Harley-Davidson CEO compares himself to ‘Taliban’ in effort to remake motorcycle brand
The Harley-Davidson motorcycle brand and business model are being “attacked” from within, social-media influencer Robby Starbuck suggested in a new post on X.
He cited the words of the company’s own CEO, Jochen Zeitz, who’s been accused of going woke as he oversees the iconic brand. The German-born Zeitz took over as CEO in May 2020.
“Imagine standing in front of CEOs of luxury brands that now think you are the ‘sustainable Taliban,’ as somebody once called me,” Zeitz said in a speech at the Zermatt Summit in Switzerland in 2020, referencing his time as board member of Kiering, parent company of Gucci, Puma and Stella McCartney.
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A few minutes later in the same speech, Zeitz referenced the terror group again, as shown in the video that Starbuck shared this week.
“Of course, Harley’s all about the sound and the smell of the Harley-Davidson, isn’t it?” Zeitz said to attendees at the chic Swiss conference.
“So I became the Taliban again in a sustainable way,” Zeitz said in the video, as he’s shown smiling and walking back and forth on stage and referencing Harley-Davidson.
“I decided to share, to create a sustainability committee, which I’m still chairing today.”
Starbuck, along with his social media followers and many longtime Harley-Davidson riders, were shocked by the CEO’s glib comparison to a terror group that has American blood on its hands.
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“I think it’s f—— disgusting,” motorcycling media mogul James “Hollywood” Macecari told Fox News Digital upon hearing the comparison.
The Taliban is the globally condemned terrorist group that rules Afghanistan. It offered a home base for Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terror network before and after it plotted its Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States.
The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and injured more than 6,000 others, according to the U.S. State Department. About 2,500 U.S. service members were killed in the effort to root out the Taliban in the war that followed.
“Harley can crash and burn now for all I care,” Macecari, founder of Insane Throttle and author of four books, said last week in an interview about Harley-Davidson’s “woke” policies under Zeitz.
The Biden-Harris administration hastily abandoned Afghanistan in August 2021, leaving behind billions of dollars’ worth of American military hardware in the hands of the Taliban.
The administration also abandoned American military personnel.
Suicide bombers killed 183 people, including 13 U.S. service members, on Aug. 26, 2021, during the U.S. military’s mass evacuation at the Kabul airport.
This week, three years after that chaotic withdrawal, the Taliban paraded its U.S. military equipment through the streets of Kabul in celebration of the moment, as Fox News Digital reported on Wednesday.
“The first thing that jumps to my mind when I hear ‘Taliban’ is all the aggressive, horrible things they’ve done,” said Starbuck, who has led a social-media effort to highlight Harley-Davidson’s drift into controversial far-left management practices.