‘Institutional Capture’ At DisneyBy Rod Dreher
March 30, 2022
A Disney ‘imagineer’ writing under a pseudonym describes the powerful company’s moral collapse in the face of woke militia who have captured it. Excerpt:
In less than two weeks’ time, the company had moved from principled neutrality to open advocacy. This new messaging, intended to mollify the company’s internal critics, accelerated Disney’s meltdown instead. “Brave Space Conversations” are now held at regular intervals—an absurd euphemism for struggle sessions designed to allow activists to vent their frustrations while drowning out dissenting voices. All regularly scheduled company meetings are cancelled to make room for these meetings, and park leadership opens the floor to hours-long performative recitations of grievances by hand-picked cast members. They conclude with grandiose statements about inclusion and fairness and understanding pain and listening, but not a single nonconforming viewpoint is heard, either from those who support the bill or those who think Disney has no business getting involved in this dispute in the first place.
“At Disney,” the company’s website promises, “inclusion is for everyone. We reimagine tomorrow as our way of amplifying underrepresented voices and untold stories as well as championing the importance of accurate representation in media and entertainment.” But, as usual, “inclusion” only protects those who think like DEI activists. “Fairness” only applies to historically oppressed people groups. The only pain worth understanding is that felt by the subsection of LGBT cast members who believe that sex education ought to begin in kindergarten. Listening and seeing is restricted to the approved narratives, and even excludes those LGBT cast members who support the Florida legislation. I know many of them personally, and nearly without exception, they are all parents.
The writer says that there are very many Disney employees who don’t agree with the activists, but they have been intimidated into silence by the aggressively work minority. More:
For a company that claims to listen to the voices of their cast members, the Disney corporation has spent the last couple years ignoring vast swathes of its own workforce. In recent months, they have gone further, actively supporting one group while actively suppressing or simply ignoring the other. We have changed our core ethos, and our storytelling has suffered under the litmus tests required by DEI requirements. I have been personally involved in no less than five projects that had their creative visions dimmed by the dictates of profoundly uncreative DEI functionaries: Replace that Christmas song, it’s too Christian. Don’t “culturally appropriate” that visual design, we don’t have a member of that ethnicity on the project team. Send this script to a “sensitivity reader,” the voice is too male. Remove “ladies and gentleman, boys and girls” from all park announcements, it reinforces the gender binary.
Time will tell whether or not Imagineering, and the Disney brand overall, can survive this internal revolution. But current trends are not encouraging. Some of us throw sand in the gears of the DEI machine when we can and produce the same exceptional experiences we always have. The capture is thorough, but Disney has survived periods of darkness before. I encourage everyone to ignore the bloviating of Disney executive leadership, from CEO Bob Chapek all the way down to park VPs. These people are not thought-leaders or cultural revolutionaries. They are cowards held hostage by the prevailing narrative, and they will run in whichever direction that narrative dictates. They do not represent the members of the Disney parks and resorts division. We are as diverse as the country itself, and the company’s attempts to use us as a bloc to push their political agenda is intolerant, exploitative, and profoundly un-Disney.
Read it all.
This controversy is a major turning point in the culture war. The broader question is whether or not Disney, a company whose influence over the culture (via its influence over the moral imaginations of the young) is without parallel, is willing to serve the majority of people who just want to enjoy life without every damn thing being compelled to serve a narrow woke agenda, or if it will capitulate to these cultural terrorists.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/institutional-capture-at-disney/
