Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate raises many troubling questions about Walz’s connections to Communist China, notes Peter Schweizer in the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast.
Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers welcome Fox Business commentator Charlie Gasparino to the show to discuss the Walz selection, as well as Gasparino’s new book on wokeness inside American corporations – and politics.
According to numerous published reports, Walz first visited China in 1989 (the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre) and has been there about thirty times. Walz has spoken glowingly of China and, while a high school teacher in Nebraska in the 1990s, led a student trip there (that he acknowledged was funded by the Beijing regime).
This piques the interest of Drill Down podcast hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers of the Government Accountability Institute, who note that GAI has begun researching Walz’s connections to China – and some of the findings are disturbing. Schweizer notes three decades ago, when Walz began his regular visits to Communist China, a young American with an affection for China, who was also a part-time member of the U.S. military, would have been a tempting recruiting target for Chinese intelligence.
Charlie Gasparino has covered the world of business for more than 15 year and his latest book, Go Woke, Go Broke, debuted at bookstores yesterday. The book asks “how a bunch of rich dudes who run corporate America become the tools of left-wing radicals.” Drawing on Gasparino’s deep sources in the corporate world and financial insight, the book describes how wokeness ruined the balance sheets of companies from Disney to Boeing and Budweiser.
“First, I want to give thanks to Kamala Harris for selling books for me,” he quips. Harris has been a strong supporter of “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” policies that have invaded corporate boardrooms since well before the 2020 Gorge Floyd riots. “The lesson of the book is the utter failure of wokeness. Businesses have realized that you still have to sell a product to a person. Watching these guys [corporate leaders] step on their ‘you-know-what’s’ was one of the funniest things,” he says.
“I mean, there’s one scene in there, a sort-of pivotal chapter is 2020, the ‘summer of love,’ where wokeness at the corporate level went nuts during COVID and the George Floyd riots, the BLM riots. Jamie Dimon [CEO of JPMorganChase] starts channeling his inner wokeness…He opens up a $30 billion racial equity fund, as if giving cheap mortgages to George Floyd would have stopped him from trying to pass a counterfeit bill in that convenience store that day… Everybody was virtue signaling. He then goes to visit a branch office and poses for a picture where he’s taking a knee,” he recalls.
“Fast forward a couple years later. I’m fact checking for the book, and the PR guys [at JPMorgan Chase] go, ‘No, no. Jamie doesn’t believe in Black Lives Matter. He doesn’t like Black Lives Matter. He was just kneeling down to fit in the photo,’” Gasparino laughs.
The book documents the experience of other large companies that tried to “go woke” and have since back-pedaled. The sad story of Bud Light’s sponsorship of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney is that it dropped their beer from #1 to #3 in sales and Bud Light is now doing a sponsorship deal with the UFC fighting association to recover their market share.
They’re even sponsoring Dana White’s side project called “Power Slap,” which is two big dudes literally slapping each other until they knock someone out,” he says.
Turning to politics, Schweizer asks if corporate interests will boost the campaign of Kamala Harris. “They won’t go nuts over it. You can’t sell this stuff,” he replies. “I read somewhere recently that if you had bought $10,000 worth of Disney stock in 2014, you would now have… $10,000. That will teach you something about corporate wokeness.”
Does Gasparino think Kamala Harris was herself a DEI hire?
“I wrote a column that said she was, and I was attacked by Gavin Newsom… But as people pointed out, Joe Biden specifically said he wanted to select a woman, then after George Floyd that it’s got to be a Black woman. Then he gives a speech where he says he believes in DEI and says ‘it’s all throughout my administration, starting with the vice president.’ I mean, it just shows you what a knucklehead Biden is, in so many ways.”
Go Woke, Go Broke, is available now through all major book sellers.
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