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Speaker 1: So the culture wars have taken a dark turn for

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Speaker 1: US businesses, with major companies now facing threats and intimidation

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Speaker 1: over their LBGTQ marketing.

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Speaker 2: More fallout now over the new voting law in Georgia.

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Speaker 3: Major League Baseball pulled the All Star Game out of Atlanta,

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Speaker 3: and over the.

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Speaker 1: Week Georgia House Republicans is canceling Coca Cola. They're saying

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Speaker 1: pepsi is okay after the company CEO spoke out against

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Speaker 1: the state's new restrictive voting law, asking for all coke

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Speaker 1: products to be removed from their offices.

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Speaker 4: Corporations once tried to stay far away from America's political

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Speaker 4: and culture wars, but in recent years that has become

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Speaker 4: increasingly difficult. Customers and employees are demanding companies take a

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Speaker 4: stand on issues like racial discrimination, police violence, and LGBTQ rights,

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Speaker 4: and when they do, it sometimes puts these corporations on

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Speaker 4: a collision course with politicians like Donald Trump.

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Speaker 3: You read about starbar no more Merry Christmas on Starbucks

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Speaker 3: no More.

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Speaker 4: That's led to protests and product boycotts. Bloomberg business Week's

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Speaker 4: national correspondent Joshua Green reports that CEOs now have to

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Speaker 4: weigh which poses a bigger threat to their brands speaking

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Speaker 4: up or staying quiet.

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Speaker 3: What we saw in the Trump rays was that a

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Speaker 3: lot of people had cultural concerns. There was a sort

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Speaker 3: of cultural consciousness among Trump voters that really wasn't being

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Speaker 3: spoken to by other candidates. These same people brought that

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Speaker 3: cultural consciousness to consumer choices.

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Speaker 4: I'm Westcsova today on the Big Take. Business and politics

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Speaker 4: make for a volatle mix.

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Speaker 5: Hey Josh, Hey Wes.

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Speaker 4: Good to see you again, talking once again about America's

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Speaker 4: political and culture wars.

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Speaker 3: Pretty much all I cover these days as a national

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Speaker 3: political reporter.

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Speaker 4: In this news story, you write about something a little

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Speaker 4: bit different, which is how corporations, a lot of the

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Speaker 4: biggest brand names that we all know, are now kind

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Speaker 4: of getting pulled into these culture wars, these political wars,

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Speaker 4: kicking and screaming in a lot of ways.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, you know.

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Speaker 3: The way I put it in the piece is that

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Speaker 3: corporate America has become the new battlefield in American politics.

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Speaker 3: And you can see this in everything from the recent controversies,

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Speaker 3: you know, from bud Light to Target to any number

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Speaker 3: of brands who now seem to have been pulled in,

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Speaker 3: especially by Republicans and Republican politicians into these national culture

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Speaker 3: wars that have really.

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Speaker 5: Defined our politics over the last few years.

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Speaker 4: So when did this start happening and why did it

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Speaker 4: start happening Because we didn't used to see these kinds

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Speaker 4: of controversies over companies and politics as much as we

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Speaker 4: do now.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think to understand the corporate culture wars, you

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Speaker 3: really have to go back to the beginning of the

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Speaker 3: political culture wars, which kicked off in earnest in twenty

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Speaker 3: sixteen with the rise of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy. During

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Speaker 3: that campaign, as you know, I was pretty deeply embedded

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Speaker 3: with a Trump campaign. I met a guy, a Republican

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Speaker 3: data scientist named Matt Askowski, who turned out to be

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Speaker 3: this fascinating figure in the Trump headquarters. He was the

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Speaker 3: guy who was the head of the team working for

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Speaker 3: Trump's campaign that came up with this idea that there

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Speaker 3: are a pool of hidden or shy Trump voters that

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Speaker 3: ordinary political polsters weren't seeing. And what Matt was seeing

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Speaker 3: in his data was that this group of Trump voters

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Speaker 3: didn't care about traditional Republican concerns like low taxes, foreign

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Speaker 3: policy deregulation.

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Speaker 5: What they cared about were cultural issues.

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Speaker 3: Things like guns, wages, immigration, concerns that weren't front and

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Speaker 3: center in what national Republicans at the time other than

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Speaker 3: Donald Trump we're really talking about. So on election night

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Speaker 3: there was a huge upset. It turned out there really

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Speaker 3: was this population of hidden or shy Trump voters who

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Speaker 3: turned out and voted. But Matt was surprised to discover

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Speaker 3: there was just as much interest in the corporate world

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Speaker 3: that ad agencies and Fortune five hundred brands really wanted

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Speaker 3: to discover. How it is that he'd seen these pool

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Speaker 3: of people and understood their motivations in a way that

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Speaker 3: nobody else really had.

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Speaker 4: And what was it that these companies wanted to know?

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Speaker 3: If you think about it in a kind of consumer

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Speaker 3: brand sense, Matt had understood Trump's audience in Trump's customer

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Speaker 3: base better than anybody else had, and so there are

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Speaker 3: obvious applications, I think to the commercial world. Matt was

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Speaker 3: squired around, like literally around the globe. He was kind

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Speaker 3: of flown around to kind of talk to all these people.

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Speaker 3: What he did was basically kind of go and tell

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Speaker 3: people what we saw in the Trump rays was that

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Speaker 3: a lot of people had cultural concerns there was a

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Speaker 3: sort of what he called cultural consciousness among Trump voters

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Speaker 3: that really wasn't being spoken to by other candidates, and

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Speaker 3: Matt's thesis all along was that these same people brought

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Speaker 3: that cultural consciousness to consumer choices. One of the interesting

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Speaker 3: things about the corporate culture wars is that historically brands

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Speaker 3: and companies did not want anything to do with politics.

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Speaker 3: There was a famous line by Michael Jordan, the NBA superstar,

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Speaker 3: maybe apocryphal, but he was asked, you know, why don't

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Speaker 3: you get involved in politics, and his answer was, well,

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Speaker 3: I want to sell shoes to Republicans and Democrats. There

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Speaker 3: was a prevailing idea that it really didn't pay off

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Speaker 3: to get involved in politics if you were a corporate brand,

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Speaker 3: because you wanted to be able to sell to people

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Speaker 3: of all political persuasions. Well, that started to change when

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Speaker 3: Donald Trump was the candidate, because he was so outrageous,

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Speaker 3: so provocative, so controversial that it created a pressure, I

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Speaker 3: think for a lot of brands to kind of want

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Speaker 3: to speak out, both from a customer base and from

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Speaker 3: a reputational protection standpoint. So you all remember the Access

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Speaker 3: Hollywood tape that came out in October twenty sixteen where Trump.

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Speaker 5: Talked about groping women.

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Speaker 3: One of the things that Trump said in that tape

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Speaker 3: was that he likes to pop a tic Tac breath

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Speaker 3: mint before he tries to kiss women, and Tic Tac

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Speaker 3: breath Mint leadership was so appalled and scandalized by this

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Speaker 3: that they went on Twitter and made a statement sort

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Speaker 3: of condemning Trump. As Trump became more controversial, a lot

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Speaker 3: of other brands were pulled into his orbit. Very early

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Speaker 3: on in his presidency, the White House had a Corporate

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Speaker 3: Ceo Council with a lot of CEOs on it, and

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Speaker 3: in early twenty seventeen, there was a white supremacist rally

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Speaker 3: in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Trump refused to condemn the marchers.

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Speaker 3: His quote was, there were very fine people on both sides.

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Speaker 3: And in response, the CEOs of PEPSI and IBM and

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Speaker 3: General Motors, who were part of a White House advisory council,

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Speaker 3: came under enormous pressure and eventually wound up resigning and

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Speaker 3: the council was dissolved. Trump himself liked to go after

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Speaker 3: companies Macy's for canceling his clothing brand.

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Speaker 5: I think you have to stop illegal immigration.

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Speaker 1: Macy's doesn't agree with me.

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Speaker 5: Obviously, Ford Motors.

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Speaker 1: To think that Ford is moving its small car division

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Speaker 1: is a disgrace.

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Speaker 5: It's disgraceful Amazon.

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Speaker 4: Do you know how little tax Amazon pays.

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Speaker 3: What we saw was this sort of sudden up surge

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Speaker 3: of politics in corporate America in a way that just

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Speaker 3: really hadn't existed before, and partly because Trump himself, the

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Speaker 3: US President, was attacking these brands.

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Speaker 4: Josh and your story, you write about how this effect

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Speaker 4: was taking home.

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Speaker 5: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: I think the iconic example of that was the Nike

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Speaker 3: Colin Kaepernick boycott. Colin Kaepernick was a former NFL quarterback

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Speaker 3: who was taking a knee in order to protest police violence,

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Speaker 3: and this became a hot button cultural issue, and Trump

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Speaker 3: himself was very critical of Nike, of Kaepernick, of the NFL.

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Speaker 3: You saw it all over conservative media outlets, and it

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Speaker 3: was a great example of the way that Trump kind

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Speaker 3: of pulled corporate brands into politics. The interesting thing about

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Speaker 3: that boycott, though, was that it didn't end up hurting

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Speaker 3: Nike sales. A lot of younger, democratic inclined customers thought

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Speaker 3: it was great that their brand was taking a stand

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Speaker 3: on this issue of social justice.

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Speaker 5: It was important to them, and it was one.

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Speaker 3: Of many many corporate boycotts that Trump tried to launch

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Speaker 3: that didn't work. You know, my favorite example was that

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Speaker 3: Trump also tried to launch a boycott of Coca Cola.

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Speaker 3: But he himself is a famous and habitual drinker of

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Speaker 3: diet cokes. I was once in his office interviewing him

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Speaker 3: in Trump Tower before he became president, and he had

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Speaker 3: a little button on his desk that he could push

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Speaker 3: and order up diet cokes. And sure enough, like somebody

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Speaker 3: came in a minute later with two diet cokes on

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Speaker 3: a tray for us to drink. Trump had called for

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Speaker 3: this boycott because Coca Cola had spoken out against.

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Speaker 5: Voter suppression law in Georgia.

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Speaker 3: Trump was very upset about this, called for a boycott

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Speaker 3: of Coca Cola, and yet a couple days later there

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Speaker 3: was are in the oval office of Trump with a

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Speaker 3: diet coke can sitting next to him. So a lot

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Speaker 3: of these things become important in the news cycle, but

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Speaker 3: until recently they didn't necessarily have a big economic effect.

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Speaker 5: On the brands that wound up in the crosshairs.

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Speaker 4: After the break. The death of George Floyd puts pressure

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Speaker 4: on companies to take a stand, Josh, Like you said,

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Speaker 4: so many companies started weighing in on these culture war issues.

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Speaker 4: Why did they feel compelled to say anything at all?

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Speaker 4: Why didn't they just stay out of it?

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Speaker 3: I think one of the big reasons was that Trump

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Speaker 3: himself was so controversial and so appalling to so many people.

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Speaker 3: After he was elected in twenty sixteen, Democrats were completely

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Speaker 3: shut out of power. They didn't control the White House

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Speaker 3: or either House of Congress, and a lot of people

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Speaker 3: were really mad about what Trump was doing. There was

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Speaker 3: a Women's March, they were out basically trying to give

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Speaker 3: public political expression of their dissatisfaction.

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Speaker 5: In any way they could.

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Speaker 3: One thing that wound up being effective was to put

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Speaker 3: pressure on consumer brands to condemn Trump and some of

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Speaker 3: Trump's actions. And I think the reason a lot of

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Speaker 3: brands were willing to do that was basically a fear

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Speaker 3: of disappointing their customers. And so you wind up where

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Speaker 3: these kind of frankly bizarre situations where companies that you

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Speaker 3: wouldn't expect to have a view on a certain political

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Speaker 3: issue are coming out and taking one publicly in a

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Speaker 3: way that seems designed to signal a corporate social concerts.

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Speaker 3: I think it just goes to show the pressure that

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Speaker 3: a lot of these companies felt to speak out because

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Speaker 3: a large part of their customer base was very distressed

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Speaker 3: about these things, and they were trying to foster a

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Speaker 3: connection with their customers or polish their brand reputations in

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Speaker 3: a way that would make them appealing to people who

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Speaker 3: were upset about the kinds of things that Trump was doing.

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Speaker 4: Josh you right, though, that in issuing these sorts of

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Speaker 4: statements to appeal to one part of their consumer base,

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Speaker 4: they also then ignited the other half.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think what you saw in the kind of

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Speaker 3: the political consumer space was that this upset a lot

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Speaker 3: of Republicans because, you know, they saw brands making what

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Speaker 3: they consider to be explicitly democratic statements, whether it was

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Speaker 3: on issues like climate change, social or racial justice, voter

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Speaker 3: id laws, all the hot button cultural issues. It appeared

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Speaker 3: to a lot of Republicans and a lot of Republican

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Speaker 3: activists that fortune five hundred brands were suddenly coming out

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Speaker 3: and aligning themselves with Democrats on the most important political

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Speaker 3: issues of the day, and that ended up creating a

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Speaker 3: huge backlash.

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Speaker 4: And Josh you Wright that a very big moment was

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Speaker 4: during the summer of twenty twenty.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, when George Floyd was killed in May of twenty twenty,

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Speaker 3: it sparked this huge uprising all across America, protests in

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Speaker 3: the streets for racial justice, condemning police violence. And part

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Speaker 3: of that response was a corporate response, and many brands

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Speaker 3: came out and condemn racial injustice, police violence. In some

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Speaker 3: cases they expressed support for organizations like Black Lives Matter

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Speaker 3: social moment that was very much still in dispute over

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Speaker 3: what it meant, what the.

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Speaker 5: Causes were, who was at fault.

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Speaker 3: These brands took an explicit political position on an issue

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Speaker 3: in a cultural moment that was highly charged around issues

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Speaker 3: of structural racism, inequality, and all the big questions that

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Speaker 3: were really at the heart of American politics. And at

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Speaker 3: the same time, President Trump was out criticizing the protesters,

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Speaker 3: criticizing Black Lives Matter, and politicizing.

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Speaker 5: The issue even more.

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Speaker 3: And so here was this supercharged national tragedy that was

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Speaker 3: being disputed not just by protesters and politicians, but that

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Speaker 3: corporate brands now had been pulled in the middle of

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Speaker 3: and became very much a participant in the controversy themselves

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Speaker 3: in a way that many of them maybe weren't hoping

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Speaker 3: to be.

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Speaker 4: And Josh you right that this is sort of a

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Speaker 4: significant shift in the way Republicans look at corporations versus

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Speaker 4: the way Democrats have looked at corporations.

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Speaker 3: The corporate response to George Floyd really caused a sea

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Speaker 3: change in the way that people view corporations. Gallup has

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Speaker 3: done long standing tracking poll asking Republicans and Democrats, do

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Speaker 3: you think that corporations have too much, too little, or

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Speaker 3: an appropriate amount of power. What we'd seen historically was

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Speaker 3: that Democrats tended to think that big corporations wielded too

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Speaker 3: much power, and Republicans were basically fine with it. But

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Speaker 3: in the wake of George Floyd, what you see is

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Speaker 3: the Republican backlash in these Gallup polling numbers, and all

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Speaker 3: of a sudden in twenty twenty, the number of Republicans

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Speaker 3: who think major corporations have too much influence suddenly doubles

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Speaker 3: and stay that high. And you can see the conservative

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Speaker 3: unhappiness with the fact that a lot of these brands

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Speaker 3: are coming out and taking positions that they perceive as

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Speaker 3: being liberal or democratic. This view among conservatives was not wrong.

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Speaker 3: It is backed up by actual research from other people

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Speaker 3: in my story. One of the most interesting guys I

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Speaker 3: interviewed for this piece was a data scientist at the

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Speaker 3: University of Chicago, SHOWBC Berrari, who had a sense that

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Speaker 3: brand statements seemed to be more liberal in the wake

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Speaker 3: of George Floyd than they had been before then, and

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Speaker 3: he went looking for data to kind of back up

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Speaker 3: his hunch, and he couldn't find any. So what he

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Speaker 3: did was he went out and assembled about two million

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Speaker 3: Twitter and Instagram posts from the thousand biggest US brands,

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Speaker 3: and he coded them for partisan sentiment. It turned out

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Speaker 3: that before George Bloyd there wasn't a lot of corporate

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Speaker 3: public political expression, and what there was tended to be

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Speaker 3: sort of Republican leading.

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Speaker 5: But after George Floyd there was indeed.

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Speaker 3: A huge explosion of corporate speech, and that corporate speech

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Speaker 3: was very clearly liberal.

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Speaker 5: So servatives weren't imagining.

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Speaker 3: The fact that corporations, which had traditionally been allied with

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Speaker 3: the Republican Party were now coming out and forcefully taking

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Speaker 3: stances on social issues that were ones that aligned with Democrats,

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Speaker 3: not Republicans.

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Speaker 5: The other thing that.

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Speaker 3: Was interesting is Matt went and surveyed thousands of people

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Speaker 3: who were participating in these boycotts across the political spectrum,

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Speaker 3: and what he found was that the people who launched

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Speaker 3: these boycotts are very much like the people who produced

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Speaker 3: most of the political content on social media. Like normy

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Speaker 3: moderate people don't post a lot about politics. It tends

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Speaker 3: to be driven by extreme partisans on the left and

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Speaker 3: on the right, And the same thing turned out to

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Speaker 3: be true of these corporate boycotts. They're driven by political activists,

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Speaker 3: liberal ones and conservative ones.

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Speaker 5: What Matt called the vast.

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Speaker 3: Movable middle of people who are aware of these boycotts,

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Speaker 3: not necessarily interested in them, but then wind up being

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Speaker 3: pulled into them anyway. And you can see the effect

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Speaker 3: on something like the recent bud Light boycotts that were

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Speaker 3: driven by bud Lights advertising campaign. They hired a social

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Speaker 3: media influencer, Dylan mulvany, and it caused this huge backlash

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Speaker 3: among Republicans that was big enough that it actually hurt

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Speaker 3: bud Lights sales and caused them to lose their position

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Speaker 3: as the number one beer brand in America.

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Speaker 2: After more than two decades as the best selling beer

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Speaker 2: in the US. Bud Light giving up that title to

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Speaker 2: Midello in May, after Boycott's and the wake of the

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Speaker 2: brand's decision to partner with a trans influencer, and the

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Speaker 2: controversy that continues to follow.

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Speaker 3: In Matt's telling, what happened in that case was that

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Speaker 3: these boycotts were pushed by a lot of right wing

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Speaker 3: media influencers, but they caught on with Fox News and

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Speaker 3: with talk radio, and all of a sudden you had

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Speaker 3: people who hadn't really given much thought about the politics

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Speaker 3: of their beer brand cared about it and stopped drinking

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Speaker 3: bud Light and Josh.

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Speaker 4: Recently, Target two had come under from the right.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, Target was the object of protests and pressure campaigns

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Speaker 3: in response to LGBTQ Pride Month displays that they'd had

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Speaker 3: out at a lot of stores, and once again became

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Speaker 3: this kind of political cause among Republicans, got a lot

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Speaker 3: of airtime and criticism on Fox News and helped drive

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Speaker 3: down Target sales to the point that a lot of

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Speaker 3: stores remove these displays. So it's another example, along with

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Speaker 3: butt Light, of these political protests having real world effects

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Speaker 3: in a way that they might not have ten or

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Speaker 3: twenty years ago.

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Speaker 4: When we come back, can companies avoid getting pulled into politics, Josh.

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Speaker 4: Some of these protests against companies have had an effect

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Speaker 4: on sales, others haven't. Is there evidence that companies are

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Speaker 4: changing their behavior now the sorts of issues they weigh

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Speaker 4: in in response to the possibility that they could come

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Speaker 4: under fire.

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Speaker 5: I think there is. I mean.

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Speaker 3: One of the people I talked to for the story

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Speaker 3: was a tough university political science named Aton Hirsch, who

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Speaker 3: studies this stuff and talks to corporate leaders. He conducts

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Speaker 3: a broad survey of business leaders on their politics, and

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Speaker 3: one of the things he pointed out was that the

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Speaker 3: corporate social response to George Floyd I think had some

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Speaker 3: unexpected consequences for corporations, not in terms of the backlash,

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Speaker 3: but in terms of these companies own employees and customers

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Speaker 3: expected them to begin to weigh in on other social

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Speaker 3: issues in the news. Suddenly they were coming under pressure

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Speaker 3: to speak out against things like anti Asian violence, which

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Speaker 3: many of them did, but they were also coming under

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Speaker 3: pressure from conservative groups. I read through transcripts of corporate

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Speaker 3: earning calls looking to see how these issues play out,

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Speaker 3: and one of the things you see is conservative groups

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Speaker 3: coming in on these corporate earning calls and asking the CEO,

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Speaker 3: and they say, well, you know you have this LGBT group,

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Speaker 3: how come there aren't groups that support republic and employees

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Speaker 3: Republican voters, and so companies started these too. So a

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Speaker 3: lot of companies now have veterans groups and so on.

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Speaker 3: But I think at a macro level, it created a

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Speaker 3: set of conditions companies didn't necessarily understand they were getting

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Speaker 3: into where they were suddenly being expected to weigh.

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Speaker 5: In on every issue.

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Speaker 3: The problem now is that having kind of opened that

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Speaker 3: can of worms and having spoken out, having become pulled

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Speaker 3: into the process, it's really hard for brands and CEOs

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Speaker 3: to figure out how to back out of it.

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Speaker 4: Josh. You also right that there's an additional pressure on

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Speaker 4: corporate executives, not just from consumers, but from their own employees,

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Speaker 4: who sometimes demand that the company takes the stand, and

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Speaker 4: the corporate leadership feels like they have to respond.

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Speaker 3: So great example this is Florida Governor Ron de Santis

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Speaker 3: signed the so called Don't Say Gay Law in Florida

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Speaker 3: that would have prevented school teachers from teaching LGBTQ issues.

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Speaker 3: Disney CEO at the time, Bob Chapek, came under a

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Speaker 3: lot of pressure from employees to speak out against the

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Speaker 3: Don't Say Gay law. He eventually did, and that put

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Speaker 3: Disney in the crosshairs of Ron de Santis in Florida.

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Speaker 1: Our policy is going to be based on the best

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Speaker 1: interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of.

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Speaker 4: What operation better.

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Speaker 3: Desantas's attacks on Disney for a while became the basis

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Speaker 3: of his whole political identity and helped give rise to

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Speaker 3: his presidential campaign.

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Speaker 4: Josh, you say that this has kind of become the

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Speaker 4: new political reality for companies. Do you think that it

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Speaker 4: stays that way. Do you think companies are now going

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Speaker 4: to become more reluctant to weigh in on politics, or

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Speaker 4: do you think they're in a position where they're just

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Speaker 4: going to have to keep doing it and find their

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Speaker 4: way through.

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Speaker 3: I think a lot of companies are very reluctant and

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Speaker 3: don't want to be in the position of a Disney

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Speaker 3: or a bud Light for all sorts of reasons. You know,

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Speaker 3: it hurts sales, it hurts their brand reputation, it can

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Speaker 3: hurt morale among employees and potential recruits. But it's not

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Speaker 3: clear how these companies can extract themselves. A lot of

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Speaker 3: people in politics, Democrats and Republicans, have realized that these

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Speaker 3: companies and the issues they stand for can be politicized,

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Speaker 3: and that companies can be pressured to kind of speak

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Speaker 3: out on political issues in a way that.

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Speaker 5: Partisans find very advantageous.

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Speaker 3: Having begun to do so more and more, it's not

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Speaker 3: really clear how easy it's going to be for these

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Speaker 3: companies to back out. Talking to Professor Hirsch, he told

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Speaker 3: me he speaks to a lot of these CEOs, he's

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Speaker 3: been working with him for years in his studies, and

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Speaker 3: he says, you know that they're really grappling with this issue.

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Speaker 5: They don't know what to do.

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Speaker 3: They don't want to alienate customers by refusing to speak out,

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Speaker 3: and so they're all sort of left in the same boat,

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Speaker 3: which is sort of trying to figure out how they

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Speaker 3: can navigate these crisis in a way that keeps them

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Speaker 3: out of the political crosshairs.

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Speaker 4: Josh, always great talking to you, Thanks for coming on

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Speaker 4: the show.

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Speaker 5: Great to be with you.

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Speaker 4: Thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take.

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