It is said that when Elon Musk arrived at failing Twitter, he realized that he had paid $44 billion for a crime scene. He found “Stay Woke” t-shirts. And he found information that details Twitter essentially being an arm of the DNC and perhaps the Deep State. Twitter is not alone. Failing and underperforming “woke” American companies are rotten with woke-ism. It is an easy way to mask poor performance: pat yourself on the back and say that you have achieved some mystical form of diversity or social justice, or that you have saved the planet.
Stocks that ascribe to this have woefully underperformed of late. The most obvious examples are Twitter, of course, which crashed and is being rescued by Elon Musk. Then we have Facebook (down 66%), FTX Crypto-Creep Mr. Bankman-Fried’s DNC donating scam (collapsing from a net worth of $32 billion to a net worth of zero), Google (down 33%), Netflix (down 50%), and of course Disney (down 40%). These compare to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, down 7% year-to-date.
All were terribly underperforming while putting their self-serving, woke agenda in front of gullible shareholders who have been conditioned to view their high-minded, progressive, political agenda as one where the end justifies the means.
Disney alienated its wholesome customer base by straying from its mission of family entertainment and cartoons. Disney is remaking its classic movies with woke twists. The Prince kissing Snow White without her consent while she was asleep was “toxic masculinity,” so that will be removed. Snow White will stay dead. And, of course, Snow White will probably now be called “Snow White Privilege,” and the Seven Dwarfs will now be known as “Seven Vertically Oppressed Little People” with no distinguishing individual proclivities.
All the classics must have a woke bent now. Schools with corporate funding might retell the story of Mary Had a Little Lamb because the big bad GOP would not let her have an abortion.
Keeping up in the constantly changing temperament of the woke agenda must be exhausting to corporations, which should just be doing a good job for their shareholders with their stock performance. Instead, they pretend to operate more like a Democrat PAC. Delta Air Lines opined on the Georgia voting law, saying it was “oppressive,” which resulted in the largest voter turnout ever. The result? Major League Baseball moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta (50% percent black) to Colorado (4% black and with stricter voting laws than Georgia). Delta should get back to canceling flights and losing luggage, its core business strategy.
You will find layer upon layer of confusion in wokeness. Kanye West is now a White Supremacist and Elon Musk is an African American. We know the names of every person at the January 6th protest but none of the Dems at Jeffrey Epstein’s island. Wokeness is kept intentionally opaque and whimsical. That way they can jack us around as they please. The problem is that corporate America keeps playing along.
Kanye West went off the rails and Musk banned him from Twitter for his anti-Semitic Tourette’s syndrome rants. “Ye” praised Hitler and said flattering things about Mussolini. This prompted a swift response from Joe Biden, who told a long story about when he and Mussolini had a rumble while Biden worked at a public swimming pool in Delaware.
Part of the reason universities and companies talk so much about their “woke” agenda is that it relieves them of real accountability for the quality of education they give or their financial performance. If you can keep pointing to all the woke things you can pretend you did, you can divert attention from the things that are hard, like accountability metrics. “Yes, we lost market share and profits are down, but the Accounting Department just hired our first Albino African American Transgendered head of auditing. Aren’t we cool?”
The woke nature of corporate America must make working there boring. Group-think corporate shills advance. I can totally see the James Bond series going away as it glorified the Sean Connery-type manly man. In the 2023 version of a Bond film, 007 flirts with disaster, is then reported to Human Resources for flirting on the job, and is canned.
Certainly Netflix, cowing to leftist protestors about the stand-up comedy of Dave Chapelle, falls into this category. I just hope I never told my joke about Michelle Obama and a transgender and God walking into a bar. The bartender says, “It better be a mean joke about God. Otherwise, Ron will have his column canceled in 5 more papers.”
A libertarian op-ed humorist and award-winning author, Ron does commentary on radio and TV. He can be contacted at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
