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Sacraments of commerce, brands as cults, and trolls are the winners of the culture wars.

Future Commerce, the media company that offers strategic advice to retailers seeking to take their businesses to the next level, released the latest edition of its annual survey and report, VISIONS 2022. This years report analyzes insights collected from 1,000 consumers across the US from May 5-12th, 2022 and looks at the three areas where the greatest shifts are occurring: consumer, culture and modernity.

The report uncovers eight key themes for brands to be aware of, among them include:

Homogenization of Experiences: blahification of online shopping

Consumers see little functional difference between eCommerce sites that have comparable offerings. The majority 64% agree its rare to come across a website that feels unique or has unexpected functionality. Were living in a world where eCommerce is boring. How did we get this way? Look no further than technology. The SaaS era and cloud platforms limit the quantity and quality of decisions that marketers and technologists can make. Their only way to stand out is to become exceptional at selling, or deliver quality products. But theres hope: Dork Mode the anti-design pattern can turn off the mundane and engage the unexpected.

Celebration of Insincerity: Trolls are Winning the Culture War

Social media is a place where people want the world to think that theyre better people than they actually are. One in three respondents say they frequently post images of things they dont own on social media to make their lives look more interesting/appealing, and 50% are more likely to post than to donate to the Green New Deal/Climate Change, Blue Lives Matter, Blood:Water, or Defund the Police.

Whats more, 70% agree that everyone posts/shares things online that they wouldnt in real life. The implication of these views? Internet culture dictates that spectators lose and participants win, but theres a catch: highly nuanced ideas must be boiled down to a meme. Algorithmic timelines make matters worse, as AI indexes engagement over enlightenment. Meme culture, hype culture, reply-guys, and online hero worship are symptomatic of a broader problem we live in a post-sincere world.

In commerce, the ones hitting the high notes are the brands catering their voices to specific channels e.g. the NFL (and its teams) rebranded their TikTok accounts in solidarity with creator Emily Zugays sarcastic redesigns, replete with intentional misspellings. These brands are winning favor with consumers, as 58% say they love when brands have an irreverent tone in ads.

Sacraments of Commerce: Brands as the New Religion

As a society were more secular, yet our need for identity, community, meaning and collective purpose are still with us (44% of all survey respondents said theyve become more superstitious, and 89% of consumers say theyve started and maintained some new rituals since the pandemic began in 2020).

For many, commerce is filling the spiritual void. At the top is our new God: AI. Algorithms bestow blessings and inflict punishment based on a reality that AI manipulates. Brand engagements are secular sacraments, which makes sense now that people have become brands, while brands are personified as corporations endowed with liberties. Meanwhile, brands fill the gap that religion has left behind, nurturing their cult fans.

Were in the midst of the greatest technological shift in a generation. The town square is now fully digitized, our every interaction is quantified and commerce stands at the center of it all. VISIONS isnt a trends report as much as a recognition of the underlying psychological and philosophical ideas that are shaping the world around us. explains Phillip Jackson, Future Commerce Co-Founder.

In addition to this report, Future Commerce will launch a 16-episode podcast and video series, exploring the underlying psychological and philosophical ideas that are shaping the world around us. It will welcome influential guests and industry leaders such as Mike Edmonds, VP Commerce at Microsoft, Elise DeCamp, Founder of Toki NFT, Miya Knights, retail technology author, and many more to discuss the practical application of the insights found within the report.

The VISIONS 2022 report, podcast, and video series can be found here.

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Future Commerce is a media company that is dedicated to the discovery and exchange of ideas that lead to future-altering outcomes for us and the world around us. It offers a newsletter and podcasts specific to the world of retail and eCommerce, trusted by nearly 35K people on a monthly basis. Learn more at http://www.futurecommerce.fm.

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New VISIONS 2022 Report from Future Commerce Reveals Trends Shaping the World Around Us - Retail Dive

By POLITICO MAGAZINE

06/17/2022 09:00 AM EDT

Updated 06/19/2022 08:05 AM EDT

Illustration by Jordan Kay

It was 1892, and James G Blaine Sr. was about to charge into the greatest political battle of his life just not the battle he expected. Blaine was challenging President Benjamin Harrison for the Republican nomination, but his true opponent that election year would be an aspiring actress named Mary Nevins Blaine.

At the age of 19, after an 18-day courtship, she eloped with James 17-year-old son, Jamie, who he described as the the most helpless, least responsible of his children. When things inevitably turned sour, she sought a divorce which threw her, her family and Blaines political campaign into the epicenter of the turn-of-the-century culture wars.

In this excerpt from her book, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier, April White tells an historic tale that sounds straight out of the social media era complete with private investigators, press frenzies, political strivers and PR battles that pitted a resourceful young woman against a seasoned elder statesman.

[He has a] Ph. D. degree from Achesons College of Cowardly Communist Containment and is a weakling, a waster, and a small-calibered Truman.

Can you guess who said this about Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.*

Kimberly Scott opened Chronic City in Detroit. But just six months later, she locked the doors to her business for good. | Sylvia Jarrus for POLITICO

Detroits Weed Woes In February 2021, Kimberly Scott finally achieved her dream of opening a medical marijuana business in Detroit. She saw it as much more than just a place to buy weed it was also a blow against the decades-long War on Drugs that treated cannabis as a menacing scourge and disproportionately targeted Black people like her.

But weeks passed and then months and the license promised by the city never came. Struggling to compete with recreational weed businesses near Detroit, Scott locked the doors to her business for good, just six months after she opened them.

In this deep-dive report, POLITICO Cannabis Editor Paul Demko examines the judicial battles that have stopped Detroit from launching a recreational market that gives preferential treatment to long-time residents or people living in areas disproportionately targeted by criminal enforcement. The result, he writes, is a still-born market where everyone is failing.

Politico illustration / AP Photo / iStock

The General and the FBI Its a classic Beltway scandal: Retired Marine General John Allen resigned as president of the Brookings Institute this week over accusations that he lobbied for the government of Qatar.

Despite Allens 2019 announcement that Brookings would phase out money from non-democracies Qatar was one of its largest donors it turns out that his entire run atop the capitals leading liberal think-tank was shadowed by a trip he took to the emirate just months before ascending to the presidency. Michael Schaffer reports in this weeks Capital City column.

Fifty years after a group of well-dressed burglars were arrested in the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate, there's still a lot we don't know. Heres how to seem up to speed on all the wild circumstances surrounding the break-in. (From magazine contributor Garrett Graff)

- Sorry, Nixon defenders. Nixon probably didn't know anything about the DNC burglary in advance. BUT he's on tape repeatedly ordering another break-in, the year before, when he wanted to firebomb and burglarize the Brookings Institution.

- I mean, yeah, retaping the door at the Watergate might have been a mistake by James McCord, but maybe it was part of a CIA operation to sabotage the burglary.

- You can always whisper, conspiratorially, Don't tell me it was just a bugging operation. Since he died last year, though, we'll never know why burglar Eugenio Martinez had a key to Ida Wells' desk at the DNC.

- You, like the rest of D.C., are glad to see Martha Mitchell finally getting her due. Maybe if America had listened when she said Nixon's goons kidnapped and drugged her after the burglary, his presidency would have unraveled faster.

Illustration by Tyler Comrie

Experimenting on Elites Railing against the elites has become a popular sport on both the left and the right. The two sides might see politics in radically different ways, but they share a common presumption: To understand whats gone wrong with American democracy, you have to understand how elites think.

But how, exactly, can we get inside the heads of Americas political elite? Thats what POLITICOs Ian Ward asked political scientists Joshua Kertzer and Jonathan Renshon, authors of a new paper on the use of elite experiments or randomized studies using elite subjects to study the decision-making processes of political leaders. How do elites weigh their options? What do they get wrong? And how on earth do we fix it?

39 percent of voters dont know which political party Matthew McConaughey favors. Twenty-seven percent believe hes a Democrat, while 18 percent think hes a Republican and 16 percent have him pegged as an independent.

Every week, The Weekend inserts a question in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll and see what the crosstabs yield. Got any suggestions? Email us at [emailprotected].

When D.C. Paid Reparations to Enslavers In April 1862, three years before the emancipation of the last enslaved people in Texas now celebrated on Juneteenth, Congress passed a law to free all enslaved Black people in Washington D.C. Barely a year after the start of the Civil War, President Lincoln intended to set an antislavery example in the nations capital.

The emancipation effort even included reparations just not for formerly enslaved Black people. In D.C.'s emancipation, enslavers were paid significant compensation for their lost property, writes Kris Manjapra in this weeks History Dept. The freed Black people not only received no reparations but also experienced ongoing governmental neglect and exclusions, [ensuring] ... the disadvantages of slavery would continue to be passed down, not ended, after slaverys end.

Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

Floral arrangements sent to Richard Nixon after his resignation on August 8, 1974, following the Watergate scandal. The bouquets sat in a storage room in Nixons Western White House, San Clemente, California, two days after his announcement of his departure.

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first, he said during a televised address announcing his resignation.

Despite his 24 percent approval rate at the time, media reactions to the speech were generally favorable: Dignity was emphasized, wrote journalist Fred Emery.

**Who Dissed? answer: Stevenson was pummeled with these quotes from then-vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon before he was pummeled again by Dwight Eisenhower in the election. Achesons College was a reference to Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State under President Truman who had been targeted as a Communist by Joseph McCarthy. Stevenson had choice words for Nixon, too, saying he was the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree and then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of POLITICO Weekend misspelled Ida Wells' name.

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The divorcee vs. the diplomat- POLITICO - POLITICO

This piece first appeared in the New York Jewish Week and was distributed by JTA.

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke to a conference of Jewish conservatives in New York on June 12, he leaned heavily into the themes that have put him on the short list of likely 2024 Republican presidential contenders: His targets included transgender rights, Critical Race Theory and, above all, wokeness, which he called a cancer that will ultimately destroy the U.S. if unchecked.

That speech earned him hearty applausefrom the 700 people who attendedthe Jewish Leadership Conference, hosted by the Tikvah Fund. Where similar gatherings of right-of-center Jews have tended to focus on defending Israel and public funding for private schooling, the Tikvah conference schedule leaned heavily into the culture wars.

Throughout the daylong event held at Chelsea Piers, multiple speakers said that wokeness threatens to destroy the very foundations that Judaism and America have been built upon.

Speakers offered various definitions of wokeness, although the consensus was that it is a far-left ideology that promotesgay and transgender rights, teaches about race in ways that undermine patriotism, and seeks the cancellation of those with opposing ideas.

In a panel entitled How To Fight Back Against Wokeness, New York Post columnist John Podhoretz ridiculed a teacher who listed their pronouns in an email, which caused the room to erupt in laughter.

Youre getting an email where your kids teacher has pronouns that dont even make internal sense, Podhoretz said. Phil Smith, He/They. What does that mean? She/They. They and Them. It doesnt make any sense.

In a panel discussing wokeness, @nypost columnist @jpodhoretz gets confused about pronouns. pic.twitter.com/OaBJuj2xPT

Jacob Henry (@jhenrynews) June 12, 2022

On the same panel, former New York Times editor Bari Weiss wholeft her high-profileposition due to what she called bullying and an illiberal environment and now runs a newsletter dedicated, in part, to exposing how progressives have stifled free speech said that woke ideology is an attempt to undermine what it means to live in America.

What it stipulates is that we are not ourselves, Weiss said. We are not to judge people based on their merit and character, but on the lane that we are born into their racial lane, their sexual orientation lane, the lane of their gender and zip code. Once youre in that lane, youre not allowed to leave it.

She called cancel culture the justice system of this un-American revolution and that due process and equality are now up for grabs.

If you dont go along with it, youre a bigot, Weiss said. It tries to uproot the very foundations that have made this country so exceptional.

Certainly, Israel was on the days agenda.

The age of Jewish liberalism is ending, Tikvah Fund CEO Eric Cohen said in his opening remarks. He added that conservatism is good for the Jews, as it fights for religious freedom, school choice and an independent Jewish state.

Still that fight including efforts to combatcampus campaigns to boycott Israelalso appeared to be waged under the banner of anti-wokeness.

In a discussion titled What is Conservatism? Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony came perhaps the closest to explaining why conservatives think wokeness threatens support for Israel, fosters antisemitism and threatens Jewish well-being in general.

He said that there is a ferocious competition in what values will succeed classic liberalism in the West. He warned that woke ideology is the most successful at the moment and thats not a good thing. It is extremely hostile to God and scripture, Hazony said. To tradition of any kind, to Christianity and to Judaism, and to the independent nation state of Israel.

In a speech titled Israel, America and the Middle East, former Israeli Ambassador to the United StatesRon Dermerspoke out against the few dozen protestors who picketed DeSantiss appearance at the conference, mostly over legislation he has pushed to limit classroom discussions of LGBTQ issues. Dermer said the protesters were angry about a position [DeSantis] has on whether or not you should teach transgenderism to 8-year-olds.

For the protesters, however, what the conference speakers derided as wokeness was the struggle for social justice and human dignity. Sophie Ellman-Golan, communications director for Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, a left-wing group, told the New York Jewish Week that language coming from a Jewish conference ridiculing the LGBTQ community is surreal.

Desantis addressed his Dont Say Gay bill saying that kids in school shouldnt have woke gender ideology jammed into their curriculum. pic.twitter.com/39rBSLarDC

Jacob Henry (@jhenrynews) June 12, 2022

Nazis went on the attack specifically against queer and trans people, Ellman-Golan said. Its disgusting to see Jews go along with this.

This type of language is a specific effort to make it impossible for trans and queer people to exist, she added.

Tikvah Fund Chairman Elliot Abrams, a former foreign policy official under Presidents Trump and George W. Bush, told the New York Jewish Week that he would not discuss politics when asked to respond to criticism that DeSantiss rhetoric threatens LGBTQ people.

However, one attendee, Ruth Freeman, who flew in from Chicago, said DeSantiss speech felt political.

I felt like he was campaigning, Freeman told the New York Jewish Week. It was a little bit of a laundry list of everything hes done in Florida.

Although the majority of those in attendance appeared to be age 50 and older, the conference seemed to focus on cultivating conservative values for a younger generation. The Tikvah Fund, whoseboard of directors includes a number of prominent Jewish conservative philanthropists and former Republican officials, runs summer fellowships for high school and college students, an Israel-based program for yeshiva students and public policy seminars for accomplished professionals.

Cohen noted in his opening remarks that nearly 100 student leaders and young professionals were in attendance, calling them the heart and soul of the Tikvah project.

These young people are models of Jewish promise and Jewish courage, especially in the great battles that are now underway in our colleges and universities, he said.

In an email sent out to attendees after the conference, he wrote that educating the rising generation of Jewish leaders is Tikvahs core purpose.

In his roughly 30-minute speech, DeSantis called out teachers who allowed their kids to change their gender pronouns, spoke out against Critical Race Theory and how it is distorting history and joked that he couldnt accept the idea that a man can get pregnant.

Desantis speaks out against Critical Race Theory.

We are not going to teach our kids to hate our country, he said. pic.twitter.com/a8wLVIvVBs

Jacob Henry (@jhenrynews) June 12, 2022

In another speech that also felt like the start of a presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed a wide range of topics, from building relationships with Arab countries to the threat of the Chinese Communist Party.

When Pompeo spoke, he was being political, but more nuanced, Freeman said.

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'Wokeness' is Enemy No. 1 at conservative Jewish Leadership Conference - The Jewish News of Northern California

Donald Trump never gave a direct order to hang Mike Pence. In fact, Trump didn't even come up with the specific idea of hanging, but when the insurrectionist mob he sent to the Capitol developed this idea on their own, he was only to happy to roll with it. As Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said during the first night of hearings, Trump responded to the chants of "hang Mike Pence" by saying the rioters "had the right idea" and that Pence "deserves it."

The "hang Mike Pence" moment became the centerpiece of Thursday's hearing of the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot. The third televised probe focused on the pressure campaign Trump waged against his own vice president to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The committee revealed that, once Trump realized how close the mob he had sent to the Capitol was to Pence, he sent out a tweet to egg them on. As video footage from the riot shows, the message was received, as insurrectionists read the tweet out loud and redoubled their efforts to find and execute the man they were falsely told could steal the election for them but wouldn't.

RELATED:Trump defends supporters' threats to "hang Mike Pence" in new audio: "People were very angry"

The timeline is important for the committee's work of establishing Trump's mindset and how he very much was using the mob's violence as a weapon to pressure Pence and other power players in D.C. to give him what he wanted: illegal control over the White House. But it also underscores one of the most frustrating aspects of this entire investigation.

Social media technologies are remaking what we think of as "organizing" an event.

Trump was remarkably skilled at using public communications speeches, and crucially tweets to convey his wishes to his followers without coming right and giving direct orders to commit crimes. It's a strategy that works to shield Trump from legal consequences, as he can always pretend that he was "merely" criticizing Pence or "merely" promising that Jan. 6 would be "wild," and that how people reacted was all on them and not what he intended at all.It's a strategy that wouldn't work, however, without the feedback loop made possible by the internet. Trump was able to receive feedback on how his followers were receiving his communications and react in real-time by feeding more communications to them through social media.

Trumpism is very much a top-down movement, with Trump as the leader. But the way it is organized and the strategies it uses borrow heavily from leaderless movements on the left like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, both of which have long used social media to organize on the fly, without relying on the traditional top-down decision-making models.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Social media helps facilitate decision-making by ecosystems. It can be chaotic, but it also means that activists can react swiftly to changing circumstances, instead of getting dragged down by bureaucratic decision-making. A lot of the Black Lives Matter protests were hastily assembled after George Floyd's murder by people throwing out ideas for places and times to assemble. The result sometimes was three or four protests in any given city at once. That chaos ended up being a strength. Here in Philadelphia, the protests spilled out in every direction, with marchers converging and diverging all over town, making it significantly harder for authorities to blunt the impact of the march by shepherding it to a part of town where it could be easily ignored.

An elaborate and secretive conspiracy for the insurrection itself was not necessary because Trump and his allies could communicate publicly through social media.

As Heather "Digby" Parton noted Friday at Salon, it appears that the original idea behind the Capitol riot was very different. It seems that Trump and his allies were thinking more that a violent riot especially if it was met with resistance from the left would give Trump a pretense to invoke the Insurrection Act and seize power with military force. But when it became clear that wasn't going to work, Trump and the mob were able to shift strategies on the fly, focusing on shutting down the electoral vote count by force. That kind of flexibility in goals and tactics is a real asset, one that leaderless movements have been using for years. Now Trump has adopted it for his fascist agenda.

RELATED:Trump wanted a different insurrection: Jan. 6 hearing reveals violent intent behind Pence plot

While the committee has hintedthat there may be evidence of direct coordination between Trump and the Proud Boys to make the Capitol insurrection happen, what is an even scarier realization is that the plan could have gone off without any such direct communication. Instead, what happened evolved the way protests and other actions have developed among Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and other leaderless lefty movements: via online chatter.

The idea of stopping the electoral count evolved in large part through people sharing conspiracy theories and spreading documents online. Trump was just as much an audience for these conspiracy theories as he was a leader.An elaborate and secretive conspiracy for the insurrection itself was not necessary because Trump and his allies could communicate publicly through social media. The goal, the place, and the time were established through these public channels. Trump could trust that groups like the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers knew what he wanted from them, without having to say so directly. Trump was well aware that there were rising groups of right-wing thugs who wanted to commit violence. His role was more of a traffic director than traditional general giving orders. He was, in many ways, reacting as much to what his followers were signaling they wanted to do as he was telling them what to do.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Of course, when people organize a Black Lives Matter protest or an underground rave, they aren't engaging in a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government. But it all goes to show that social media technologies are remaking what we think of as "organizing" an event. Increasingly, it's not about leaders setting an agenda, but about collective groups formulating a plan together by talking online. In most cases, that's a good thing (such as with Black Lives Matter protests) or largely harmless (underground raves). But there can be no doubt that the far-right, with Trump right in the middle, has figured out how to co-opt these same strategies.

Just last weekend, authorities arrested 31 members of Patriot Front for what appears to be a plot to attack a Pride event in Idaho. As with Jan. 6, it seems the plot evolved and formed from the swamp of online chatter. We can expect to see more violence like this, especially as January 6 really demonstrated to the larger American right the power of plugging into these online channels. Law enforcement needs to adapt quickly and find ways to prosecute people for these new-fangled methods of criminal conspiracy, or this situation will just get worse. The place to start is with Trump. Merrick Garland must charge him based on all the evidence of criminal intent developed by the January 6 committee.

Read more from the original source:
Trump's insurrection stole the strategies of Black Lives Matter - Salon

A Home Depot logo sign hands on its facade, Friday, May 14, 2021, in North Miami, Fla. Wilfredo Lee/AP hide caption

A Home Depot logo sign hands on its facade, Friday, May 14, 2021, in North Miami, Fla.

A National Labor Relations Board judge has ruled to dismiss a case filed by a Home Depot employee who alleged the company wrongly banned workers from wearing the Black Lives Matter slogan on their aprons.

An employee at a Minnesota store first filed a complaint against the home improvement company in March 2021, after allegedly being suspended, and later resigning, for having the phrase on their uniform.

NLRB lawyers became involved in August 2021, arguing that Black Lives Matter should not fall under The Home Depot's uniform policy, which bans political or religious messages "unrelated to workplace matters" from employees' aprons, or elsewhere on their clothing.

The employee was "required to choose between engaging in protected concerted activity, including displaying the 'BLM' slogan, and quitting employment," the complaint said.

The NLRB defines concerted activity as any action taken with coworkers in an effort to improve working conditions, including talking with coworkers about earnings, petitioning for more hours and speaking with media or government agencies about workplace issues.

Lawyers representing the former Home Depot employee did not argue whether BLM was political messaging, but rather that not allowing employees to display the slogan on their aprons interfered with their right to concerted activity.

NLRB Judge Paul Bogas wrote in his opinion that the plaintiffs had not sufficiently reasoned their argument. In order to meet the standard of concerted activity, the prohibited messaging has to be a group effort and a means of improving working conditions, he said.

"Rather, the record shows that the message was primarily used, and generally understood, to address the unjustified killings of Black individuals by law enforcement and vigilantes," Bogas wrote. "A message about unjustified killings of Black men, while a matter of profound societal importance, is not directly relevant to the terms, conditions, or lot of Home Depot's employees as employees."

However, the company does encourage employees to personalize their aprons with names, doodles and other additions.

"The record shows that the additions employees make to the aprons are sometimes extensive," Bogas said.

The employee, who worked at the store from August 2020 to February 2021, wore the slogan on their apron for the duration of their employment, Bogas said.

The store is located in New Brighton, Minnesota, nearly 12 miles from Minneapolis, where George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed by police in May 2020, sparking nationwide protests.

The employee said that Floyd's death, as well as racist behavior from a coworker such as making stereotypical remarks and being unhelpful to Black and Hispanic customers sparked the donning of Black Lives Matter on the apron.

"It's a symbol of alliance," the employee testified. "I have never seen it as something political myself. It's something that I put on so that people know to approach me. I am a person of color myself, so it's a form of solidarity. It's a way...for people to feel safe around me."

Lawyers for both The Home Depot and the NLRB submitted documents and news articles with different interpretations of what the Black Lives Matter saying and movement means.

Home Depot, Inc. said the BLM movement has caused infighting within the company and "occasioned civil unrest in the vicinity of the New Brighton store and elsewhere," according to Bogas' opinion.

Bogas wrote, though, that none of the documents submitted "are representative of the public discourse on the meaning of Black Lives Matter/BLM or were authoritative regarding either what that phrase encompasses or everything the Black Lives Matter organization or movement does, or does not, support."

The employee said they were told by a district manager that if she allowed them to keep BLM on the apron, she'd also have to allow employees to wear a swastika in fairness.

Two other employees at the store were asked to remove BLM messaging, and one employee was asked to remove "Thin Blue Line" messaging. They all complied and returned to work.

The employee in the complaint refused to remove the messaging, and the district manager offered up alternative wording, such as "diversity," "equality" or "inclusion."

That employee, "... agreed that there were 'plenty of other ways' to express support for racial justice, but that insisting on continuing to wear the BLM message was 'the best way,'" Bogas wrote.

The employee said he was willing to be fired and later resigned.

Home Depot has said it interprets its policy of not allowing political messaging on its uniforms to include Black Lives Matter, but that the rule was not communicated to management at the Minnesota store, according to Bogas.

Bogas did say the employee engaged in protected activity by discussing and emailing with team members about racist allegations about a coworker.

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Judge dismisses case in which Home Depot is accused of banning BLM from uniforms - NPR