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Fox News host Harris Faulkner tore into Chick-Fil-A’s CEO after a video of him addressing alleged systemic racism by claiming he said some “amazingly crazy stuff.”
The fast-food franchise, once a favorite on the right for its embrace of Christian values, is facing new boycott calls from conservatives similar to those of companies Bud Light and Target over their embrace of far-left woke cultural morals that appeal to a fraction of the population.
During her program on Tuesday, Faulkner addressed the budding controversy. “We didn’t even know this existed — watch this!” Faulkner said before playing the unearthed clip of CEO Dan Cathy, dated June 2020 — as violence spread across the country, with much of it caused by leftist activists under the guise of the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis just weeks earlier.
In the video, Cathy relayed a story about an older black man who attended a Christian revival.
“At that revival, in the front seat, there was an older African-American man that was sitting there, and this young man got up,” Cathy said. “And he’d been so gripped with conviction about the racism that was in that local community in a small town in Texas that he took a shoe brush and walked over to this elderly gentleman and knelt on his knees and began to shine his shoes.”
The CEO then stood up with a shoe brush in his hand and walked over to a black man who was sharing the stage with him.
“I invite folks to put some words to action here,” Cathy said as he approached and then knelt in front of the black man. “And if we need to find somebody that needs to have their shoes shined, we need to go over and shine their shoes.”
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Next, the video cuts to a segment where Cathy is seated again, saying, “Any expression of a contrite heart begins with an apologetic heart. I think that’s what our world needs to hear today.”
Jason Rantz, a Seattle-area talk radio host and a guest of Faulkner, noted, “There’s pandering that goes on that I think is more offensive than anything else. On the one hand, I don’t like the idea that we’re looking for things to be offended by on the right. But on the other hand, that is the exact kind of nonsense we have to push back against.”
Other conservatives responded online, including Benny Johnson, who said during a podcast segment that Chick-Fil-A was “the biggest fraud ever pulled on American Christians.”
Later, during her co-hosting of “Outnumbered,” Faulkner, who is black, brought up the video again.
“Chick-fil-A, look, we played it last hour. We dug up that CEO and some pretty amazingly crazy stuff he said. But, you know, and it was offensive to many people over the weekend, and that’s why this story blew up,” she said during a segment.
“People felt like, well, you brought in race and all these things. You can get offended by a lot. But, can Chick-fil-A walk the plank, continue to have the value system it has, the delicious waffle fries — which are my spirit animal — and, at the same time, do DEI, which keeps everybody really happy in the corporate end?” she asked.
“And, if their states start mandating it, some of these companies are going to have to start doing some things they said they’d never do,” she added.
To that point, Fox News itself was recently raked over the coals by conservatives after internal company materials surfaced revealing the network’s own ‘woke’ LGBTQ initiatives and accommodations.
But while Fox News hosts regularly push back against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, New York City — where the network is headquartered — requires all companies to adopt such measures.
