For the offense of praising President Donald Trump during the announcement of a new White House initiative fostering better educational choices and more entrepreneurship within the Hispanic community, the left decided to cancel Goya Foods CEO Bob Unanue and his company.

Unanue praised the president’s leadership at a Rose Garden ceremony. For that, there were calls to boycott Goya products, and Twitter hashtags such as #Goyaway and #BoycottGoya began trending. Forget that Unanue was there to promote opportunity for the Hispanic community. Forget that Goya is an extremely charitable company in both the United States and abroad. And forget that Unanue had participated in White House events with President Barack Obama.

Simply allying oneself in any way with President Trump is worthy of leftist cancellation. Similar anti-Trump hysteria has been visited upon companies large and small.

This cancel culture extremism reveals a coarsening toward the respect that has usually been automatically shown to the White House. On the Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper explained the growing problem to guest host Brian Kilmeade:

What we’re being asked to do is to disregard every tradition, every acknowledgement of respect.

It is a very high honor to meet with the President of the United States. I had an opportunity when Barack Obama was president to actually get a chance to shake his hand. I was polite. I was respectful. And it wasn’t something extra that I needed to do – even though I wasn’t personally a supporter. I respected and honored the office.

This woke crowd is asking America to completely reject all of its values. All of its traditions. And, in this particular case, they’re actually attacking a minority-owned and -operated company which has done amazing things in the community to help minorities.

But it appears the boycott has failed, as Hispanics and conservatives alike (including members of the National Center staff, as shown) have instead engaged in a “BUYcott” of the vast array of Goya products.

Horace told Kilmeade that the underlying factor the left does not take into consideration is that average Americans are less likely to obsess about politics and knee-jerk reactions than to ask themselves about the economy and their quality of life: “How is it working out for me?”

In the case of the White House and Goya, the “BUYcott” was a stunning rebuke of the mob:

All of the language and the cancel culture – and all of those things mean nothing.

What I’m hearing is that Goya now is a hotter product than it’s ever been. More Americans – black, white and brown – are reaching out and buying these items. And that’s a good thing.

If you offer a quality product in America, you ought to be welcomed. What the woke crowd wants is for us to break off into little segments.

That’s not what America’s about.

That’s not what Martin Luther King said he wanted us to be about. That’s not even what our Founders wanted us to be about. This is a radical agenda.

The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.

• The Free Enterprise Project (FEP), the liberty movement’s only full-service shareholder and activism group that’s effective in pushing corporate America to the right;
• Project 21, the liberty movement’s only public relations agency for black conservatives and libertarians that has already created over 40,000 media opportunities;
• The Environment and Enterprise Institute (EEI), which counters misinformation being spread by the environmental left.