Trump Ghoul Stephen Miller’s Group Threatens Disney For Not Donating Enough To GOP
The letter presumably got filed in the Happiest Trash Can On Earth.
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
America First Legal, an organization established by Trump administration alum Stephen Miller, sent a letter to Disney chairwoman Susan Arnold outlining a number of supposed legal violations and demanding the company release documents and commit to an internal investigation.
The letter comes from the group’s senior counsel, Reed Rubinstein:
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Apparently, the Company’s executives have chosen to… alienate the Company’s core customers; and violate the law, all for the purpose of advancing a very narrow political and social agenda…. Accordingly, management has placed the Company’s assets, including its brand, reputation, and good will, at risk.
Hear hear! One assumes Rubinstein is talking about the decision to introduce Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lanes to the park, further gouging guests already paying through the nose for general admission. Coupled with the fact that guests can’t schedule their rides until the morning of their visit to the park, the new programs discourage anyone trying to make food reservations for fear that their $50/head lunch might interfere with their $15/head ride on the latest attraction. It’s all a tremendous drain on “the Company’s assets, including its brand, reputation, and good will.” I mean… it’s freaking ridiculous.
Alas, these legitimate beefs aren’t the subject of Rubinstein’s letter, which instead preens for the Fox News spotlight — and, more to the point, the Fox News viewer who might want to donate — by rehashing half-baked and legally vapid complaints about Disney’s response to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
For the record, Disney’s response to that bill was to do… absolutely nothing for weeks and then pledged to stop giving money to Florida political candidates of both parties. The company also said it would like to see the law repealed or struck down, but offered little in the way of concrete action to back that up — especially since the company abandoned contributions to political candidates who might actually be able to do that.
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It’s the latest evolution in the campaign finance debate, from corporations have unlimited rights to use money as speech to money as compelled speech if it’s not lining the right local politician’s pocket.
All this, America First claims, will harm Disney financially and, it threatens, could trigger shareholder action.
The Company’s business is uniquely tied to its reputation for family-friendly entertainment products and experiences. For this reason, management identified, “Misalignment with public and consumer tastes and preferences”—domestically and internationally—as a significant material risk factor threatening future profitability and shareholder value.1 Preventing such misalignment, and correcting course when it occurs, are among the Board’s most critical fiduciary tasks.
Oh nos! A boycott! Let’s see how that one’s working out from Ohio Senate candidate and continuing blemish on Yale Law School’s good name, JD Vance:
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The. Next. Day.
Yeah Disney’s really worried.
This is one of those instances where Disney can literally point and say “scoreboard, bitches.” Conservatives actually mounted a boycott of Disney before, cutting the entertainment giant off from June 1997 to June 2005 based on its support for gay people. Disney’s stock suffered… not at all during that effort.
But I’m sure the Disney board appreciates unsolicited business advice from the “family-friendly” folks that engineered a child kidnapping policy at the border that the White House is still struggling to untangle.
The other cudgel America First cites against Disney is, of course, religious freedom. Disney makes movies with gay characters and has held Pride events for years but not cutting checks to local politicians is the straw that broke these deeply religious employees.
The letter rehashes the usual nonsense about the bill really being about preventing age-inappropriate sex education, which is a bald faced lie because opponents of the bill suggested a version that just banned sex ed for K-3rd graders and Republicans didn’t want that. Because what they actually wanted could never be captured by a straight-forward statute, namely to stigmatize little kids who can’t post their family tree project on the wall because they have two dads.
Where are these supposedly overwhelming numbers of aggrieved employees? America First won’t say, but it will cite anonymous supposed employees complaining that the workplace claims to promote inclusion, but seems hostile to these employee’s desire to be openly exclusionary. The nerve!
On March 29, 2022, a Company insider published a pseudonymous article on the website Quillette.com.
Holy hell. Quillette still exists? I assumed all those people moved to Substack by now. Or Stormfront.
In less than two weeks’ time, the company had moved from principled neutrality to open advocacy.
No, it actually moved from open advocacy to the tune of thousands and thousands in political contributions to neutrality. Even if folks want to give the company a whole lot of benefit of the doubt that its claim to support advocacy groups opposed to the bill, that’s still not getting the bill repealed the way giving money to only Democrats would.
What follows are a list of supposedly discriminatory acts that boil down to “Disney tries to make the parks as open as possible and this offends me as a bigot.”
Replace that Christmas song, it’s too Christian. Don’t ‘culturally appropriate’ that visual design, we don’t have a member of that ethnicity on the project team. Send this script to a ‘sensitivity reader,’ the voice is too male. Remove ‘ladies and gentleman [sic], boys and girls’ from all park announcements, it reinforces the gender binary.”
Yeah… that’s pretty much what a brand trying to own the entire market would do. Don’t alienate religious minorities, don’t piss off other ethnicities, go ahead and say “children of all ages” because no one really cares if they hear “boys and girls.” Expanding the company’s market share does not amount to discrimination against an employee for merely being on the payroll.
The letter ends with an absolutely bonkers list of demands that the company hire a million and one outside counsel to conduct internal investigations. Including a demand that the company “conduct a culture audit” which actually sounds like a term conservatives made up and claim “woke” mobs are imposing on the country. This audit will supposedly “guarantee[] a politically neutral workplace.” If you’re wondering when politics became a protected class… it didn’t. But this is where America First Legal unintentionally reveals its whole problem — there isn’t anything here that amounts to religious discrimination, just discrimination against the current screeching points flogged by Republican politicians.
When these folks fought tooth and nail to expand the notion that corporations are people, that cuts both ways. It means the corporation gets to take stands that its employees don’t have to like. That doesn’t give the company license to discriminate against employees from protected classes, but it does mean that a cashier at Chick-fil-A doesn’t get to sue the company for being in deep with hate groups and “CGI animator #65747493” from the latest Star Wars project doesn’t get to sue Disney for skipping the next Ron DeSantis dinner.
Not a single allegation in the rants cited in this letter amounts to discrimination against these anonymous folks who, let’s be honest, don’t seem like they’re destined for the C-suite under any situation.
Don’t worry, this letter is going to get even dumber:
Finally, provide real transparency to shareholders regarding the Company’s commercial and other relationships with the Chinese Communist Party and its instrumentalities.
What letter about religious liberty and LGBTQ rights is complete without a non-sequitur about the Chinese Communist Party? Presumably someone in the editing process said, “hey, we’ve got a tight letter here about religious discrimination” and someone said, “you know what this needs to show how not at all absurd we are? China stuff!”
And I assume that person was Stephen Miller.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
