A popular candy brand is being blasted for going woke and promoting LGBT ideology, sparking calls for boycotts. Although Pride Month is over, Skittles has introduced new packaging featuring LGBT Pride slogans and images.
The packaging was designed in collaboration with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a group which has partnered with Skittles for years to push ideology under the banner of “tolerance and inclusion.” The packaging features mantras like “Black trans lives matter,” “Joy is resistance,” and “Express urself” emblazoned across the Pride progress flag colors spiraling out of the sky. The artwork was designed by LGBT artists, including “Ash + Chess,” a self-described “queer and trans couple” who manufacture greeting cards, and a host of others who identify as queer, nonbinary, or transgender.
Skittles has promoted Pride Month since at least 2020, when the company announced its colorful packaging and candies would be colored grey throughout June, explaining then and throughout subsequent years that “[d]uring PRIDE only #OneRainbow matters.” Since then, Skittles has featured various Pride themes during June and has donated its June proceeds to GLAAD. As early as 2016, Skittles has been promoting LGBT ideology in Canada, Germany, and the U.K. A Skittles ad campaign in London told Pride London the company wouldn’t “steal your rainbow thunder” and that “only one rainbow deserves to be the center of attention — yours.”
Skittles’ parent company, Mars Incorporated, has been an ardent LGBT supporter for years. In 2007, Mars pulled an ad campaign deemed “anti-gay” and earning the praise of such progressive organizations as the Human Rights Campaign. Since then, the company announced its “diversity and inclusion” policy and publicly celebrated LGBT Pride events. In 2021, Mars’s vice president of Public Affairs North America, Brad Figel, contributed to an op-ed promoting gender transition procedures (such as genital mutilation surgeries) for children, referring to parental rights and child protection legislation as “dangerous, discriminatory,” and “bad for families, for communities, for businesses and for the U.S. economy…”
Culture guru and contributing editor at The American Spectator Scott McKay quipped to The Washington Stand:
“Normal people shouldn’t buy that product even without its woke marketing. It’s poison from a nutritional perspective as well. … When you stop and consider how much demoralization, character deficiency, and bad-habit encouragement that modern advertising and pop-media programming contains, it will shock you. We are being made into people unworthy of freedom. The only thing to do is unplug.”
In the wake of the newly-unveiled Skittles packaging, conservatives are calling for boycotts, akin to the boycotts that crippled Anheuser-Busch to the tune of nearly $30 billion. On Twitter, Libs of TikTok said Skittles “is trying to turn your kids into BLM & LGBTQ+ activists. … Skittles have gone completely woke.” Former GOP congressional candidate Robby Starbuck added, “We should transition Skittles to broke.” The Libs of TikTok post already has over two million views and over 7,000 reposts. Dr. Robert Malone, inventor and skeptic of mRNA vaccine technology, also criticized Skittles, saying, “This is marketing aimed at children. … It isn’t ‘just’ the brand that is at fault, it is the company. That would be Mars.”
This follows a string of conservative-led boycotts against brands and companies for aggressively promoting LGBT ideology. Earlier this year, Anheuser-Busch made Dylan Mulvaney, a male social media personality who identifies as transgender, the face of one of its brands, Bud Light. The decision resulted in a widespread boycott of not just the brand but the company.
Other companies — notably Target, but also Starbucks and Levi Strauss — were also subjected to what social media users dubbed “the Bud Light treatment” after promoting LGBT agenda items, especially to children. Sports teams — like the Los Angeles Dodgers and Kansas City Royals — have also been blacklisted by conservatives after hosting drag performers at Pride nights.
Meanwhile, leftist outrage over songs like Jason Aldean’s “Try That in A Small Town” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” have only served to increase the songs’ popularity.
As for Skittles, FRC’s Joseph Backholm told TWS, “Presumably the people at Mars are aware of what happened to Bud Light and Disney, so this looks like evidence of real commitment. They really believe they will make the world a better place once they convert everyone to their religion of autonomy and sexual license. They believe it so much they’re willing to sacrifice their companies and their careers to spread their message of salvation. They know there will be a cost, but they don’t care because they believe it’s the right thing to do. If the church had the same level of commitment to the actual truth, our country would be a very different place.”
“The silver lining in all of this for conservatives,” Backholm continued, “is that their lives will be objectively better for not drinking Bud Light, eating Mars candy, and watching Disney movies. This is the definition of a win-win situation.”
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
