I rarely post articles from the Wall Street Journal because their subscription is pretty costly. It can run $400 plus a year. If one spends a lot of time on their site, it's worth every penny. But I rarely link to them because I don't want to promote costly websites if they are rarely accessed.
But this article on Disney is worth a read and at least the video preceding the article is a freebee, I think.
I say "I think" because I'm a subscriber so my devices are loaded up with their cookies and I can't tell exactly what your system will allow.
But here's a few pull-quotes:
"That’s the latest chapter in this tale of a CEO who followed his woke staff like a lemming off the cliff of cultural politics. Disney employees demanded that Mickey Mouse oppose Florida’s misdescribed “don’t say gay” bill. Now state lawmakers are reacting by putting down a few glue traps."
"Soon Mr. Chapek (Disney CEO) was groveling to his underlings and calling Florida’s bill a “challenge to basic human rights.”
"There’s a warning here to other companies, especially Big Tech and Wall Street, which are mainly based in liberal states but conduct business everywhere. If they try to impose their cultural values, they risk losing Republican allies on the policy issues that matter most to their bottom lines, such as regulation, trade, taxation, antitrust and labor law."
2 comments:
You’ve heard the phrase by now and seen it demonstrated.
“Get woke, go broke.”
At this point, it should be chapter one in the best business practices handbook. I’ve only seen one company that benefited from wokeness and that’s Nike, which saw a spike in sales after it allowed Colin Kaepernick to represent the brand for a time. Every other time, the moment a company dipped its toe into wokeness, like some reverse-Midas touch, whatever the product was turned to crap. It doesn’t matter if it was a razor company or a television show. If it went woke, it went broke.
The question is, what is it about wokeness that turns people off so much?
There are a lot of reasons. People don’t like politics in their escapism, for one. It sucks that you can’t enjoy a show without “the message” being shoved in your face in some sort of way. The story becomes secondary to the social justice box-checking and it ruins storylines and characters to the point of becoming unwatchable.
But even outside television, wokeness taints everything it touches. You might not have to hear a virtue signal every time you walk into a Dick’s Sporting Goods but it’s difficult to walk in there since the CEO effectively told you that your beliefs about firearms are horrendous and he actively opposes your right to bear them freely.
Wokeness doesn’t just bother you because it’s annoying, it bothers you because it is the thing that directly opposes you as a person. It tells you that your beliefs, virtues, morals, and traditions are actually evil and that in order for you to cease being evil you must kneel before it and believe what it tells you to. You must do this in spite of the fact that you can see how its toxicity affects those who subscribe to its near-religious tenets.
Wokeness doesn’t just suggest, it intrudes and demands. It forces you into a war you didn’t want to be a part of.
This is why a person who has no problems with gays, lesbians, or even transgender people as individuals will still become annoyed and turn off a television show that injects homosexual/transgender characters or allegories. The person knows that it’s not being done in the name of “inclusiveness,” it’s being done because that person knows the creators of the show believe that they, the viewer, need this shoved in their face so that they’ll get used to this kind of thing and turn from their evil ways. They know that the showrunners are just using the thing they’re viewing as a trojan horse for a political message and it kind of feels like being both talked down to and being used.
It’s insulting, and it’s even more insulting when you know these show creators are just patting themselves on the back for subjecting you to a message that you did not want or need in the first place.
It feels shallow and self-congratulatory. It makes you want to push back, and when you do they use your protest about being insulted as Kafka trap. They declare that your protest is just further proof that they need to keep shoving the message in your face and coopting the things you love in order to do it.
In response, the customer decides the product isn’t of good quality and walks away. He or she is joined by many others who feel just as insulted and used and before you know it, once-great companies and brands are bleeding money and attention. They got woke and thanks to customers not wanting to be preached at by people who have no business preaching at them, the brand goes broke.
The underlying cause of rejection of wokeness isn’t an underlying hatred for differences in America, it’s the fact that we don’t want people who think they’re better than everyone else using things we love to demand we believe as they do or else. Buried underneath the myriad of details is that one simple truth.
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Well-written article! I like the last paragraph:
"The underlying cause of rejection of wokeness isn’t an underlying hatred for differences in America, it’s the fact that we don’t want people who think they’re better than everyone else using things we love to demand we believe as they do or else."
Too many of these upper management types are products of top-name schools (many in the Northeastern USA). From day one they are brainwashed into thinking
A) They are special because they are at that particular school, B) The general population outside of the walls of that classroom are a bunch of dummies who aren't special and who need to be led around by the nose.
After the brainwashing is complete the students are fed four to eight years of Woke propaganda and then sent out to fix the world. When they actually get a real job they fall in with like-minded coworkers.
This doesn't become a huge problem until they get into upper management and get some real power. Then they want to reshape the world by trampling on the successes that came before them and by using other people's money.
How do I know all this? I watched this movie clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSLscJ2cY04
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