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(LifeSiteNews) – Entertainment giant Disney’s stock has fallen by almost half over the past year after a protracted period of the company’s activist bent becoming more visible than ever before.
RedState’s Brandon Morse observed that Disney’s stock declined 45.44% from June 2021 to June 2022 amid the box office failure of recently released Toy Story spinoff Lightyear and the relatively underwhelming performance of Disney Plus’s latest superhero streaming series, Ms. Marvel.
Once a unifying cultural institution, over the past several years Disney has steadily infused left-wing politics into the army of entertainment properties it owns, from appeasing LGBT “representation” demands in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to firing and publicly defaming conservative former Star Wars actress Gina Carano to the promotion of LGBT “pride.”
Earlier this year, Disney took a hardline stance against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which bans schools from teaching children in kindergarten through third grade about transgenderism and other sexuality-related issues, limits discussions of sexuality for older children to “age appropriate” content, and requires parents to be informed of any changes that could affect their child’s physical, emotional, or mental well-being.
Left-wing activists within the company, who misleadingly dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law, pressured the company into taking a stand by staging walkouts in protest of Disney’s initial muted reaction to the law. More conservative Disney employees released an anonymous open letter decrying the company’s internal climate of hostility toward “those of us whose political and religious views are not explicitly progressive.”
The ordeal backfired on the company, prompting the leak of internal videos by Disney executives and creators openly declaring their intentions to inculcate children with LGBTQ+ dogma via their film and television projects, and provoking Florida to repeal the financially-advantageous “special district” status for its theme park in the Sunshine State.
Most recently, Disney’s “social justice” bias manifested in some particularly hostile ways, including Lightyear star Chris Evans attacking critics of the children’s movie’s same-sex relationship as “idiots” and “dinosaurs,” and the official Star Wars Twitter account highlighting for harassment an anonymous user’s mild pushback against a Pride Month post:
1. Queer characters existing isn’t political
2. Star WARS is literally in our name
— Star Wars (@starwars) June 15, 2022
The Star Wars Twitter account has bullied a fan off social media.
They went after a guy with only 2 followers for calling out their cringe comicbook.
Claiming to be against harassment, Star Wars celebrated the 1,000s of nasty replies that bullied someone off Twitter. pic.twitter.com/oNHc0SeSIj
— Dataracer (@Dataracer117) June 16, 2022
“Before, “Disney was too big to truly feel the pain of any political activism. It’s Disney, after all,” Morse wrote. But now “[p]eople are turning away from Disney and Disney has only itself to blame for not heeding the warnings that were given to it by its customers.”