Ben & Jerry’s cofounders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield would have done a lot better sticking to making their delicious frozen treats while keeping their mouths shut.
The painfully liberal and awkwardly socially conscious duo were last in the news over the Fourth of July when their company stupidly tweeted out the historically inaccurate charge that “The United States exists on stolen Indigenous land.”
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://t.co/45smaBmORH pic.twitter.com/a6qp7LXUAE
— Ben & Jerry's (@benandjerrys) July 4, 2023
“Ok you start. Relinquish your headquarters,” one Twitter user wrote. “This should be easy then,” wrote another. “Shut down and donate all of your land, facilities, and assets to indigenous people.”
It wasn’t exactly their “Bud Light moment,” but maybe it should have been.
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Now Ben Cohen has put his foot in his mouth again by blaming the conflict in Ukraine on NATO and the “military-industrial-congressional complex.”
Cohen claims that Bob Dylan’s 1963 song “Masters of War” opened his eyes to the problem.
“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”
“In the end, money won,” Cohen told Politico. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”
“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he added. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”
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The left has been blaming the “military-industrial complex” for every conflict in the world for 60 years. It’s intellectually lazy and completely unprovable. It’s a way to bring anti-capitalism and anti-military sentiment into any conversation.
The ice cream mogul, who no longer maintains any control over his namesake dessert brand, has not allowed aging to slow down his commitment to political protest and activism.
Cohen was arrested earlier this month by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) police for blocking the entrance to the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., where he was protesting the detainment of Julian Assange.
Assange is imprisoned at Belmarsh Prison in London and may soon be extradited to the U.S.
Cohen never misses an opportunity to blame America. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Cohen predictably blamed the U.S. for the conflict.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.
Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
The “deliberate provocations” were all in Putin’s mind. Ukraine was not going to join NATO, they were not going to send hordes of neo-Nazis across the border into Russia, and the Ukrainian army was not going to invade. Cohen is a Putin stooge — just like he was a stooge for the Soviet Union and the North Vietnamese in the 1970s and ’80s.
Cohen no longer has any input into the day-to-day operations of Ben and Jerry’s. But he still finds a way to display his ignorance and stupidity on a regular basis.
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