The Ricochet Podcast - Coming Up Empty

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

We've heard it said, "Go woke, go broke," but is it really panning out that way? This week Fox Business's Charles Gasparino joins James, Steve, and Charlie Cooke to say exactly that in his fittingly titled book Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America. Plus, the hosts break down the absurdity of Kamala Harris's economic proposals and joyful gaslighting; they enjoy basking in the warm summer sun, and challenge Ricochet members to a friendly round of Fantasy Football. 

My opinion around here these days is laugh for while you can, monkey boy. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lilex. Today, we're going to talk to Charlie Gasparino about his new book, Go Woke, Go Broke, the inside story of the radicalization of corporate America. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I'm James Lileks. Today we're going to talk to Charlie Gasparino about his new book, Go Woke, Go Broke, the inside story of the radicalization of corporate America. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Grocery prices have skyrocketed. Cereals are up 26 percent. Bread is up 24 percent. Butter is up 37 percent.

Baby formula is up 30 percent. Flour is up 38 percent. And eggs are up 46 46%, and many items are up at much higher rates than that. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number seven. Oh, who cares? Who cares what number it is? I mean, it's not like you're going to go back and say, you said something at 702 that I believe was contradicted by a guest at number 204. No, nobody's keeping track. Okay, it's 704. And we're very proud to have got this far. It's a rainy day here in Minneapolis. I'm joined by Stephen Hayward somewhere, and Charles C.W., which does not stand for conventional wisdom, Cook, who I believe is still being the ultimate Florida man down there, the nation's wang. uh you know gentlemen it's those who forget history are doomed to repeat etc etc etc but uh how about a good round of price controls on food that's worked out so well

everywhere it's tried um what do you think of uh veep presidential hopeful kamala harris's proposal to to do that and and hi thanks for being here. Well, all right, I'll go first since I'm at Steve Hayward sitting in for Peter Robinson again. You know it's bad when even the Washington Post economics columnist Catherine Rampell says, well, her subhead is, it's hard to exaggerate how bad Pamela Harris's price gouging proposal is. Yeah, I actually remember having done research years ago on Nixon's wage and price freeze from the, what, 1971. And one of their problems was, how do you enforce or set price controls on food? And one of the more comical elements was orange juice, the price of frozen orange juice wasn indeed frozen, but oranges were not because they're seasonal, right?

And so it all became arbitrary and ridiculous. And I'm trying to remember, there are a couple of other categories. I don't know if it was tomatoes or whatever. It was chaos and you couldn't possibly make it work. So this is just an attempt to deflect blame for inflation that everyone's mad about and say it wasn't our fault. It was the fault of Albertsons and Kroger and Winn-Dixie or something like that charles well i think that's right i think that's primarily why she did it it's a political ploy not an economic ploy she is aware that despite her many attempts to insinuate otherwise she is still called called Harris, that Harris being the Harris of the Biden-Harris

administration. She is in the office of the vice president, as we speak, and massive overspending led to inflation and people are angry. So she wants to point to the mustachioed man from Monopoly and say he did it. That said, although I have been a leading exponent of this idea that this is a political ploy, not an economic one, I do think it's incumbent upon voters to take at face value what candidates say they want to do. And not least because although he hasn't gone this far, Biden has been with the Federal Commission, doing some of this stuff already. And there are people within the FTC who are very much in favor of this sort of thing. And once again, Harris has not mentioned Congress.

This is a running trend. She never mentions Congress. Back in 2019, she said over and over and over again she could do anything without Congress, including gun control even. She was going to ban the AR-15 without Congress. So when Jason Furman, Obama's economics friend, said this morning, wow, this is a terrible idea, so it won't happen. Yeah, under our constitutional order, that's probably true. But if she's going to leverage the administrative state, which is already poised to try this sort of thing, then you should be worried about it.

And I think she should pay a price for having proposed it. Yeah, I mean, there's an epicycle to these things, too, that comes up a lot here in California. When oil prices are high, the left says, oh, it's collusion, price gouging by the oil companies and the refiners. Let's investigate. The government at all levels has been investigating high prices on gasoline and so forth for 40 or 50 years now, and they always come up empty because it's wrong. But then, the other side of the mouth, they say, we should have higher taxes on gasoline to discourage consumption. Well, which is it? It's actually an easy lesson. The left is

only happy when high gasoline prices are because of taxes and not because of market forces. And the same thing's happening now on groceries. And you're right, Charlie. I mean, again, an old story. When the Reagan people came into office in 1981, they found the Federal Trade Commission had an open investigation, not of my dog barking in the background, but of the cereal companies, you know, Kellogg and Post. And the argument was they were monopolizing shelf space in grocery stores, and that had to be stopped. And the Reagan people scratched their head and said, go away, this is stupid, which, of course, it was. If I could just very, very briefly add another cycle to that, which has amused me enormously, that is that when prices go up, when a Democrat's president, it's price gouging. Apparently, big companies don't price gouge under Republicans. You'd think they would be more likely to do that

because evil Republicans love corporations, but they price gouge when Democrats come in, when the prices go up. When the prices go down, that's because of the president. So we've seen the most hilarious trend under Biden, where prices will go up and he would say, this is outrageous collusion from the supermarkets and the meat producers. And then it would go down. He would say, happy Thanksgiving, Joe Biden wishes to tell you that your potatoes are less than they would have been last year. Right. Well, how would you how do you think that this let's say she gets elected president and she does, she decides to go around Congress to do this. How do you possibly think that would manifest itself as an executive order that would say what? Because I know that this is just thrown out there for, as you said, for political means, but it is revelatory of what somebody wants to do and thinks they can do. How would she possibly keep the grocery store's profit margins within an acceptable amount for her? Executive order saying what? Well, I think Charlie put his finger on it.

They'll use things like the Federal Trade Commission to harass big business and the grocery chains. I mean, the Justice Department is trying to block a big grocery store merger right now. I think it's, I forget, it's Albertsons and somebody. It might be Kroger. I can't remember. But they'll do that kind of thing. And, you know, that always has some effect. But the effects that we will see as consumers are shortages, hoarding, black markets pop up.

It's the old story, especially with supermarkets and low-margin items. That's why you run out of toilet paper when there's price controls, for example. I mean, the profit margin for supermarkets in the United States is about 1.18%. It's the latest figure. 1.18%. Just very low relative to most American businesses. That's lower even than health insurers, which always get told that they're making gobs of money, which they're not. 1.18%. So the actual capacity of the Federal Trade Commission to do anything here is limited. And as Steve says, the product of that will not be a change in profit margins,

but shortages. But that doesn't mean that the attempt won't be extremely difficult. I mean, it's a bit like being sued, even if you're right on the law. You could be 100% right on the law, but if somebody decides to make your life hell, the process becomes the punishment and you end up having to spend all your time complying with this or that and paying lawyers and frankly, just worrying at night. And I think, you know, if indeed I am right, which I am sometimes, and this is a political rather than an economic thing, then that sort of harassment will be more likely, not less, because she'll want to point to it and say, look at all of the stuff that I'm doing. I'm an outsider. I didn't have anything to do with this. I'm trying to stop it. And that will make it worse for publics, not less. People don't understand the percentage of the American workforce that it is involved in

compliance. It tells you something about the reach and the power of the regulatory state when you have entire departments and companies engaged in compliance, the name of which just sounds as if we're in a state of constant servitude with our heads bent and our arms manacled. But you're right about the profit margins, Charlie. They are absolutely thin. How do they make their money then? Well, with really high jacked up stuff that people pay for. I mean, the profit margins on ready to eat meals. You walk into the store and you see a sandwich for $12.

You see an entree for $14 or something. And people pick it up because they can and it's convenient and the rest of it. And that's where the profit really comes from because the margins are so huge. Is that in itself gouging? Are we to have the never blinking eye of the panopticon fall upon the deli meat section and call their margins too fat? If it all ends with people, as you said, a black market, people going to an alleyway somewhere

where somebody sells them a plastic baggie full of Captain Crunch, that is not exactly the America I signed on for. Then again, I'm speaking as one of those people who owns a house and isn't troubled by the market today, which is very expensive and bad for first-time homeowners. I think the best way to stabilize the homeownership market, get more people in, and bring the price down,

is to give everybody $25,000 if they're buying a house. Some say, ridiculously, that that would just mean that $25,000 would be tacked onto the price. I don't understand this thing called economics, but that's what they say. Is this another serious proposal, or is it just another bit of political grandstanding? And I think we know the answer to that. I mean, wage and price controls are one thing, but proposing this kind of subsidy for housing really does remind us once again how economically illiterate leading Democrats have become. I mean, one of the reasons, in fact, one of the main reasons that higher education costs have risen, I think at twice the rate of health care, is the government

subsidizing student loans, having lots of grants. And colleges are, even though they're non-profit institutions, they capture those subsidies in higher prices and can get away with it. And why you would think that wouldn't happen in housing is beyond me. And the rent control proposal is also biden has already floated and harris is doubling down on will have the same effect on rents it's just going to raise prices or raise rents um and i don't know what remind me again what the rent control proposal is because we've had it here in the twin cities and it has been disastrous they put a i mean they they capped it at three percent

or something like that over the course of x number of years and what it meant was that just about everybody who's going to build something said nah no i'm not going to do that i'm going to go i'm going to go build it over here across the border from your town it never works but are they remind me again because i've had a busy week and I haven't been able to follow every little detail of rent control, national rent control laws. Well, as I understand it, the Biden proposal was to apply this to large corporate owners of multifamily housing. So that would be your large apartment REITs like Avalon Bay and people like that. But also, supposedly, hedge funds have been buying a lot of residential property,

both single-family homes and apartments. So they want to gouge the big guy. But eventually that's going to trickle down to the little guy. It just has to because it seems to me, if you're going to be consistent about it, which they have been in places that have rent control like New York. New York's rent control started as a temporary measure in World War I, just to remind people, and we still have it a century later. So there are a few liberals. I'm surprised to find them out here in California, and maybe, James, you have some in Minneapolis who have been saying, I never thought I'd live

long enough to hear this, that the problem with housing is we over-regulate land use and building too much. And there's actually sort of this left wing, it's actually here in California, called the NIMBY movement. NIMBY meeting, or YIMBY, sorry. Yes, in my backyard. And they actually say pretty sensible things, along with a lot of nonsense about, you know, segregation and redlining and stuff like that. But you would think that this would trickle up to the Biden administration or Democrats at the national level, but so far not much progress on that front. Yeah, this has cracked me up. It's like, you know, you have someone who's a heroin addict,

and he's like, it's causing me all sorts of problems being a heroin addict. I'm late for work, and I can't remember to do stuff, and my work's really low quality. And you say, well and I can't remember to do stuff and my work's really low quality. And you say, well, what are you going to do about that? And they go, well, I was thinking of getting up earlier. Well, there's certainly one option. Well, okay. Any other ideas? Well, I was thinking of setting alarms that tell me to do my stuff. You know, I'm going to take some Xanax. Maybe stop being a heroin addict. Like it's, it's obviously a complicated issue, but one of the core problems with housing in the United States is that it is so regulated,

especially in places like California and union rules and environmental rules make it so difficult to build at cheap prices that people are struggling to get into the market. And the fact that the inflation that we cause led to high interest rates has not struggling to get into the market. And the fact that the inflation that we cause led to high interest rates has not helped people get into that market either. And the one thing, I mean, she says nothing for a month, nothing. She's an avatar candidate.

The press does all of her work. And she says, I'm going to make a big speech. And the one thing she can think of is give people money on the demand side. You can't see all of the stuff that everyone's been talking about. You want to give people money on the demand. It's just astonishing.

Total inability to see the problem. Well, at this point, of course, everybody on her side is saying, well, what about Trump and terrorists? And that's another conversation. We can have all of these conversations, but at the moment we have our guest and our guest popped up

and we're glad that he did. It's Charlie Gasparino, senior correspondent for Fox Business, also columnist for the New York Post, and an author most recently of Go Woke, Go Broke, the inside story of the radicalization of corporate America. Charlie, thanks for joining us today. Charlie, I know that this is a nation that has many problems that afflict us, many deep societal problems that we're eager and keen to grasp with some of them. Some of them we are too painful and we turn away. But I know that when I want guidance in where the soul of America should be headed, I look to tractor companies and motorcycle makers. So let's talk about the company, the ones that I just mentioned, for example.

The problems that they face may not be instantly notable to the people who aren't on Twitter and the rest of it, but Harley-Davidson is the most recent company for people to look at them and say, wait a minute, iconic American brand, symbol of the open road, the throaty engine roar, the smell of the gas, the great American icon, and they're smell of the gas the great american icon and they're they're lecturing us about the need to reinvent capitalism sadly they're not alone i mean yeah i mean one of the things in my book that i point out is just you know how stupid just just how pervasive wokeness is at companies and now you would think corporate america is a right-wing pursuit right capitalism uh it is within the confines of wokeness at least lately i mean all these companies have devolved into sort of messaging the um the cultural dynamics of the left

and uh i know this sounds really sort of academic when i explain this but read the book um and you you'll both get a laugh out of it because watching corporations do stupid woke stuff is really fucking funny right did we mention new york post we mentioned new york it absolutely is joe it is it's amusing and in its cluelessness and their inability to read the room and the rest of it. But let's go down some of the examples you talk about in your book. And then let's also get to the important question. Do they really go broke? I mean, Disney's still trading.

Harley's still selling cycles. That farm supply guys, you know, they may have taken a little hit, but they're going to be still around. First example. supply guys uh you know they may have taken a little hit but uh they're going to be still around do they really but first example your favorite example of a company that went woke for no good reason at all well it's got to be budweiser well you know it's it's a brand budweiser is a brand in the people think anheuser-busch owns budweiser it's it doesn't it sold out 2009 i go through the the buyout uh the bush family became very rich by selling it for billions of dollars to a company called ab imbev which is essentially a bunch of brazilians and and uh and uh and belgian you know the businessmen very davos who bought the brand and uh and know, that's where you could trace the increasingly sort of progressive branding of Budweiser and other brands to that purchase.

And, you know, it reached its sort of high or low part point with the Dylan Mulvaney trans woman in a bubble bath drinking a Bud Light you know yeah which yes did happen uh but i you know sort of that to me was the most infuriating and the funniest and also it just really captured you know why this is this this occurred and i'll tell you why i you know i covered this when it went down in 2023 and the company tried to blame it blame it on a couple of misfits in the marketing department. And as I found out, it was much more than that. It was literally those misfits in the marketing department, first of all, weren't such misfits. They were actually good marketers, but they were under some pretty strict guidelines to impose DEI, diversity equity and inclusion in various parts of the branding of their of their um of beer including the use of influencers so what happened was they want they

ab embed was increasingly going there it wanted to um include in its you know in its DEI mandates for influencers the trans community, essentially, as part of that DEI mandate. And if you're going to go to the trans community to sell beer, Dylan Mulvaney becomes someone that you'd go to, even though the company sits there and says, oh, we've never heard of this person before. Dylan Mulvaney is a famous trans activist uh she interviewed uh joe biden before the um before those ads hit and you know and and it became sort of a cultural touch touchstone the whole the whole budweiser flap or bud light flap or Bud Lightflap. She chronicled on Twitter or on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok her

364 days of becoming a woman. No, it's called Being a Girl. Yeah, I mean, it was really... And by the way, it was pretty off-brand. If you did any research into her, her brand was bizarre

because it was so activist i mean no listen i have trans friends no problem with people that want to go there i mean that's your business i have a problem with proselytizing obviously but you know you could make a case that you might have proselytized kids there was a ted cruz told me and it's in the book the senator from texas about how she um had some did some skit on on instagram or tiktok about her name being eloise and she's six and she's dancing around i mean it's it's i mean it's just it's bizarre that that budweiser in there go there but if you know dei you understand why they went there and that's part of the whole corporate woke movement now when i say go woke go broke um listen i mean obviously i'm not prone to exaggeration here but listen

there is a there is a a brokenness to this budweiser went from the number three um brand number one brand to number three best-selling beer brand uh disney stock has not moved since yeah since 2014 you know that uh i can go down the line target took a hit to its bottom line you know um we can go on and on and uh you know i don't think this stuff sells i mean i don't think my book proves it doesn't sell and it's so stupid that you wonder why they go there. But then you have to kind of get a handle on the woke ecosystem, which I tried to get my hands around. So, Charles, it's Steve Hayward out in California. And I wanted to take us back to the very beginning a little bit of how this happened.

What were the invasion routes? I've had two theories about this that are complementary, but I've only really worked on ones as an academic. I used to say, yeah, it's really bad that our universities are so left and into identity politics, but if you ruin the English department and the philosophy department, it's no big deal. But it broke out of the confines of the campus and found its way into the corporate boardrooms, starting, my point is, the Silicon Valley 15 years ago. And I think it's the HR departments are a large part of it, because if you've got a degree in gender studies, you can't actually do anything in a real business, but you can go in the HR department and the new DEI department,

which it's one thing to have an HR department that's trying to advance civil rights and affirmative action and all those problems. Right. Well, the DEI people, what do they do? They just exist to make trouble. And I haven't gotten into your book very far yet, but I'll bet you've got lots of stories,

and I keep hearing stories of DEI offices that tie units of companies in knots with their maw of struggle sections over pronouns and what statements they should put out. And then I think the big business lobbies at the other end of this, World Economic Forum, also put pressure. Oh, and CEO wives, I think, are a big problem. I don't know if you get into that or not, but how did this happen? Take us from the top for us. Well, I did trace how it happened. Again, this is not a history book, but history is important

here, in my view. listen like all cultural revolutions it happens slowly at first and then you know you know so i traced i i tried to trace when was the first time i've heard of esg you know that's a key blanket right environmental social governance uh investing the first time i saw it was in you you know, when I went back in my databases was 1995. Now, coincidentally, in 1995, I was hired as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I spent nine years there covering corporate scams and you name it. There's all the stuff that reporters do at the Wall Street Journal. And i noticed at the time i was covering mutual funds and in 1995 um there was a sort of sort of small but kind of growing movement of social

responsible investing and um it wasn't like quite a thing i mean you know when i got hired at the journal as i remember it was literally i was in the newsroom, you know, I got offered the job. The day Netscape went public, and I don't know if you remember Netscape, it was like the first browser, right? Right. And at the time, the IPO. So, you know, I spent a lot of time initially covering, you know, these tech funds that were blowing up. People were getting involved in dot-com stuff and um but there was this sort of side business over here about social responsible investing and i remember stuff like

the domini index that would bring company mutual funds under social responsibility so it started to grow out of that now you know why wasn't it just ignored and thrown to the side? Well, there's a lot of factors because of that. Okay, so there's a groupthink in corporate America. There's no doubt about that, right? So part of the groupthink gets together in Davos, and like all bad ideas, you know, I find that all bad ideas begin at the UN. All bad company ideas, most ideas, begin at the UN and maybe Davos, right? Yeah. It all starts inculcating these sort of classrooms of influencer professors like the Jeff Sonnenfelds of the world at Yale, where, you know, progressive corporate responsibility become a huge thing.

And corporate responsibility was defined broadly in terms of left-wing policies in the boardroom. Right, right, right. Well, I remember, Charles, that around 2000, what caught on for a while before ESG solidified was, you may remember this too, it was the triple bottom line. It was profit, people, and planet. It's the same thing as ESG. And the name changed and but you do pick up on one thing i think is quite important um and i think more should be said about this you quite rightly single out the people who call themselves stakeholders this has been around

for a while but you know shareholders we understand that there are people with skin in the game they bought the stock who is a stakeholder and how do you become one? It seems very sinister to me, but give us your take on that. Well, stakeholders, you know, the whole notion of stakeholder capitalism started to seep in around the time that you mentioned, 2000, you know, about that we're, we actually, you know, live in a global community. It's and and ceos need to think more holistically not in the milton friedman fashion of shareholder capitalism and i think the 2008 financial crisis took it another step further i mean you did have congressional pressure on companies the emergence of elizabeth warren as a powerful leftist progressive force in the u.s and others and um and then you had business caving into it and i think 2008 was one way to cave into it it was was what because remember what happened

with big business there was massive government bailouts you had a wicked um sort of backlash populist backlash of tea partiers but mostly occupy wall street which was you know just galvanizing cities and these ceos started to like you know essentially virtue signal to buy to buy themselves cover from from the left populist you know sort of revolt that was going on and there was something interesting that happened in 2018 or 2019. I can't quite remember. I think it was 2018. It's when the Business Roundtable, which is the business lobby group, right? It's where the 100 top CEOs essentially set the agenda for all public companies, defenestrated Milton Friedman and shareholder capitalism for stakeholder capitalism,

where you are we think more broadly and um and that was Jamie Dimon of all people the the great banker at J.P. Morgan who actually turns out to be kind of woke I mean it's a funny scene in my book you know during the George Floyd by the way the George Floyd um and this just shows you how absurd it is a cop kills maybe accidentally probably accidentally but whether you use brute force too much force is a matter of contention uh a guy that was trying to pass a counterfeit check in a convenience store in minneapolis that's george floyd the guy has fentanyl in his system and he resisted arrest now i'm not saying he deserves the death penalty far from it but you know in in that struggle he's he dies but that death sparked these riots and all this sort of

it was like a weird woke come to jesus moment for every corporate ceo like like they need it was so absurd that jamie diamond brian moynihan a Bank of America, I go down the list, all of them, that virtue signaled about this, you know, use that example that the country is racists in need of change. And they did. And, like, how do people that are, like, supposedly smart, Jamie Dimon graduated from Harvard Business School, now runs a big bank, he's very smart. How do these people go there? Because it's actually quite stupid, now runs a big bank. He's very smart. How do these people go there? Because it's actually quite stupid, if you think about it. My conclusion in the book is they did that for virtue signaling reasons, to gain good publicity, to get higher, because there is a corporate woke ecosystem that's developed.

The human rights campaign grades businesses, and it does have impact. ESG is now catching on in 2020 and the g and esg and the the s and esg is very much about social justice and so jamie diamond so brian moyni had a bank of america does a you know tells all his direct reports to read the collective works of raj chetty i don't know if you know that name. That's an economist that's very progressive. And then he says, we're going to start a $1.5 billion fund for racial equity. And everybody said, well, how are we going to hand out money? Just get it to the communities fast. So they're just low-interest loans.

Jamie Dimon reads that and says, we're gonna do a bigger one we're gonna do 35 billion dollars and he does it you know so i raise with them okay so are you telling me that george floyd had a low interest loan that day and you know and their answers i mean i put their answers in the book it's stupid you know and what's also interesting about this is like jamie diamond and you know at the time was was he went to visit a branch because remember this was during the covid lockdowns he went to visit a a jp morgan branch in mount kisco new york and he was and they took a picture of him taking a knee and it like went viral and and we all asked you know it was like a group picture and we all asked we said you know is he is he like now you know a social

justice warrior and they were like well you can write whatever you want you know we're not gonna come you know so they had no problem letting you know that that impression for four years so when i went back and i checked and this is in the book i said yeah i'm just saying oh i'm gonna write about this and the pr people at jp morgan were like oh no no jamie didn't take it just want to make make it clear jamie is not a blm supporter he took a knee merely to fit in the photo because he was didn't want to obstruct the people behind him and i said that's so stupid why did you wait four years to tell me that well I had a question for you Charles Cook here so how do we fight this because there's a paradox in that you're right to identify a host of examples of where companies that have gone

woke have suffered to some extent and yet it's still spread. I mean, there's still an ecosystem that in some sense seems to be impervious to outside influence. And insofar as the examples you've given are of a diminished fortune for a company that's gone work, they're not going under, right? I mean, Disney still exists. It's flatlining in the stock market, you're right, and the movies aren't doing so well, with one exception. So if you're a consumer and you can't do what was done to Budweiser with the Dylan Mulvaney nonsense, how do we fight this so that it goes away?

Because its influence is pernicious. You know, one of the things i noticed about the target situation which is kind of interesting is that for many years target would have these very sort of expansive um pride month celebrations right and um the uh they do it and there was there was increasingly there was stuff on social media about like parents being outraged and you know i'm taking my kid to the target and you know i see this and that and you know i don't i just want to shop there i'm going to i want to get diapers so to speak you know which is why you shop at target right right um so uh you want you know good good you want some quality at a low price um they reached a tipping point in

2023 when you know woke reached its i guess apotheosis the best way to put it all this stuff's happened in 2023 where you know people had enough and literally people took to social media and the company was totally caught off guard to just sort of um do what the press what most of the press wouldn't do the media wouldn't do and just report about what was going on inside the store which was at another level um literally rainbow colored onesies i mean first off the pride it wasn't just i am just just, I have no problem with pride displays. I, you know, I don't, and I don't have kids. So that's a whole other story.

But if I go to a Target and I see a pride display, I will walk to a tuck-friendly bathing suit for men who haven't transitioned, next to a row of books about children transitioning, that rubs them the wrong way. There's a cultural—they're proselytizing a cultural change that most people hate. And they took to social media. And guess what happened? Target backed off it yeah budweiser backed off it now here's the funniest thing with budweiser because i did a lot of reporting on this they tried to blame it on the the uh you know the poor the two guys the two people in the marketing department which it's much more than that but if you want to know how absurd the overreaction in budweiser is right now. So they go from Dylan Mulvaney drinking Budweiser half naked in a bubble bath, right, in their social media spots. Now they're in.

Now they cut some massive deal. They actually paid up wickedly for it with the UFC. Right. Dana White, the very unworked Dana White, very, un-woke, you know, cage match boxing, right? Guys ripping their head off. Bud White, the Anheuser-Busch is the main sponsor of that. As part of that, they're thinking about one of the Anheuser-Busch brands is thinking about partnering with one of Dana's other side hustles he's doing right now, which is called Power

Slap. That's literally two big guys slapping each other in the face until one falls. Now think about that. The guys that brought you Dylan Mulvaney a year ago, almost a little more than a year ago, are now supporting or promoting and sponsoring something where two lunatic guys smash each other in the face that's how bad their brand has been damaged and how they try to put the genie back in the bottle

and that's how much the consumer backlash did work now you're never going to put companies putting companies out of business is very difficult as someone who's covered business for years i mean you know uh you know lehman brothers bear studs you know that sort of stuff i i broke a lot of stories during the financial crisis there's there's a whole bunch of reasons why that happens you know i i don't think budweiser is going you know necessarily going to go out of business tomorrow but slowly but surely they are losing a lot of money dis stock, the fact that its stock hasn't moved since 2014 will tell you something. Disney's getting hammered for what it did to Star Wars.

Target is getting hammered for what you said exactly. I'm here in Minneapolis. So I was here during George Floyd. I'm still here. And the Target headquarters, I can see it out my window if I crane my neck. So I'm in the epicenter of all this. You're absolutely right about what happened to Target. For years, they had pride displays and nobody really cared. Suburban moms didn't care. They'd go in, they'd see it, they'd wave, whatever. But it was when

they went specifically really heavily leaned into the trans stuff that the moms who shop at Target all of a sudden reared up. And it became known on social media and elsewhere that one of the artists with whom they had partnered, who sold stuff on the Target website, was actually a Satanist, which is, you know, tiresome, and was giving away little buttons that had Satan, I'll respect your pronouns, that had a guillotine for the TERFs. Target completely, completely misread the fact

that when this got out, the moms who would just absolutely, who would show up at the pride parade when it went down the suburban street would look at this and say, wait a minute, hold on, hold on too far. And I don't think that any of them have come back in the same way because I used to shop at Target all the time. And now in the back of my head, I hate to use the word, but they're just weird. The whole feeling I get about the places, it's just that they did that. And now in the back of my head, I hate to use the word, but they're just weird. The whole feeling I get about the place is just that they did that and they're just, you know, they're weird and they got other options. But you're right. They do come back and they try to tell us that they're not that anymore. As if I see Kid Rock blowing up some, you know, some cans of beer of the competitor with a shotgun and then saying, I'm a Bud Light guy myself. I'm

going to just robotically turn towards them again and say, all is forgiven. No. We all remember. It's going to take so long for Bud Light to come back. It's going to take so long for Disney to regain the trust that they've lost amongst the parents. One of the problems Bud Light has is that it's kind of a shitty beer.

That's part of the problem there, too. We go to keg parties and buy bud because it was like you know spuds mckenzie and everything i mean it was that was in my head you know i don't like if i'm gonna drink a beer i'm not gonna drink bud it doesn't taste very good but you know so there was an image that bud that you know it just gives you an impression if you you really get into Bud, which I did, there's this amazing ad they did with the Clydesdales right after 9-11. Right. Where the Clydesdales walk up in a field and you see the Twin Towers. And then you see them gone.

And then the Clydesdales take a knee. And I still get shivers, like, watching that ad. It was just amazing. As someone who worked, listen, I was two minutes. I worked at the Wall Street Journal at the time. We were across the street from the Trade Center. I remember that day very well. I mean, I was at a doctor's appointment like five blocks uptown,

so I saw the whole thing unfold. You know, that was chilling. And you go from that to Dylan Mulvaney. And I think that will tell you, you know, why so many people revolted and will still revolt now. And it tells you about the shape of the overculture. Charlie, we got to we got to get out here. And but we got to tell people to buy your book, which is Go Woke, Go Broke, the inside story of the radicalicalization of Corporate America. And I hope there's a second edition and it has some addendum at the back that tells us more because it's not over.

It's not done. It's still going to ripple through business for a while. But thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you, guys. Bye-bye. Yeah, it's going gonna keep on going. You know what I find interesting is

We were talking before about or Charlie was talking when all we're talking about how they don't sometimes realize that What they believe to be the absolute proper way to think is actually know the luxury beliefs of an overclass that are not shared by Everybody else and I find this most notable in the media where there are words that do not have quotation marks around them all the time. The meaning is accepted. Climate change is one of them. I mean, it's indisputable that it's happening. Equity is another. Equity has replaced equality. You guys notice that? That whenever somebody talks about equity, it's an automatic positive good and nobody seems to, you know, I don't know. All I know is that if you want to feel as good tomorrow as you did the day before when you wake up, and that's a form of equity, isn't it? Equality or something like that. Well, you got to be careful

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I don't even know where I would start. I don't need that in my head. I don't need to worry about it. I don't need another way to lose as a Minnesota Vikings fan, shall we say. But Charles, of course, you are a great football guy. What is this Ricochet Fantasy Football thing about? I love fantasy football. In fact, I won my family league last year, which means I expect to do really badly in the Ricochet fantasy football league. Not that I will be included as eligible for the prizes, but I will be taking part. And you too can take part, providing that you are a member of Ricochet.

It is a members-only fantasy football league. I think we had a post up on it last night. And as far as I understand, the idea is to get as many leagues together as we need. I think there's probably a limit on how big each one can be, but we can have five or six of them. We can have divisions. And then at the end of the whole thing to hand out prizes. Now, am I right in saying, Steve, you're going to be involved in this too? I am. You know, I've never really understood or participated in the fantasy baseball or football leagues, but I want to learn about it.

And, you know, it sounds like fun, so I'll be all in. But I have to say, Charlie, I haven't heard yet if Henry Olsen is going to be part of it. He probably will. Look out for him. He does fantasy baseball. Oh, my goodness. He absolutely kills every year in fantasy baseball, I know, because he's such a numbers geek. And I'll bet he'll be just as good at football. So look out.

You know, one of my favorite things is to be checking Twitter on some random evening, you know, Thursday night or something. And Henry Olsen is giving extremely detailed, granular analysis of the election in Lichtenstein and saying things like, well, of course, when you enter the palace region, then the Parti de Framboise is expected to do well this year given their support for the bat2 platform that was anything wow i know you could do this in america how can you do this in every single country in the world so it doesn't surprise me that he's extremely good at fantasy baseball yeah and then and on the other hand john you will just bet on the philadelphia

eagles he'll just do hometown stuff. So it'll be easy to pick his pocket. Yes. Well, I was going to show up as I walked to my computer to sign up, actually. I tore my meniscus, and so I'm going to be out for the interview. Isn't that your quarterback? The new quarterback. Yep.

Yep. One game. We're dead. We're dead. We're absolutely dead. Yeah, it does, but that's part of being a Minnesota Viking fan. The self-delusion that is required year after year, week after week, is really quite extraordinary. It says something about the character of this state, either our ability to be deluded or our

tenacious loyalty, or a combination of the two. You know, I was going to ask, for example, that we're coming down to the end of summer here. We've got a fortnight left, I guess, if you want to look at it. Calendrical summer, that is. Meteorological summer will last way into September, but nobody in these parts believes that at all. I just thought it's kind of ridiculous to ask you fellows how you feel about the shank of summer,

since Charles is in Florida, and Stephen, you're in California now? Yeah. I mean, you guys live in a perpetual bliss of clement weather. You know nothing of the character that develops when the world itself turns and paints itself into these most beautiful ways. Can I contradict you slightly? I do know something of it, which is one reason I now live in Florida. I've grown up in England for 26 years.

Yes, I imagine so. And it was that that drove you away. Is the English fall, does it lack that bittersweet? I thought with Keats telling us the fruits, the mellow fruits of autumn and all the rest of it, or is it just another dismal, drizzly interval? Yeah, it's dismal and drizzly and great. You know, I looked this up recently. The closest analogue I find to the English weather is Seattle. And for years, I said to people, they said, what's England like? What's the weather like? And I would say it's like Seattle. Seattle has 100 days more of sunshine than England does.

So even the one example that I could find, there's actually a really good map I saw that shows how much sunshine places in the world get. And America in general, even, you know, you're joking about Minnesota, but Minnesota too, they're just so much lighter and sunnier and brighter than all of Europe, with a couple of exceptions. And it has to affect the national character in your outlook. Oh, it absolutely does. I mean, I was in England at the end of July, or the end of June or the beginning of July.

And we had five, six glorious days in Suffolk. I mean, it's just it was hot. It was actually hot. People were putting on shorts and they were fanning themselves and complaining about the lack of air conditioning and all the rest of it. Although the place where I stayed had AC because it was built by civilized, sane people. But then, of course, we get in a and we go to Glasgow. And Glasgow rained. But as a Minnesotan, I don't understand the sort of Scottish rain until I get there, in which it rains and then it doesn't. And then it rains a little bit and then it mists for a bit. And then it rains very heavily.

And then the clouds blare through like trumpets from Berlioz. And then the clouds slam shut again with a clank, and the rain comes in again, over and over and over again. And I think the Scottish must have as many names for rain as the Eskimos do for snow, that old canard. No, they don't. It's just rain. Which is followed by four glorious days in Edinburgh, where it barely rained at all and everything was absolutely

wonderful but glasgow in the rain and the griminess and the and the sort of sodden careworn nature of the place really brought through the spirit of it in a way that if i'd gone there during nothing but sun i don't think i would have understand understood as much so i'm glad my vacation was completely rained in glasgow i understood it a bit more, and I understood why perhaps that shaped the Scottish temperament as it did. Stephen, your summer has been going fine, I assume. Make it interesting to everybody in the next

few minutes that we have. Oh, that's hard to do. I mean, summertime for an academic is when you try and catch up on unfinished articles, read books that have been piled up in a corner, try to get outside and enjoy things. I will say that the climate change business can go on forever, but this summer has been very unusual. Where I live on the Central Coast, it has been thick fog almost the entire summer until

this week, and that's partly because our producer Perry visited me, and I think he brought some good weather with him. It's sunny outside and beautiful right now, and I'm looking at the ocean. But part of it is, get off on this for a minute, you and listeners may remember about a year and a half ago, there was that enormous volcano eruption in the South Pacific. And the honest climatologist said, ah, this is going to affect the planet's climate over the next two years, since there's a little lag in it because it threw up so much high altitude water vapor and particulates and it's going to have both a cooling and warming effect depending on where you are and i think that accounts for some of the weather patterns that otherwise the media is freaking out about this summer which are to be entirely expected if you're

honest about it it's going to make it cooler or warmer that is just a climate change advocate's dream because you can point to absolutely everything. And also, but it means that if you're looking at coughed-up water vapor in particular, and you look at subterranean jets coming out from the depths of the ocean warming things up, and if you look at the fact that the Great Barrier Reef seems to be doing okay, and if you look at the fact that Antarctic ice is not a nightmare, and you consider that sunspots, that big, huge, glowing nuclear furnace up in the sky might have something to do with our climate. It means then that all of the stuff telling us to do to get out of our cars and into EVs, which are powered, of course, by some magic that's generated somewhere, that falls on deaf ears.

And we can't have that because we've all got to have an electrified future, right? That's one of the things that I fear the most about a Harris administration would be the continuing war against the most effective means of generating power you possibly can. Then again, maybe she'll be pro-nuke. Then again, maybe whatever. I don't particularly trust the gray matter behind those sparkling, joy-filled eyes.

And by the way, guys, I'm tired of hearing joy. I'm really tired of hearing joy. Not because I'm not a joyful person. Because they're about this close to saying that America will achieve strength through joy. They're about this close without realizing it. James, are you really pining for the sour countenance of John Kerry? Is that your nostalgia now? Better lurch than this empty effervescence.

Yeah, I just hate being told this stuff that we all know is not true. It's an injunction. They are joyful! They're not joyful. You know what it reminds me of? That old 1990s version of Superman with Dean Cain and Terry Hatcher. So I watched this when I was a kid.

I love this show. And there was this particular episode in it where this guy, I think, I guess, in the show he was running for elected office, and they found some brain control technique that would allow him to broadcast out to the people of the city this one phrase that he was a darn nice guy and so everywhere lois went during this episode she starts to notice she would say what do you think of this guy and and they would say well you know i think he's a darn nice guy. And everyone said it and it just got really, really creepy.

This is the joy thing. The people who are promulgating this, they are happy. They are joyful because there was a period of a few months where they thought they were going to lose. And they thought they might lose Minnesota and New Mexico and New Hampshire and Virginia. And so they were crying themselves into their breakfast cereal. And now they're all happy because they've got this candidate who looks like she's marching in the ahead and they feel joy

but they're using this brain control technique where they're trying to convince everyone else that that they feel joy and they see joy and what this is is joy and it's joyful and the thing that defines it is joyfulness and i keep watching these rallies and i'm like, what? What are you talking about, you weird people? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Weird is the right. Joy is the left. These are the two words. It's joy versus weird. Joy versus weird.

Just repeat that to yourself until you are convinced and vote accordingly and correctly. That'll do for us, folks. Thanks, guys, for showing up here. Thanks for ZBiotics for sponsoring us. Go to Apple Podcasts. Give us those five us, folks. Thanks, guys, for showing up here. Thanks for ZBiotics for sponsoring us. Go to Apple Podcasts, give us those five-star reviews. Five big, bright stars so more people can find

Ricochet. And be joyful about it, though. And be very joyful about it, yes. Press hard with joy. And join us joyfully at Ricochet.com where, if you're part of the member feed, which means you're a member, you get all sorts of stuff, not just the fantasy football, but you get the meetups and you get to have conversations.

They're in private and they're all over the place. And it's a great community. I was just there last night at about 12 o'clock or so, typing out and reading and go there every day a couple of times. So I'm not just a flap and mouthpiece here. I'm an actual contributor. And I'm also a flap and mouthpiece. Thank you, guys. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. So I'm not just a flap and mouthpiece here. I'm an actual contributor. And I'm also a flap and mouthpiece.

Thank you, guys. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Well, next week.