00:00:02.000We dive into this villain that is on the landscape of the corporate pension fight.
00:00:08.000And then Heather McDonald, who is one of the clearest thinkers in the entire movement, joins us for her reaction on the Memphis situation and also what happens when race is prioritized above merit.
00:00:18.000Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:21.000Get involved with TurningPointUSA today at tpusa.com.
00:00:48.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:57.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:02.000It's one of the great threats to our liberty, one of our great threats to private property, one of the great threats to Western civilization.
00:02:09.000And I don't think people understand it fully or completely.
00:02:13.000And you've been hearing about one of our partners here on this program, Consumers Research, great organization.
00:02:21.000And joining us now is the executive director of Consumers Research, Will Hild, taking over as executive director in 2020, launched Consumer First Initiative.
00:02:34.000Will, tell us about ESG and the work that you're doing to expose this treacherous scheme.
00:02:41.000Well, very simply, ESG stands for environmental social governance, and it's billed by its proponents, like big asset managers like BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard.
00:03:00.000What it really is, is a stalking horse.
00:03:03.000It's a way to wedge in a far-left progressive platform into the management of the United States investment funds and to push corporate America to basically just become a political utility for the Democratic Party.
00:03:17.000And I'm sad to say that unfortunately, they've built it right under our noses.
00:03:21.000And right this day, you have billions upon billions of dollars of red state pension fund money that's being managed by these companies.
00:03:30.000It's being used to drive up prices at the grocery store and at the gas pump and to undermine conservative value.
00:03:39.000It seems as if this was an abstract academic concept that, at least in my own memory, began with trying to get college pension funds to divest from fossil fuels.
00:03:50.000At least that seemed to be the activist energy when I first got started at Turning Point USA.
00:03:56.0002012, 2013, there were these wackadoodle apparatchiks that used to take over these board of regent meetings at Williams College and UC Berkeley, and they'd say, we need to divest all of our pension funds from fossil fuels, but it didn't seem to really have that much teeth.
00:04:13.000And then out of nowhere, all of a sudden you have BlackRock and these trillion-dollar fund managers that take this incredibly radical concept of manipulating pension funds based on ideology.
00:04:30.000If you want to go to the very, very beginnings of it, Wall Street tries to claim that it's all about fiduciary duty and risk management.
00:04:37.000The term ESG, the idea, the concept behind it, actually was a project of the UN, came out of a UN report in 2005.
00:04:45.000So it's about 15 to 20 years old now, but it's always been a nefarious plot to try and push the free market economy that provides us all the goods and services we need into a leftward direction.
00:05:08.000And you had CEOs like Larry Fink of BlackRock starting to just openly state that they were going to use all of the, as you said, trillions of dollars that they have.
00:05:26.000You have the pension fund for our United States military right now pushing left-wing policy proposals in corporate America, have them targeting things like net zero, which is another, I know, wonky term of art.
00:05:40.000What that means is companies being net zero carbon emitters by 2050.
00:05:46.000This is that crazy treaty that the United States has never signed, couldn't even get through a democratically held Senate when they were trying to push it through.
00:06:11.000Two years ago, they voted three radical environmentalists onto the board of Exxon.
00:06:15.000That's a company obviously that should be focused on oil and gas recovery and making sure that there's affordable energy for United States consumers.
00:06:23.000Instead, BlackRock is pushing them towards unaffordable, unreliable, so-called green energies, which are nothing but.
00:06:31.000They're horrible polluters built mostly in China.
00:06:34.000So again, this is a real nefarious plot to turn corporate America into simply a wing of the Democratic Party.
00:06:41.000And I'm sad to say that as of right now, they're using conservative states like Texas and Florida.
00:06:47.000They're using our pension dollars against them.
00:06:49.000So Will, all of this is somewhat sustainable, to use one of their words.
00:06:56.000If the economy is growing robustly and if profits are being reported that are really healthy, one of my working theories is, and I'm just curious to see how it works out.
00:07:10.000Can you sustain an anti-market force, which really what ESG is, when all of a sudden the sobering reality of economic recession starts to set in?
00:07:23.000Do you think that as the economy starts to turn sour in the next nine months, that some of these major firms are going to kind of put ESG on the back burner?
00:07:35.000And I share that same hope, but also projection that as the negative consequences of ESG that they've been running for the last 10 years starts to come home to roost.
00:07:47.000We already see it with the inflation, with the lack of energy supplies.
00:07:51.000These are because of 10 years of underinvestment in oil and gas recovery, new mining, new agriculture projects because of the restriction of capital by ESG.
00:08:02.000And it absolutely is going to throw sand in their gears.
00:08:05.000I'm hopeful it will also focus people's minds on what ESG is, what it means for them and their families, so that we can finally do something about it.
00:08:13.000Because during the cheap money era, during the low inflation era, people, it was real easy to virtually signal.
00:08:19.000I know you go hard against the virtue signal.
00:08:34.000I learned a lot by going there because there's going to be this kind of delicious deathmatch that is going to unfold between these hyper-woke HR departments and the bean counters at these major corporations, where they're going to say, look, we really can't afford to pick our stock portfolio or allocate the funding of this firm solely based on abstract ideological principles.
00:08:58.000When all of a sudden interest rates go up to 7% or 8% for a home and inflation is going out of control and the economy starts to fall and Dropbox lets off 10,000 people and Salesforce lets off 15,000 people and Meta lets off 20,000 people and the economy starts to fall apart.
00:09:15.000I think it's going to be a blow to the ideologues unless these companies are willing to become super PACs and not turn a profit.
00:09:24.000Well, and you're already seeing some of that.
00:09:26.000They're pushing companies and they, again, this falls under their ESG framework to admit so they can scold them when they've given to political candidates that don't toe the line on net zero or trade associations or C3s or C4s.
00:09:40.000So they know that the clock is running out, that the pressure is going to be higher and higher to turn the boat around, and they are doing whatever they can to gag politically anyone who would oppose them.
00:10:19.000He's uncomfortable at times being exposed, but he is able to deploy more muscle when it comes to making corporations to bow to his will in a very creepy, subservient way than anybody else.
00:10:33.000He has more power than the king of Saudi Arabia when it comes to American corporations.
00:12:31.000Was it, is that really the spirit of the rule?
00:12:34.000Is you push somebody when they have one foot out of bounds and you are barnstorming across the field as quickly as you possibly can?
00:12:42.000I watched that play five, seven, 10 times.
00:12:45.000And not to mention the play that happened earlier that did, of course, actually result inconsequentially, where the ref just kind of blows off the play and no one listens to him and then they do a redo.
00:15:21.000And it's across the entire, it's not just one company.
00:15:24.000We're talking about the largest companies in America over and over and over again.
00:15:28.000And so that's, you know, you want to one of the reasons we've seen such a huge increase in woke capitalism, as we call it, right?
00:15:34.000All these, all these companies, you know, alienating themselves from their consumers, doing weird things with their mascots, you know, pontificating on election integrity legislation in Georgia and Texas a couple of years ago.
00:15:47.000Larry think and BlackRock is a huge reason why.
00:15:50.000They may be the number one reason why.
00:15:52.000And they're probably the most powerful company the average person has never heard of.
00:15:55.000And that's why we launched this initiative to make sure that consumers understand how their own state's money is being used to undermine their interests.
00:16:03.000Walk our audience through your website, consumerswithansresearch.org.
00:16:12.000You can find out more about the ESG scam.
00:16:15.000You can find out what you can do and push back.
00:16:17.000And of course, you can donate to the efforts.
00:16:18.000We are running a multi-million dollar ongoing ad campaign against BlackRock to say, no, enough is enough to educate consumers and to educate elected officials that they need to do something.
00:17:12.000She has a new book you guys can pre-order starting February 6th of When Race Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.
00:17:31.000So, Heather, how should we think about the George Floyd 2.0 that wasn't?
00:17:37.000It seemed as if the media was ready for another explosion in Memphis.
00:17:41.000In fact, the New York Times had dispatched 11 reporters to Memphis alone.
00:17:47.000How should we think about what happened in Memphis?
00:17:51.000Well, the official narrative about this is it was because the cops were charged so quickly, although that now is being viewed as an act of racism on the part by Benjamin Crump, the ubiquitous civil rights attorney and other race activists.
00:18:07.000But I think the more likely reason is that even though we weren't told this as long as possible, these were black cops, not white cops.
00:18:16.000If there had been five white cops engaged in this utterly abysmal display of police brutality and incompetence, I think cities would probably be smoldering still today.
00:18:30.000So in a remarkable tweet, freshman House Democrat Maxwell Frost tweeted out, the murder of Tyree Nichols, and I don't know if I mispronounced the name, is anti-black and the result of white supremacy.
00:18:44.000So Heather, they're blaming this on white supremacy.
00:18:49.000Yes, what we've learned through this, Charlie, is that racism is by now a fully unfalsifiable proposition.
00:18:56.000The first one out of the gate with this new expanded definition of racism was Van Jones for CNN that said, sort of, now you're telling us, Van, thanks a lot.
00:19:07.000Well, we were wrong to focus on white on black police violence all along.
00:19:12.000That was way too narrow a perspective.
00:19:15.000Now it turns out the definition of racism is defined exclusively by the victim.
00:19:21.000Anything bad that happens to a black victim is by definition racism, according to Van Jones.
00:19:28.000And that idea has been picked up and made so widespread, it's really quite extraordinary.
00:19:36.000Even the fact, as I say, according to the New York Times, that these five black officers were indicted so quickly is itself a factor or a result of racism.
00:19:50.000If they end up getting put in prison, that's going to be just increasing mass incarceration and racism.
00:19:57.000So there is simply nothing that will ever be viewed through the lens of individual behavior and personal responsibility and not as a way to simply slander the American polity.
00:20:11.000White supremacy, when they say it, it works kind of like a conspiracy theory, like an actual conspiracy theory.
00:20:18.000It can never be disproven and it's always completely hidden.
00:20:22.000It's like, oh, it's just white supremacy and no matter what it is.
00:20:24.000So the Oxford educated cable news host wants us to believe that he's oppressed.
00:20:29.000This guy, Mendy Hassan, or Mehdi Hassan, he responds to the Memphis shooting by says, look, I'm a person of color and absolutely is racism because if not, I wouldn't be able to get into Oxford Play Cut 11.
00:20:46.000Just because the officers who assaulted him were black.
00:20:48.000I mean, the idea that black cops can't be racist towards other black people on the street, in school, at traffic stops must come as a huge surprise to millions of black people in this country who've had to deal with black cops.
00:21:02.000The idea that black and brown people can't internalize white supremacist tropes, narratives, ways of seeing the world is something that I, as a brown man, I'm telling you, is just patently untrue.
00:21:15.000Well, you know, this Oxford-educated poor oppressed minority should know the previous academic definition of racism, which is by definition blacks cannot be racist because the definition of racism was privilege.
00:21:30.000And even though we've seen the videos of blacks brutally beating up whites, brutally beating up Asians out of undoubtedly a very large component of race hatred, we were told, oh, nothing to see here, folks.
00:21:58.000So now that we have five black cops beating up a black driver, possibly somebody who was speeding down the wrong street, in order to preserve the ubiquitous racism explains everything narrative, we now have to be able to fold blacks into the racist perpetrator category.
00:22:20.000The only upside to this whole sordid response and this tragic event would be if, in fact, the definition of racism gets so big that the rest of the country just rebels against it and says, we're not going to put up with this any longer.
00:22:39.000I mean, the rules are really hard to follow.
00:22:41.000So if five white people kill a white person, is that also racism then?
00:22:46.000Basically, are they using racism as a filler term for just being awful?
00:22:52.000Is that basically now the new filler term?
00:22:55.000No, it has to be against a black victim.
00:22:57.000But if we now learn that blacks can be, if according to Van Jones and other activists, if something bad happens to a black person, that's racism.
00:23:05.000Well, then maybe we can also say that the black on black violence is racist.
00:23:10.000Maybe that will get the attention of the Black Lives Matter activists because this parallel narrative, of course, that was not dislodged for one second by this incident, which is that the police are the greatest threats to blacks.
00:23:26.000We heard Biden echoing this both before and after the videos of the Memphis beating were released, that this just shows the trauma that Blacks and grief and harm and sorrow and pain and suffering they put up with every day.
00:23:41.000Biden would be right in saying that if he was referring to black on black killings, there's several dozen blacks who are killed in homicides every single day.
00:23:52.000That's more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though Blacks are only 13% of the population.
00:24:00.000And they're being killed not by the police, not by whites, but by other Blacks.
00:24:13.000But that's, you know, this is not going to change that narrative either.
00:24:16.000And we have, as we're already seeing, this massive overcorrection of Memphis disbanding the anti-crime unit, the scorpion unit that these officers were from, rather than looking at training, rather than looking at hiring standards, we're once again saying, oh, it's something systemic about policing that's to blame.
00:24:37.000And of course, the real systemic issue for most people on the left, including Biden, is race.
00:24:44.000For years, I've been told by activists that Blacks commit, they don't commit more crimes, but the reason they might and the statistics is because there's more police in their neighborhood.
00:24:53.000It's the exact opposite of a way to view it.
00:24:55.000There's more police in your neighborhoods because blacks commit more crimes, period.
00:25:00.000It's like, you know, we always hear about, well, riots are caused by the police showing up in riot gear and that causes everybody to riot.
00:25:07.000No, it's, as you say, it's the exact opposite causality.
00:25:11.000The reason the police are there in riot gear is you guys are rioting.
00:25:15.000If you don't want the police in riot gear, how's about you stay home and or protest peacefully and don't start throwing Molotov cocktails at police precincts?
00:25:26.000Yes, I mean, we've got an independent test of this thesis that, oh, crime is just an epiphenomenon of police presence, which is homicide statistics.
00:25:41.000And blacks between the ages of 10 and 24 die of gun homicide at 25 times the rate of whites between the ages of 10 and 24.
00:25:50.000That's not because the police are in neighborhoods counting black gun homicide victims and ignoring white gun homicide victims.
00:26:00.000To the contrary, you know, the media is blatantly racist.
00:26:05.000The media ignore black homicide victims, but they do get up in blathers upon occasion at white homicide victims like the girl that was abducted or killed by her boyfriend in the national park.
00:26:22.000We do have missing white girl syndrome, but we won't talk about black homicide victims because doing so, if one were honest and giving the complete picture, would mean talking about black homicide perpetrators, and that is completely taboo.
00:27:45.000Not to mention the rapes and the drug use and all of that.
00:27:48.000But there were two people that were murdered in just a short period of time, not exactly entering, re-entering into the Garden of Eden that they always tell us.
00:28:10.000Well, the book is sort of a perfect, coming out of the perfect time for this moment, because what we see is when you lower standards, you get mediocrity.
00:28:23.000And we are lowering standards in every institution in this country in the name of fighting so-called disparate impact and in the name of promoting diversity.
00:28:34.000Well, you can have diversity or you can have meritocracy.
00:28:38.000And so I'm giving the actual facts that explain why we do not have so far proportional representation in our institutions, whether it's at Google or in the prison system.
00:28:52.000We have underrepresented minorities, above all blacks, underrepresented in meritocratic institutions and overrepresented in prison.
00:29:01.000Now, I'm not saying anything about any individual.
00:29:05.000There's individuals from all races that are at the top of performance levels and at the bottom of performance levels.
00:29:14.000But on average, we do have very large academic skills gaps and we have very large crime commission gaps.
00:29:22.000Those are much stronger explanations for the lack of proportional representation in medical schools, in medical research labs, in hospitals, in ER rooms, in classical music orchestras, in museums, and in prison than racism.
00:29:42.000But currently, the only allowable explanation for any kind of racial disparity is racism.
00:30:08.000But we are determined to tear it down in order to fight something that is absolutely an optical illusion.
00:30:15.000I encourage everyone to check out Heather's book when it's available for pre-order, but also the previous book, Diversity Delusion, which I think was really ahead of the curve, predicting so many of the disturbing trends we've seen.
00:30:32.000But Heather, what I find interesting, and you're going to have to help me understand this, and we're going to have you back on the program to promote your book once it's available, is the people that are most aggressively pushing this new racial regime are ones that would never put up with it in their own personal lives.
00:30:46.000These are high-income whites that would never put up with an incompetent hiring scenario in their business, on their private jets, whether it be running their own home or estate.
00:31:12.000They'll get on their Gulf Stream and fly down to Palm Beach, but they're going to want to make sure their pilots were hired for competency.
00:31:17.000When they go in for heart surgery, they're not going to care the color of their skin.
00:31:20.000But for lower income people, you guys better get used to race over merit.
00:31:28.000And I thought you were going to say what is one of the most weird features is that leaders of important and groundbreaking traditions and institutions are willing to turn on their own institutions and accuse them of phantom racism.
00:31:45.000So you have college presidents presiding over what used to be great institutions saying, oh, woe is me, we're so racist, and implicitly accusing their own faculty of being racist, which is preposterous.
00:32:00.000You have heads of art museums saying the Western tradition, 5,000 years of art, is racist because there weren't black sculptors in 5th century BC Athens.
00:32:11.000Well, there were no blacks in 5th century BC Athens, but they're willing to tell people, they're willing to tell young people coming to museums for the first time, see this collection through the lens of racial exclusion, which is poison.
00:32:26.000Classical music heads are also saying, oh, the reason that there were no black composers in 15th century Flanders is racism.
00:32:35.000No, that demographically, Europe was white until the 20th century.
00:32:41.000But yes, up to a point, you're right that the elite white perpetrators of racial preferences, when it comes to their own immediate lives, do expect that merit will triumph.
00:32:56.000On the other hand, for their own institutions, corporations are mandating that managers get promoted based on their own hiring of blacks and promotion of blacks and are setting just preposterous hiring standards that can't possibly be met.
00:33:18.000And to just close the point, show me anything from the third world that is as beautiful as Beethoven's Fifth.