Winning the culture war

The battle against corporate evil is worthy and Real Americans are winning. Companies apparently are abandoning ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) in favor of making money again.

Disney is one example. The backlash against its embrace of lefty lunacy has it trimming its expenses because its revenues are leaking like a sieve.

Attendance dropped at its amusement parks. It spent $890 million making four movies that failed at the box office. That is more bombs than the Manhattan Project launched. Disney-Plus is now Disney-Minus as it had a net loss of 7% of its subscribers in July alone.

Deadline reported that Disney won’t show two series of TV shows that it already spent millions making. As a reader pointed out, those shows are so woke that releasing them would hurt the Disney brand so much that it is better off eating its losses to protect the brand. Disney is trying to get another studio to buy the series.

Too bad Bryanston Distributing Company isn’t around to distribute it, but it went bankrupt a few years after giving the world Deep Throat. I wouldn’t be surprised if they show it in grade school now.

Another reader pointed out shelving projects is an accounting trick and I assume Disney accountants are as good as Disney lawyers who never seem to lose a case.

Maybe Disney should start peddling to another studio its remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a film and not a cartoon. Disney spent $100 million making it in 2022 but has postponed releasing it until next March.

The film apparently is so woke that conservatives call it Snow Brown and the Seven Diversity Hires. Only one of the leads in the story is white — the Evil Queen, who is Jewish to boot. Only one of the seven dwarfs actually is a dwarf. There is no Prince Charming this time. Rachel Zegler, who has the title role, called him a stalker.

We get it. Man, do we get it. Zegler dumped on the original, which is considered one of the greatest films ever made. Its score (Whistle While You Work is a classic song), its animation and its storyline are all beautiful. Her trashing it shows a profound ignorance that can only come out of a sense of entitlement.

Judging by Zegler’s comments, maybe the Evil Queen had a point in wanting to be rid of her.

The Daily Mail reported, “Branding experts warn Rachel Zegler backlash could RUIN Disney's big budget Snow White remake and predict executives will be having ‘crisis talks’ in order to win back fans ahead of 2024 release.”

Disney is the Bud Light of corporate media and for the same reason; it embraced transgendering. But Bud only embraced adult trannies. Disney embraced grooming children in school and opposed the Parental Rights In Education bill in Florida.

Parents do have rights and those rights include not allowing their children to get anywhere near Disney.

But as I said, that is just one example.

Chris Talgo asked, “Has ESG been cast into the dustbin of history?”

Experience tells me no because evil is so tenacious. Easy victories (such as General Washington forcing the British to leave Boston in 1776) come quickly but setbacks and failures occur later. We are in a long slog. It took Washington another five years to earn a surrender.

Talgo gave examples of recent wins. He said, “First, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, one of the foremost champions of ESG investing, disavowed the very term, saying, ‘I don't use the word ESG anymore, because it's been entirely weaponized.’”

By weaponized the wicked wonk means conservatives turned the tables, but he is abandoning the term, not the concept. Fink just will stop saying ESG out loud.

Talgo wrote, “Then, just a few weeks later, the first-ever lawsuit over ESG investing practices in a private company’s 401(k) retirement plan was filed. The lawsuit, filed against American Airlines and Fidelity Investments, accuses Fidelity of offering several funds to plan participants that ‘pursue nonfinancial and nonpecuniary ESG policy agendas’ and ‘have underperformed compared to other similar investment funds.’”

Show me the money, not the song and dance about diversity, equity and inclusiveness. That last word actually means excluding conservatives.

Talgo wrote, “Over the summer, anti-ESG laws have also been enacted in several states, typically barring state pension plans from engaging in ESG investments. As Alabama governor Kay Ivey put it after signing into her law her state’s anti-ESG bill, ‘Alabama citizens, in no way, shape or form, want ESG influencing business in our state, and this legislation most certainly sends that message.’”

Good for her. Governor Ivey is 78 and does not have time for this communist nonsense.

The media valiantly tries to launch a counter-attack.

NYT asked, “Are G.O.P. Voters Tiring of the War on ‘Wokeness’?

“New polling shows national Republicans and Iowa Republican caucusgoers were more interested in ‘law and order’ than battling ‘woke’ schools, media and corporations.”

One poll by a biased source — NYT — does not prove a thing no matter how much NYT wants the poll to prove it. What conservatives tire of is wokeness. Some advertisers are so woke they have abandoned showing white families in their ads.

The left’s attempts to undermine conservative victories does show an acknowledgement that ESG/DEI/woke and the like are bigger losers than the 1962 Mets.

Meanwhile, Forbes rolled out Dana Brownlee, a self-described corporate trainer and speaker, to admonish conservatives (she called them white people) from using the word woke. I suppose I can say “stopped sleeping” instead.

Brownlee wrote, “Woke is problematic for two primary reasons. First, it’s an offensive cultural appropriation.”

Cultural appropriation? What happened to diversity is our strength?

She went on, “As is disturbingly often the case, White people (or any racial group outside the term’s origin) will sometimes begin using a term that originated in a community of color often as a term of pride, endearment, or self-empowerment years or decades later while either willfully or inadvertently distorting the original meaning of the term. While any significant analysis of what cultural appropriation is and why it’s problematic is beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that hearing White people randomly label individuals and organizations woke is very often an unsettling, if not infuriating experience.”

A bigot like her should be unsettled. White people have the same right to free speech as black people do. Deal with it.

She also said, “Second, the term’s use often prevents the deep, honest, sometimes uncomfortable conversation that arguably is our only pathway to real reconciliation.”

Reconcile what? Today’s old white people are baby boomers who endured affirmative action. We are not Bull Connor or Simon Legree. One is dead, the other is fictional. Both are long gone.

If there are words only black people can use, how can we have a conversation? But she does not want to converse because when a liberal says we need to talk, she means sit down and listen.

Brownlee’s complaint is a victory. My how she hates that conservatives took woke and changed its meaning; woke now means fools foolishly following foolishness. Americans are waking up to the lefty agenda and the left is worried.

The Las Vegas Sun said in an editorial, “There is a war being waged across the country by conservatives seeking to rewrite history, distort fact and eliminate free and independent thought. The GOP’s agenda represents a shocking and nearly unprecedented attempt to use the state to control the lives of Americans and what they can say, think and do.”

By calling it nearly unprecedented, the newspaper means doing what the left has done throughout my 70 years. And it is not the GOP’s agenda either. The GOP agenda is to eat the bounty of the harvest in Washington and throw a few bones to conservatives.

The Sun said, “The war is being waged on multiple fronts, with everything from school curriculum to library books to the very structures of education itself at play.”

In other words, we are fighting in the territory that the left thought it owned. The way to win a war is to fight the enemy on its own turf, which is why we are winning. The left has to defend the indefensible.

Stay alert. Real Americans are winning.