Disney once embodied family entertainment. Today, according to some reports, Disney has adopted ‘gender neutral’ language at its theme parks. Peter Pan, apparently, comes with warnings that some might find it offensive.
Disney has taken sides in a dispute over a new law in Florida that limits schools’ ability to give instruction about sexual orientation. Whatever you might think about the wisdom of Florida’s new law, it seems odd for a children’s entertainment company to actively side against parents’ rights.
Of course, it is not just Disney.
Large swathes of corporate America now seem to have adopted radical ideas about gender and identity politics that were once the preserve of a few liberal colleges.
Disney goes woke?
I used to assume that when young adults left university and entered the world of work, they would leave behind daft ideas about ‘gender fluidity’ and identity. In fact, it seems that the opposite has happened.
Corporate America today is starting to think the way liberal college campuses did a generation ago. It is striking the extent to which the HR departments across much of corporate America have embraced the idea that employees be assessed in terms of their immutable characteristics, rather than simply their ability to do the job.
Once an organization starts to hire and promote people on the basis of anything besides their competence to do the job, they risk becoming incompetent. It might take a while for the effects of abandoning merit-based management to be felt within an organization, but I suspect a swathe of big businesses have created big problems for themselves in the future.
‘Woke’ corporations like to talk about ‘diversity’ in the board room. They seldom seem to mean board members actually having different outlooks and opinions. That might be about to change at Twitter, where the board just got genuinely more diverse with the arrival of Elon Musk.
Musk, perhaps America’s greatest living engineer, entrepreneur and immigrant, has a habit of seeing things differently. He seems to have developed a recent interest in social media companies and free speech. It could be that Musk is about to take on ‘woke’ corporate America the way he took on the established motor car companies. Let’s hope so.
Several ‘woke’ Twitter employees announced that they would be leaving Twitter with Musk’s arrival. Good. Mr Musk is off to a great start!
Last but not least, as the battle over income tax here in Mississippi has unfolded, I have kept you informed. This week, the Governor signed the actual bill that will reduce the income tax burden by about a third. Here is a picture from the signing ceremony.
It was a joy to read this article about our efforts in the Wall Street Journal. As Mississippi moves the dial, our progress is getting noticed across America!
Have a great weekend!
Douglas Carswell
President & CEO
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