Conservatives Are Winning The Red Hen / Sarah Sanders Battle
Conservatives and Liberals are battling online over the Red Hen restaurant and whether or not it was right to kick our Sarah Sanders. But at least by one metric the right is winning, the Yelp rating for the restaurant is declining rapidly due to fake reviews by people who support Trump.Even with the left counter brigrading the average ratings continues to declineSUPPORT JOURNALISM. Become a patron athttp://www.patreon.com/TimcastSupport the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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Just a few days ago, we saw the story break about Sarah Huckabee Sanders being kicked out of the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia because she worked for Donald Trump.
At least, that's what she's tweeted out.
Since then, there's been a lot of back and forth between the left and the right over whether or not the business should have done this.
And seemingly paradoxically, you have just recently this court ruling about the bakery in Colorado where the man didn't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, and people on the left are saying, see, the conservatives are all hypocrites.
They get mad when they're kicked out of an institution, but then they get mad when a baker is forced to bake a cake, and it's a very complicated situation.
The rhetoric is flying left and right like crazy, but guess what?
There is at least one quantifiable metric to say, in this fight, it seems like the conservatives are winning.
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First, let's quickly go over the story from CNN, why Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant.
Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the Red Hand Restaurant, who had asked Press Secretary
Sanders to leave, told the media on Saturday that she is not a huge fan of confrontation,
adding, "...I have a business, and I want the business to thrive.
But as Wilkinson rightly noted, this feels like the moment in our democracy when people
have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals."
Wilkinson further explained her approach to handling the situation.
She first spoke with her employees who disagreed with Sanders' defense of Trump's discriminatory
ban on transgender Americans who want to serve in the military, and her recent defense of
Trump's un-American family separation policy.
In response, she then asked Sanders to step outside the patio and explained, Now, this is an op-ed, okay?
This is not CNN's official reporting on the matter.
I'm just trying to show you the perspective on what happened and who it's coming from according to CNN.
But Donald Trump recently intervened.
This story from USA Today.
Donald Trump attacks restaurant that kicked out Sarah Sanders.
They said, President Donald Trump defended Press Secretary Sarah Sanders on Monday by attacking the Virginia restaurant that asked White House spokeswoman to leave the premises.
Trump tweeted, The Red Hen restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors, and windows.
Badly needs a paint job.
Rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
I always had a rule.
If a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside.
Now, there is a quantifiable metric to say that the right is winning in this fight, and I'll get to that, but I just want to point out, isn't it great that our political bickering is over where someone eats food?
And unlike last year, where people were bashing each other in the streets, I would much rather see people complaining about a restaurant in Lexington than street battles.
But it is ridiculous and entirely absurd that in this country, this is what it comes down to.
Somebody who worked for the White House tries to go to a restaurant, gets kicked out, and now we're seeing mudslinging like crazy.
Is this the battle that everyone wants to engage in?
I guess so.
Because we are seeing mass brigading of the Red Hen restaurant on Yelp.
And this is the metric.
The right is winning this fight, and I'll explain why.
On Yelp, Red Hen has one and a half stars out of five, with 14,851 reviews.
Clearly, the reviews are not real.
And just above it says, this business is being monitored by Yelp's support team for content related to media reports.
When we scroll down, we see this active cleanup alert.
Talks about how the business made waves in news, which means that people come to the page to post their views on the news and not the restaurant.
Says, as a result, your post to this page may be removed as part of our cleanup process beginning Saturday, June 23rd, 2018, but you should feel free to post your thoughts about the recent media coverage for this business on Yelp Talk at any time.
The first two posts are a perfect example of the fight between the left and the right, and why the right is winning.
Because we can see five stars.
The food, the experience, and the workers are good here.
Obviously, Sarah Sander liked to eat here enough to come here.
Sorry, not sorry.
This is probably a fake review from someone who doesn't like the Trump administration giving five stars.
Just below, from the 25th, we have a one-star review.
And this is an actual review, it looks like.
However, I have to say, this is still probably a fake review.
But they do talk about their actual experience, so let's move down one.
This post immediately calls out low-IQ liberal comments about the Red Hens standing up for what's right, and they're clearly here from the news story, giving it one star.
So, here's what's happening.
The left and the right are brigading this page.
However, it seems like the right is winning because they're currently at one and a half stars.
When I first checked out their rating the other day, it was at two stars.
So it is going down.
And the two stars, it's not even their original rating.
When we go to TripAdvisor, we can see that they actually have four and a half out of five circles, whatever that means.
And it does say that they've blocked publishing to this page to help protect it from media reports.
Long story short, the left and the right are fighting on this Yelp page, and the score is going down, meaning more people on the right care about this, or are voting on it, than people on the left.
And Charlie Kirk tweeted something interesting that I wanted to address.
He said, The Red Hen restaurant on Yelp has 13,700 negative reviews
with an average rating of two stars.
Would be a shame if another 100,000 reviews would be added.
This is the market at work.
Don't force someone to serve another person, but if you refuse, you must accept the consequences.
And I think he's technically right, but I do disagree.
This is not really the market.
This is politicking.
According to the market, TripAdvisor shows that people actually like their food.
And yeah, they engaged in politics, and now they're reaping the political marketplaces.
Retribution against them, so they will receive negative reviews.
Now, why I think the right is winning this fight comes from something someone pointed out to me.
Initially, I said I think they'll actually swing the other direction, that even though all these people on the right are attacking them, the left will probably go there now and give them money.
But someone pointed out that when all of this is said and done, when the turmoil dies down and people forget the Red Hen exists, those negative reviews will stay.
Obviously not all of them, but many of them will, because many of them are disguised as actual reviews.
In which case, what can Yelp do?
Purge the entire page?
Or leave up some of the bad reviews?
But of course, the controversy doesn't end there.
CNN compares restaurant kicking out Sarah Sanders' private family dinner to bakery refusing Joe Biden campaign photo op.
This is from the Gateway Pundit.
The story brings up Andrew Kaczynski's tweet.
He says, I'm doing a search of entertainment conservatives who celebrated a Virginia bakery
who refused to serve Biden and are condemning Red Hen for not serving Sarah Huckabee Sanders
and having a 100% success rate so far.
I have to say, in this instance, you really see the true colors of Andrew Kaczynski.
This is a heavily biased tweet on his part, because when you actually break down the two situations, you realize they're not the same.
And this is what the Gateway Pundit is getting at.
Yes, there was a bakery that refused to service Joe Biden, but it was for a political campaign stop, not Joe Biden walking in and trying to order a bagel.
They're very different.
Gateway Pundit shows a tweet from Jason Rantz, who said, Which is also rather biased in the other direction, but it is correct.
to be honest, so I shall. The bakery in question was asked to host a campaign
stop, but now CNN believes businesses should be forced to host campaign
visits." Which is also rather biased in the other direction, but it is correct.
Joe Biden wanted to have a campaign event and photo op at a bakery, and the
baker, for political reasons, said he wouldn't do it.
So Biden simply went to another event.
It was actually someone from Joe Biden's team asking in advance, can we do a campaign stop here?
The baker said, no, I disagree with your politics.
They moved on down the street and did their event.
Dramatically different from Sarah Sanders going to a restaurant, sitting down, trying to eat, and then being kicked out.
But back to my main point about the potential market ramifications.
The left might actually win in the long run.
The bakery in question that refused the campaign stop for Biden sells out of Freedom Cookies.
A Radford businessman's decision not to host an unscheduled campaign event with Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday has sparked a news story that's gone viral and led to a surge in business.
Just call him Chris the Baker.
Chris McMurray had just opened the bakery, come and get it, Wednesday morning when he received a visit from Biden's advance team asking if he'd help the vice president for a media event.
This baker sold out after he politely declined the advance team's request to host a campaign event.
out of a difference in politics and Biden instead went up the street to the
River Street Grill instead. This baker sold out after he politely declined the
advance team's request to host a campaign event. It is very different from
what Sarah Sanders was doing.
Now I will point out, the people who are servicing this bakery were seemingly conservative because it seems like the positive response he got was from people who didn't like Joe Biden.
In which case, if there are more negative Yelp reviews on the Red Hen page, and a baker who rejected Biden sold out, it is possible that the right is able to mobilize better than the left.
Ultimately, though, I think when it comes to these kinds of stories, there's one old adage that proves true.
The left can't meme.
For whatever reason, I don't know why, it seems like people who are hooked into the internet tend to lean conservative, or at least libertarian-ish centrist, just not far left, not hardcore resistance.
Now, here's my opinion.
I think businesses should not be able to turn people away for political reasons, the same as they shouldn't be able to turn people away for their race, gender, national origin.
And I lean slightly in favor of this.
It's a very tough position, because it is scary to think the government can force you to provide a service.
But I feel like if you're hosting a business, if you're running a service and participating in public paying taxes, you shouldn't be able to remove people because of how you feel about them.
It does get a bit nuanced when we talk about the cake or the florist who denied services to a gay wedding because you're asking for customization of service, in which case someone has to go out of their way and do something above and beyond.
But it's still, you know, I still lean in favor of just serve people.
Because when we look at what's going on with Red Hen, it actually scares me to think.
We might come to a point where you try and go to a restaurant and they have someone at the door asking you who you voted for.
All that will serve to do is divide us more and that can only lead to a really bad place.
Now, I don't know exactly why, but in Washington, D.C., they do protect political affiliation, which I find very interesting.
According to the D.C.
Office of Human Rights, their protected traits include number 12, political affiliation, belonging to or supporting a political party, and below that, number 17, source of income, applies to housing, public accommodation, and educational institutions.
Origination of a person's finances.
If someone says, you work for Trump, if that were to happen in DC, it is not allowed.
It is legal.
If they said you support certain policies, you're a part of this political organization, they also can't do that either.
Maybe that's a protection we need nationwide.
And I know a lot of people are saying that you should let the market handle it.
But I am concerned that all that will serve to do is push our tribes further and further away from each other.
We've already seen businesses deny Trump supporters, conservatives.
We heard the story of that man who was mocked and ridiculed at a cheesecake factory for wearing a maca hat.
The last thing we need is for people to be berated in the streets, for our society to further break down, and for more political problems to arise because it's just going to make the problem worse every single time we hear a story.
It makes the problem worse.
So you know what?
How about everybody just grows up and says, look man, if you're gonna sell, you know, chicken salads or whatever it is the redhead sells, just serve the people who ask for it.
If you're baking cakes, bake a cake when someone asks for it.
It's a complicated situation.
It's not black and white.
There's nuance here.
But I'm just hoping we can maintain the fabric of our society and not tear it apart because, look, we all live here.
We have to get along.
We have to figure out how to make sure we get along.
And the last thing we need is to divide into tribes and then attack each other.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
How do you feel about this?
I think there's gonna be a lot of people who believe that Sarah Sanders should have been served, and a lot of people who say, hey man, let the business do what they want.
So I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Comment below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast.
Stay tuned.
New videos every day at 4 p.m.
Thank you all so much for watching.
One last announcement.
On my second channel, YouTube.com slash TimCastNews, I'm going to periodically be uploading strings of different stories individually, and you can go to my channel and check it out, because there's some up now.
It's doing really well, so hopefully YouTube monetizes that channel, and I can use that to help expand what I do.
