Charles Gasparino On How Woke Ideology Reshaped Corporate America

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Transcript:

BENSON: Let’s bring in our first guest of today’s show. It’s Charlie Gasparino, senior correspondent for Fox Business Network and a busy guy. He’s author of a brand new book, Go Woke, Go Broke The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America, available today. Congratulations all that. It’s good to see you.

GASPARINO: Thanks, Guy. Really appreciate I love your show. I listen to it as I work out.

BENSON: Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. So I want to ask you we’re looking at the Dow right now. It’s up significantly today not making up the losses from yesterday. Making up some of them Thursday Friday Monday what 2K points down. This is something of a rebound. Is this like just a correction here. Because I know there was a kind of a freak out understandably over some of the underlying economic numbers.

GASPARINO: Remember stock traders are stupid. So they react to headlines. They overreact. It’s often overreact on the downside and the upside until the markets settle out. And in the long run, these stock prices are or you know, they’re what’s the word for it. They they put in all the available information and you get like an accurate price in the long run. Okay. I will say this. When you have someone like Kamala Harris who brags about being woke. As my book points out, I mean, and not just woke, but we’re talking about Uber progressive woke, you know, embracing of DEI. So we’ve got the clip.

BENSON: Let’s just play real quick.

GASPARINO: Those plays into the book a little bit.

BENSON: Don’t take our word for it. Here’s Kamala Harris, leaning hard into wokeness with her signature chuckle cut 15.

VO: We have to stay active. And, you know, we have to stay woke like everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you’re the woke ist or woke her, but just a more woke and less woke. Yeah.

BENSON: And that’s basically maybe she’ll say exactly that as she introduces Tim Walz today. Right. In Philadelphia because it’s woke on woke for this ticket.

GASPARINO: Right. And so what I pointed out in my book is that wokeness exploded, began to explode under Biden in practice. And then the backlash exploded, during the Biden-Harris years, because corporate corporations took their cue from the white House, which this is one of the most woke white houses ever. One of the reasons is because of her, but it’ll she’s probably going to be wokeness on steroids. Oh, yeah. Well, if, you know, if she gets elected, if you look at it, DEI runs rampant. The president brags about it. He’s basically he said it starts at the top. My vice president. Wokeness in terms of environmental policies and all that. Basically, that’s virtue signal to the business community. And the business community went there. Now, what was interesting about the business community as they wickedly embraced wokeness, as I show in the book, particularly after 2020, after that, that year, that that crazy year where we just stuck in our houses and during COVID.

BENSON: Unless you were rioting.

GASPARINO: You did not have to wear a mask when you were right. Yeah, I remember that. Crazy, you know, those largely peaceful protest, businesses started getting really into the woke business when Joe Biden got elected, it went on steroids. And then there was the backlash when, you know, it was interesting when I, when I was sitting down doing the book, it was, when I first thought of it, it was early 2023 and Silicon Valley Bank blew up. Remember that one of the big regional banks and it was going to be a regional bank crisis. And so I’m a business reporter. I was going to do something on that, a book on that. And I also noticed that Silicon Valley Bank, you know, was totally into the woke stuff. You know, DEI ISG, they obviously took their eye off the ball. Well, you know, the the sort of risk management ball to embrace all this like the.

BENSON: Stay in business ball?

GASPARINO: So that was going to be the book. But then guess what happens like within a week as I as I start writing Dylan Mulvaney becomes a thing. A trans woman who becomes this like kind of a spokesman for Budweiser to sell a beer that is big in Middle America was always a very American beer, you know, a Bud Light, Bud Light, I mean, you know, spuds Mackenzie, the Clydesdales. And then all of a sudden, a trans woman giggling in a bubble bath became the face of Bud Light. And was it I, I, I believe in diversity. I have, you know, I have friends who are trans. That’s not the issue here. The issue here is when you go that overtly, what are you doing? Are you trying to sell beer or are you pushing a progressive political agenda?

BENSON: Well, you you also had beyond Dylan Mulvaney. You had some of the executives, like trashing the core customer. Right. In interviews.

GASPARINO: Right, too fratty?

BENSON: Yeah. Like, you know, the people who buy and drink our beer, that’s kind of gross. We want to remake it in the image of this other person. And a lot of those people said, no, thank you.

GASPARINO: Well, you know, I do deep dives into all this. I do deep dives into that, into what went on a Target with their pride displays the overt ness of mixing children’s clothing, I mean, and the backlash. I go, I get into Disney and, you know, their their attempts with governor DeSantis over the, the sex education bill that, that they said that they mislabeled the don’t say gay bill. And you know what all that was about? So I get into this, but, you know, it’s always more complicated when you do real reporting. So here’s the interesting thing Budweiser. Anheuser-Busch tried to blame it on one woman, Alyssa Heinerscheid showed, and she was the the first woman to ever market Bud Light. She actually was caught in those very unfortunate comments about, yeah, we need to we’ll have a less Fratty image for but we have to expand our base, which that business in of itself is not so bad. I mean, you know, marketing is all about expanding your market, your market. Right. But what people forget is that she was under tremendous pressure from the DEI edicts of the the parent company, AB InBev, to expand the pool of influencers. They were relying largely on influencers to push products because they’re cheap. And this. Was a company that was under tremendous pressure to expand it into the Lbgtq Boutique Plus area. And if you’re going to go, there’s a hate.

BENSON: Crime, by the way, you just stumble over the acronym. So I have to ask you to leave, Charlie.

GASPARINO: I’m sorry. I get on my knees to the, to the gods of wokeness.

BENSON: Please forgive me. It’s my show. As I said, you’re good, you’re good.

GASPARINO: Please bless me, father, for I have sinned. So you know.

BENSON: So if you’re the scapegoat, they kind of scapegoat.

GASPARINO: That’s what the book says. And I say, well, remember, this is always more complicated. And I think that’s what makes it an interesting book. It’s a fun read because watching corporations step on their, you know, what is the funniest thing in the world? I brought you inside Goldman Sachs, where they have debates over whether they should eat chick fil A, because the founding family of chick fil A are Southern Baptists.

BENSON: a little too Christian for Goldman Sachs. It’s crazy and like it does feel. And I wonder what you think of this. It does feel like the most insane excesses of that era have been clawed back a little bit. Yes, but. If you have a Harris Walz administration coming into the white House in January, a lot of corporate America is going to say, well, we don’t want to really piss off our customers again, but we don’t want to get cross crossways with these people in the white House. And I think there’ll be a lot of pressure again, top down to go back in this direction.

GASPARINO: I think you’re right, except for the fact that they learned the hard way. Really hard. I mean, Budweiser used to be the Bud Light used to be the number one selling beer. It’s number three now. The company has gone straight to image. So non woke that it teamed up with UFC with Dana White. I actually interviewed Dana White about this. Budweiser not only is going to, you know, sponsor the UFC, which is a decidedly non woke sports of guys beating out of each other. You know.

BENSON: Dana White introduced Trump at the convention.

GASPARINO: Right. So but not only that they’re thinking about sponsoring one of their Dana White’s new projects which is called Power Slap. This is when two really big guys sit there and smash each other in the face, slap each other until one gets knocked out. This is the new thing Dana White’s doing. So think about this. Anheuser-Busch, which is a subsidiary of AB InBev, which is really where the wokeness starts at the top. It’s a very Davos like foreign company AB InBev that went from Dylan Mulvaney giggling in a bubble bath.

BENSON: Sipping a beer to men slugging each other in the face. I mean.

GASPARINO: Can you go? So that’s why I don’t know if it’ll go that hard. Woke again just they they learned you know, Disney’s learning target learn. They backed off. Larry Fink I spent a lot of time. He’s the head of Blackrock who got the unfortunate sort of, you know, guest image of being Mr. Woke on Wall Street for.

BENSON: He kind of earned it for himself, didn’t he?

GASPARINO: He stepped in it a lot. He’s a good guy. I know the guy pretty well. And I interviewed him at length for the book. And you’ll see how wokeness caught up with him and his business model. And to targeted him. There was a guy named Will Hild. I don’t know if you know him. We’ve run something called consumer research. Oh, yeah. Will Hild. Would put like murals in front of Blackrock of pictures of Larry Fink with a deep, dark look in his face saying, this man is raising your energy prices by ESG. And it was incredibly effective. And it it. So what I found interesting in the book that this will help kid. You know, like a I call my kid because I’m 62 years old, but you know, he’s a 30 something kid in his, you know, just literally nipple twisting, the most powerful man on Wall Street over wokeness. And it was one of the it’s one of the most fascinating parts of the book and how effective he was.

BENSON: Especially because it wasn’t just this one, guys. Also a lot of members of Congress. Oh yeah.

GASPARINO: But they followed. They followed after. Will Hild made Larry Fink public enemy number one of the right. So it’s an interesting story.

BENSON: You got to identify someone who represents the problem. Yes. And then use kind of lefty tactics. I mean that that’s part of what this has been.

GASPARINO: And that’s what Hild did. And he and he played incredibly hard ball. I mean, so hard ball that Larry forget to hire a bodyguard, you know, I mean, there was there was legitimate threats against him. I talk about that in the book as well. So. And, you know, I, I actually feel bad for Larry Fink because he’s so much more than this wokeness. He created a great company worth.

BENSON: I’m not. I don’t feel that bad for him.

GASPARINO: He’s worth more than a billion.

BENSON: Yeah, I think he’s going to be okay.

GASPARINO: I think so. Well, he can hire as many private security guards as he wants.

BENSON:  Before I let you go back just to the economy here, the markets are gonna do what they’re going to do. The underlying fear seems to be okay. Is the hangover coming from all that crazy spending and then all the interest rates going up? Is a recession or a big slowdown upon us? On top of the 20% higher prices, that is a very unpleasant proposition for many Americans.

GASPARINO: Right? So, the the markets really started to, you know, mess the bed up, so to speak. And I’m not going to use the exact.

BENSON: We are  on the radio

GASPARINO: But on last Friday on the employment report, okay. So on Wednesday I was planning that exact column. You know, it looks like that. And I planned it on Wednesday. Friday. Just put the exclamation point on it, that the numbers are starting to turn really negative, that the Wall Street numbers see for, for, for three years Wall Street have and say what is Main Street, what was what are these guys smoking? These construction workers who can’t make, you know, can’t pay the bills because of inflation? What are they talking about? We got, you know, full employment this, that and the other thing. So then all of a sudden I noticed because I’ve been I speak to a lot of economists and market strategists, they were starting to come to the opinion that, no, it looks like the economy’s slowing. Jobless claims keep going up. They keep revising the numbers lower.

BENSON: The revisions aren’t good.

GASPARINO: Yeah. And then all of a sudden, the thing came out on Friday where unemployment creeped up to 4.3%. It was weak hiring and, you know, all hell broke loose. I will say this. I think right now the market’s going to go up and down. Trust me, I’ve saw many rallies for the Lehman Brothers collapse and the whole thing blew up. But the numbers are getting to look really bad. And my.

BENSON: My hit the stock market numbers, the number, the underlying, the underlying numbers.

GASPARINO: And I think if you if, Kamala Harris and, Mr. Walz I’d be more worried about that than bragging about, you know, trying to get Trump on a, on a debate stage for for the eight for ABC. I mean, this is this this it’s it has never been the case with a party in power during an economic downturn, wins the white House. Now, maybe this will be the first time, but it’s. I can’t think of one.

BENSON: Well, I don’t know how they could possibly lose with cut 15.

VO: We have to stay active. And, you know, we have to stay woke like everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you’re the woke is Roker, but just a more woke and less woke. Yeah.

GASPARINO: She’s a great advertisement for my book. Could she just. I want Kamala Harris to say go woke, go broke.

BENSON: Well, she doesn’t believe that, but it might in fact be true. That’s the book’s title. Go will go broke Charlie Gasparino out with his brand new book today. Senior correspondent at Fox Business Network. Thanks so much for your time.

GASPARINO: Thank you for having me.