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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm John Bickley.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I'm Georgia Howe.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: With November fast approaching and the race extremely tight, Kamala Harris has signaled she's backing away from some left-wing policies she's long endorsed. But she continues to get support from powerful far-left groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, which has pledged to spend $15 million to promote the Democratic presidential candidate.
--:-- John Bickley: In this episode, we talk with columnist Carol Markowitz about the role the well-funded left-wing organization and its DEI agenda is playing in the Democrats' electoral campaigns.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Hey guys, producer Brandon here. Balance of Nature is my go-to source for whole food ingredients. Balance of Nature takes fruits and vegetables, they freeze-dry them, turn them into a powder, and then they put them into a capsule. The capsules are completely void of additives, fillers, extracts, synthetics, pesticides, or added sugar. The only thing at Balance of Nature fruit and veggie capsules are fruits and veggies. So go to balanceofnature.com and use promo code WIRE for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's balanceofnature.com, promo code WIRE.
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--:-- John Bickley: Joining us now is Carol Markowitz, columnist and host of The Carol Markowitz Show. Carol, it's great to have you back on.
--:-- Carol Markowitz: Yeah, thank you for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: So you make the point in your recent article that we've seen Vice President Harris flip-flop on several policies in an attempt to appeal to more moderate voters. But at the same time, she's been endorsed by groups that are far from moderate. That includes the Human Rights Campaign. First, what's significant about that particular endorsement?
--:-- Carol Markowitz: So what's interesting about that is that Donald Trump gets a lot of abuse for Project 2025 which he has repeatedly disavowed. Yet Kamala Harris has this group that is fully supportive of her completely on board with her campaign which is so far outside the mainstream. They pressure hospitals to give surgeries to kids who declare themselves transgender. They work with school librarians to get really inappropriate books into libraries that are far outside the mainstream of American culture. And they're fully in Kamala Harris's ear, and nobody seems to have any problem with that. None of the mainstream media says a word about it.
--:-- John Bickley: As to Harris's position on transgender operations, including funding for those from the government level, what do we actually know about her record on that?
--:-- Carol Markowitz: Well, it's hard to say because she has now seemingly reversed all of her previous positions. And I say seemingly because we really don't know. It's been sort of a word of mouth thing where a news outlet will run something and say that she's reversed herself based on a conversation with a staffer. We haven't heard her say it. So when the story broke recently that she had supported transgender surgeries for migrants who are criminals and in our jails, that sounded outlandish and crazy. And Donald Trump said it during the debate, but it was true. And she looked as if that could not possibly be true, but it was.
--:-- John Bickley: So we don't really know where she stands because the media has decided that we don't need to know and that the idea is to drag her across the finish line. And that's where they are right now.
--:-- Carol Markowitz: The Daily Wire just released a report that documents the fact that right now, under the Biden-Harris administration, some 22,000 foreign nationals that are in prison are technically eligible for transgender surgery funded by the government. That's happening right now. So her policy as the vice president is this. This is her policy.
--:-- John Bickley: That's correct. It's absolutely the policy of the White House, whether or not they admitted, again. And the fact that she looked so shocked and surprised that she could support that kind of thing while supporting that is partly why we need a debate where the moderators actually question both candidates where they actually fact check both candidates. It's not a pro opinion to say that we really being shortchanged by the media and by the moderators at these debates when they don't challenge Harris on things that are actually true.
--:-- Carol Markowitz: You know that the human rights campaign is very well funded. How much money are they working with?
--:-- John Bickley: You know, it's hard to say, but they are partnered with so many major corporations that it is in the many, many millions. BlackRock is part of their funding. George Soros is part of their funding. They recently had some pushback because groups like Lowe's or Jack Daniels and Harley Davidson were pressured to roll back some of the DEI policies that HRC push. But they still work with, if you go to their website, they partner with Amazon, Google, so many others, and they're extremely well-funded by these groups.
--:-- Carol Markowitz: It's sort of an operation where these companies and groups and agencies provide them with funding and also take orders from them. So it's a very well-established place for HRC, where if you don't partner with them, they can come after you for being anti-LGBTQ. And a lot of these companies don't want to take that chance.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, they do this in part through the Corporate Equality Index. Can you remind our listeners what that index is and how HRC uses it to pressure companies?
--:-- Carol Markowitz: So what they do is they assign a score to these corporations and they say, we're going to give you a report card about how well you're abiding by the diversity criteria set by HRC. Then that report card, that score is used by investment firms like BlackRock to decide where they should direct their investments. So you have this woke organization partnering with woke investment firms to pressure companies to behave in a certain way. That pressure is significant when you look at the kind of money that BlackRock controls. Companies don't want to be on the wrong side of that report card. They don't want to lose any possibility of BlackRock investing in their company because they didn't abide by HRC diversity criteria.
--:-- John Bickley: Like you mentioned we have seen some companies push back. What are some of the more high-profile ones that have decided to abandon their DEI policies?
--:-- Carol Markowitz: I would say they didn't decide one day to abandon this. They were pressured into it by Robbie Starbuck. He is a conservative activist and he an anti activist and he noticed that some of the companies that HRC pressures are quite conservative. So he went to these companies and said, perhaps don't abide by their DEI policies. That's not what your customer base wants you to do. And those companies include Lowe's, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, Ford, and they've rolled back their DEI policies based on Robbie Starbuck's pressure. Basically, he's mimicking what HRC is doing on the left from the right, and it's working.
--:-- John Bickley: Final question. Are we seeing HRC pivot or change their approach in terms of trying to promote their agenda?
--:-- Carol Markowitz: I don't think so. I think that they have managed to get away with being fairly open about their agenda for a long time. Again, if you go to their website, they have their partners all listed there. It's not a secret that they have so much control over the biggest corporations in our country. They've managed to convince at least Democrats that they are a good group. And of course, it helps that they have such an innocuous name, Human Rights Campaign. How could anybody not like that? But they've really done a number on American society. They've instilled their message into different parts of our country. As I mentioned in my article, it's libraries, it's trade groups, it's not just companies. So I don't see them changing direction. I see them doubling down on this. And the thing is that nobody is holding Kamala Harris accountable for her relationship with them at all. And that's what I hope to do in the article and in this conversation is to say she is tied to this very fringe group and more mainstream outlets need to be calling this out, same as they try to do to Donald Trump with Project 2025. Let's hope we see more balance than we saw in that last presidential debate.
--:-- Carol Markowitz: Thank you so much for coming on to report this.
--:-- John Bickley: Thank you so much. That was great.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Carol Markowitz, host of The Carol Markowitz Show, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.
