Disney and the Left

It's simply amazing how the Left destroys everything it touches

Walt Disney’s problems with the Left started in the 1940s when various strikes were called against the movie studios. Long-suspected Communist and labor leader Herb Sorrell was especially active in going after Disney’s studio, and started spreading the calumny that Disney was anti-Semitic.

Following the deaths of Walt (in 1966) and his older brother Roy (in 1971), the company pretty much kept to G-rated family fare. Still, the successors realized they had to get a bit more edgy to capture the all-important teenage audience. Big changes would occur in 1984, as former Paramount exec Michael Eisner was brought in as CEO.

Early in Eisner’s tenure, the craven decision was made to stigmatize Song of the South (1946), in the company’s first submission to political correctness.

A host of bold mergers and acquisitions followed, turning Disney into a true entertainment powerhouse. Bob Iger would replace Eisner in 2005, and continue building the company until 2020, when he was replaced by Bob Chapek, just in time for the COVID pandemic, which hit the company hard. Thousands of jobs were cut.

Even worse for Chapek, he was forced—somehow—to put the company at odds with an obvious majority of the public that supported Florida’s HB 1557, which prohibited the teaching of explicit sexual content to schoolkids in kindergarten through the 3rd grade. HB 1557’s opponents gave the law the mendacious name the “Don’t say gay” bill, even though it does no such thing.

Chapek, demonstrating much more fealty to the lords of PC (and the Alphabet people) than to his shareholders and customers, took up the cause against HB 1557. He chose this course even though the bill was overwhelmingly supported by Florida voters, not to mention parents around the country. HB 1557 was signed into law.

If Chapek was taken in by the Twitter/TikTok mob, and its postings against HB 1557, the public was also given a sometimes shocking look into just how many perverts exist, and how many seem to be teachers of young kids. It was revealed that Disney seemed to have no shortage of pedophile employees, either.

While it is too early to evaluate the damage to Disney’s business by this clueless move, the company has already lost stock value and its sweetheart tax-saving special district arrangement, dating back to 1967. Notably, this disaster came in the wake of people “suddenly” realizing that a family trip to a Disney theme park had now become prohibitively expensive.

The only question remaining here is an old one: Did the Left deliberately conspire to take up a sick and unpopular position in an attempt to destroy a great company; or was it merely exposing its true Bolshevik origins? That is, always “progressive,” but never showing any real progress, against a backdrop of its leaders endlessly enriching themselves.

Of course, a concurrent situation exists now with Twitter’s board—whose members own very little Twitter stock. It has chosen to put the concepts of PC diktat ahead of its fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.

I guess Pope Pius XI was on to something.