After three consecutive years in which we were able to get our shareholder proposals on the proxy statement for The Walt Disney Company, which brought significant attention to our calls for accountability regarding the company’s business activities in China and its woke gender ideology advocacy, this season the Securities and Exchange Commission permitted the entertainment giant to exclude us from its proxy ballot at the March 20, 2025 annual meeting.
The proposal we submitted for this year had to do with Disney’s participation in the World Federation of Advertisers, “a global association that represents over 150 of the world’s biggest brands,” to “create a peer-to-peer network of the world’s best marketers.” In June 2019 WFA formed the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which was ostensibly created to “[work] towards a media environment where hate speech, bullying and disinformation is challenged … and where everyone is, especially children, better protected online. Alliance members acknowledge their collective power to significantly improve the health of the media ecosystem.”
These are all leftist code words for permissible censorship.
This noble-sounding initiative also trafficked more nefarious practices: arguably illegal anticompetitive behavior. A July 2024 investigation by the United States House Judiciary Committee revealed how GARM “has collectively used its immense market power to demonetize voices and viewpoints the group disagrees with….” According to the committee’s report:
Through GARM, large corporations, advertising agencies, and industry associations participated in boycotts and other coordinated action to demonetize platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and other content deemed disfavored by GARM and its members. This collusion can have the effect of eliminating a variety of content and viewpoints available to consumers.
Our proposal would have asked the company to investigate the risks related to its anti-competitive, collusive censorship of disfavored online and media outlets in conjunction with other corporate members of WFA and GARM.
While we didn’t make the cut, however, another shareholder named Dana Tuggle did, who also addressed the GARM issue. Tuggle, represented by Bowyer Research, approached the GARM censorship issue from a religious and political discrimination angle. The proposal can be found on page 88 of Disney’s proxy statement:
For its part, GARM promoted hyper-partisan and censorial groups like the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, which smear many mainstream outlets as “disinformation.”
GARM threatened Spotify because Joe Rogan promoted views it disagreed with on COVID-19. And it infamously boycotted X because Elon Musk (pictured above) loosened some of the platform’s censorship restrictions. GARM disbanded shortly after public pressure and a lawsuit from X in 2024, which ironically evinces how brand-damaging these practices are. But these censorious practices are still prevalent. Many of the “Big Six” advertising agencies that were all a part of GARM, for example, maintain similar policies.
These policies and Disney’s actions create legal exposure under antitrust and anti-discrimination laws.
Also making it onto Disney’s proxy statement was a resolution sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research, which calls upon the company to cease cooperation with the LGBTQ+ pressure group Human Rights Campaign in producing its gender ideology-driven Corporate Equality Index. NCPPR’s proposal is on page 86 of Disney’s proxy statement:
When corporations take extreme positions, they destroy shareholder value by alienating large portions of their customers and investors. This proposal provides Disney with an opportunity to move back to neutral.
From 2007 to present, Disney received a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)’s annual Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which can only be attained by abiding by its partisan, divisive and increasingly radical criteria.
Though HRC – which Disney has a paid partnership with – claims the CEI is just a “benchmarking tool on corporate policies… pertinent to LGBT employees,” in reality, it functions like a social credit score for corporations. The threat of a bad score is wielded against corporations to force them to do the political bidding of HRC and others (like GLSEN, the Trevor Project and GLAAD, which Disney also has paid partnerships with) that seek to sow gender confusion in children, encourage irreversible surgical procedures on confused teens, effectively eliminate girls’ and women’s sports and bathrooms, and roll back longstanding religious liberties.
Receiving a perfect score on the CEI can only mean that Disney espouses and funds those divisive positions. Because, as clearly outlined in the CEI criteria, not advancing those efforts prevents companies from receiving a perfect score, as Disney continuously has.
Disney disastrously engaged in such activism when it inserted itself in the middle of a divisive public debate over the Parental Rights in Education Act. And when a leaked video conference between Disney executives revealed that Disney has a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and was “adding queerness” to children’s programming.
NLPC has filed reports with the SEC in support of NCPPR’s proposal and Dana Tuggle’s proposal, asking shareholders to vote in favor of each.
