PJ Media readers are unlikely to miss Ben & Jerry’s Commie ice cream if all its American stores close, and the Bolshevik entrepreneurs are unlikely to be so consistent as to shut down all their operations in the U.S., but that was the upshot of a July 4 Ben & Jerry’s tweet: “This 4th of July, it’s high time we recognize that the US exists on stolen Indigenous land and commit to returning it. Learn more and take action now: https://benjerrys.co/46vrYu3.”
The link goes to a piece of weepy propaganda demanding the destruction of Mount Rushmore, but surely Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t think that only the area of South Dakota that is occupied by four massive presidents’ heads is stolen indigenous land, do they? Time for Ben & Jerry’s to shutter all its stores on the North American continent. And everywhere else, for that matter, for consistency’s sake.
The propaganda piece on Ben & Jerry’s website begins: “Ah, the Fourth of July. Who doesn’t love a good parade, some tasty barbecue, and a stirring fireworks display? The only problem with all that, though, is that it can distract from an essential truth about this nation’s birth: The US was founded on stolen Indigenous land. This year, let’s commit to returning it. Here’s why we need to start with Mount Rushmore.” All right. But we can’t end there with a good conscience, can we?
Once Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln have been dynamited and the Sioux Nation is granted total sovereignty over that part of South Dakota, all will be well, right? No, not at all. Ben & Jerry’s laments that “the Great Sioux Nation, as the tribes in the area were collectively known, was forced to surrender its land and relocate to smaller reservations on land that the government considered ‘useless.’ From there, in 1927, they watched as their holy mountain, now located on land known as South Dakota, was desecrated and dynamited to honor their colonizers, four white men — two of whom enslaved people and all of whom were hostile to Indigenous people and values.” Gee, that’s a shame, but where did the Sioux get the land? They must have lived there since time immemorial, right?
Not quite. The Sioux drove another Native American tribe, the Arikara, out of the area in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They didn’t coexist in peace. They didn’t make some marvelous deal to the mutual benefit of both parties. The Sioux drove the Arikara out by force of arms. So if the U.S. blows up Mount Rushmore and gives the land back to the Sioux, the Sioux have to turn around and give it back to the Arikara, right? If we’re being consistent here.
Also, Ben & Jerry’s is headquartered in South Burlington, Vt. Is that any less stolen indigenous land than Mount Rushmore? Ben & Jerry’s should lead the way by giving its land in South Burlington back to the Abenaki and heading back to… where? Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, besides being limousine-Left Marxists, are Jews, but they hate Israel as much as they hate America, so they aren’t likely to want to go back there. For some reason, their concern about native people having their land stolen from them doesn’t apply to the indigenous people of Israel (the Jews, that is, not the Arabs, who only arrived there in the seventh century).
Related: The Green Radicals Even Want to Ruin Our Ice Cream Now
The uncomfortable fact behind Ben & Jerry’s propaganda is that pretty much the entire world is stolen land at this point. Human history is a history of conquest and occupation. The idea that the United States is somehow uniquely stolen land while the rest of the world is occupied by native peoples is naïve and ahistorical. If Ben & Jerry’s were to follow through on its determination to return land to its indigenous owners, it will have virtually no place anywhere to sell its ice cream.
But of course, Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t really care about stolen land or indigenous people at all. Its objective is not justice; it’s virtue-signaling and appealing to the woke to buy more desserts. The Commie ice cream salesmen are engaging in that most capitalist of endeavors: appealing to their customers based on shared values so as to sell more of their product. And that’s why patriots should respond to Ben & Jerry’s call to destroy Mount Rushmore by giving them the incentive to shutter their stores that exist on occupied territory: don’t buy their ice cream. Put Ben & Jerry’s on the path of Bud Light. It’s a matter of simple justice.
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