Is DEI DIEing?

Tyler Durden sounds just a tad too optimistic. At a moment when half of the country is lathering itself into a frenzy over the least qualified presidential candidate in American history, a grossly embarrassing giggling, cackling fool, Durden suggests that cancel culture and the cult of DEI is losing its corporate enablers.

And yet, corporate America has discovered that DEI is a losing game. So, it has begun to unravel the programs that hire and promote by race and gender. Evidently, this is not a task that one can accomplish quickly or even painlessly. 

Durden emphasizes that cancel culture, the kind that punished people for expressing incorrect thoughts-- a reprise of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a highly ambitious effort at mind control-- could not have gained so much ground if it had merely been limited to college campuses and media. It needed the active support of large companies:

In fact, without the support of companies like Blackrock, Vanguard, Google, Facebook, Twitter and many others the cancel mob would have little to no power.  The situation seems to be changing, or the damage seems to be minimized.  One corporate entity reflects this shift more than any other, and that's Disney. 

It was not, he suggested, organic growth. The advent of the Biden Administration gave power and legitimacy to the companies who promoted cancel culture, environmental activism and diversity initiatives. 

The political left had been accumulating social influence with the aid of international corporations, NGOs and government officials since at least 2016.  However, after the Biden Administration took office and pandemic hysteria went into full swing, the activists sought to flex their cancel culture muscle in a big way.

The result was a dystopian frenzy in which mass censorship was rampant and speaking out in any way against official narratives might get you booted from social media and even fired from your job.  Leftists called it "consequence culture" as a way to justify their behavior, but the consensus was that this was thought-policing on an Orwellian scale.  The assumption by leftists being that they are the virtuous arbiters over what words and beliefs should be punished.  No one voted for them to do this job.

The madness reached deep into the Disney corporation:

UFC fighter and actress Gina Carano was one of those people.  Carano says she was harassed by Disney management to add "pronouns" to her social media bio to "prove her support for trans lives".  After the actress made an online joke by listing her "pronouns" on Twitter as 'beeb bop boop', the company brought pressure to bear in an attempt to force Carano into silence. 

So, Gina Carano was canceled:

Her eventual removal by Disney was heralded by the political left as a great victory and a display of the cancel mob's power.  If they could destroy the career of a Hollywood celebrity then there was a good chance they could destroy the life of almost any average conservative.

Flush with success, Disney then started to put DEI propaganda in its movies and television shows:

Disney then engaged in a slow boil of the theater-going public with DEI propaganda.  Many suspected Disney was removing white, straight and male characters from the majority of their productions on purpose.  As it turned out, that's exactly what they were doing.

Disney wanted to be on the right side of the war against white males.

The result, bad product and lost profit:

The vast majority of Disney content from films to streaming series have been met with box office failure and audience disinterest.  In 2023 alone, Disney had only one film that made a significant profit (Guardians Of The Galaxy) while spending a billion dollars on multiple box office flops (not counting marketing costs).  Not one Disney+ series was met with audience acclaim.  Streaming subscriber numbers sank.   

The wreckage of DEI appeared on the bottom line. 

 Disney stock has been hovering near 5-year lows since 2023.  Their brand is essentially destroyed and their content is treated by most consumers as radioactive.  The sheer size of Disney and their holdings means that they have the capital to survive for years without public support, but the company has already started cutting employees in mass layoffs, including 14% of Pixar in May.  Not a good sign.   

Given the choice, the free market is voting against DEI. And Disney is paying the price.

Is the karmic hammer finally swinging back to hit Disney in the face after nearly a decade of woke bullying?  It seems that way.  But the bigger question is, does Disney's decline reflect a larger national move away from the woke mob and cancel culture in general?  Are Americans finally fed up with progressive pearl clutching and DEI?  This seems to be the case.  Disney fueled cancel culture for years only to find themselves canceled in return.   

Which leaves us with the conundrum called Kamela Harris. Is her candidacy the reductio ad absurdum of DEI or does it represent the apotheosis of a very bad and very stupid idea?

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.