The Woke Ideology Takes Charge of Corporate America

CLAY: We’re talking about — because I think this is a big cultural moment here — Disney and many of its top employees losing their minds and making all sorts of outlandish decisions to try to bow down to the woke universe. And, by the way, they’re doing this while not holding any of the rest of the world to the standards of basic human rights because, remember, they filmed the Mulan movie and thanked the Xinjiang Province people who were actually committing genocide against the Uyghur population.

So you bow down to China in China and don’t have anything at all to say for their direct human rights violations, but you then go crazy woke here in this country. Now, Karey Burke is a Disney president, said she has a “transgender and a pansexual child.” She graduated, by the way, from UCLA in 1988 so her kids at the utmost are probably in their twenties, but she has five of them, so who knows how old her kids are.

She also is now making aggressive, ridiculous wild comments. This is from a company Zoom. Here is a second cut where she says that — effective basically immediately — all of Disney’s characters are going to be LGBTQ… I can’t even keep up with all the different letters, but LGBTQIA+. Is that right? Did I get it right?

BUCK: Pretty good there, Mr. Travis.

CLAY: Listen to this. Listen to this comment that she made also in the same clip that has gone viral.

SCOOP: Disney corporate president Karey Burke says, “as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child,” she supports having “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories” and wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities. pic.twitter.com/oFRUiuu9JG

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022

BUCK: She’s crying. The president of content entertainment at the Walt Disney company is crying because of the insufficient number of Disney stories that are focusing on — as the primary story and the primary character — members of the LGBTQIA+ community. I would also like to put out an official protest. I’ve just learned about pansexuality today, after she said it. I don’t see a P in the LGBTQIA+ acronym. So I think there’s a little bit of anti-pansexual bigotry out there right now.

CLAY: I’m feeling that vibe. I’m feeling that vibe. That phrase is not inclusive enough to me.

BUCK: It’s not in there, and I think we have to ask why, Clay. Oh, there’s a plus. The pansexual folks only get a plus?

CLAY: That’s a good point.

BUCK: That’s not right.

CLAY: Feels a little discriminatory.

BUCK: It does. But let’s look at what’s really going on here. What started all of this? You and I, we had dinner with Governor DeSantis last night. He’s on the forefront of so many of the battles against the woke left and against the mask madness. Oh, we got some Fauci stuff to share with you later on in the show too, folks.

He’s back. We knew he would be. They found him in the couch cushions over at the MSNBC greenroom. They dusted him off. Here he is. But I gotta tell you, Clay, what we all see here is there was a huge outrage — wasn’t just a manufactured outrage — at the idea on the activist left that you cannot…

You cannot indoctrinate children from kindergarten to third grade in the state of Florida as a function of law without having some liability. It’s completely enraging to them, which means that they obviously want to at least have that option or that ability, which raises a lot of questions.

CLAY: No doubt. And I’m just still focused on the craziness of “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” being offensive. Like, to me that crystallizes Disney and the radical departure and genuflection at the altar of the woke that this represents because what percentage, Buck, of the American population is offended by a greeting that says, “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls”?

I don’t even understand how someone could be offended by that. Biology is real. Men and women and the distinctions between men and women and real. You can’t just decide that you don’t acknowledge basic biology. I can’t just start walking around and say, “You know what? I’m anti-gravity. I think gravity sucks.” Okay. Gravity’s real. I can’t just walk around, Buck, and say, “Hey, you know what? I think it sucks that water freezes eight 32 degrees.

“F water freezing at 32 degrees! I’m anti-ice.” Well, this doesn’t make any sense to me at all, and then you acknowledge these people? It’s like, hey, we’re outside walking around; there’s a temperature. “I refuse to acknowledge temperature exists.” Like, what are…? I don’t understand. The Party of Science is fundamentally repudiating the most basic essence of life, which is biology.

BUCK: This is why we have to remind ourselves in all this of two things. First of all — and remember this — the left, everybody, chose this fight. The left decided that this is a battle that they want to win. They forced this on all the rest of us. This is not — ’cause now what they do is, “Oh, why you so obsessed with gender identity and ideology?” Excuse me?

You’re the ones, meaning the leftist activists — and, look, this is the Democrat Party. You will not see a mainstream Democrat politician condemn biological males in female sports right now. You will not see it. I mean maybe with the exception of Joe Manchin but he’s basically Republican. But you will not see people. You will not see woke Democrats condemn this, in office.

I’m not even just talking about in the media. You will not see them speak obvious truths here, and so that’s one part of this. They’ve picked the fight. And the other is, look at the power they seek to have. To Clay’s point about biology is real; they’re repudiating and rejecting observable science. Think of the power that they seek to have over all of us now.

“Reject what your eyes and ears and experience and history tell you or else you’re a bad person and we will destroy you.” You think they’re just gonna do that on gender identity issues as a function of policy and culture? Absolutely not. If they can force you to say things that you know are untrue on this, they can force you to say things that you know are untrue on whatever topic they want because this is about brute culture and in the case of the Democrat Party state force in clear defiance of reason and observable fact. That’s what they’re doing.

CLAY: It’s scary, Buck, how quickly we’re destroying the tenets of basic society and replacing them with nothing. And this may seem for some people, “Oh, this is just…” To me, this is a metaphor of a rejection of basic fact and science, and this is a major entertainment corporation that has effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by the woke ideology. There’s no other way to describe it.

BUCK: I think it’s run by the woke ideology now. I think we’ve kind of… To your point, Clay, this is about the Trojan horse — which is absolutely true — it started really 10 or 15 years ago with the infiltration of this D&I and the woke in all of its fashions in the H.R. department, the corporate training departments. Now the CEOs and the presidents of content, et cetera — whether they believe it or not is tough to know.

Although, I mean, this president at Disney who starts out talking about a pansexual and transsexual. By the way, what are the chances that somebody who has this ideology happens to have a child of any age who also fits into that ideology and is there some interesting correlation there? Have you ever noticed this?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Very woke leftists with overwhelmingly more likely to have, it seems, a child who identifies in this capacity, and I think that’s… You know, again, the pansexual issue has obviously gotten a lot of attention. This is Disney’s president saying it. What…? I think we should take this to the audience a little bit. I just want to remind everybody, ’cause they’re running around saying everyone who supports the Florida law, which is how this whole argument got started, is a bigot.

Fifty-two percent of Democrats in the state of Florida support the Parental Rights in Education bill. A huge majority of obviously Republicans and a majority of independents, but more than half of Democrats think that that’s just a little crazy, folks — a little too much — to get angry about not telling someone’s 5-year-old about the 37 genders that exist now on some college application. (sigh) I’m fired up about this one.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

SCOOP: Disney’s activism partner Nadine Smith of Equality Florida tells LGBTQ employees that @GovRonDeSantis and @ChristinaPushaw want to “erase you, “criminalize your existence,” and “take your kids”—a wild conspiracy theory that Republicans want to kidnap gay people’s children. pic.twitter.com/Ger3a2xekI

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022

BUCK: “To criminalize you and take your kids.” That is Equality Florida executive director Nadine Smith telling Disney employees — in some official video conference — that DeSantis, Florida, the Parental Rights Bill is ultimately about criminalizing people from the LGBTQIA+ community and taking away their children. That’s madness. It is insane. It is nowhere in the bill.

It is completely crazy to suggest that that’s what is being intended here. But just to give you a sense of how overheated the rhetoric is from the activist community, that’s the kind of stuff that’s being said — in official corporate training, mind you. This is not just someone with an opinion standing on a street corner.

This is somebody who is indoctrinating employees of the Disney corporation and, as we all see now, Disney is gonna find out, I think, it doesn’t run the state of Florida, actually. Turns out that it’s just a company, and you know what? Moving their whole facility is gonna be pretty expensive. So I think they’re gonna have to be stuck here.

CLAY: Disney needs Florida politicians way more than Florida politicians need Disney, in terms of a power dynamic. They’re not gonna relocate Disney World. They’re not gonna relocate the massive amount of footprint that they have in Orlando, and I don’t even know if Disney understands what they have unleashed.

Because I feel like there’s a ton of parents listening to us right now, Buck, and they are furious over all of this because what they want Disney to represent is just a company that they can trust and have their kids consume their content and not have to worry about it. I can speak as a parent. That’s overwhelmingly what they want Disney to represent.

They want Disney to represent the movies that they grew up on, right? If you’re older, the Peter Pans and the Snow Whites and that era of films. If you’re younger, Little Mermaid, Aladdin, all of those things. Watch those films and tell me that they in any way were making aggressive political comments on anything. They were just trying to entertain kids, and we live in an era now where — and I think Bob Chapek, the CEO of Disney, was trying to be smart and stay out of this.

And that’s when I say that he’s been captured by the Trojan Horse inside of his own company. I think his instincts were right. Disney doesn’t need to get involved in individual bills that are being passed. But what happened was his own job — and this is what I think happens far too often, Buck. Guys and girls who are in positions of authorities inside of companies become terrified that they’re going to lose their job if they oppose anything. Remember, not taking a stand is what — in my opinion — most companies should do on most issues.

BUCK: Excuse me, Clay, but I have been informed by very smart, blue check libs that “silence equals violence.”

CLAY: Yeah, that’s right, and that’s what they try to argue now. But the reality is in a 50-50 America — which, by the way, is rapidly slanting more towards the Republican Party because of stories like these. In a 50-50 America, Disney’s job should be to appeal to everyone of all political aspersions. And the way you do that typically is by not getting caught up in all of the craziness that’s going on.

BUCK: I’ll just point out that this is also… Disney was built on that promise that you’re talking about.

CLAY: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: That promise to every parent and every person. I grew up watching Disney movies. So many of us have such a really fondness and emotional association, nostalgic memories of Disney, a great American company making great products that inspire people, that make them feel good, that tell great stories. That’s what we want. They still could do that.

What’s fascinating is they’ll say, “Sorry, crazy right-wing bigots but things have changed now.” Well, they’re gonna ruin Disney, you see. The people in charge now didn’t build the company that they are running. They are woke bureaucrats from inside the corporate system who have risen to the top. They have seized the reins of something that they themselves — they’ve seized the levers of power inside an institution — they didn’t build. To borrow from Obama, “They didn’t build that.” They didn’t build that, right?

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: And so this is what’s happening in a lot of these companies where you see great, storied American companies with a promise to the American people that’s been kept up for decades, now it’s being ruined and the left says, yeah, go build your own. Okay. We’re gonna have to start building our own, one, and number two, they’ve destroyed the neutral ground.

Companies that take stances like Disney must suffer the consequences. Folks, if you don’t start making decisions about this stuff, they will just continue to weaponize corporations that they did not build, overwhelmingly — well, in the case of Disney — in order to get policies that you don’t want to live with.

CLAY: For a long time, many people out there have said, “I don’t want to get involved in this.” Well, the left wingers always get involved, and when they put the pressure on companies to take stands, they’re taking stands that are directly contra to what many of you believe. So saying, “Hey, we need to be entirely neutral,” which is often the default Republican response, doesn’t win because of the woke universe will not accept neutrality. And so I think Disney needs to feel pain over this decision on a corporate level, on a dollars-and-cents level. I think that they need to understand that there is at least half the population that they are alienating.