Category: DEI
Billboard’s Affirmative Action Greatest Rock Bands List
Billboard magazine released its 50 Greatest Rock Bands. The list tells us more about the listers than the listed. The…
Reports of Woke’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
Woke is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness By Piers Morgan Harper Collins, 310 pages,…
Philadelphia Art Museum’s Former Diversity Officer Busted, Faces Theft Charges
She resigned soon after “without resolution”
EEOC Takes Northwestern Mutual To Court For Refusing To Comply With DEI-Related Subpoena
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on Thursday filed a subpoena enforcement action against Northwestern Mutual after the company refused to produce information about its diversity policies.
The post EEOC Takes Northwestern Mutual To Court For Refusing To Comply With DEI-Related Subpoena appeared first on .
‘I feel like I’ve been fired by America’: Cracker Barrel CEO nearly brought to tears over redesign backlash
Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino told BlazeTV’s Glenn Beck that the company was trying to correct for lighting and comfort when it presented its redesign.
Masino was at the center of controversy in August when the old country store was blasted for changing its logo, branding, and interior design. Customers particularly took issue with the removal of the country man sitting on a chair next to a barrel, as well as the barrel itself, leaving just black “Cracker Barrel” text on a yellow background.
‘Were you surprised you weren’t fired?’
Beck sat down with Masino inside a Cracker Barrel, tucked away in a corner booth along with the company’s senior vice president of store operations, Doug Hisel. During the hour-long conversation that saw Masino almost shed tears at one point, the CEO expressed anxiety about agreeing to the interview due to feeling that her position throughout the ordeal had been misconstrued.
“I want to set the record straight,” she said. “I want people to know that this is the brand that they’ve always known and loved, and that our job is to take care of it and just set it up for the next 55 years.”
Beck cut the noise and directly asked, “Were you surprised you weren’t fired?”
“I feel like I’ve been fired by America,” Masino replied.
“That’s probably worse,” Beck noted.
The CEO explained that her intentions were only to help Americans love the brand, “the way I love this brand … the way everybody who works here.”
Pointing to the some 70,000 employees at Cracker Barrel, Masino said she knows the responsibility she has on her shoulders and that she must ensure her employees are taken care of, and in turn are able to put a roof over their head and food on their table.
“My job is to make sure that Cracker Barrel helps them do that,” she added.
RELATED: Cracker Barrel saves its old-timey decor — but will we settle for a Potemkin past?
Cracker Barrel CEO Finally Addresses ‘Woke’ Rebrand Controversy | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 275
Surrounded by classic Americana synonymous with the store, Beck asked the execs about the disconnect in terms of the rebranding; Masino rejected that there was ever a plan to remodel.
“Was [the rebrand] ever intended to get rid of all this?” Beck asked, kindly referring to the bleakly remodeled restaurants that were shown online.
“I think a lot of people think that Doug and me and other people sit around are like, ‘Let’s remodel Cracker Barrel.’ Nothing could be further from the truth,” Masino claimed.
The real reason for the recalibration, she cited, were customer experiences that described visits as being “real dark” and not being able to read the menu. She then recalled not one but two stories where she spotted customers using a stadium cushion while eating at the restaurant.
“I love your food; I love it here, but your chairs are so uncomfortable,” she remembered one man telling her.
“That’s really where it all started,” Masino said. “How do we make the stores more comfortable?”
“How do we get the right balance of investment, of comfort, of nostalgia, of the tradition that everybody knows and loves here? But in a way, that’s easy for our teams to take care of,” she went on.
Masino said it was her expectation that customers would take issue with the presence of too many booths, but “it wasn’t that. It was the black and white and the decor.”
“So that’s why, when people got upset about it, we were like, ‘Oh gosh, that’s not the intention. We can revert them,'” she added.
RELATED: Cracker Barrel folds again, tells customers they ‘don’t need to worry’
Glenn Beck (L) interviews Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino (M) and Doug Hisel (R), senior vice president of store operations. Image courtesy Blaze TV / Glenn Beck
Beck was able to extract a lot of the boardroom reasoning behind the branding blunder from the CEO. Masino told him that the remodeled stores in question were all company-owned and have since been reverted back to their original design, save for four in Florida that are dealing with permitting laws; but the company is working on that.
During this line of questioning, Beck pointed out that he could feel Masino’s genuine nature and that she was “hurt deeply” and “personally” from the backlash the company received.
“You’re so human, and you’re fighting it. Why?” Beck asked.
“I don’t know,” Masino replied, appearing to tear up. At this point, Hisel jumped in to reassure Masino that she is a good person, doing her best.
The productive conversation concluded with a brief mention of Hisel and Masino reaffirming that “everybody is welcome at Cracker Barrel.”
“It’s America’s store,” Hisel said. “Come as you are. If you play checkers, we can do pancakes and country fried turkey. Come as you are.”
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The Spectacle Ep. 300: Why Movies Suck: Screenwriter Lou Aguilar Tells the Story
As the struggling film industry faces an all-time low in ratings and box office performance, can conservatives step up to…
The Spectator P.M. Ep. 170: Study Finds University Students Can’t Do Basic Math
The University of California, San Diego, released a shocking report that revealed an explosion of students who are enrolled in…
The Spectacle Ep. 298: Condé Nast Fires Woke Staff: DEI Hires Hardest Hit
Four LGBTQ Condé Nast employees went viral for their disrespectful confrontation with the magazine’s HR officer. The employees were later…
MSNBC Hires Black Actors To Feature Alongside Its White Anchors in Racial Justice-Themed Ad Promoting ‘MS NOW’ Name Change
A slick new civil rights-themed video promoting MSNBC’s forced name change to “MS NOW” features paid black actors playing ordinary Americans, intercut with pensive shots of MSNBC’s white primetime stars. The promotional spot, narrated by Rachel Maddow reading the Constitution, appears to be a ham-handed effort by MSNBC’s new parent company, Versant, to cater to MSNBC’s large black audience—the largest in cable news—when its primetime and morning anchor lineup is overwhelmingly white.
The post MSNBC Hires Black Actors To Feature Alongside Its White Anchors in Racial Justice-Themed Ad Promoting ‘MS NOW’ Name Change appeared first on .
Maryland school district allegedly indoctrinates 7th graders about gender: ‘Girl, boy, both or neither’
A middle school lesson is reportedly promoting the idea of “gender identity” and being “assigned” sex at birth.
Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland allegedly has an assignment designed for grade-seven students that pulls directly from pro-transgender sources.
‘Embrace family diversity, create LGBTQ+ and gender inclusive schools.’
The alleged assignment, provided to Defending Education, asks students to match a list of terms with a list of possible definitions. The terms are “sex assigned at birth,” “gender identity,” “transgender,” “gender expression,” and “cisgender.”
One of the definitions allegedly given refers to a person’s “internal sense of being male, female, or transgender,” further explaining that is “how you feel. Girl, boy, both or neither.”
Another definition refers to an “individual’s presentation,” which includes appearance and clothing as they relate to how the individual communicates “aspects of gender or gender role,” according to a screenshot on Defending Education’s site.
A person’s sex is also referred to as what “doctors/midwives” assign to someone when they are born, while gender identity is “how you feel,” the alleged exercise indicated.
Four of the definitions directly cite a program from the Human Rights Campaign, an organization that promotes transgender surgery and hormone therapy for children.
The lesson references WelcomingSchools.org, which describes itself as the “most comprehensive bias-based bullying prevention program” in the United States, meant to provide “LGBTQ+ and gender inclusive professional development training, lesson plans, booklists and resources” for educators who have access to children.
“We uplift school communities with critical tools to embrace family diversity, create LGBTQ+ and gender inclusive schools, prevent bias-based bullying, and support transgender and non-binary students,” the website says.
Erika Sanzi, senior director of communications for Defending Education, told Blaze News in a statement that the apparent vocabulary lesson requires students to “buy into an ideology that many reject.”
“Does MCPS require that students subscribe to gender ideology in order to fulfill the district’s family life requirements for middle schoolers? Because if so, that seems like viewpoint discrimination in a public school,” Sanzi stated.
At the same time, MCPS recently introduced harsher penalties into its code of conduct, which include suspension and expulsion for incidents involving drug possession, for example.
At least one local activist group said the new rules were detrimental to “black and brown students.”
“When we talk about intersecting into experiences of these black and brown students, they intersect to then lead them to be out of the classrooms, which means less time with academic study,” said Dorien Rogers from Young People for Progress, a Maryland group.
As reported by WJLA-TV, Rogers was also disappointed that the code of conduct was written only in English. The school system told WJLA that the new rules would soon be available in six languages.
MCPS did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Blaze News.
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