On June third of this year (2020), an Instagram user by the handle Weckingball posted a video (left) directly calling out Supreme for their blatant hypocrisy in a recent caption (right).
Weckingball is a professional skateboarder known for comedy through his social media, but he is also known for his unbiased wisdom on the mishaps and discrepancies within skateboarding culture. Weckingball’s dedication to the truth is imminent in that through the post in question, he publicly turned on a brand he once represented and was ultimately blocked by their social media team.
Supreme is an immensely popular skateboarding hardware and apparel company that was established in New York in 1994 and is now a worldwide phenomenon.
The controversy Weckingball attacks in his post is the fact that though Supreme’s words imply a yearning for the well-being of all humans, their actions speak to a different priority. In his post (video), Weckingball explains that Supreme, a privately owned company, sold fifty percent of their equity to The Carlyle Group for $500 million. You may be wondering how Supreme’s decision to divide its ownership could possibly be the sole reason for their post to represent hypocrisy. This is also explained in the video, in a brief description of The Carlyle Group, an international private equity company, and their heavy investment ties with BAE Systems, the largest defense and security contractor in Europe. For more than thirty years BAE has been supplying the kingdom of Saudi Arabia with one of the world’s most advanced combat aircrafts, the Eurofighter Typhoon. As of 2015, Saudi Arabia had become home to more of these jets than their place of origin, Britain. A more important occurrence of the same year was the kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen’s ongoing civil war. Finally getting to the point here; statistically, this war has been a nightmare. The United Nations has reported an estimation of upwards of 16,000 civilian casualties, and an overall death toll of approximately 50,000. The kicker is that the vast majority of which have been the result of airstrikes. To summarize this last paragraph’s string of connections, Supreme chose to be represented by a company that funds the distribution of weapons to a country that uses them to add an element of excessive chaos to a war that they had no business entering.
I believe that Weckingball’s intentions were not malicious in nature, but rather educational. Being the rhetor of the situation, his teachings were to break his audience, one that almost certainly follows Supreme as well, free of ignorance. Knowing that most of his followers are skateboarders who, naturally, know of and possibly respect Supreme, Weckingball saw the opportunity to ensure that a big name would not succeed in misleading his followers. Weckingball extended his insight to a young community of followers who more than likely had no previous knowledge of these controversial connections, more than likely aiding in future decision-making regarding purchases ad representation. As a result, Supreme blocked him, revoking his ability to view and/or comment on their posts. The fact that Supreme was either unwilling or unable to defend itself from Weckingball’s proclamation is certainly a further show of character.