rules have changed” before retweeting Trump’s tweet saying RBG’s Supreme Court seat should be filled “without delay.”

Yes, this wordsmith is the one who also called Trump, back in 2016, a “kook” who was “unfit for office” before spending the next four years cozying up to him like a neglected puppy. Now, in 2020, he goes to lick Trump’s boots as his regular golfing buddy. “I don’t like what he says about John McCain,” this supposedly close friend of McCain later said of Trump. “But when we play golf, it’s fun.” Among many other insults both before and after McCain’s death, Trump called McCain a “loser” because he was captured and tortured during the Vietnam War, a war which Trump himself avoided serving in because of a fictional diagnosis of bone spurs. Boy, some friend.

Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about the senior United States Senator from the great state of South Carolina, Lindsey Olin Graham! The many other betrayals of his constituents and whatever remnants of dignity he had left are far too voluminous to catalogue in what is already a too-long column, but suffice it to say that the people of South Carolina can do better, namely with Graham’s challenger in the upcoming election, Jaime Harrison. In a recent debate, Harrison said of Graham’s flip-flopping and subsequent tortured justifications:

The greatest heresy that you could do as a public servant is to betray the trust of the people that you took an oath to serve, and that’s what you’ve done. Just be a man of it and stand up and say, you know what, I’ve changed my mind.

Now there’s a leader, eh?

I’ve already explained what a girlcott is, and this is a “Blue Men’s Group” girlcott only because I am probably going to take my trip with a group of Democratic-leaning guys and I like the double entendre of a bunch of literally blue Tobias Fünke types traipsing around South Carolina. Men, women, and any and all nonbinary folks are totally welcome to join in the fun. So, this is how it works. If you want to join the girlcott, all you have to do is commit to visiting South Carolina sometime in 2021 (whenever it is safe, pandemic-wise) and to spending some money there, if and only if Harrison wins the Senate seat. This will be a reward to the good people of South Carolina for making the right choice on election day, and it will be a little treat for all of us who no longer have to listen to Graham misuse the powers of the government to rant at James Comey in a committee hearing about whatever the hell Obamagate is supposed to be.

Hey, it’s going to be a great time too. South Carolina has a lot going for it as a tourist destination. I should know: as I’m writing this, I’m even wearing my South Carolina Gamecocks sweatshirt from my last trip to the Palmetto State — go Gamecocks!

And if Graham gets re-elected? Well … I hear Vermont is lovely in the fall.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].