Does woke really mean broke? If there is any justice left in the marketplace, hopefully it means economic catastrophe for companies that are pushing a toxic ideological agenda that people don’t want to buy but who are often shamed into purchasing it anyway.
But the charm seems to be evanescent just as the Democratic Party can no longer convince working class voters that it somehow has their best interests in mind as the cost of living escalates and they are told to jettison their fossil fuel lifestyle by colossal hypocrites like Climate Czar John Kerry who ferries his carcass around the world on a greenhouse gas producing private jet that the average American can never even imagine flying in, let alone owning.
Imagine this narcissistic piece of baggage telling us that we have to work “22 times” as hard to convert to electric vehicles while he remains insulated from any economic hardship as a super wealthy entitled swamp dweller. The monumental gall of this recycled senator; he doesn’t even see the irony of it.
The woke media – be it entertainment or news – is losing its flavor for patrons as well as they people begin to wonder why they are paying to watch execrable productions that are reminiscent of the sort of grating Soviet propaganda that used to be issued to ensure the citizenry all thought the right thoughts and remained ideologically pure. It is part of what might become the great retrocession in media.
Netflix shares are descending faster than a stone in freefall as an increasing number of television viewers ask themselves why they should pay to watch woke extravaganzas like “He’s Expecting,” a leftist opus to some guy getting pregnant, It’s not even good science fiction; it’s horrendous drama but we’re supposed to get emotionally involved in this?
Last Wednesday, the company’s shares plummeted 30% after Netflix shared the news that its subscriber base had fallen for the first time in more than 10 years.
So far in 2022, Netflix has lost 200,000 subscribers when the company was anticipating and additional 2.5 million new viewers.
The stock has continued to drop.
In Florida, Disney World won’t be allowed to operate as an autonomous corporate agent in the state and will be losing the special self-government and low corporate tax status it received in 1967 when Walt Disney brought the theme park to the state. The late cartoonist and entrepreneur would be in shock if he could see what has happened to his empire as it vows to overturn Florida’s parental rights law that stops teachers from sexualizing children from kindergarten to grade three with gender identity and sexual orientation indoctrination.
"This company had a deal unlike any company or any individual in the state of Florida and probably anywhere in the United States. They were self-governing," Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
"They had extraordinary powers. They could build nuclear power plants. They didn't have to go through the permitting process [which] obviously [offers] a lot of tax benefits. And so that's just inappropriate."
Those who oppose the law – and they largely don’t live in the state but in California and other liberal hideouts – have found the communications imagination but ultimate mendacity to call the legislation the “Don’t say gay” act although they could just as well have called it the “Don’t say sodomy” act because the law doesn’t mention either word. DeSantis (R-FL) is doing something a lot of Republican governors don’t tend to do: listen to their grassroots supporters and voters in general and support the kind of legislation that mirrors their concerns and aspirations. Most parents simply don’t want their children to be unnecessarily sexualized when it is not just unnecessary but an assault on their minds and emotions.
The decision to stop giving the increasingly languorous Disney a free ride has absolutely nothing to do with penalizing a corporation for their political beliefs. You’ve probably heard some Democratic apologists declare that this is no different than left-wingers who went after Chick-Fil-a when it supported socially conservative policies and attempted to impede their business.
But this isn’t political persecution of Disney.
Disney is now ruled by a woke management that is committed to promoting the LGBTQ agenda and frankly doesn’t care if that is what you want your kids to watch. It has vowed to stop a wildly popular law in the state because it and Hollywood Democratic elites don’t like it.
When that corporation declares its intention to overrule the democratically elected officials in the state, it should not be encouraged to do so with any special privileges or self-government status. Disney has amassed billions of dollars over the years and can certainly do business without corporate welfare.
Of maybe it can’t while it pursues a woke agenda that is not resonating with da common folk.
We have seen corporations fleeing in fear from the threat of woke politics before. Just think of the travesty last summer when Major League Baseball (MLB) surrendered to liberal lies about Georgia’s election integrity law and moved the All-Star game out of Atlanta as some kind of protest. This asinine act was largely based on the outrageous claims from Democrats like Stacey Abrams who was still insisting she had really won the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election.
She and others said the law would enforce voter suppression – without so much as a shred of evidence. The mentally feeble President Joe Biden cheered on MLB and called the legislation “Jim Crow on steroids” — like black people were being lynched again in Georgia and forced to the back of the bus.
But it was the hour for the empty heads of baseball to flash their woke credentials and enable a ridiculous accusation. Losing the all-star game cost Atlanta millions of dollars in lost revenue and when Abrams realized she was largely responsible for that fiscal shortfall, she retroactively amended a column in USA Today to minimize her support for the boycott.
Guess you can have your woke cake and eat it too.
And CNN was humbled last week too. The network may have introduced 24/7 cable news coverage in the early 1980s but it is struggling to maintain an interested audience 40 years later. If you want to know how irrelevant the station has become, watch “Reliable Sources” with Brian Stelter some time on Sunday afternoon – if you can stand it. The very title is an exercise in self-irony: there is nothing reliable about the sources and the host usually spends most of his hour railing against Fox News – where most of CNN’s viewership has long gone.
So while its numbers decline CNN decided to expand with a streaming service called CNN+. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of a plus to offer viewers and very few clicked on the service to watch. It received less attention than a lot of independent podcasts and that’s really an indictment of how low the network’s status has sunk.
When it launched CNN+ this month it actually seemed to believe that viewers would pay to see their oleaginous anchors talk about their favorite cuisine and informally dish up the news. It wasn’t to be as people were loath to pay money to watch a station that they didn’t want to see for free.
Anybody with half a brain for business should have deduced that if people are less and less inclined to watch CNN for nothing they probably won’t be seduced to subscribe to its streaming service at a cost.
So after three weeks in cyberspace, the station will be folding at the end of April.
Did the woke culture at CNN contribute to its decline? No question. It has lied about the Florida parental rights bill, insisted Georgia’s voter integrity law was about voter suppression, enabled the Russia collusion hoax and ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story and declared it to be Russian disinformation.
There’s enough talk of disinformation. Let common sense Americans decide what is truth and what is disinformation – not the Biden government or the ever-activist former President Barack Obama who is still trying to dictate what you are allowed to see, hear and believe.
Remember the marketplace of ideas? Well the woke marketplace is bankrupt and the public clearly knows it.
