Sometimes, it is the little things that tell us the most about where the culture is headed. If so, this is terrific news. The New York Times ran a very encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Starbucks Reverses Its Open-Door Policy for Bathroom Use and Lounging. Our long national nightmare is finally over. It started in 2018 when two black guys were arrested for loitering (which the Times laughably euphemized into ‘lounging’) and otherwise hanging around in Starbucks without buying anything and using the bathroom. At the time, Black Lives Matter was just getting started, and apparently they were spoiling for a racist bathroom fight, and the rest is surreal history.
In 2022, Starbucks started closing some stores because of what its then-CEO euphemistically called a “growing mental health problem.” In other words, crazy homeless people were hogging the bathrooms and literally taking sponge baths in the sink, which is a sight you’ll never forget, believe me.
Since “the unhoused” were camped out in there for hours, paying customers had to hold it. And some Starbucks started to seem more like soup kitchens than places where folks pay $7 for “coffee.” And they stank, which might not be homeless people’s fault but it didn’t help sell sugary caffeine drinks and mediocre baked goods.
But the point is, the climate in this country was so woke that Starbucks would rather close stores than be called “racist” and “heartless,” by simply requiring people to buy something to access its bathrooms, and by restricting the rooms’ use to architecturally intended purposes.
Meaning, not taking sink showers or shooting up heroin in there.
Two years, one triumphant election, and a new CEO later, Starbucks now dares to lock its bathroom doors and discriminate against race-hustling homeless people. That lone decision signals a significant shift in the zeitgeist.
But it’s so much bigger than that: just look at the universally uncritical coverage:
The closest thing to even a hint of criticism appeared only in far-left Axios’ headline, but I clicked through to see, and it had already changed the actual headline to something consistent with the new homogenous narrative. This is the current, bland Axios headline:
“Among the changes,” Axios reported, “will be the posting of signs banning discrimination and harassment, violence or abusive language, outside alcohol, panhandling, drug use, and other disruptive behavior.” In other words, seven years of tolerant coffeeshop management later, Starbucks will call the cops on you again, and corporate media is too chicken to call them racist.
It’s not just a welcome change in overpriced coffeeshop policy. It’s the great unwinding of a terrible and destructive narrative shoved down our throats during Trump’s first term. It is a reversion of woke, the unfolding success of the conservative counter-revolution as the enemies’ battle lines collapse.
It is even more Trump Effect.
At the risk of reading too much into it, I can’t help but recall the end of Lord of the Rings. Sam asked Gandalf, “Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” And then:
“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.
I also feel like a great Shadow has departed. What do you think?
Am I imagining things?
