Creepy Joe Biden is at it again, doing what he does best, pandering with no facts or truth to his claims, this time with his snuggling up to the Hispanic community by praising the new movie “Flamin’ Hot.” Only, there is one tiny little problem.
On Thursday, Biden welcomed “Desperate Housewives” actress Eva Longoria to the White House to screen the new Disney+ comedy/drama, “Flamin’ Hot.”
The film follows the tale of a janitor at snack maker Frito-Lay who purportedly invented the flavoring for the company’s “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos” snacks.
President Joe Biden was thrilled to welcome the film, which is available for streaming now, gushing about the “courage” of Hispanic “ancestors.”
“When I think about tonight’s movie, I think about courage. So many of you, your ancestors left behind all that they knew to start a new life in the United States,” Biden said, according to USA Today.
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For her part, Longoria — who also had quite another misadventure at the White House — was thrilled by the film because she has been told “no” so often during her career and it was a joy “to produce this authentic film steeped in inclusion.”
First lady Jill Biden echoed Longoria’s barking about “inclusion,” by adding, “This film isn’t just about Richard. It’s about everyone who has been overlooked or underestimated.”
According to the film’s summary, it follows the “true story” of Frito-Lay employee Richard Montanez (Jesse Garcia), the son of a Mexican immigrant, who “disrupted the food industry by channeling his Mexican heritage to turn Flamin’ Hot Cheetos from a snack into an iconic global pop culture phenomenon,” IMDB noted.
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This “feel-good story,” as USA Today calls it, is a tale of a father and family man who invents the Flamin’ Hot flavoring based on his Mexican heritage and is encouraged by his children and wife to take his recipe to his bosses and offer it up for the company’s next big snack. Naturally, because he is just an Hispanic janitor, his bosses dismiss him as an unimportant annoyance. But eventually, he prevails and the new flavor becomes a massive hit that makes Frito-Lay billions.
It would really be a wonderful tale of an underdog rising to the top, except for one little problem.
There is no evidence whatever that the real-life “janitor,” Richard Montanez, was the “true story” creator of the Flamin’ Hot recipe.
In 2021, no less an authoritative source than the Los Angeles Times published a story that concluded that the claims Montanez has made for years are simply not true — or, at least, that there is no evidence to prove his claims.
Montanez has spent years on the public-speaking circuit, the Times said, charging between $10,000 and $50,000 to tell his engrossing tale of the plucky outsider outsmarting corporate masters and helping his company launch an iconic snack brand.
But Frito-Lay couldn’t find any records at all that give any hint that the former janitor had a hand in the snack brand. It’s all fake news, they said.
“None of our records show that Richard was involved in any capacity in the Flamin’ Hot test market,” Frito-Lay wrote in a statement to the Times, in response to questions about an internal investigation whose existence had not been previously disclosed. “We have interviewed multiple personnel who were involved in the test market, and all of them indicate that Richard was not involved in any capacity in the test market,” Frito-Lay told the L.A. Times.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate Richard,” the statement continued, “but the facts do not support the urban legend,” they added.
Further, Montanez wasn’t just a janitor. He started as a plant worker and rose to the level of marketing director. So, he wasn’t just an ignored, everyman. He had a real career path that the company did not hinder.
According to the Times, the flavor was actually created in 1989 by Frito-Lay’s food professionals led by an employee named Lynne Greenfeld, but Montanez didn’t start staking his claim to its invention until the year 2000. And, likely fearing the label of being racist, Frito-Lay decided not to challenge him.
Greenfield contacted Frito-Lay and asked them why they were allowing Montanez to take credit for the work her team did. And after an investigation, the company agreed with Greenfield. But they didn’t want to get too proactive in the situation, telling the Times, “We value Richard’s many contributions to our company, especially his insights into Hispanic consumers, but we do not credit the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or any Flamin’ Hot products to him.”
The actual creator of the flavor has been disappointed in the company’s lack of action.
Greenfeld said, “It is disappointing that 20 years later, someone who played no role in this project would begin to claim our experience as his own and then personally profit from it,” the paper reported.
The Times has much more on the story, of course, but for our purposes, it must be noted that it is a shame that Joe Biden is using this fake-news movie to promote an untrue story of Hispanics being disparaged and discriminated against. And it also shows the left’s pecking order. Biden is raising up a Hispanic man over an Anglo woman. Clearly, Hispanics trump Anglo women in Joe Biden’s estimation.
It’s all just another example of how liberals use race and heritage as a wedge issue to separate Americans and keep us all fighting each other.
