I am pleased to welcome on the news line a return guest to the program.
He is Will Hild.
Mr. Hild is with Consumers Research.
ConsumersResearch.org is the website where you get much more information.
And as noted, Mr. Hild is executive director of that fine group.
Mr. Hild, thanks so much for taking the time.
Welcome back to KXEL.
Absolutely.
Always good to be with you guys.
Remind people who may have missed prior conversations, consumers research, who are you folks and what do you do?
Certainly, we're the nation's oldest consumer protection organization founded in 1929 and we've spent the last six or seven years focused specifically on pushing back against woke capitalism
the ESG movement that's caused woke capitalism and all the myriad of ways that it ruins the consumer experiencing, lowering the quality of goods, increasing prices, sometimes creating dangerous situations like doors flying out, blowing out airplanes.
We're pushing back on ESG, DEI, and woke capitalism.
and again it's consumersresearch.org as noted almost been around for a hundred years and you can sign up for woke alerts right there on their website and this new woke alert I thought was very interesting when we got word about it because of the breadth of the companies involved and these to my mind anyway some of these are companies because of their
public posture and advertising, etc.
I looked at and I thought, well, that seems odd that they'd be the subject of a woke alert.
But I guess that shows what they use in marketing to get us to buy their products, maybe hiding how they really feel behind the scenes.
Give us a sense of this, this new woke alert and who's involved.
Absolutely.
Well, we've seen a lot of companies, you know, kind of walk back, at least publicly, their push for woke capitalism and in particular, DEI and net zero targets.
But that doesn't mean that inside the engine, they have changed much.
And that's really the point of this woke alert was to help consumers understand, we still have to keep our foot on the gas and pushing back against this because a lot of these people still work at these companies pushing this insanity.
two companies you mentioned in particular dilute trading company in carhartt are both brands that sort of bill themselves as sort of a working man company uh... blue collar uh... you know quality goods for for people engaged in the trade that kind of thing but in reality they've continued to push the e i uh... in their human resources and and broadly speaking their corporate governance and the eyes really just another way of saying race and
sex-based discrimination.
It's setting race and sex quotas for a company and trying to drive towards that, which requires choosing people not based on competency or skill in serving consumers, but in fetishizing race and sex.
And so we have those companies listed on this local art and we have contact information.
So if you're a consumer of their products,
You can push back.
I can tell you it does have an impact when people call or email these companies.
They hear you, and it does change their behaviors.
I've heard from many companies behind, or I should say through back channels, when we put out a local art, that they hear us, that consumers have reached out to them, and they are making changes.
So consumers should absolutely feel empowered.
But those are two companies, and if you look at their advertising, it's very different than what it appears is going on behind the scenes.
I'm sure many people listening are wearing Carhartt clothing right now as they're working out in rural areas.
And again, I just don't understand why you need to hire someone in the position of chief people and impact officer.
I mean, that from the start of it sounds like somebody had a little too much to drink when they were planning the flow chart.
But
It's not just that they have this goofy name for a job to try to make it feel better.
I mean, that's what it's all about.
But the fact that the person they put in the job had a pedigree within the company, that suggests, I mean, that's the red flag, right?
That's the alert.
That's exactly right.
And so just to go a little bit of history on this, you had a group of large asset managers, BlackRock, Namely, and another two state streets in Vanguard, who have hoovered up a lot of state local pension funds and manage a ton of the stocks of these companies.
And they were pushing these companies infamously.
BlackRock says we're forcing behaviors in that clip that goes viral every six months or so.
he was talking about forcing d i down the throat of the company and fortunately a lot of these companies didn't have uh... a ton of option they had to answer to the people that were stewarding their shares and so they hired these d i managers and now that the pendulum has swung back the other direction d i sort of out of vote those people don't wanna you know self uh... delete from the company they don't want to lose their careers even though that what they're pushing is a not just and frankly the legal ideology of race and sex based discrimination
And so we've seen a lot of rebranding of DEI around Department of Belonging is another one we hear.
Chief people and impact officers, you noted, that's basically just a new rebranded title for their head of DEI.
He's still going to be pushing the same
uh... agenda items at that car park that he was uh... uh... before so that's one of the reasons why we're putting out this local or to help people understand that we're going to have to play whack-a-mole for a while with these companies because they're going to have to learn that uh... simple rebrand is not going to fix the problem we are going to come for you and we're going to want to know are you following state and federal labor law are you choosing people based on their competition skill and serving consumers or even still engaging in this insane woke politics that we've all rejected collectively the nation
I didn't realize this because Will Hild and folks at Consumer Research follow it, so the rest of us don't have to.
Carhart is in Dearborn, Michigan.
Oh my gosh.
I mean, you want to talk about a place that lost its way long ago, am I right?
That's exactly right.
And a lot of times you see that with these corporate headquarters is they, you know, they end up in a place like we see that with Nike, which has also made our woke alert.
and they take on the culture not of the consumers that they serve but of some little municipality or city within the country and you know but you've got cities like portland or seattle for example that go super woke and then everyone that works there uh... is from that milieu and they become completely disconnected from their actual consumer base and that's a great point dearborn michigan obviously that very different culture than most of the country and certainly the people
that were shopping and buying Carhartt products historically.
Will Hild is our guest.
He's executive director of Consumers Research.
They're online at consumersresearch.org.
You can sign up right there on their main page for Woke Alerts, and he's kind enough to join us live on News Talk 1540KXEL.
The Duluth Trading Company ads, those are, they're quirky, they're inventive, they're, you know, it's animated basically.
But oh my gosh.
Duluth would be Minnesota, but they're based now in Mount Horrib, Wisconsin.
I'll admit, I have no idea where in the blazes that is.
But the corporate humanity page, how do you, why do you need a corporate humanity page?
But give us a sense of where Duluth has gotten off, Duluth trading has gotten off the rails.
Yeah, that's a great point.
And I think their advertising is great.
I'll pay them a compliment here.
They were able to make a name for themselves with that advertising.
It's very quirky, but it also obviously appealed to sort of a manly or blue-collar customer base.
dove head first into this d-e-i nonsense as well and they basically bragged that they make every employee go through diversity equity inclusion training at the company and what the d-i training that they don't don't don't uh... be fooled by the propaganda these d-i trainings are incredibly hostile towards whites towards men towards christians towards agents in terms of what they teach but also what it what it suggests about the company's own promotion and hiring policies uh... at that at the company there is no company
that needs DEI.
If you treat your employees well, if you pay them the most you can pay them and still make a buck and keep your prices low for consumers, that's what makes for a great place to work, is being treated well by corporate.
In fact, there was a leaked memo from Amazon, this was years ago, three, four years ago, an internal memo from Amazon leaked that found when they were trying to break up trust, excuse me, union busting, when they were trying to break up
unions that were forming around their fulfillment centers.
One of the things that they found was extremely effective to deploy was DEI trainings.
Because what DEI trainings train you to think through is a part of a team.
I'm white, or I'm black, or I'm Asian, or I'm Hispanic, or I'm a man, or I'm a woman.
And so it actually destroyed the collective bonds amongst the employees and it made it easier for them to keep the fulfillment centers from unionizing.
Well what does that say?
about DEI, that it can be deployed to ruin solidarity between the employees.
There is no company that needs to be pushing DEI, specifically a company like Duluth, with its customer base, to really be thinking through whether that makes sense, but then it doesn't.
Well, this is the thing that so often, unfortunately, even in smaller companies, when they decide to
get everyone together and do team building.
Well often it has absolutely nothing to do with the work product and there's too much focus on the game as opposed to actually continuing education that could lead to a better work product and it's probably no wonder that a lot of small to mid-sized companies that drunk that Kool-Aid why they're having problems today because again instead of focusing on the skillset necessary for a good work force
We're off in the weeds on this other stuff, and I know a lot of people, Mr. Hild, have made a lot of money being consultants for it, and I hope I don't sound jealous for not thinking of it first, but it's a scam, isn't it?
Oh, it's entirely a scam, and you bring up an incredible point, which is any moment that an employee or a company spends on DEI is a moment they didn't spend on making the customer experience better, either with new products, better products, cheaper products, and as you note,
Someone has to pay these people to come in and do these classes.
Well, that can only come out of three things.
The money they pay their employees, the amount of money they return to their shareholders, or the price you pay at the checkout counter.
That's the only way those people get paid.
So somebody is subsidizing this.
And I don't think the employees should have to subsidize it.
I think shareholders have a right to say, what does this have to do with returning value to us?
And customers above all, the nation's oldest consumer protection organization, most of all, I don't want customers to suffer because of this.
And they have.
The quality of goods and services across the country went down because of DEI.
And it's time we wiped this thing off the map, finally.
Will Hild is executive director of Consumers Research, consumersresearch.org, the website.
He joins us live on KXEL for a couple of more minutes.
And I'm a big fan of building a good workforce, having a good work climate.
And as part of that, you get the best people you can.
And they may represent different viewpoints, but that's a wonderful thing.
That concept is fine.
But the way that it has been subverted,
That diversity only means certain things.
Equity.
Well, that has nothing to do with excellence.
I mean, it's the way that they have co-opted to fit a narrative, this DEI stuff.
That's what's made it toxic.
In my view, I'm curious about yours.
100%.
The psychology research on this is rock solid.
We've known this for decades.
get people working together is a shared mission.
People who have a shared mission where they understand what they're trying to accomplish, that's what makes for great teams, that's what makes for a great work environment.
When people think about a moment, you enjoyed work, okay?
It's rarely that the work itself is what you're enjoying.
You were working with a team that was all running in the same direction, the horses were all pulling in the same direction.
That's what makes for a wonderful work environment.
And this is the opposite of that.
DEI fetishizes.
sex and rate and and put people into categories based on that which is the opposite of what you want to do you want people to come together across all those things for the shared mission of serving the consumer and doing it a profitable way for yourself and for your shareholders so it is the insanity of employing you know allowing the asset managers to force this
insanity into these companies because they basically have become cancerous within these countries.
Companies, I should say, they don't produce anything of value.
DEI does not produce anything value for the shareholder or the consumer, and yet they soak up resources and they try to become a bigger and bigger and bigger part of what the company is focused on and what it's doing and the money that it's spending.
That is the definition of cancer.
And so our local arts are designed to help consumers push these companies to get rid of that.
It's time to have surgery, get rid of the DEI cancer,
Focus your time and attention on me, the consumer, and that's what work alerts are all about.
And if you have the time, let's close with Traeger, because again, they've got a certain image, you know, the family or that guy at that grill, you know, the whole bit.
They're not cheap.
And apparently they've decided to stick to the DEI mission and just fool us with rebranding.
That's exactly right, and it's just yet another category of companies that have simply tried to rebrand in fact.
They felt that this rebrand was so important.
They put it into their SEC financial filings, their so-called 10Ks.
So this is something they thought was important enough that they needed to, they had a legal obligation to provide to their shareholders.
But the truth is that these rebrands don't mean anything.
We did a local alert about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago now, companies that had changed their department of DEI, the department of belonging, or inclusion of belonging, and changed literally nothing else.
Those stock photos on the web pages were the same.
The people in charge of it were the same.
They hadn't changed any staff.
They hadn't even changed any of the programs that they described as being part of DEI.
So they think that if we just don't use the word DEI, if they just don't use the word DEI, people will be fooled.
And they won't be.
Consumers are smarter than that.
But consumers' research and our local arts are here to help educate and empower consumers to push back on companies when they do that.
And I'm going to be emailing Traeger myself.
I have a Traeger grill.
It's a decent grill.
But I don't want one put together by people based on race and sex.
I want one put together based on who was the best at designing and building these things.
And that's what we need to get back to in America.
You sign up for woke alerts right there on the main page and if you're so inclined because it is a non-profit, if you have the means, would like to donate, there's a nice subtle button for that as well.
If you go to consumersresearch.org, Will Hilde is Executive Director of Consumers Research.
It's kind of depressing when you accumulate all of these things, but you're made of strong stuff.
You'll get past it.
But it's such a valuable resource, these woke alerts.
Thanks so much for taking the time on a Monday.
Take good care now.
Great to be with you.
Take care.
All right.
And Mr. Hill joined us live on the news line on News Talk 1540KXEL, where Iowa comes to talk.
I mean, the concept of having to
Fair it out all of this.
It makes you think, ah, there's no end in sight.
Well, that's why they're there.
They'll do that research.
They give you the flag with contact information right there.
So if you want to, as he's going to do, say, hey, Traeger, why are you doing this?
You've got a phone number and an email address.
And stop buying the products, puts them on alert.
ConsumersResearch.org, the website, and again, Will Hild joined us live on the news line on News Talk 1540KXEL, where Iowa comes to talk.
News Talk 1540 KXEL where Iowa comes to talk and coming up this weekend.
It's a long weekend.
That's a good thing.
It helps to get through this week knowing that there is a three day break on the other side of the work week, but there's some free music as well on both Saturday and Sunday.
Saturday and Cedar Falls Sunday in Waverly as the Waterloo Cedar Falls Symphony.
gets ready to go into its season.
A couple of free Labor Day weekend concerts are on the schedule.
We're going to find out more now with Jordan Bancroft, the executive director of the Waterloo Cedar Falls Symphony.
Thanks for being back with us.
Thanks for having me, Tim.
these have become kind of a tradition and maybe a way for you and for the symphony to mark the start of the the season even though these are not maybe technically part of the coming season it's sort of like a like a pre-season warm-up.
Yeah absolutely it's a good time to get our musicians back together to get them working together again after the summer break but then it's also a good way for us to you know both at the same time
mark the beginning of of our season but also kind of the last weekend of summer right and to provide some community offerings for the last week of summer things for you to do with your family
so the concert on saturday is in cedar falls it's at the riverplace plaza so an outdoor event and another outdoor event it looks like on sunday in waverly
What kinds of things do you want to bring to a concert like this, knowing that you have maybe a wider audience, some more general audience than you might have for a different kind of performance?
You alluded to the time of year.
And for the musicians, I'm guessing they don't necessarily want to learn a whole bunch of new music for this type of atmosphere.
So what's good for them?
Yeah.
So this year, we've been kind of experimenting with this concert, trying to figure out the best way to interact.
with the community and to really bring people into what we're doing.
And so this year we're actually just focusing on our woodwind section by doing Dvorak's Wind Serenade and an Arthur Bird piece.
But really what we're gonna do is try to highlight the folks who live in this community and who play in our orchestra so that you can get to know this section of the orchestra.
And so this year what we're about is getting to know the people.
who are in the Woodwind section of the symphony.
That doesn't mean that the strings and the horns get to just take the weekend off and go on a trip, right?
It
actually does.
Really?
Yes, it does.
We do have one cello player who will be playing with us on one piece, but yep, it's going to be the Woodwind section that we're really honing in on and highlighting with these concerts.
We're talking with Jordan Bancroft, who's the executive director of the Waterloo Cedar Falls Symphony.
A couple of free Labor Day weekend concerts are coming up in Cedar Falls on Saturday and in Waverly on Sunday, and both of them start at seven o'clock.
Let's talk about the outdoor nature
of
this, which we're gonna hope the weather works out, obviously.
But
what sort of circumstances does that present if we were in a different point in the calendar, for example?
outdoor weather could have some big impact on the instruments themselves, and maybe it still will if it's warm and
humid.
Yep, absolutely.
So we have to be really careful about the conditions that we ask our musicians to perform in, not only for their health and safety, but also for the health and safety of their instruments.
They're made of wood.
They expand when it's hot, when it's humid, they absorb moisture.
And so we really do need to be careful.
And so we are always watching the weather as we come up.
on these outdoor concerts, but knock on wood, Labor Day weekend always tends to be really nice weather for us.
How have these concerts been received in the past and does that set any expectations for what you're hoping for
this weekend?
Generally speaking, people really like these concerts.
We've got a good following of about five or six hundred people who come pretty regularly to these concerts and spend the holiday weekend with us.
And it's really just a good time, you know, bring a picnic blanket, bring your, you know, a picnic with you, bring out the family and just spend a nice, you know, Labor Day weekend evening with the family, listening to some really good music by, you know, truly professional musicians.
I think we can all appreciate this time of year from our back to school days and trying to get back into the regular routine, trying to maybe shake off summer, trying to get maybe in some cases hold on to summer as long as we can.
What's this like though for an orchestra where I'm sure that there are some similar sentiments and it really is where everything comes back into gear.
Yeah, yeah, so you know, I mean generally speaking our musicians have been performing Just not with us kind of out in the community doing things, but really playing coming together as a cohesive group You know the skills it takes to listen across a group that size to be able to perform with that many people Yeah, you got to shake that off and shake off the cobwebs and get used to doing it again Reigniting those skills and then in terms of the staff of the symphony
You know, we spend all summer planning and preparing for the season.
And so our goal is then we now switch into kind of execution mode, you know, like many people in their workplaces, right?
There are periods of time where you're planning and periods of time where you have to go.
And so we're gearing up to go.
We're talking with Jordan Bancroft who is the executive director of the Waterloo Cedar Falls Symphony.
A couple of free Labor Day weekend concerts are on the schedule this coming weekend on Saturday in Cedar Falls starting at 7 o'clock at River Place Plaza then on Sunday also at 7 o'clock in Waverly at Coleman Park.
You alluded to Dvorak being one of the featured pieces one of his works and is that
the piece that he wrote when he was up in
Spillville.
That is a great question.
No, he did not write the Wind Serenade when he was in Spillville, but both this concert and our season opener focus on Dvorak because of his time in Spillville.
We're giving kind of like an appetizer of Dvorak to prepare people for our season opener and get them excited for it.
So yeah, it really is about tying Dvorak to
Northeast Iowa and is time here.
with these concerts.
Dvorak was a Czech composer.
He was most prolific in the late 19th century.
And I know some people know the story.
Some people don't.
So give us the version that you tell when you talk about Dvorak and perhaps the most significant impact Iowa's ever had on instrumental music.
Yeah.
So Dvorak, like you said, Czech composer was living in New York City.
He was the director of a conservatory there.
And my understanding is he really didn't enjoy living in the big city.
He was from rural Czechoslovakia and did not like how busy New York City was.
And he was really homesick.
And so he was planning after he finished writing the New World Symphony, which is what we're performing on our season opener, he was planning on returning home to Czechoslovakia.
And there was some very serious concern from folks here.
that he would not return.
And so I can't remember if it was his assistant or somebody around him's assistant was of Czech immigrant heritage and grew up in Spillville and said to Dvorak, you know, you don't have to go home to feel like you're home.
There's this village in northeast Iowa that's primarily Czech immigrants.
They speak the Czech language there.
And the landscape looks like rural Czechoslovakia.
Why don't you just go?
to Spillville in northeast Iowa.
And so he packed up his family in May of 1893, took the train here and spent three months that summer in Spillville and described it as one of the best summers he's ever had in his life.
Loved walking along the Turkey River, playing the organ that is still there in the St.
Wenceslas Catholic Church in Spillville.
And...
He composed two of his most famous chamber works, the American Quintet and a quartet that was inspired by his time living in Spillville.
There would have to be a temptation from an orchestra playing in eastern Iowa to come back to Dvorak over and over again and particularly the
New
World Symphony.
How do you keep it special and bring it out at the right time?
Yes.
That's also a great question.
So this year, we were thinking about the 250th anniversary of this country and thinking about how do we provide a perspective on the culture and the history of our country while also weaving in the history and culture of this place, Northeast Iowa, through the music.
And sometimes, as we were thinking about this, because we could have programmed Copeland or Gershwin or Bernstein, these iconic American composers.
But we thought about Dvorak because of this tie to Iowa, but also sometimes we felt that an outsider's perspective looking in at who you are.
highlights the best of what you can be.
So kind of like we saw with the World Cup this summer, with lots of videos on the internet of Europeans who had negative ideas of what America is, coming and experiencing it for the first time, and absolutely loving it.
Loving the hospitality, loving the natural curiosity Americans have, loving the welcoming nature, but then also loving things like air conditioning, right?
And that was really cool to see.
And so Dvorak with his New World Symphony and some of the other pieces he wrote in this American period, including the two pieces he wrote in Spillville, I think provide this outsider's perspective on who we are.
And what I hear in the music is optimism, industriousness, and kind of like an idyllic, you know, especially in the second movement.
of the New World Symphony, you hear this almost like pastoral scene of like the farmer working the land and the hard work behind that.
And then Dvorak also took American folk music that was going on at the time and wove it into what he was writing to tell American composers, don't write music like Europeans.
You have your own musical sound.
that you should be focusing on, write American music.
And one of Dvorak's students ended up teaching Copeland and Gershwin, who are the two composers we look to at creating the American sound and classical music.
And so Dvorak really takes this outsider's perspective and kind of reflects as a mirror who he sees the American ethos and the American culture as being.
and then gives it to us to turn into our own sound.
And that's why Dvorak is so important to American music and to his time in Iowa.
Well, the Dvorak Ninth Symphony will be featured during the Waterloo Cedar Falls Symphony's season opening concert September the 19th at Gallagher Blue Door and Performing Arts Center.
Anything more we should know about that?
Yeah.
So we are actually bringing back Rebecca Burkhart
She was the director of orchestral studies at UNI.
She was one of my professors when I was a student at UNI.
I took music theory with her.
And now that she's retired from that job, she composes.
And so we actually commissioned Rebecca Burkhart to also compose a piece for this concert about Dvorak's time in Iowa.
And so we're going to move from...
You know, we're starting with Rebecca Burkhart setting the scene about Dvorak's time in Iowa.
And then we're moving to two of his most famous pieces that he wrote when he was in America, the cello concerto, which was last performed by the Waterloo Cedar Falls Symphony way back in like 2003 with Yo-Yo Ma.
So it's the first time since then that we're bringing it back.
Jamie Clark from the University of Iowa will be performing the piece.
And then we have the New World Symphony.
It's going to be a barnstormer of a concert.
Well the Waterloo Cedar Falls Symphony season officially opens September 19th at the Gallagher Blue Door and Performing Arts Center, but free Labor Day weekend concerts coming up this weekend in Cedar Falls and Waverly Cedar Falls Saturday, Waverly on Sunday both beginning at 7 p.m.
and we've been hearing about those from Jordan Bancroft, the Executive Director of the Waterloo Cedar Falls Symphony.
Thanks for being with us.
Thank you for having me, Tim.
This is the station where Iowa comes to talk.
News Talk 1540 KXCL.