WTH?! McDonald’s Celebrates … Ramadan

The West is in trouble.

One of the reasons is that the West has fundamentally failed to distinguish between tolerance of one another’s traditions and lifestyles on the one hand, and the bizarre bend-over-backward celebration that accompanies the undermining of traditions unique to the West.

A perfect example is what’s happening in Germany now. It seems like a small story, but it is indicative of a broader mindset that has been setting in throughout the West for generations.

In Germany, McDonald’s decided on an ad campaign. The German population is roughly 6.5% Muslim at this point. Muslims celebrate Ramadan around this time of year, which means they are fasting from sunup to sundown.

Fine. That is the Muslim tradition. There are a lot of Muslims who live in the West who are perfectly fine Western citizens.

McDonald’s is not halal, meaning food that religious Muslims can eat. If you are a Muslim who is celebrating Ramadan or commemorating Ramadan, chances are that you are eating halal in your non-Ramadan hours and in your non-fasting hours, because if you’re religious enough to actually not eat all day, you probably don’t go at sunset and find a rasher of bacon and eat it.

But McDonald’s decided to put up an ad campaign in Germany. The ad campaign removes the food from the billboards during Ramadan hours out of respect for Islam. The food appears on the billboard after sunset, but it disappears during the day, presumably so as not to tempt Muslims to feel hunger pangs.

That is Bizarro World. It’s weird and self-defeating, and it bespeaks of something that lies at the heart of the cowardice of a lot of both corporations and people in the West.

It’s Bizarro World because McDonald’s is not halal. The people who are presumably going to be very moved by these billboards are not going to head over to McDonald’s after dusk and start chomping down on their cheeseburgers.

So what is McDonald’s doing? According to Newsweek: 

The campaign was created by the German agency Scholz & Friends, whose concept centers on removing McDonald’s most recognizable visual element—its food—as a gesture of respect for those observing Ramadan.

This is strange. The reality is McDonald’s is a food company that sells food, and the vast majority of the food that you sell is not to the people to whom they’re trying to appeal.

Who exactly is McDonald’s appealing to? Who’s the target audience?

The answer is: The dullards in the West who believe that it is a mark of virtue to subsume your own values beneath the values of other cultures.

That is the problematic part. It is a strange form of cultural reparation that somehow the West owes it to other cultures to participate in their religious activities while subsuming its own interests.

I don’t think McDonald’s cares all that much in Germany about whether or not Muslims like McDonald’s. I think what German McDonald’s cares about is that there are a lot of people in Germany who see this as a form of left-wing social virtue signaling, in the same way that in the United States, you have major corporations that every year decide they’re going to signal for Black History Month or Gay Pride month.

But the basic idea is not that you are going to earn vast oodles of cash from doing that. The idea is you’re appealing to left-wing people in the United States who will give you more money because they believe that you share their values.

The reason that you see all these companies doing DEI in the United States is absolutely not because they think it’s going to be good for their balance sheet. Hiring on the basis of non-merit is always bad for the balance sheet.

The reason these companies do it is because they believe they can appeal to an entire group of consumers who have warm feelings toward them if they take their own corporate business interests, throw those aside, and start signaling their politics.

This is a major problem. It’s not unique to Germany and is a widespread symptom of a disease that is spread across the West, where you are supposed to be overtly apologetic about not celebrating Ramadan.

This is not a sign of cultural respect.

It’s a sign of cultural disintegration.

It would be the same thing as if companies in the UK decided that they were suddenly going to take female models and suddenly cover up their faces out of respect for radical Islam.

It’s saying something, but it’s not the thing they think they’re saying.

There is an assumption that in the Trump era, DEI is basically dead, that we’re never going back to a time when corporations were virtue signaling like this, when policy did not reflect this idea that the dominant American culture ought to be put under the foot of splinter cultures.

But the reality is that it can very easily come back.

It doesn’t take a lot for it to come back. All it takes is a group of people who see it as a mark of virtue to yell at their own culture and pretend that it is somehow inferior and owes it to other cultures to demonstrate its own inferiority.

There’s a piece from Time magazine titled “Why Donald Trump Can’t Kill DEI.” The point the piece makes is that the anti-DEI era, which is a backlash to the Barack Obama/Joe Biden era, will be followed by a backlash to the backlash, and that all this stuff will come back with a vengeance.

The piece states:

Ideas of inclusion and diversity also permeate everyday institutions, including schools, universities, foundations, nonprofits, and corporations. … Many companies have retreated from DEI under legal and political pressure. What makes fewer headlines is that most companies that have sidled away from the acronym continue to affirm the values of DEI under a different name. … 

Boeing stated that it maintains “procedures aimed at encouraging an equality of opportunity.” Lowe’s has proclaimed that it remained “committed to fostering an environment where individuals are treated fairly, valued, respected, safe, and inspired to serve customers and the communities where we live and work.” These statements sure sound like diversity, equity, and inclusion to us. … The education sector is equally if not more committed: a 2025 review of 262 colleges and universities found that 245 of them still maintained DEI offices and programs.

This is only going to continue. What does it mean?

It means this will come back if Republicans lose the forward momentum.

I know that we’re also riding high on the horse right now because Donald Trump won and because Republicans are in charge of the legislative branches of the government.

But if you think this stuff can’t come back, you’re wrong.