Judging Freedom - Charlie Gasparino: Go Woke and Go Broke

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Charlie Gasparino: Go Woke and Go BrokeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. 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. But first this. A divisive presidential election is upon us, and the winner is gold. Let me tell you what I mean. Since 2016, our national debt has grown a staggering 70% and gold has increased by 60%. Do you own gold? I do.

I bought my gold in February 2023 and it has risen 33%. You've heard me talk about Lear Capital, the company I trust. Let me tell you why. Recently, Kevin DeMeritt, who is the founder and CEO of Lear, assisted the FBI in discovering a nationwide gold theft ring. And because of Kevin's good work, the FBI caught these people before they could steal anymore. That's why I have been saying the people at Lear are good people. They believe in America. They believe in their product and they're honest to the core. So take action right now, my friends. Call 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com. Protect your savings and retirement before it's too late. 800-511-4620 learjudgenap.com. Remember, hope is not a strategy, but gold is. 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 just, 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. 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 married is scary. And 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. You know, there was stuff like socially responsible investing. I mean, who can 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 tone tonality to it. But it was a backwater. articulated as you know essentially left-wing dogma um in some cases fat you know straight up fascism um is um you know slowly becomes part of the zeitgeist and you know i trace it without giving away too much of book because i want people to buy it you know i trace it it it starts at the un like all crappy ideas right uh 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 going out there and prodding the companies to adopt certain causes that are deemed politically correct. And, you know, one of those causes, obviously, reducing the carbon footprint, which became a huge issue, particularly during the Obama years. 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, he said, no longer would we be holding what Milton Friedman, Whom you and I both know. through their capitalist endeavors, not go out there in the political world to, you know, not pollute the ocean and, you know, dump PCBs in the Hudson River like GE got nailed for back in the day. But 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, you know, just another way of discussing ESG and then essentially, you know, 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, and most people know about this because we all saw these crazy ads. Right. 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, and I think that's where this got, that's where the sort of, you know, the train came off the tracks in recent years. And the Bud, the Budweiser commercial was, 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? Right, right, right. 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 DE dei their influencers because they were going out in the dei spectrum to include gender diversity as part of their influencers they made them it was essentially a mandate to put in you know certain ads um a transsexual and it was not this was not a transsexual who, again, was just living her life and, you know, saying, I am who I am and I want to be me. This is an activist transsexual,

someone named Dylan Mulvaney, who, you know, chronicled her transition from a man to a woman, you know, on TV, you know, 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 investment. 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. Dylanalvaney is a major trans activist. Again, Dillamalvaney 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 like strikes me and strikes my, it strikes my libertarian bona fides a certain way. You know, it kind of disgusts me because it was almost compulsory. You know, it was in your face. You know, sometimes people just want to have a beer. Do you ever think of that? Is that the essence of our constitution? Just leave me alone and do what you want to do. You know, 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 blowing up. 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, you know, have really horrible balance sheets. Silicon Valley Bank was one of those. But I was 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. 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 is who got ousted tried to fight back against the wokeness and got the and you got you got like 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 two kids and you're shopping at our by the way you're middle

class working class you don't it's hard child 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 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. And I got a great view on that too. 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 fought back against this?

Yes. As a matter of fact, it's funny you mentioned Ken Langone. 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 corporate wokeness run by a guy named Ed Renzi. 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 Chapek had to do what he did.

He 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, you know, should we just be worried about getting, putting kids in the, shouldn't they be worried about putting kids in the park? 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 they noticed that in African-American neighborhoods, a lot of McDonald's, everybody worked there was black, but 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. Right. 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. JP Morgan is Jamie Dimon. Larry Fink's at BlackRock, the king of ESG. like uh honest uh same with larry fink jp morgan is jamie dimon larry thinks that blackrock the

king of esg um but for the most part most of these guys don't and they're they're afraid of upsetting the human rights campaign and the center for american progress which are both left-wing groups particularly human rights campaign who are enforcing trying to enforce woke mandates upon them, including DEI and various levels of hiring. I was, it was remarkable how much Disney and these big companies allowed the human rights campaign to sort of the tail wag the dog, so to speak there and mandate stuff. You know, Disney, I got, I was able to get my hands on them 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.

So, 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 percent of America, I don't know the exact number, but it's huge swaths of Americans. They want nothing to do with this. If Americans like corporate wokeness, Judge, you know, Budweiser wouldn't have controversy over its overt and sort of sort of political, you know, gay pride month that went, you know, stretched to bounds. Disney stock has not moved since 2014. That's Bob Iger, the now CEO of Disney who had to come back after Chapik 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 part, that's a part of the book. That's

a lot of corporate sort of, there's a lot of corporate drama around the wokeness issue. And that, 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, didn'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 is, I tried to make it a fun read. Okay. This is a fun read. I mean, I read it over the weekend. It's enjoyable. It's not a, listen, this is, I tried to make it a fun read. Okay. It 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 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 a tariff a sales tax? Yes. And, you know, if there's one part. Man, I wish Trump would understand that. 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. Yeah, 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. I mean, Trump just, now he was a businessman, but people seem to think of him as like some sort of, you know, just a spoiled rich kid. But, you know, he does get it. And I think what he is aiming for on these things, and I, and I could be wrong. 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 as a tool that he that this whole thing about a 10 percent 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 how we have to deal with them. That's a that's a huge sort of that's a whole other segment that we might want to do. Let me just stop for a minute. They are geopolitical. 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. The problem with what 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. So 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. 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. 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-

Let me tell you why I think tariffs are dangerous, and it goes to the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court said tariffs are part of foreign policy. Therefore, the president can impose them on his own. It doesn't even require a vote of the Congress. He gets mad at Olaf Schultz 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 – that's almost a libertarian standpoint right 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 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. 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 three, and all the way from Moscow, Pepe Escobar, always worth waiting for at four o'clock. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. We'll be right back. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future.

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