1 year ago
71
Chick-fil-A—yes, that Chick-fil-A, is under attack from conservatives after somebody realized the company has an executive position overseeing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the company. Even worse, the executive in that position isn’t even white! The fact that he’s seemingly had the job since 2021 and nobody eating Chick-fil-A has turned into a communist is clearly astonishing. But, like Target and Bud Light before it, calls for a Chick-fil-A boycott have spread across the web.
More than your average company, Chick-fil-A has always been an actively conservative-run business—funding anti-LGBTQ+ causes for years. That and the fact that the people calling for canceling Chick-fil-A are the same people who spend the rest of their time whining about how liberals want to cancel everything makes for a space-time-fabric-ripping level of hypocrisy.
The last couple of days have seen right-wing mouthpieces from all over the extremi-sphere throwing their logic-free thoughts into the world. BlazeTV host Lauren Chen wrote, “There is no legitimate, non-woke reason for any company to have a ’DEI’ department or program.” And because the term “woke” is simply the new way of being racist, right-wing clown Benny Johnson posted a three-year-old video of Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy’s son, Dan Cathy, shining the shoes of a Black man as a performance of Christian service.
The video was from June 2020, at a Passion City Church event in Atlanta (Georgia is where Chick-fil-A was founded). Cathy—a devout Christian—was participating in a roundtable discussion on trying to ameliorate heightened racial tensions after the deaths of George Floyd and other Black citizens at the hands of police. He attempted to make a point that white folks should consider showing their solidarity with Black people by performing services (like shining shoes). He framed this as a Christian obligation of sorts, but Christianity is only worthwhile to Christian conservatives if it agrees with their politics. It is so decidedly not a spiritual pursuit for right-wing evangelicals.
The hand-wringing has continued to build, with misinformation extremists like Ian Miles Cheong writing, “DEI is literally wokeness,” and the unintentionally comedic videos of people enacting their boycotts have begun streaming in. And so have the reactions and responses to the snowflake right.
