Media reports indicate that Trump is set to nominate Carl’s Jr. CEO Andrew Puzdur as secretary of labor.  First, full disclosure: I don’t like Carl’s Jr.’s burgers and vastly prefer In-N-Out and Five Guys.  So there’s my bias out front.

That said, I had the opportunity to hear Puzdur give a keynote address at a 2014 law conference at Chapman University in Orange County, where I gave a talk on environmental law.  My take on him is now more alarming for me to re-read, given the position of power he appears to have been granted.

You can read the whole post here, but here’s the long excerpt:

The low point for me came with the lunchtime address from Carl’s Jr. CEO Andrew Puzdur (video here), who gave a largely a-factual, a-historical takedown of an imagined socialist California.  Puzdur assumed the chairmanship of the Southern California-based fast food chain in 2000 from Anaheim-based Carl Karchner, the founder who starred in many of its TV commercials.  Puzdur revived the company into a global chain.

Puzdur described numerous legitimate-sounding complaints about doing business in California.  He cited the long wait times to get a building permit, the work rules that keep store managers from filling in on various store duties in times of need, and the required rest breaks without flexibility that keep stores from being able to serve large customer groups that come in unexpectedly.  Meanwhile, state overtime rules prevent the schedule flexibility that would come with a 40-hour workweek rather than mandatory 8 hour days.  While I’m sure there are good reasons for these laws, it all sounded like typical complaints from a CEO.

But then Puzdur went off the rails.  First, he simplistically painted world history as a progression from feudal servitude to the freedom provided by capitalism (glossing over the global slave system that capitalism boosted), now under threat from “socialism.”  He blamed teachers for the poor state of California’s educational system, ignoring that the state ranks last in per pupil spending.  He dismissed the recent economic success and low unemployment in the San Francisco Bay Area as occurring in just one “enclave” of the state (home to 7 million people).  And he cited California’s onerous regulations as the reason he won’t open many more restaurants in the state, when consumer surveys repeatedly indicate that Carl’s Jr. food is nowhere near as good as In-N-Out (or Five Guys, for that matter).

One revealing moment came when the mayor of Anaheim, a Karchner family friend and observant Catholic, objected to Carl’s Jr. racy TV commercials.  Puzdur expressed no remorse, saying the commercials saved the company and featured “beautiful women” who enjoy doing the spots.  Puzdur and his all-male management team see no reason to object to them.

I guess his appointment shouldn’t exactly be a surprise, given the extreme picks in his cabinet so far. And of course, closer to my field, we now have a climate denier nominee, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, set to run the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My colleague at Legal Planet Cara Horowitz has a depressing take on that nomination.

As they say on Game of Thrones, winter is coming.