‘Go Woke, Go Broke’ Review: The Worst Investments

Charles Gasparino is a gladiatorial journalist. When he steps into the arena to fight a money-man or enterprise that he believes is anticapitalist or crooked, he can be brutal. Making an enemy of him is not for the faint-hearted: Watch him trade insults with his critics on social media. He was once a Wall Street reporter for this newspaper, where editors and colleagues remember him for his no-holds-barred style. Which is precisely how we’d describe the approach in “Go Woke, Go Broke,” Mr. Gasparino’s blistering account of “how corporate America became something close to a foot soldier in the progressive movement.” Now a senior correspondent at the Fox Business Network, Mr. Gasparino is also a columnist at the New York Post, whose irreverent, indignant (and often irresistible) tabloid style is very much in evidence here. (Fox, the Post and the Journal share common ownership.)

“Go Woke, Go Broke” is a takedown of “corporate wokeness,” which Mr. Gasparino describes as the “noxious ideology of progressive politics in the boardroom”—an ideology, he says, that “needs to die a thousand deaths.” The book can be seen as a demotic complement to “Woke, Inc.” (2021), by the brainy (and sometimes tiresome) former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy. Mr. Gasparino’s is the better book for its plainspokenness: Many more Middle Americans—whose jobs have been outsourced or have been imperiled by the high-minded dictates of “diversity”—will grasp its message. These are the people who, Mr. Gasparino argues, have been shafted by the Wall Street “fat cats” who’ve grown “much fatter” by their “feeding at the ESG trough.”

ESG stands for “environmental, social, and governance”—metrics intended to direct or funnel investment in an ostensibly socially responsible direction. Mr. Gasparino is a populist-capitalist, and ESG is his bête noire, along with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). These “leftist shibboleths” have, the author says, “warped” American business practices for nearly two decades and grew in intensity under the second Obama administration.

Mr. Gasparino traces the roots of ESG to the 1980s and ’90s, when business leaders began embracing so-called corporate social responsibility (or CSR, in its now archaic abbreviation). CSR, in time, evolved into bien-pensant notions of stakeholder capitalism, championed by the likes of Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Davos Man, writes Mr. Gasparino, “represents the ultimate marriage of the progressive globalist corporate citizen with the globalist progressive regulatory bureaucrat.”

All this performatively moral investing is a revolt against Milton Friedman, the economist who in 1970 stated that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Friedman, writes Mr. Gasparino, would have hated ESG and DEI, “among the most heinously anti-American management philosophies ever developed.” (Readers of Mr. Gasparino’s robust book will realize pretty quickly that nuance is for wimps.)

Basing his book largely on a host of interviews with “company insiders,” Mr. Gasparino gives us entertaining (and informative) accounts of corporate blunders in the name of wokeness. He reminds us of the time AB InBev—the holding company for Anheuser-Busch and its beer, Budweiser—thought it would be a great idea to use a “transwoman influencer” named Dylan Mulvaney to market its top-selling Bud Light. Middle America revolted and stopped buying the beer, heretofore branded as a manly beverage. Mr. Gasparino also recounts how the discount retailer Target was punished by consumers for promoting “tuck-friendly bathing suits for men transitioning to women” alongside rainbow-colored onesies for toddlers. And Disney, recalls the author, erred politically and financially when its chief executive, Bob Chapek, embarked on a bruising battle with Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis and challenged the validity of a state law barring public schools from teaching sexual education to children before the fourth grade. In each case, the company’s stock price tanked and sales plummeted.

It enrages Mr. Gasparino that America’s corporate management luxuriates “in progressive causes as a side hustle.” But in some cases, he tells us, these causes are the main course. Among the villains trying to ram ESG down our throats are Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock; Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase; David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs; and the “ESG-obsessed” Gary Gensler, President Biden’s chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whom Mr. Gasparino describes as “a male version” of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “among the most woke, annoying, and . . . dangerous bureaucrats in government.” Add to the list Adena Friedman, the CEO of Nasdaq, which demands that companies seeking to list on its exchange disclose board-level diversity statistics and, if the need arises, explain why they don’t have a diversity of directors. Such demands aren’t, of course, slapped on Chinese companies, which are, Mr. Gasparino points out, curiously exempt from all the wokest rules. When was the last time a Chinese company was asked why it didn’t have a Uyghur on its board, or an LGBTQ+ person?

Attacking Larry Fink as “Mr. ESG,” says Mr. Gasparino, has become “a rallying cry on the populist right,” whose backlash against corporate wokeness has been so fierce that even BlackRock has started to dismount from its moral high horse. Consumers’ Research, a conservative advocacy group pushing back against ESG, derides the abbreviation as “elitists, socialists, and grifters,” as well as “erasing savings and growth”—pungent and effective put-downs. More and more investors are aware that ESG-specific funds are expensive and rarely beat the market. In fact, writes Mr. Gasparino, “they’re some of the worst investments,” even as they make it harder to tackle inflation by forcing curbs on fossil fuels. But Middle America appears to have woken up to the perils of ESG and is giving voice to its displeasure. “It’s now their Arab Spring,” says Mr. Gasparino. This may be hyperbolic overreach, even for the crusading Mr. Gasparino, but he’s confident that America’s version of a grassroots people’s revolt will end better than the one in the Middle East. Let’s pray he’s right.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society.

Must even steak be politicised? The American Heart Association recently recommended eating more “plant-based” protein in a move to counter the Health and Human Services Department’s new guidelines calling for more red meat.

Few would argue that eating a Big Mac a day is good for you.

On the other hand, growing evidence, including a study last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that eating more meat—particularly unprocessed red meat—can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s in the quarter or so of people with a particular genetic predisposition.

The APOE4 gene variant is one of the biggest risk factors for Alzheimer’s.

You inherit one copy of the APOE gene from each parent. The most common variant is APOE3; the least is APOE2.

The latter carries a lower risk of Alzheimer’s, while the former is neutral. A quarter of people carry one copy of the APOE4 variant, and about 2% carry two.

APOE4 is more common among people with Northern European and African ancestry. In Europe the variant increases with latitude, and is present in as many as 27% of people in northern countries versus 4% in southern ones. God smiled on the Italians and Greeks.

For unknown reasons, the APOE4 variant increases the risk of Alzheimer’s far more for women than men.

Women’s risk multiplies roughly fourfold if they have one copy and tenfold if they have two. Men with a single copy show little if any higher risk, while those with two face four times the risk.

What makes APOE4 so pernicious? Scientists don’t know exactly, but the variant is also associated with higher cholesterol levels—even among thin people who eat healthily.

Scientists have found that cholesterol builds up in brain cells of APOE4 carriers, which can disrupt communications between neurons and generate amyloid plaque, an Alzheimer’s hallmark.

The Heart Association’s recommendation to eat less red meat may be sound advice for people with high cholesterol caused by indulgent diets.

But a diet high in red meat may be better for the brains of APOE4 carriers.

In the JAMA study, researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute examined how diet, particularly meat consumption, affects dementia risk among seniors with the different APOE variants.

Higher consumption of meat, especially unprocessed red meat, was associated with significantly lower dementia risk for APOE4 carriers.

APOE4 carriers who consumed the most meat—the equivalent of 4.5 ounces a day—were no more likely to develop dementia than noncarriers. (

The study controlled for other variables that are known to affect Alzheimer’s risk including sex, age, physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption and education.)

APOE4 carriers who ate the most unprocessed meat were at significantly lower risk of dying over the study’s 15-year period and had lower cholesterol than carriers who ate less. Go figure. Noncarriers, however, didn’tenjoy similar benefits from eating more red meat.

The study’s findings are consistent with two large U.K. studies.

One found that each additional 50 grams of red meat (equivalent to half a hamburger patty) that an APOE4 carrier consumed each day was associated with a 36% reduced risk of dementia.

The other found that older women who carried the APOE4 variant and consumed at least one serving a day of unprocessed red meat had a cognitive advantage over carriers who ate less than half a serving, and that this advantage was of roughly equal magnitude to the cognitive disadvantage observed among APOE4 carriers in general.

In all three studies, eating more red meat appeared to negate the increased genetic risk of APOE4.

Perhaps one reason men with the variant are at lower Alzheimer’s risk than women is that men eat more red meat.

These findings might cause chagrin to women who rag their husbands about ordering the rib-eye instead of the heart-healthy salmon.

But remember, the cognitive benefits of eating more red meat appear isolated to APOE4 carriers.

Nutrition is complicated, and categorical recommendations—other than perhaps to avoid nutritionally devoid foods—would best be avoided by governments and health bodies.

Readers can order an at-home test from any number of companies to screen for the APOE4 variant.

The Swedish researchers hypothesize that APOE4 carriers may be evolutionarily adapted to carnivorous diets, since the variant is believed to have emerged between one million and six million years ago during a “hypercarnivorous” period in human history.

The other two APOE variants originated more recently, during eras when humans ate more plants.

APOE4 carriers may absorb more nutrients from meat than plants, the researchers surmise. Vitamin B12—low levels have been associated with cognitive decline—isn’t naturally present in plant-based foods but is abundant in red meat.

Foods high in phytates (such as grains and beans) can interfere with absorption of zinc and iron (also high in red meat), which naturally declines with age. So maybe don’t chuck your steak yet.

‘Go Woke, Go Broke’ Review: The Worst Investments

Charles Gasparino of Fox Business excoriates the progressive pieties that dominate the modern boardroom.

At least for people who carry the APOE4 genetic variant, a juicy steak could keep the brain healthy.