Recent Woke-Corporation Disgrace Roundup

It’s August. It’s hot and lazy and a good time to be away from the computer. This hasn’t stopped the endless stream of woke corporate evildoing, but it has made it harder to keep up. So as a public service, here’s a summary of some of the worst recent misdeeds.

Scott Shepard

Scott Shepard

Let’s start with the cadre of arrogant pigs in a poke recently acquired (to its ever-nearing regret) by Discovery. Of course I mean CNN. This week’s headline disaster there is revelations that Q-tip wielding sideshow barker Chris Cuomo, who covered his brother constantly before it became clear that disgraced Governor Andy Cuomo was a vector of death, has not only failed to say a word about the criminal magistrate now that he’s dropping spectacularly into the ash heap of history, but actively – and secretly – helped his brother trash his sexual-harassment accusers and craft his defense to their claims. Surely this means that Andy isn’t the only Cuomo in need of a pink slip. If Discovery gets this wrong at the beginning of its tenure, CNN’s fate (“it spun in; there were no survivors”) will be sealed, and Discovery’s general reputation will have taken a terrible blow.

CNN is hardly the only company to be damaged by the widening gyre of the Cuomo collapse. It appears that most of the news industry knew that Cuomo was running a smear campaign against at least one accuser. None reported the fact. Isn’t that verboten in the age of #metoo? Apparently not, as the #metoo co-founders themselves helped Cuomo write the letter attacking an accuser – and the president of the “Human Rights Campaign” got in on the act too, providing yet more evidence that these organizations – whatever causes they purport to advance – are simply and solely hack-level hard-left activists. What centrally matters to them is power for the left, not human rights or women’s rights or anything else at all.

And speaking of hard-left hacks posing as other things, this cadre of character assassins was joined by Facebook executive Dani Lever, who leaked Facebook information to help smear Andy’s accuser. Lever had worked on Cuomo’s communications team before going to Facebook but continued to help Cuomo work his evil even after she took her Facebook gig. Aside from anything else, this provides further evidence that Facebook is conspiring with government to violate citizens’ civil rights – a practice that could and should send Facebook and other tech executives to prison.

But that’s not all the evil – and potential criminal and civil liability – that Facebook has racked up in recent weeks. It appears that Facebook is trying to decrypt encrypted data while still portraying it as encrypted. Zoom has been fined $85 million for providing Facebook (and Google) with information that Zoom had said was encrypted. Facebook has banned academics who are studying Facebook misdeeds, which may constitute misconduct for any company, but raised additional concerns for a company with monopoly power that has behaved in so many monopolistic ways – ways such as combining with fellow social-media companies to restrain competitive trade by funding stories trashing potential competitors in the press.

Nor of course could Facebook be alone amongst the censors in conspiring against American liberty. In continuing lockstep with administration goals to keep the panic – and the submission – of the COVID era continuing forever, Twitter initially suspended an account for truthfully reporting that vaccinations are not medically recommended for everyone. It suspended accounts reporting on election audits in an array of states. YouTube, owned by Google, similarly cut off the feed to an Arizona audit hearing in mid flow. And it banned SkyNews Australia, an outlet that has been brave enough (legitimately brave, not the “stunning braveness” of doing what everyone else applauds to the rafters) to report true things that the tech lords don’t want us to know. Funny how all these Big Tech “mistakes” carry the same ideological tenor, and the same water for the current administration.

No woke-BS roundup would be complete without checking in on the usual suspects, so the next stop is obviously Disney. Disney’s ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in Woke, can’t figure out why people dislike Megan Rapinoe. One reporter explained that “I will never understand why folks get so pressed over someone whom they will likely never meet and who has no bearing on their lives or livelihoods,” thus proving that ESPN’s own talent either doesn’t watch or doesn’t understand what has become the vast majority of ESPN’s own programming. Which, really, is fair. And Disney itself proved the point on a corporate scale, when it also failed to understand its own constant preaching, failing to fulfill a contract with a strong woman lead playing a strong woman character (fierce!) and then attempting to marginalize and disgrace the strong woman for standing up for her rights by claiming that she’s insufficiently caring about people who are frightened and unwell. (So gendered! So coded! Oh, Disney, how you disgrace you.)

Then of course there’s Comcast (owner of NBC), whose viewing figures for the Olympics have been cut nearly in half since 2016, costing it billions. While it’s not true that going woke causes most companies to go broke, it certainly seems to have that effect on revenues tied to the number of people who watch sports. And good heavens is Comcast reaping what its (and American sports’ and sports-outlets’ generally) wokification has sown.

This column could go on forever (this list is pretty much just off the top of my head from the last few days), but, to finish where we started, it’s August, and nice outside. So I’ll end with one last entry. It appears that BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, in concert with Nanny Mike Bloomberg and the other malefactors of great wealth and power, thinks we peons must abandon our dirty habit of wanting to own our own homes, leading BlackRock to buy up huge tracts of housing to rent, thus gaining additional power to run our lives. Tell ya what, Larry and Mikey: you first. You sell your houses and start renting one of these suburban tract homes – and nothing else – and maybe we’ll pause in our conclusion that you’re would-be tinpot dictators who must be stopped. BlackRock delenda est.

Happy August, all!

 

Scott Shepard is a fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research and Director of its Free Enterprise Project. This was first published at Townhall Finance.



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.