For an ice cream business, Ben & Jerry’s political views are anything but vanilla. Since its first pint in 1978, the brand has become synonymous with hard-core progressivism — often putting them crosswise with Americans, who’ve been turned off by their decades of in-your-face political extremism. But, in a move that proves even the unapologetic leftists aren’t immune from the current crusade for corporate neutrality, “Vermont’s finest” just got a taste of the backlash.

Dave Stever hadn’t been on the job long. The latest victim of America’s consumer activists was hired in 2023, a month after Dylan Mulvaney made Bud Light a corporate pariah. And while Stever was only continuing Ben & Jerry’s long legacy of virtue signaling, the timing couldn’t have been worse for the company tour guide-turned-chief executive. Suddenly, the brand’s far-left causes were even more irritating — and not just to customers, but to the ice cream magnate’s parent company too.

Unilever, the packaged goods corporation with 400 brands under its umbrella, bought the colorful cow-covered brand in 2000 but became increasingly wary of the hippie chain’s insistence on wading into controversial issues like abortion, trans activism, and social justice. Tensions boiled over publicly in 2021 when Ben & Jerry’s announced it would no longer sell to certain areas of Israel, accusing the Jewish state of violating the rights of people in what they called “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Internally, the two sides had been warring over the chain’s political agenda for years. Apart from goading Trump supporters with a “Pecan Resist” flavor in 2018 aimed at stopping the “most unAmerican president in my lifetime,” as co-founder Ben Cohen called him. From there, things only got worse. In 2020, the company partnered up with the hugely polarizing quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who refused to stand for the National Anthem, then rallied behind former Squad member Cori Bush’s push to defund the police. At the height of the George Floyd protests, the ice cream makers threw itself headlong into the Black Lives Matter movement, even sending food to the rioters in Seattle’s CHAZ zone.

Under Stever, the brand pledged its allegiance to the radical Human Rights Campaign, ACLU, Advocates for Trans Equality, climate justice, Planned Parenthood, and anyone else on the who’s who of woke progressivism. But last year was especially exasperating for Unilever, who watched the chain alienate Americans with its Fourth of July messaging by declaring “the United States was founded on stolen Indigenous land.”

But the cherry on top had to be Ben & Jerry’s direct lobbying for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign (which included the release of a new flavor, “Kamala Coconut Jubilee”) during a 20-city “get out the vote” partnership with the far-left MoveOn organization. (Fans of Jeni’s ice cream will be disappointed to know that she was also part of the Harris-hyping tour.) By January, the brand was in all-out resistance mode, launching direct action “against fascism” to oppose Trump’s second inauguration. “Dissent!” they shouted from customer newsletters.

It all led to a monumental headache for Unilever, who informed Ben & Jerry’s on March 3 that it would be replacing Stever as CEO — right before another controversy ignited over the brand’s celebration of “National Abortion Provider Appreciation Day.” While conservatives vented their disgust over the “psycho” March 10 messaging (“No decent person should ever take another bite of this garbage again,” Michael Knowles proclaimed), officials at Vermont headquarters were furiously prepping a lawsuit that claimed, among other things, that Unilever was trying to silence their radical views.

“Unilever’s suppression of Ben & Jerry’s social mission has reached startling new levels of oppressiveness,” the complaint reads. Among other things, the chain argues that it was banned from “‘issuing any posts criticizing President Trump’ pending further review.” Just this month, the ice cream business’s tweet defending anti-Semitism as “political speech” on Columbia University’s campus was blocked, they griped. Officials also fume that their independent board wasn’t consulted before the CEO’s ouster.

But a win in court might be a stretch. As Stephen Soukup, author of “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,” pointed out to The Washington Stand, “Unless Ben & Jerry’s is able to demonstrate conclusively that Unilever is in breach of contract (as B&J claims), then it’s hard to see how it has much of a leg to stand on here. And if Unilever is in breach of contract, then whoever negotiated that contract should never work again,” he argued.

“The fact of the matter is that Ben & Jerry’s political posturing hurts the brand, hurts the company, and, by extension, hurts its shareholders. If Unilever were to allow ongoing use of the Ben & Jerry’s brand to make divisive political statements — including statements that many perceive as anti-Semitic or supportive of terrorist entities — then it would be in breach of its fiduciary duties to its owners, its shareholders,” Soukup warned. “‘Social purpose’ is one thing, but aggressive political acrimony is something else altogether, and Ben & Jerry’s appears to have left Unilever no choice but to act.”

As word leaked out this week that the parent company was reading the writing on the market wall, Americans cheered. It was “smart to fire him,” author Chadwick Moore insisted. “How many other people stopped buying Ben & Jerry’s over their silly and toxic activism?” Others, like pro-life activist Lila Rose, called it “sweet justice.” Then there’s Robby Starbuck, the force who’s brought several absurdly liberal companies to their knees, who posted last year, “I’m one of those weird people who think ice cream companies should sell ice cream instead of low grade political activist takes.”

Unfortunately for the county’s woke CEO holdouts, he’s not alone. After the last two years, who can blame any business for being gun-shy about rank social extremism? It’s a financially punishing path — one that some brands are still struggling to recover from. When even the Targets and Amazons of the world are rethinking their political engagement, times have changed. Ben & Jerry’s should change along with them.