Ben Stein Complains About Syrup Logo in Bizarre Rant

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off actor Ben Stein has some serious beef with his pancake syrup bottle.

In a viral video that appears to be pulled from the actor’s Truth Social account, Stein bizarrely drones on about the appearance of his Pearl Milling Company — formerly Aunt Jemima — syrup bottle.

In 2021, the Pearl Milling Company re-branded their Aunt Jemima brand and retired the brand’s iconic, yet problematic, logo, which previously featured an illustration of the racist “mammy” archetype, which is rooted in American slavery.

“About to do something which I sometimes do which is to make breakfast for dinner,” Stein begins.

“Aunt Jemima yummy pancake syrup. This used to show a large African American woman chef, but because of the inherent racism of America’s corporate culture, they decided to make it a white person or maybe no person at all,” the actor continues.

“But I preferred it when it was a black person showing their incredible skill at making pancakes. So God bless you all [and] have a good evening,” he concludes.

Watch below:

This isn’t the first time Stein has been under fire for comments made in regard to race.

In 2014, Stein appeared on Newsmax TV where he claimed that the “real problem with race in America is a very, very beaten-down, pathetic, self-defeating black underclass that is — uh, just can’t seem to get its way going in the way that blacks were able to before the scourge of drugs and the scourge of gangs.”

“I mean, it’s an amazing thing — blacks were on their way in this country, even after the horrors of slavery, and then drugs came in, the destruction of families came in, and the crisis in the black community is just absolutely unbelievable. And that, it seems to me, is something that Mr. Obama could have addressed, and he just ignored it completely,” Stein continued, according to BuzzFeed.

The same year, Stein drew backlash for comments he made about 18-year-old Michael Brown, a Black teen who was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Mo.

“The idea of calling this poor young man unarmed when he was 6’4, 300 pounds, full of muscles, apparently, according to what I read in The New York Times, on marijuana. To call him unarmed is like calling Sonny Liston unarmed or Cassius Clay unarmed. He wasn’t unarmed. He was armed with his incredibly strong, scary self,” Stein said.

Earlier in his career, Stein worked for the Nixon administration.