Speaker 1: So the culture wars have taken a dark turn for
Speaker 1: US businesses, with major companies now facing threats and intimidation
Speaker 1: over their LBGTQ marketing.
Speaker 2: More fallout now over the new voting law in Georgia.
Speaker 3: Major League Baseball pulled the All Star Game out of Atlanta,
Speaker 3: and over the.
Speaker 1: Week Georgia House Republicans is canceling Coca Cola. They're saying
Speaker 1: pepsi is okay after the company CEO spoke out against
Speaker 1: the state's new restrictive voting law, asking for all coke
Speaker 1: products to be removed from their offices.
Speaker 4: Corporations once tried to stay far away from America's political
Speaker 4: and culture wars, but in recent years that has become
Speaker 4: increasingly difficult. Customers and employees are demanding companies take a
Speaker 4: stand on issues like racial discrimination, police violence, and LGBTQ rights,
Speaker 4: and when they do, it sometimes puts these corporations on
Speaker 4: a collision course with politicians like Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: You read about starbar no more Merry Christmas on Starbucks
Speaker 3: no More.
Speaker 4: That's led to protests and product boycotts. Bloomberg business Week's
Speaker 4: national correspondent Joshua Green reports that CEOs now have to
Speaker 4: weigh which poses a bigger threat to their brands speaking
Speaker 4: up or staying quiet.
Speaker 3: What we saw in the Trump rays was that a
Speaker 3: lot of people had cultural concerns. There was a sort
Speaker 3: of cultural consciousness among Trump voters that really wasn't being
Speaker 3: spoken to by other candidates. These same people brought that
Speaker 3: cultural consciousness to consumer choices.
Speaker 4: I'm Westcsova today on the Big Take. Business and politics
Speaker 4: make for a volatle mix.
Speaker 5: Hey Josh, Hey Wes.
Speaker 4: Good to see you again, talking once again about America's
Speaker 4: political and culture wars.
Speaker 3: Pretty much all I cover these days as a national
Speaker 3: political reporter.
Speaker 4: In this news story, you write about something a little
Speaker 4: bit different, which is how corporations, a lot of the
Speaker 4: biggest brand names that we all know, are now kind
Speaker 4: of getting pulled into these culture wars, these political wars,
Speaker 4: kicking and screaming in a lot of ways.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: The way I put it in the piece is that
Speaker 3: corporate America has become the new battlefield in American politics.
Speaker 3: And you can see this in everything from the recent controversies,
Speaker 3: you know, from bud Light to Target to any number
Speaker 3: of brands who now seem to have been pulled in,
Speaker 3: especially by Republicans and Republican politicians into these national culture
Speaker 3: wars that have really.
Speaker 5: Defined our politics over the last few years.
Speaker 4: So when did this start happening and why did it
Speaker 4: start happening Because we didn't used to see these kinds
Speaker 4: of controversies over companies and politics as much as we
Speaker 4: do now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think to understand the corporate culture wars, you
Speaker 3: really have to go back to the beginning of the
Speaker 3: political culture wars, which kicked off in earnest in twenty
Speaker 3: sixteen with the rise of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy. During
Speaker 3: that campaign, as you know, I was pretty deeply embedded
Speaker 3: with a Trump campaign. I met a guy, a Republican
Speaker 3: data scientist named Matt Askowski, who turned out to be
Speaker 3: this fascinating figure in the Trump headquarters. He was the
Speaker 3: guy who was the head of the team working for
Speaker 3: Trump's campaign that came up with this idea that there
Speaker 3: are a pool of hidden or shy Trump voters that
Speaker 3: ordinary political polsters weren't seeing. And what Matt was seeing
Speaker 3: in his data was that this group of Trump voters
Speaker 3: didn't care about traditional Republican concerns like low taxes, foreign
Speaker 3: policy deregulation.
Speaker 5: What they cared about were cultural issues.
Speaker 3: Things like guns, wages, immigration, concerns that weren't front and
Speaker 3: center in what national Republicans at the time other than
Speaker 3: Donald Trump we're really talking about. So on election night
Speaker 3: there was a huge upset. It turned out there really
Speaker 3: was this population of hidden or shy Trump voters who
Speaker 3: turned out and voted. But Matt was surprised to discover
Speaker 3: there was just as much interest in the corporate world
Speaker 3: that ad agencies and Fortune five hundred brands really wanted
Speaker 3: to discover. How it is that he'd seen these pool
Speaker 3: of people and understood their motivations in a way that
Speaker 3: nobody else really had.
Speaker 4: And what was it that these companies wanted to know?
Speaker 3: If you think about it in a kind of consumer
Speaker 3: brand sense, Matt had understood Trump's audience in Trump's customer
Speaker 3: base better than anybody else had, and so there are
Speaker 3: obvious applications, I think to the commercial world. Matt was
Speaker 3: squired around, like literally around the globe. He was kind
Speaker 3: of flown around to kind of talk to all these people.
Speaker 3: What he did was basically kind of go and tell
Speaker 3: people what we saw in the Trump rays was that
Speaker 3: a lot of people had cultural concerns there was a
Speaker 3: sort of what he called cultural consciousness among Trump voters
Speaker 3: that really wasn't being spoken to by other candidates, and
Speaker 3: Matt's thesis all along was that these same people brought
Speaker 3: that cultural consciousness to consumer choices. One of the interesting
Speaker 3: things about the corporate culture wars is that historically brands
Speaker 3: and companies did not want anything to do with politics.
Speaker 3: There was a famous line by Michael Jordan, the NBA superstar,
Speaker 3: maybe apocryphal, but he was asked, you know, why don't
Speaker 3: you get involved in politics, and his answer was, well,
Speaker 3: I want to sell shoes to Republicans and Democrats. There
Speaker 3: was a prevailing idea that it really didn't pay off
Speaker 3: to get involved in politics if you were a corporate brand,
Speaker 3: because you wanted to be able to sell to people
Speaker 3: of all political persuasions. Well, that started to change when
Speaker 3: Donald Trump was the candidate, because he was so outrageous,
Speaker 3: so provocative, so controversial that it created a pressure, I
Speaker 3: think for a lot of brands to kind of want
Speaker 3: to speak out, both from a customer base and from
Speaker 3: a reputational protection standpoint. So you all remember the Access
Speaker 3: Hollywood tape that came out in October twenty sixteen where Trump.
Speaker 5: Talked about groping women.
Speaker 3: One of the things that Trump said in that tape
Speaker 3: was that he likes to pop a tic Tac breath
Speaker 3: mint before he tries to kiss women, and Tic Tac
Speaker 3: breath Mint leadership was so appalled and scandalized by this
Speaker 3: that they went on Twitter and made a statement sort
Speaker 3: of condemning Trump. As Trump became more controversial, a lot
Speaker 3: of other brands were pulled into his orbit. Very early
Speaker 3: on in his presidency, the White House had a Corporate
Speaker 3: Ceo Council with a lot of CEOs on it, and
Speaker 3: in early twenty seventeen, there was a white supremacist rally
Speaker 3: in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Trump refused to condemn the marchers.
Speaker 3: His quote was, there were very fine people on both sides.
Speaker 3: And in response, the CEOs of PEPSI and IBM and
Speaker 3: General Motors, who were part of a White House advisory council,
Speaker 3: came under enormous pressure and eventually wound up resigning and
Speaker 3: the council was dissolved. Trump himself liked to go after
Speaker 3: companies Macy's for canceling his clothing brand.
Speaker 5: I think you have to stop illegal immigration.
Speaker 1: Macy's doesn't agree with me.
Speaker 5: Obviously, Ford Motors.
Speaker 1: To think that Ford is moving its small car division
Speaker 1: is a disgrace.
Speaker 5: It's disgraceful Amazon.
Speaker 4: Do you know how little tax Amazon pays.
Speaker 3: What we saw was this sort of sudden up surge
Speaker 3: of politics in corporate America in a way that just
Speaker 3: really hadn't existed before, and partly because Trump himself, the
Speaker 3: US President, was attacking these brands.
Speaker 4: Josh and your story, you write about how this effect
Speaker 4: was taking home.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think the iconic example of that was the Nike
Speaker 3: Colin Kaepernick boycott. Colin Kaepernick was a former NFL quarterback
Speaker 3: who was taking a knee in order to protest police violence,
Speaker 3: and this became a hot button cultural issue, and Trump
Speaker 3: himself was very critical of Nike, of Kaepernick, of the NFL.
Speaker 3: You saw it all over conservative media outlets, and it
Speaker 3: was a great example of the way that Trump kind
Speaker 3: of pulled corporate brands into politics. The interesting thing about
Speaker 3: that boycott, though, was that it didn't end up hurting
Speaker 3: Nike sales. A lot of younger, democratic inclined customers thought
Speaker 3: it was great that their brand was taking a stand
Speaker 3: on this issue of social justice.
Speaker 5: It was important to them, and it was one.
Speaker 3: Of many many corporate boycotts that Trump tried to launch
Speaker 3: that didn't work. You know, my favorite example was that
Speaker 3: Trump also tried to launch a boycott of Coca Cola.
Speaker 3: But he himself is a famous and habitual drinker of
Speaker 3: diet cokes. I was once in his office interviewing him
Speaker 3: in Trump Tower before he became president, and he had
Speaker 3: a little button on his desk that he could push
Speaker 3: and order up diet cokes. And sure enough, like somebody
Speaker 3: came in a minute later with two diet cokes on
Speaker 3: a tray for us to drink. Trump had called for
Speaker 3: this boycott because Coca Cola had spoken out against.
Speaker 5: Voter suppression law in Georgia.
Speaker 3: Trump was very upset about this, called for a boycott
Speaker 3: of Coca Cola, and yet a couple days later there
Speaker 3: was are in the oval office of Trump with a
Speaker 3: diet coke can sitting next to him. So a lot
Speaker 3: of these things become important in the news cycle, but
Speaker 3: until recently they didn't necessarily have a big economic effect.
Speaker 5: On the brands that wound up in the crosshairs.
Speaker 4: After the break. The death of George Floyd puts pressure
Speaker 4: on companies to take a stand, Josh, Like you said,
Speaker 4: so many companies started weighing in on these culture war issues.
Speaker 4: Why did they feel compelled to say anything at all?
Speaker 4: Why didn't they just stay out of it?
Speaker 3: I think one of the big reasons was that Trump
Speaker 3: himself was so controversial and so appalling to so many people.
Speaker 3: After he was elected in twenty sixteen, Democrats were completely
Speaker 3: shut out of power. They didn't control the White House
Speaker 3: or either House of Congress, and a lot of people
Speaker 3: were really mad about what Trump was doing. There was
Speaker 3: a Women's March, they were out basically trying to give
Speaker 3: public political expression of their dissatisfaction.
Speaker 5: In any way they could.
Speaker 3: One thing that wound up being effective was to put
Speaker 3: pressure on consumer brands to condemn Trump and some of
Speaker 3: Trump's actions. And I think the reason a lot of
Speaker 3: brands were willing to do that was basically a fear
Speaker 3: of disappointing their customers. And so you wind up where
Speaker 3: these kind of frankly bizarre situations where companies that you
Speaker 3: wouldn't expect to have a view on a certain political
Speaker 3: issue are coming out and taking one publicly in a
Speaker 3: way that seems designed to signal a corporate social concerts.
Speaker 3: I think it just goes to show the pressure that
Speaker 3: a lot of these companies felt to speak out because
Speaker 3: a large part of their customer base was very distressed
Speaker 3: about these things, and they were trying to foster a
Speaker 3: connection with their customers or polish their brand reputations in
Speaker 3: a way that would make them appealing to people who
Speaker 3: were upset about the kinds of things that Trump was doing.
Speaker 4: Josh you right, though, that in issuing these sorts of
Speaker 4: statements to appeal to one part of their consumer base,
Speaker 4: they also then ignited the other half.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think what you saw in the kind of
Speaker 3: the political consumer space was that this upset a lot
Speaker 3: of Republicans because, you know, they saw brands making what
Speaker 3: they consider to be explicitly democratic statements, whether it was
Speaker 3: on issues like climate change, social or racial justice, voter
Speaker 3: id laws, all the hot button cultural issues. It appeared
Speaker 3: to a lot of Republicans and a lot of Republican
Speaker 3: activists that fortune five hundred brands were suddenly coming out
Speaker 3: and aligning themselves with Democrats on the most important political
Speaker 3: issues of the day, and that ended up creating a
Speaker 3: huge backlash.
Speaker 4: And Josh you Wright that a very big moment was
Speaker 4: during the summer of twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when George Floyd was killed in May of twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: it sparked this huge uprising all across America, protests in
Speaker 3: the streets for racial justice, condemning police violence. And part
Speaker 3: of that response was a corporate response, and many brands
Speaker 3: came out and condemn racial injustice, police violence. In some
Speaker 3: cases they expressed support for organizations like Black Lives Matter
Speaker 3: and put themselves front and center in a political and
Speaker 3: social moment that was very much still in dispute over
Speaker 3: what it meant, what the.
Speaker 5: Causes were, who was at fault.
Speaker 3: These brands took an explicit political position on an issue
Speaker 3: in a cultural moment that was highly charged around issues
Speaker 3: of structural racism, inequality, and all the big questions that
Speaker 3: were really at the heart of American politics. And at
Speaker 3: the same time, President Trump was out criticizing the protesters,
Speaker 3: criticizing Black Lives Matter, and politicizing.
Speaker 5: The issue even more.
Speaker 3: And so here was this supercharged national tragedy that was
Speaker 3: being disputed not just by protesters and politicians, but that
Speaker 3: corporate brands now had been pulled in the middle of
Speaker 3: and became very much a participant in the controversy themselves
Speaker 3: in a way that many of them maybe weren't hoping
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 4: And Josh you right that this is sort of a
Speaker 4: significant shift in the way Republicans look at corporations versus
Speaker 4: the way Democrats have looked at corporations.
Speaker 3: The corporate response to George Floyd really caused a sea
Speaker 3: change in the way that people view corporations. Gallup has
Speaker 3: done long standing tracking poll asking Republicans and Democrats, do
Speaker 3: you think that corporations have too much, too little, or
Speaker 3: an appropriate amount of power. What we'd seen historically was
Speaker 3: that Democrats tended to think that big corporations wielded too
Speaker 3: much power, and Republicans were basically fine with it. But
Speaker 3: in the wake of George Floyd, what you see is
Speaker 3: the Republican backlash in these Gallup polling numbers, and all
Speaker 3: of a sudden in twenty twenty, the number of Republicans
Speaker 3: who think major corporations have too much influence suddenly doubles
Speaker 3: and stay that high. And you can see the conservative
Speaker 3: unhappiness with the fact that a lot of these brands
Speaker 3: are coming out and taking positions that they perceive as
Speaker 3: being liberal or democratic. This view among conservatives was not wrong.
Speaker 3: It is backed up by actual research from other people
Speaker 3: in my story. One of the most interesting guys I
Speaker 3: interviewed for this piece was a data scientist at the
Speaker 3: University of Chicago, SHOWBC Berrari, who had a sense that
Speaker 3: brand statements seemed to be more liberal in the wake
Speaker 3: of George Floyd than they had been before then, and
Speaker 3: he went looking for data to kind of back up
Speaker 3: his hunch, and he couldn't find any. So what he
Speaker 3: did was he went out and assembled about two million
Speaker 3: Twitter and Instagram posts from the thousand biggest US brands,
Speaker 3: and he coded them for partisan sentiment. It turned out
Speaker 3: that before George Bloyd there wasn't a lot of corporate
Speaker 3: public political expression, and what there was tended to be
Speaker 3: sort of Republican leading.
Speaker 5: But after George Floyd there was indeed.
Speaker 3: A huge explosion of corporate speech, and that corporate speech
Speaker 3: was very clearly liberal.
Speaker 5: So servatives weren't imagining.
Speaker 3: The fact that corporations, which had traditionally been allied with
Speaker 3: the Republican Party were now coming out and forcefully taking
Speaker 3: stances on social issues that were ones that aligned with Democrats,
Speaker 3: not Republicans.
Speaker 5: The other thing that.
Speaker 3: Was interesting is Matt went and surveyed thousands of people
Speaker 3: who were participating in these boycotts across the political spectrum,
Speaker 3: and what he found was that the people who launched
Speaker 3: these boycotts are very much like the people who produced
Speaker 3: most of the political content on social media. Like normy
Speaker 3: moderate people don't post a lot about politics. It tends
Speaker 3: to be driven by extreme partisans on the left and
Speaker 3: on the right, And the same thing turned out to
Speaker 3: be true of these corporate boycotts. They're driven by political activists,
Speaker 3: liberal ones and conservative ones.
Speaker 5: What Matt called the vast.
Speaker 3: Movable middle of people who are aware of these boycotts,
Speaker 3: not necessarily interested in them, but then wind up being
Speaker 3: pulled into them anyway. And you can see the effect
Speaker 3: on something like the recent bud Light boycotts that were
Speaker 3: driven by bud Lights advertising campaign. They hired a social
Speaker 3: media influencer, Dylan mulvany, and it caused this huge backlash
Speaker 3: among Republicans that was big enough that it actually hurt
Speaker 3: bud Lights sales and caused them to lose their position
Speaker 3: as the number one beer brand in America.
Speaker 2: After more than two decades as the best selling beer
Speaker 2: in the US. Bud Light giving up that title to
Speaker 2: Midello in May, after Boycott's and the wake of the
Speaker 2: brand's decision to partner with a trans influencer, and the
Speaker 2: controversy that continues to follow.
Speaker 3: In Matt's telling, what happened in that case was that
Speaker 3: these boycotts were pushed by a lot of right wing
Speaker 3: media influencers, but they caught on with Fox News and
Speaker 3: with talk radio, and all of a sudden you had
Speaker 3: people who hadn't really given much thought about the politics
Speaker 3: of their beer brand cared about it and stopped drinking
Speaker 3: bud Light and Josh.
Speaker 4: Recently, Target two had come under from the right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Target was the object of protests and pressure campaigns
Speaker 3: in response to LGBTQ Pride Month displays that they'd had
Speaker 3: out at a lot of stores, and once again became
Speaker 3: this kind of political cause among Republicans, got a lot
Speaker 3: of airtime and criticism on Fox News and helped drive
Speaker 3: down Target sales to the point that a lot of
Speaker 3: stores remove these displays. So it's another example, along with
Speaker 3: butt Light, of these political protests having real world effects
Speaker 3: in a way that they might not have ten or
Speaker 3: twenty years ago.
Speaker 4: When we come back, can companies avoid getting pulled into politics, Josh.
Speaker 4: Some of these protests against companies have had an effect
Speaker 4: on sales, others haven't. Is there evidence that companies are
Speaker 4: changing their behavior now the sorts of issues they weigh
Speaker 4: in in response to the possibility that they could come
Speaker 4: under fire.
Speaker 5: I think there is. I mean.
Speaker 3: One of the people I talked to for the story
Speaker 3: was a tough university political science named Aton Hirsch, who
Speaker 3: studies this stuff and talks to corporate leaders. He conducts
Speaker 3: a broad survey of business leaders on their politics, and
Speaker 3: one of the things he pointed out was that the
Speaker 3: corporate social response to George Floyd I think had some
Speaker 3: unexpected consequences for corporations, not in terms of the backlash,
Speaker 3: but in terms of these companies own employees and customers
Speaker 3: expected them to begin to weigh in on other social
Speaker 3: issues in the news. Suddenly they were coming under pressure
Speaker 3: to speak out against things like anti Asian violence, which
Speaker 3: many of them did, but they were also coming under
Speaker 3: pressure from conservative groups. I read through transcripts of corporate
Speaker 3: earning calls looking to see how these issues play out,
Speaker 3: and one of the things you see is conservative groups
Speaker 3: coming in on these corporate earning calls and asking the CEO,
Speaker 3: and they say, well, you know you have this LGBT group,
Speaker 3: how come there aren't groups that support republic and employees
Speaker 3: Republican voters, and so companies started these too. So a
Speaker 3: lot of companies now have veterans groups and so on.
Speaker 3: But I think at a macro level, it created a
Speaker 3: set of conditions companies didn't necessarily understand they were getting
Speaker 3: into where they were suddenly being expected to weigh.
Speaker 5: In on every issue.
Speaker 3: The problem now is that having kind of opened that
Speaker 3: can of worms and having spoken out, having become pulled
Speaker 3: into the process, it's really hard for brands and CEOs
Speaker 3: to figure out how to back out of it.
Speaker 4: Josh. You also right that there's an additional pressure on
Speaker 4: corporate executives, not just from consumers, but from their own employees,
Speaker 4: who sometimes demand that the company takes the stand, and
Speaker 4: the corporate leadership feels like they have to respond.
Speaker 3: So great example this is Florida Governor Ron de Santis
Speaker 3: signed the so called Don't Say Gay Law in Florida
Speaker 3: that would have prevented school teachers from teaching LGBTQ issues.
Speaker 3: Disney CEO at the time, Bob Chapek, came under a
Speaker 3: lot of pressure from employees to speak out against the
Speaker 3: Don't Say Gay law. He eventually did, and that put
Speaker 3: Disney in the crosshairs of Ron de Santis in Florida.
Speaker 1: Our policy is going to be based on the best
Speaker 1: interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of.
Speaker 4: What operation better.
Speaker 3: Desantas's attacks on Disney for a while became the basis
Speaker 3: of his whole political identity and helped give rise to
Speaker 3: his presidential campaign.
Speaker 4: Josh, you say that this has kind of become the
Speaker 4: new political reality for companies. Do you think that it
Speaker 4: stays that way. Do you think companies are now going
Speaker 4: to become more reluctant to weigh in on politics, or
Speaker 4: do you think they're in a position where they're just
Speaker 4: going to have to keep doing it and find their
Speaker 4: way through.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of companies are very reluctant and
Speaker 3: don't want to be in the position of a Disney
Speaker 3: or a bud Light for all sorts of reasons. You know,
Speaker 3: it hurts sales, it hurts their brand reputation, it can
Speaker 3: hurt morale among employees and potential recruits. But it's not
Speaker 3: clear how these companies can extract themselves. A lot of
Speaker 3: people in politics, Democrats and Republicans, have realized that these
Speaker 3: companies and the issues they stand for can be politicized,
Speaker 3: and that companies can be pressured to kind of speak
Speaker 3: out on political issues in a way that.
Speaker 5: Partisans find very advantageous.
Speaker 3: Having begun to do so more and more, it's not
Speaker 3: really clear how easy it's going to be for these
Speaker 3: companies to back out. Talking to Professor Hirsch, he told
Speaker 3: me he speaks to a lot of these CEOs, he's
Speaker 3: been working with him for years in his studies, and
Speaker 3: he says, you know that they're really grappling with this issue.
Speaker 5: They don't know what to do.
Speaker 3: They don't want to alienate customers by refusing to speak out,
Speaker 3: and so they're all sort of left in the same boat,
Speaker 3: which is sort of trying to figure out how they
Speaker 3: can navigate these crisis in a way that keeps them
Speaker 3: out of the political crosshairs.
Speaker 4: Josh, always great talking to you, Thanks for coming on
Speaker 4: the show.
Speaker 5: Great to be with you.
Speaker 4: Thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take.
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