The last five months have been a stirring reminder that corporations do not have ethics so much as they have self-interest dressed in various useful fashions: Watching companies—including Disney—find various ways to bend in the face of pressure from the incoming, and now festering, Trump regime on topics like diversity, trans rights, immigration, and more has been nearly as instructive as it has been depressing. Still, there are, apparently, limits to how much at least some companies of sufficient fiscal strength can brings themselves to bend, as demonstrated in a report from Deadline this week about Disney’s shareholders, who rejected with firm force a series of explicitly pro-MAGA measures that had been put before them at their annual meeting.
The two proposals getting the majority of the attention here are both pretty obvious in their aims, despite using a familiar set of positive spin words to try to soft serve their nastier intent. Take the “Respect Civil Liberties in Advertising Services” proposal, which certainly sounds delightful—civil liberties and respect, hooray!—but which is actually about trying to interrogate Disney’s previous decision to stop advertising on the Elon Musk-owned Twitter after Musk retweeted antisemitic talking points. Shareholders really didn’t like that one, rejecting the proposal to “conduct an evaluation and issue a report within the next year, at reasonable cost and excluding proprietary information and confidential information, evaluating how it oversees risks related to discrimination against ad buyers and sellers based on their political or religious status or views” at an impressive 99 to 1 against.
They weren’t much warmer on the other proposal in the crosshairs, a call for the company to stop participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which rates American businesses on how well they treat LGBTQ employees, consumers, and investors. A handful of name-brand companies, including Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and Toyota have pulled out of participating in the Index in recent months, and the proposal in question—while taking time to ladle out some very tired rhetoric about efforts to “sow gender confusion in children”— attempted to put a financial spin on the request, trying to float the idea that Disney’s stock price has dropped because it participates in the report. Shareholders don’t seem to have agreed; they shot that one down 93 percent to 7.
Deadline notes that nothing that happened in the meeting this week was especially novel; Disney’s shareholders always field a couple of blatantly right-wing moves like this, and they always slap them down. But it’s also impossible not to note that that same ol’, same ol’ is now happening in a very different, much scarier context, one where assumptions of corporate principle no longer feel safe to be, well, assumed. All of which is made slightly more surreal by the need to frame all of it in the context of the company’s balance sheet: In their unanimous (and widely followed) recommendation to reject the proposals, the company’s board wrote that, “Given the Company’s existing practices to assess participation in transparency efforts and the Board’s oversight of ESG reporting, workforce equity matters and human rights policies, we do not believe this proposal would provide additional value to shareholders.”
