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July 5, 2023

Ben & Jerry’s to its few remaining conservative customers: Go away!

By Andrea Widburg

Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was founded by two Northeastern leftists who made that leftism part of their brand. It’s now owned by Unilever, one of the world’s largest purveyors of packaged goods, which is headquartered in London. Staying true to the brand, on July Fourth, the Ben & Jerry’s subsidiary tweeted out an announcement that America must return its stolen land to the indigenous people. Calls for boycotts immediately ensued. The only thing that surprised me is that there are still Republicans and other conservatives eating that product.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, childhood friends from New Jersey, founded their eponymous company in 1978. Their shtick was that the ice cream had big chunks of chocolate, nuts, cookies, or whatever thrown into the mix. As far as I’m concerned, although I could live on ice cream, Ben & Jerry’s is unpalatable because its hyper-sweetness (achieved through corn syrup; ick) and chunkiness remind me of childhood sweets. I’ve been boycotting it for decades.

Aside from corn syrup and chunks, the ice cream brand was known for its founders’ leftist politics and social liberalism. Their foundation, the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, supports leftist causes across the board. Personally, the founders have never met a Democrat political candidate (or, in Bernie’s case, a socialist one) whom they haven’t liked.

Even after Unilever bought Ben & Jerry’s in 2002, it allowed the company to continue to combine politics and ice cream. It was during the Unilever years that Ben & Jerry’s dove into Middle East policies by announcing that it would no longer sell its sugar bombs in “Occupied Palestinian Territory”—i.e., the Israeli regions of Judah and Samaria, which have been Jewish land for about 3,000 years. In other words, they were boycotting Israel’s indigenous people.

Ben & Jerry's images from Wikipedia.

The company has also opposed drilling in the Arctic, agitated for “climate change” policies, supported same-sex marriage, interfered in Sweden’s foreign policy regarding Afghan asylum-seekers, and made an anti-Trump ice cream flavor, to name just a few of its overtly political activities. The Babylon Bee, naturally, captured the Ben & Jerry’s zeitgeist:

Amusingly, one of the company’s virtue stances was to oppose slavery and child labor in third-world chocolate bean corruption. However, it turned out that the company hadn’t vetted its own suppliers, which were using illegal alien children as labor. One would think that, at this point, any conservatives and pro-Israel people would have given up on Ben & Jerry’s, even if they liked the product. However, just to be sure that only leftists buy its product, the company decided on July 4 to tweet out its demand that America return all her stolen land to Native Americans:

My instant response was, “You go first.” I can guarantee you that not a single person at either Ben & Jerry’s or Unilever (which occupies land the Romans stole from the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons stole from the Celts and Romans, and the Normans stole from the Anglo-Saxons; plus all the English theft from the Scots, Welsh, and Irish) is planning on giving up the land that they personally occupy or the land on which their various businesses sit. This is empty virtue-signaling. The Twitterati, of course, not only recognized the vapidity of the tweet but also suggested that anyone else who doesn’t want leftist politics with their ice cream seek out other, better products. (I’m a Haagen-Dazs gal myself, although nothing equals my homemade chocolate ice cream.)

The beauty of the Bud Light debacle is that it finally made ordinary Americans realize that they are indeed a silent majority. Once they focus their energies on something, they can effect change. For so long, they’ve been cowed by the screaming 20% on the left, along with the disapproval of their leftist neighbors. Now, though, they feel the wind at their back, so Ben & Jerry’s had better beware.

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