The Patriot Post® · Kellogg's Spoon-Feeds Activism With Woke Cereal
Kellogg’s hasn’t been sugar-coating its agenda for years. But its latest venture — a “create-your-own-pronoun” cereal for kids — is bowling over parents. “Boxes are for cereal, not people,” the company insists about its new Together with Pride rainbow edition that donates $3 from every box to an extreme LGBT group, GLAAD, who’s out to recruit and confuse your children. Of course, anyone who’s been online or walked the aisles of a grocery store knows that some companies will do anything to pander to the radical Left. But this June, these brands are on a collision course with a group of fired-up American shoppers who might just eat them for breakfast.
Everyone from Coca-Cola to Major League Baseball could have told Kellogg’s it was a bad idea. After speaking out against Georgia’s election reforms, the fixture in American soda has taken a major hit — not just in profits, but in PR. Thirty-seven percent of Americans (myself included) say they’re less likely to buy Coke products now, leading several CEOs to wonder: go woke, go broke? And yet, misguided businesses from Lego to Disney and Mars and Nestle continue to poke the bear with in-your-face campaigns that target kids with their radical brands of extremism.
There are rainbow Skittles, gay Mickey Mouses, custom Converse, even Love Is Love Le Creuset, but they’re coming on the market at a time when most Americans are saying: Enough! They don’t want their cereal preaching transgenderism or their drinks fighting voter ID. By a 3-to-1 margin, they don’t want corporations openly involved in political activism at all. So when Fruit Loops tries to serve up new genders, don’t be surprised if he, she, they, or them don’t buy it.
According to Gallup, the fatigue over LGBT extremism is finally starting to register on a national scale too. In the last year, the enthusiasm for things like boys in girls’ sports and transgender-identifying people in the military is bottoming out. In bad news for these brands and everyone else on the Left’s bandwagon, a solid majority of Americans — 62 percent — don’t want our daughters competing against biological boys in athletics. And there’s also been a five-point dip in the number of people who think the military should encourage this sort of gender-confusion. Political Independents, especially, saw pronounced drops in support for transgenderism in the ranks — down 11 points since just 2019.
And yet, when the media does acknowledge people’s reservations and tries (however nominally) to present both sides of the transgender issue, they’re torn to pieces for it. Just this past Sunday, when “60 Minutes” aired a segment on the Arkansas law that protects minors from transgender treatments, Leslie Stahl dared to also talk to people who had transitioned — and regretted it. It was barely five minutes of content, but the network was hammered for it by Leftist and LGBT extremists for even including it.
The young woman Stahl interviewed, Grace Lininsky-Smith, explained how she’d started cross-sex hormones and later a double mastectomy. When Leslie asked about the process, Grace replied, “They asked, ‘So, why do you wanna go on testosterone?” And I said, “Well, being a woman just isn’t working for me anymore.” And they said, “Okay.” That was it, Leslie asked? “Yup,” Grace said, highlighting one of the strongest arguments against the trend, which is that there are almost no barriers to any patient — child or not — making decisions that could mutilate them for life. “I can’t believe I transitioned then detransitioned, including hormones and surgery, in the course of like, less than one year,” Grace shook her head.
Garrett, a young man from Louisiana, was castrated just three months after starting female hormones. “I didn’t get enough pushback on transitioning. I went for two appointments and after the second one, I had my letter to go get on cross-sex hormones,” he explained. “I had never really been suicidal before until I had my breast augmentation. And about a week afterward, I wanted to actually kill myself. I had a plan, and I was gonna do it — but I just kept thinking about my family to stop myself.”
Another part of the segment that created hysterics on the Left was the admission by a youth gender psychologist that there’s a culture of intimidation around transgenderism in the medical field. “Everyone is very scared to speak up because we’re afraid of not being seen as being affirming or being supportive of these young people,” Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper conceded. “But even some of the providers are trans themselves and share these concerns.”
Almost immediately, CBS was bombarded with social media attacks from groups like GLAAD (Kellogg’s partner in crime), who said that even after months of meeting with “trans leaders” on the segment, “They delivered a piece which still promulgates the same anti-trans dog whistles that we hear from anti-LGBTQ activists and in state legislatures like Arkansas.” Other so-called “equality” groups railed the show for “dehumanizing” trans-identifying children. “Where’s the love for trans people?” Laverne Cox tweeted.
The love, as it turns out, is in telling both sides of the story. That may be fatal to the Left’s agenda, but it’s the only chance this generation has to know the truth. What psychology and medicine are doing by ignoring the risks and regrets is only leading more children down an irreversible and painful path. “We already have girls, physically health girls, who are being referred for double mastectomies at age 13,” Dr. Michelle Cretella, president of the American College of Pediatricians, warns. “This is institutionalized child abuse.” And companies like Lego, Levi, Kellogg’s, Disney, Mars, Target, and others are celebrating it with their specialized toys and fun rainbow colors. At the end of the day, those are all just a distraction from the real heartbreak: that changing genders won’t fix anyone’s problems. Only a changed heart, turned toward God, can.
To contact Kellogg’s and complain, email them here or Tweet them @KelloggsUS. For a list of their family of brands, click over to their website, so that you aren’t unknowingly contributing to their mass deception of our young people.
Originally published here.
States Race to Block Woke Curriculum
The United States of America is embracing and exporting critical race theory, while the individual states of America are doing the opposite. The Biden State Department recently encouraged American embassies around the world to fly the BLM flag “on the external-facing flagpole.” Yes, you read that right. The new sales pitch of America’s top diplomats is: “We hate our country and everything she stands for; you should, too.” With self-aggrandizing totalitarian regimes like China and Iran aggressively peddling anti-American propaganda, why couldn’t our own lifelong, diplomatic professionals come up with anything better?
The State Department’s woke brigade could take a few lessons in patriotism from Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (R). On Monday, he signed a measure that would prohibit state-run schools from teaching that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.” Lee explained, “We need to make sure that our kids recognize that this country is moving toward a more perfect union, that we should teach the exceptionalism of our nation and how people can live together and work together to make a greater nation, and to not teach things that inherently divide or pit either Americans against Americans or people groups against people groups.”
Tennessee followed Idaho and Oklahoma in protecting children’s impressionable minds from the insidious fallacies of critical race theory. And it doesn’t stop there. In a letter to the state Board of Education, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp wrote that critical race theory has “no place in Georgia classrooms.” The Texas Senate approved a similar prohibition on teaching critical race theory last week, and lawmakers are also considering proposals in Arkansas, Arizona, Missouri, Oregon, and Utah.
Predictably, the Left threw a fit over Tennessee’s ban on teaching critical race theory. The ACLU of Tennessee complained that the governor had “silenced constructive dialogue” by signing the law. Yet even the Associated Press was forced to admit the measure doesn’t ban “impartial discussion of controversial aspects of history” or silence teachers from speaking freely. The bill does, however, kick critical race theory to the curb.
There’s irony in the ACLU’s complaint; they rarely speak out when the Left silences conservatives. Google suppresses search results from conservative sites. Social media giants shadow ban, “contextualize,” and temporarily suspend conservative outlets and individuals for no good reason, or block and delete individual posts. At universities, radical Leftists cancel conservative professors, lecturers, and even students for expressing their views, to the point that most conservatives have learned to “self-censor” in a university context. For the Left to accuse conservatives of silencing constructive dialogue is projection, pure and simple.
The Left silences conservatives because they don’t want to have a constructive dialogue. There’s nothing constructive to foment resentment and hostility between people simply because of their ethnic or racial background, the basic thesis of critical race theory. Nor is it constructive to insist that the proof of someone’s racism is that they insist they aren’t racist, a basic tenet of the critical race theory manual “White Fragility.” If, as critical race theory teaches, a person’s political positions, worldview, and allegiances are determined solely by his or her group identity, then there’s no point to dialogue at all.
It should be clear why the Left wants to shut down debate. Critical race theory is rationally and morally bankrupt. Worse, it is a Marxist ideological cancer. The real crime here is that a group of activists is trying to indoctrinate the next generation — our children — with divisive, destructive, demonic notions that everything is about race and power. Schools should teach children to think, not hate.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.