Trump Advisor Stephen Miller — formerly the senior advisor for policy and White House director of speechwriting in the Trump administration — has a MAGA business called America First Legal that hunts for “woke” companies to sue.
Finding that Kellogg’s — the iconic American maker of corn flakes and much else — was actively trying to diversify its workforce, Miller recently submitted a letter to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that alleges, as The Daily Beast phrases it, that “Kellogg’s hiring, training, and promotion practices seeking to achieve a ‘balance’ in its staff based on race and gender violate federal laws prohibiting workplace bias.”
America First Legal says in a release that Kellogg’s “faces significant challenges in finding capable employees. Nevertheless, the evidence is that Kellogg’s hiring, training, and promotion policies and programs are infused with woke ideology.”
But that diversity problem, as Miller and MAGA see it, extends beyond hoping to hire more Black people into management positions — Kellogg’s is also in their view killing its own brands by associating them with “woke ideology” in its marketing. In other words, Kellogg’s has a Bud Light problem.
Striking MAGA gold in this sense, America First references a photo op featuring Kellogg’s brand icon Tony the Tiger (Frosted Flakes) and transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, whose work with Bud Light famously set off a conservative firestorm that dented the Bud Light brand’s decades of earned consumer equity and cost its owner hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.
Tony the Tiger spotted with Dylan Mulvaney on the Tony Awards red carpet
— Vulture (@vulture) June 11, 2023
(not an Other Two plot an actual real-life thing) pic.twitter.com/WdECXgFeYn
America First writes: “[Kellogg’s] management knew or should have known that Mulvaney’s association with Bud Light had cost InBev shareholders billions of dollars and that there was a strong likelihood that using him as an avatar for Kellogg’s would drive away many of the Company’s core customers.”
Below, Mulvaney is featured in a Wall Street Journal post, responding to her post-protest treatment by Bud Light’s ownership, who offered what she and the LGBTQ community more broadly characterized as lukewarm support after the conservative backlash.
Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney criticized Bud Light for not publicly supporting her after her association with the beer brand sparked calls for a boycott #WSJWhatsNow https://t.co/WOJt8J2ast pic.twitter.com/kb6IiTfT2Z
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 4, 2023
With Kellogg’s Miller’s group takes issue (purportedly on behalf of shareholders, who are, of course, free to sell their shares) with the company’s embrace of “social issues,” specifically objecting to a cereal box celebrating pride and equality.
America First describes of the box to which it objects:
Management ran the 2021 “Together with Pride” cereal promotion. This was a partnership with “GLAAD” – which describes itself as “the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) media advocacy organization”, opposes parental rights to know about transgender “transitions” in public schools, and promotes censorship and cancel culture.
The company also put drag queen Ru Paul on a Cheez-It box, another trigger.
Here is America First’s overarching anti-woke complaint, summarized in its Kellogg’s excoriation by attorney Reed Rubenstein.
“Kellogg’s officers and directors are, of course, free to spend their own money on whatever social or political cause they deem fit. But this freedom does not extend to breaking the law or to spending the Company’s funds and eviscerating Kellogg’s brand equity and consumer goodwill to serve their extreme woke activism. Management has a fiduciary duty to promote and protect Kellogg’s business, not hijack it for leftist political ends.“
