Fox Business Senior Correspondent Charlie Gasparino celebrated a brutal year for corporate racial discrimination after Jack Daniel’s parent company abandoned DEI initiatives.
Gasparino responded to a string of DEI defeats by pointing out that these leftist initiatives pose legal liabilities for companies on the Aug. 24 edition of FOX and Friends Saturday. Specifically, Gasparino told Fox News co-host Pete Hegseth that DEI is “a loser from a consumer standpoint” and could be a loser in courts “because the Supreme Court has ruled you cannot discriminate blatantly, and DEI is blatant discrimination.”
In an Aug. 21 email, Jack Daniels's parent company Brown-Furman announced it would scrap its DEI initiatives and cease providing information to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The HRC is a radical LGBTQ+ pressure group that compiles the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), judging the extent to which major corporations capitulate to their radical demands.
During the interview, Gasparino discussed how corporate DEI rose rapidly in the summer of 2020 but argued that the Supreme Court ruling against racial discrimination in 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard marked a key turning point for corporate DEI.
“[C]ompanies went sort of nuts on DEI following the George Floyd killing. It was very rigid. It went from the very top, the board members all the way down to suppliers,” he said. “After that, there’s been sort of a consumer and public backlash against it because it’s patently unfair. And the minute the Supreme Court ruled on affirmative action is when you saw companies starting to unwind this stuff, particularly as it applies to employment.”
The author of Go Woke, Go Broke went on to add that corporations not only had to fear the legal consequences of woke racial discrimination but also said that consumer backlash had played a huge role in ending corporate DEI or changing behavior at many companies.
Gasparino credited some companies for learning from this debacle and reining in unaccountable DEI departments, scrubbing radical language from their websites and recognizing that discrimination is “definitely” illegal.
Companies have also increasingly rejected the radical demands of DEI proponents such as the HRC. The HRC’s leftist demands include providing “pharmacy benefits for hormone therapy, medical visits and lab procedures related to hormone therapy, surgical procedures, and short-term leave for surgical procedures,” according to the HRC website. The HRC also requests that the companies they rate “fully affirm healthcare coverage for medically necessary transition-related care.”
Major companies like Tractor Supply and Harley-Davidson have also recently abandoned DEI initiatives and agreed to cease providing data to the HRC. Both companies promised to ensure that employee groups were focused on normal business goals. Tractor Supply promised to stop sponsoring pride festivals, “eliminate DEI roles” and “retire our current DEI goals.”
John Deere, meanwhile, has made similar changes, pledging to audit “all company-mandated training materials and policies to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages.” The company also promised that it “will no longer participate in or support external social or cultural awareness parades, festivals, or events.”
In response to these defeats, the HRC boasted that “this year’s CEI engaged over 1,300 businesses,” while attacking podcast host Robby Starbuck’s successful efforts at helping end the anti-American practices of these companies.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192 and demand they report on the dangers of leftist DEI ideology infecting corporate America.
