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Sept. 8, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:32
Charlie Gasparino: Go Woke and Go Broke
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, September 9th, 2024.
Charlie Gasparino, my dear friend, my best buddy from Fox is here with us on how when corporations play politics, they lose.
And when they go woke, they go broke.
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Charlie Gasparino, my dear friend, welcome here.
Welcome to the show.
I have to tell everybody that the reason for this show, in large measure, is because of your twisting my arm in the days after I left Fox, suggesting I'd be happy and fulfilled doing this.
And of course, it's been successful beyond our wildest imaginings.
I'm not beyond my imaginings.
I had faith in you.
I know you so well.
You are Mr. Libertarian, as far as I'm concerned.
You know, you articulate it better than anybody.
You know the Constitution better than anybody.
Thank God you're not a warmonger.
You're for freedom.
Well, thank you, Charlie.
But you are not here just because you're my friend and best buddy from my 24 years at Fox.
You're here because you are one of the most astute explainers and understanders of what corporations do, how they acquire wealth.
What they do that's good.
What they do that's bad.
So one of the interesting things that struck me in your book, Go Woke, Go Broke, is corporate CEOs that are progressives.
You know, when I was a kid, I always thought, you know, these rich fat cats, they're conservative Republicans.
How did CEOs become progressives?
Or how did progressives become CEOs?
It's a great question.
It didn't happen overnight.
I would say the CEO class was never conservative, libertarian as we are.
There was always a sort of dance between big government and big business.
Eisenhower famously warned about it, right?
The military-industrial complex was not just the military.
It was in partnership with the industrial complex, right?
And the perniciousness of having big government and big business.
You know, married, you know, is scary.
And, you know, this has always been going on.
The woke part is a much more of a new phenomenon.
And, you know, I trace it back somewhere to the early 1990s, where it really started to seep in to the zeitgeist of corporate America.
There was stuff like socially responsible investing.
I mean, who could be against that?
Okay, I want investing that makes the world a better place.
That's what it sounds.
But it had a coercive sort of tonality to it, but it was a backwater.
Slowly, this whole notion of corporate responsibility and what it means to be corporately responsible, which was much more articulated as essentially left-wing dogma.
In some cases, you know, straight up fascism is, you know, slowly becomes part of the zeitgeist.
And, you know, I trace it without giving away too much of it because I want people to buy it.
You know, I trace it.
It starts at the UN, like all crappy ideas.
It starts to populate at Davos.
Where this notion of corporate responsibility and a new investing style known as environmental social governance investing which essentially is asset managers You know,
then it starts getting into the sort of bigger picture.
Lobby groups and the functional, you know, the rulers of corporate America through the Business Roundtable, where they defenestrate the great Milton Friedman in 2019, or 2018, I believe it is, check my date, where Jamie Dimon, the great CEO, J.P. Morgan, is considered America's banker, one of the best in the world.
Whom you and I both know.
We know him well.
And, you know, he came out and he said, no longer would we be...
not go out there in the political world, to not pollute the ocean and dump PCBs in the Hudson River like GE got nailed for back in the day.
Their main responsibility is within the confines of ethics and legality to do what they're paid to do, and that's run a company, shareholder capitalism.
Amy Diamond threw that out in 2018 for something known as stakeholder capitalism, which is just another way of discussing ESG and essentially all the sort of woke policies that surround what you hear today, diversity, equity, inclusion.
Some of the woke stuff is extreme and absurd.
It is.
Tell us the Budweiser story.
I mean, this is ridiculous.
Well, you know, what was interesting about this, and listen, I just want to be clear.
I use proper pronouns, Judge.
I don't care how you want to live your life as an adult, okay?
I'm from the sort of Ayn Rand school.
You know, you got total liberty until it infringes upon mine.
And I think...
And the Budweiser commercial was, you know, one of these sort of examples of just how far this corporate wokeness went.
I mean, in Budweiser, which is no longer owned by Anheuser-Busch, like a pure American, remember the Clydesdales and Spuds McKenzie?
They're gone since 2008.
It's been owned by a very woke.
A very Davos-centric company called InBev.
It's actually known as AB InBev right now.
They have very strict DEI components.
They wanted to DEI their influencers.
Because they were going out in the DEI spectrum to include gender diversity as part of their influencers, they made essentially a mandate to put in certain ads a transsexual.
And it was not this was not a transsexual who.
This is an activist transsexual, someone named Dylan Mulvaney, who chronicled her transition from a man to a woman on TV.
Essentially, a lot of people thought she was appealing to kids in some of these things.
Well, did they actually think that this would sell beer?
I mean, that's their job.
Now I'm getting back to Milton Friedman.
Their job is to maximize profits for the event.
Do they think Dylan Mulvaney would sell more beer?
That's the problem.
Who knows?
But they had to meet DEI mandates in their influencers.
And to be quite frank, if you're going to go there, if you're saying, listen, I'm Matt Budweiser, we need to add DEI to our influencer mix.
And we want gender diversity in that.
Dylan Mulvaney is the perfect person to pick from that standpoint.
Dylan Mulvaney is a major trans activist.
Again, Dylan Mulvaney interviewed President Biden months before the ad hit that blew up Budweiser.
So she's out there.
She's out there politically.
That's the crazy thing.
And that's where this sort of strikes me and strikes my libertarian bona fides a certain way.
It kind of disgusts me because it was almost compulsory.
It was in your face.
Sometimes people just want to have a beer.
Do you ever think of that?
Is that the essence of our Constitution?
Leave me alone and do what you want to do.
We all kind of live our lives.
Tell us the story of the Silicon Valley Bank.
Well, that's what got me on the book because I'm covering this bank that is And you know me, I do a lot of just straight business stories.
And it obviously was blowing up.
And by the way, there's still a lot of toxicity in the regional banking system because a lot of these banks, in order to compete, have really horrible balance sheets.
Silicon Valley Bank was one of those.
But I noticed something about Silicon Valley Bank as it was blowing up.
It was spending a lot of time on DEI and diversity and ESG.
I mean, it was touting this every five minutes.
You know, I did a little research and I'm like, why were they doing, like the chief risk officer was talking about DEI.
This is the risk officer who should have known about the balance sheet.
Why is this person obsessing with DEI?
And so the initial angle of the book was about Silicon Valley Bank and how this bank blew up because of corporate wokeness.
And then we realized within short order, this is a much bigger book.
It's not just the Silicon Valley Bank.
It actually became a few pages in the book.
It's Budweiser, as we mentioned.
It's Target.
It's Disney.
You know, Disney would gratuitously under Bob Iger.
Who's now back with the company.
And I talk about the implosion and how Bob Chapek, who got ousted, tried to fight back against the wokeness and you got whipsawed.
You know, they would gratuitously insert same-sex kissing scenes into cartoons that made no sense.
Target, like if you're a woman with By the way, you're middle class, working class.
Child care is expensive.
So you take your kids shopping with you.
And as you go, you go through like aisles and aisles and aisles of tuck-friendly bathing suits.
And, you know, there was kind of a revolt of the working class here.
You see it in a lot of ways throughout this book where people are like tired of being proselytized by companies who nobody elected to run their lives.
And then people have to work at these companies, Judge.
That's the other thing.
I got brand new around that.
Have any CEOs fought back against this?
I mean, our mutual friend, I don't know if he still actually runs Home Depot and all the other gazillion things he owns, including the largest hospital in Manhattan, Ken Langone.
Have people like that Yes.
As a matter of fact, it's funny you mentioned Ken Angone.
He was the founder of Home Depot, as you know.
His co-founder, Bernie Marcus, is part of the pushback.
And I interviewed Bernie at length and Bernie actually created an organization to counter, If you know anything about Ed Renzi, he ran McDonald's USA.
The reason why there is a McNugget is because of Ed Renzi, to be honest with you.
I'm not touting McNuggets.
But Ed was at home one day, and he was watching TV, and he saw that Bob Chapek.
He didn't understand the backstory.
And if he's read the book, he has read the book.
He knows the backstory of why.
Chapik had to do what he did, started opposing a Florida law that basically outlawed teaching of sex to toddlers, sex edged to toddlers.
And he was sitting there saying, what the hell is this?
Why are we wasting shareholder money?
And why are we taking a stand on this thing?
I mean, this is like, should we just be worried about getting, This is antithetical to everything I've done when I was a CEO.
And he was a very inclusive CEO.
If you know anything about McDonald's, they opened up branches.
They sought out to try to get sort of franchisees that were African-American back in the day because, you know, they noticed that in African-American neighborhoods, a lot of McDonald's, everybody worked there was black.
The franchisees weren't.
So Ray Kroc and Ed Renzi went out and did that.
That's the type of diversity that's not in your face.
It's actually real.
It's not proselytizing.
It's good business.
He saw just the opposite was going on in corporate America, particularly at Disney.
So he launched a counterattack, and I get into it in great detail in the book.
Wow.
Are modern CEOs with their eight-figure incomes and private jets and huge staffs Cowards?
Bernie Marcus says it at the end.
They are cowards.
I think they are.
And in this sense, you know, they, you know, every now and then, like, Jamie Dimon will say something remarkably, like, honest.
Same with Larry Fink.
J.P. Morgan is Jamie Dimon.
Larry Fink's at BlackRock, the king of ESG.
But for the most part, most of these guys don't, and they're afraid of upsetting the Human Rights Campaign and the Center for American Progress, which are both left-wing groups, particularly the Human Rights Campaign, who are enforcing, trying to enforce woke mandates upon them, including DEI and various levels of hiring.
It was remarkable how much Disney and these big companies allowed the Human Rights Campaign to sort of detail wag the dog, so to speak, there, and mandate stuff.
Disney, I was able to get my hands on a document that showed how much DEI permeates the entire ecosystem from the top, the board member.
All the way down to suppliers.
And I'm not talking about DEI in the notice.
We made great efforts to go to the Black community.
We are talking about quotas, which is patently illegal, particularly now that the Supreme Court has ruled that college admissions cannot be done based on race and ethnicity.
You know, I was just blown away.
And a lot of it's these activist groups that they're apparently afraid of a boycott or they're afraid of, you know, the Twitter storm.
When in reality, 90% of Americans, I don't know the exact number, but it's huge swaths of American stuff.
They want nothing to do with this.
If Americans like corporate wokeness, Judge, you know, Budweiser wouldn't have fallen from the number one beer to the number three.
Target lost.
Tons of money.
you know, stock went down during that whole controversy over its overt and sort of, it's sort of political, you know, gay pride month that went, you know, stretched the bounds.
That's Bob Iger, the now CEO of Disney, who had to come back after Chapek got blown out.
But Bob Iger is the reason why Disney went woke.
And I get into all that sort of background between him and Chapik.
You know, that's a part of the book that's a lot of corporate sort of And to me, that was one of the more fascinating parts.
And Larry Fink, who was the king of ESG, environmental social governments investing, made a lot of money and then has this sort of coming to Jesus moment about it.
And I talk about his transformation, why he backed off it after, you know, after being the champion that, you know, wouldn't miss a camera opportunity to tout it as, you know, saving the world.
So, you know, what I tried to do with this book, Judge, it's not a listen, this this is.
This is a fun read.
I mean, I read it over the weekend.
It's enjoyable, it's informative, and it's easy to read.
Yeah, and it's narrow.
It's actually like listening to you at dinner.
Minus the curse words, although I'm sure there's a couple F-bombs in there.
There are.
I promised a lot of people I would ask you this.
It's a little off from the book.
Isn't that tariff a sales tax?
Yes, and you know, if there's one part You know, I go back and forth with this judge, and I'll say this.
You know, I covered his economic speech.
At the Economic Club of New York.
And you might have seen me on TV talk about it.
Yes, it was last week.
Yeah, I thought he was incredibly detailed on it.
I mean, I was impressed by his mastery of economics as someone who covers economics.
But, you know, he does get it.
And I think what he is aiming for on these things is, It depends on who's going to have his ear.
And no one really knows who's, will it be Larry Kudlow who has his ear?
Or Steve Forbes?
Or will it be Steve Moore?
Or will it be, you know, Steve Miller?
And people like that.
You know, Peter Navarro.
I got the impression that he wants to use it as a tool.
That this whole thing about a 10% across the board is sort of a bargaining chip against our trading partners.
Take China out of the equation because, you know, the Chinese are, you know, we can argue about, you know, how we have to deal with them.
That's a huge sort of, that's a whole other segment that we might want to do.
They are geopolitics.
Knowing you were there because I saw your report on Fox Business.
We took a clip from him last week.
Here he is.
Would you strengthen or modify any of these economic sanctions programs, particularly Russia, including the pipeline you mentioned?
Well, it's a great question.
We have with sanctions, and I was a user of sanctions, but I put them on and take them off as quickly as possible because ultimately it kills your dollar and it kills everything the dollar represents, and we have to continue to have that be the world currency.
I think it's important.
I think it would be losing a war.
If we lost the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war.
That would make us a third world country, and we can't let it happen.
I use sanctions very powerfully against countries that deserve it.
And then I take them off.
Because look, you're losing Iran.
You're losing Russia.
China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency, as you know better than anybody.
All of these things are happening.
You're losing so many countries because there's so much conflict with all of these countries that you're going to lose that and we can't lose that.
So I want to use sanctions as little as possible.
You were impressed with him.
Yeah, I like that.
I mean, that was a great answer, wasn't it?
I mean, he understands that.
And it made me think that this whole tariff thing is kind of a bargaining chip because, you know, sanctions and tariffs are kind of almost, you know, you know, there's a flip side of each other, right?
No, I think a sanction is, Therefore, the president can impose them on his own.
It doesn't even require a vote of the Congress.
He gets mad at Olaf Scholz one day, and suddenly he puts a $50,000 tariff on Mercedes.
That hurts a lot of people in the U.S. I know.
But tariffs are like a step further on that scale of imposition of economic harm on enemies.
But the fact that he understood the tariff argument from...
I mean, you know, what good is it to debase the dollar, to stop free trade, to stop essentially Americans from making money?
You know, he understands that.
I mean, can you imagine Kamala Harris explaining that?
I can't.
We'll find out tomorrow night.
Charlie, Chris, put the full screen up again.
Charlie, thank you so much.
There it is.
Go woke, go broke.
The inside story of the radicalization of corporate America.
By the great Charlie Gasparino.
Charlie, tomato sauce soon.
My pleasure.
We love having you over.
Jen says she wants to send her love to you.
You're the brother from another mother, and I'm so proud of your new career here.
Oh, God bless you.
Thank you, Charlie.
All the best, my friend.
See you soon.
You got it.
Great guy.
Wonderful human being.
Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at 11 in the morning Eastern.
Matt Ho at 2 o 'clock in the afternoon.
Karen Kwiatkowski at 3. And all the way from Moscow, Pepe Escobar.
Always worth waiting for at 4 o 'clock.
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