After Chick-fil-A drew attention to its diversity, equity and inclusion program, prominent figures across Twitter reacted to the news while leftist media exaggerated criticism or missed the problem entirely.
On Tuesday, May 30th, many Twitter users noticed that Chick-fil-A had created a “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” page on its website and spread the word about Chick-fil-A promoting Erick McReynolds to Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the restaurant chain.
Following a quote by Erick McReynolds, the DEI page includes this line: “Chick-fil-A, Inc.'s commitment to being Better at Together means embedding Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in everything we do.” Twitter users from Michael Knowles, to Allie Beth Stuckey, to Jack Posobiec, Erick Erickson, and Charlie Kirk reacted to the hire, criticizing Chick-fil-A and DEI more broadly.
Leftist news sources like The Hill exaggerated this criticism, uplifting smaller accounts calling for a boycott, while others like The New York Times and CNN aggressively missed the point on what DEI is and why conservatives object to it.
This uproar also led to many accounts sharing a video from 2020 where Chick-fil-A owner, Dan Cathy, shines the shoes of rapper Lecrae Moore, while telling white people to do likewise with a “contrite heart, a sense of humility, a sense of shame, a sense of embarrassment, beget with an apologetic heart.”
Human Events Senior Editor, Jack Posobiec and TPUSA Founder Charlie Kirk called out Chick-fil-A for going woke. Allie Beth Stuckey, who hosts the podcast “Relatable,” noted the apparently “innocuous” nature of the Chick-fil-A page, but asserted that creating a DEI initiative at all leads to embracing gender theory and discriminatory “anti-racism.”
Stuckey said, “Well, if we look at the DEI policies that are implemented by the companies that aren’t afraid to just come out with what that means, they mean the so-called anti-racism that has been championed by people like Ibram X. Kendi who famously or infamously said that the remedy for past discrimination is present and future discrimination. What is meant by that is that because black people and certain kinds of people were once discriminated against in the past, that now we must discriminate against non-black people, white people in order to try to even the playing field.”
Daily Wire columnist, Michael Knowles, agreed with the idea that creating a DEI department is a problem in and of itself. On his show Wednesday, Knowles told his audience, “The exact verbiage does not exactly matter. It’s all pretty much just gobbledygook anyway. The disconcerting thing is not the exact wording. The disconcerting thing is that Chick-fil-A has embraced DEI at all, and now while some conservatives are calling for a boycott of the openly religious, generally relatively conservative company, as far as I’m concerned this story has almost nothing to do with Chick-fil-A.”
Knowles went on to add that this incident demonstrates the ubiquity of liberal ideology in our culture.
Most conservatives who mentioned a boycott, spoke in opposition to it. Radio host Erick Erickson opposed a boycott, suggesting that adding a boycott of Chick-fil-A would discredit conservatives with the general public and before noting by omission that Chick-fil-A’s DEI page does not promote gender theory.
Conservatives are under attack! Call or write The New York Times at 1-800-698-4637, The Hill at editor@thehill.com and CNN at 404-827-1500 and demand that they honestly cover Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives and their attendant promotion of “anti-racism,” gender theory and discrimination
