AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan
For all the election headlines in 2022, one of the most significant political developments of the past year may not have been in the voting booth, but in board rooms from New York to Los Angeles. After years of wokeism dominating U.S. corporate culture, conservatives saw some encouraging signs this year that the left’s grip on the business world may be slipping amid mounting backlash from everyday Americans.
One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon was in Hollywood, where Tinseltown’s obsession with injecting wokeness into everything from commercials to major blockbusters appeared to finally catch up with studios. Since 2019—the last year before the pandemic—summer box office numbers have plummeted a remarkable 21 percent. According to the Wall Street Journal, the summer of 2022 marked “the lowest haul since 2001.”
Movie studios’ disastrous year was led by films like Toy Story spinoff Lightyear, which drew controversy over a lesbian kiss scene between two of the film’s animated characters. Disney filmmakers had originally removed the scene because it was unnecessary to the story, but re-inserted it in an apparent protest of a Florida parental rights bill. Film executives also ditched Tim Allen, a rare outspoken conservative in Hollywood, who voiced the Buzz Lightyear role in the original Toy Story films.
Another 2022 Disney film, Strange World—which was lauded by the media for including the franchise’s first gay main character and contained a storyline chock full of woke messaging about climate change—similarly amounted to a “historic bomb” for Disney.
Clearly, attempts to use children’s films as a vehicle for radical left-wing social and cultural ideologies are not as popular with parents as Disney executives would like to think. Meanwhile, movies largely devoid of wokeism like Top Gun: Maverick and Spiderman: No Way Home retained their summer blockbuster status this year.
But the demise of Disney is only one of many signs that corporate wokeism may finally be on its way out the door. Following his takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk proved decisively that CEOs can purge far-left activists from their businesses and not suffer significant professional or financial consequences—a positive sign for other right-leaning corporate executives who have feared potential backlash from doing the same.
Pressure has also continued to mount on woke investors like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, whose company has routinely pushed far-left priorities as part of its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles. In early December, fellow investment giant Vanguard announced that it was withdrawing from a major climate change collective, signaling that woke banks are beginning to rethink their embrace of liberal policies.
Republican politicians are also stepping up to push back hard on corporate wokeism. Perhaps the best example of this is Senator Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) now-viral questioning of Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, who sought support from GOP officeholders to offset regulatory policies proposed by Democrats. “You know, this situation reminds me a little bit of the situation Big Tech companies have found themselves in recent years. They’ve come to Washington because they fear regulation from our Democrat friends, or action by the Biden administration and they expect Republicans, who are traditionally more supportive of free enterprise, to come to their defense,” Cotton told McMullen.
“I’ve cautioned them for years that if they silence conservatives and center-right voters… if they discriminate against them in their company, they probably shouldn’t come and ask Republican senators to carry the water for them whenever our Democrat friends want to regulate them or block their mergers.”
Cotton’s comments come after two former Arkansas-based Kroger employees were fired for refusing to wear rainbow-colored aprons in support of “pride month.” Kroger had also recently introduced a guide urging employees to stop using words like “sir” and “ma’am.”
“I’ll say this,” Cotton concluded in his remarks to McMullen. “I’m sorry that’s happening to you. Best of luck.”
As Cotton suggested during his questioning, the Republican Party for far too long has been blindly beholden to national and multinational corporations that actively discriminate against conservative voices and openly work to advance the interests of the Democrat Party. As Cotton makes clear, Republicans are now willing to treat corporations like their Democrat opponents until such time that those companies return to their primary role of providing value for consumers and investors, not promoting far-left political ideologies.
This year’s developments by no means indicate that corporate wokeism is dead. However, the relationship between big business and militant progressivism may be beginning to fray—and should the GOP take a page from Tom Cotton’s book and use their platform to call out woke corporations, it could soon be fully destroyed.