Is woke good for business?

Automakers are finally realizing that electric cars are not selling and many, if not most, have scaled back production goals to reflect the flagging consumer demand.  It may be good politics in Washington right now but it make not be economically feasible.  Do we want our corporations to be the leaders of change and risk the pension funds, IRA money, and all the other economic institutions owning stock in such companies?  Do we want them to gamble with our future when the public is pulling back from electric cars and trucks as the solution for all our problems?

Now it appears that a giant player in the game of promoting free sexual desire and fluid gender identity is also suffering.  Uncle Walt Disney's legacy is awash in failures tied directly to its embrace of the alphabet soup side of the woke agenda.  Once Hollywood’s most successful film studio, Disney lost $1Billion on its last four pictures and Universal has taken over the top spot.  The reason for all this red ink is that Disney bet the farm on public approval and support for its woke positions reflected in its entertainment line up.  Last year they admitted they had bet wrong.  There was a growing ‘misalignment’ between Disney’s output and ‘public and consumer tastes and preferences for entertainment’. ‘Consumers’ perceptions of our position on matters of public interest’, it said, are affecting the company’s bottom line. People are weary of storylines with political messaging and stories manipulated to fit the progressive political and social narrative.  Entertainment is not cheap for the consumer and they are not going to pay premium prices to be lectured to.  Even the Marvel spin offs will not rescue Disney from its own version of foot in mouth disease.  When Gina Carono, one of the stars of the successful Mandalorian series shared an Instagram story in which she compared being a Republican in 21st-century America to being Jewish during the Holocaust, she was fired almost immediately for ‘denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities’.  Oddly enough, the public is firing Disney for pretty much the same reason.

Eventually the woke leaders of corporate America, along with their counterparts in education, will have to admit that the social experiment has been a failure.  Americans will then have to decide if it is worth it to waste corporate resources on a failing strategy and to squander education on the altar of woke ideology.  Bud Light appears to have permanently lost the battle but has Anheuser-Bush and its corporate parent learned the lesson?  The woke agenda is not beyond the comprehension of middle America but is known to be what it is -- the stance of a political and economic elite who seem not to care what the rest of America thinks and who love to paint those who disagree as gun toting, red neck, religious bigots.  Turns out the pronoun toting mostly elite necks who despise religion are themselves the real bigots.