Race Discrimination Is Illegal: Someone Tell Disney!

 by John Hinderaker

Actually, someone just did. On Thursday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr wrote to Robert Iger, the Disney Company’s CEO, expressing concerns about the legality of Disney’s DEI programs. Carr’s letter is posted here on Scribd and embedded below.

For more than 50 years, first through affirmative action and more recently in the souped-up version of DEI, American businesses have generally believed that race and sex discrimination are not just acceptable but praiseworthy, as long as the correct races (white and Asian) and gender (male) were being discriminated against. While that was never the law, under either the 14th Amendment or the Civil Rights Act, companies got away with it because the government was on board.

That changed with the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases. In those decisions, the Court made it clear that universities can’t lawfully discriminate against Asians (or even whites!) any more than they can discriminate against blacks. The context of those cases was education, but every general counsel in America told every company’s management that the Court’s reasoning would apply equally to employment. This is why companies have scrambled to abandon DEI and, where possible, to cover their tracks.

Disney is a famously left-wing company. Its policies have been openly discriminatory. Here are some excerpts from Brendan Carr’s letter to Robert Iger:

As you know, Disney started out a century ago as an iconic American company. For decades, Disney focused on churning out box office and programming successes. But then something changed. Disney has now been embroiled in rounds of controversy surrounding its DEI policies.

Numerous reports indicate that Disney’s leadership went all in on invidious forms of DEI discrimination a few years ago and apparently did so in a manner that infected many aspects of your company’s decisions.

As you may know, the Communications Act and Commission rules prohibit regulated entities like Disney’s ABC from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, or gender. Indeed, the FCC’s longstanding equal employment opportunity or EEO rules set forth specific requirements to which Disney’s regulated operations must adhere.

Of course, Disney’s officers believe they have only engaged in the “good” kind of discrimination. In a Democratic administration, and with a liberal Supreme Court, this would not be a problem.

Now, the facts (copious footnotes omitted):

In recent years, Disney made DEI a key priority for the company’s businesses and embedded explicit race- and gender-based criteria across its operations. Indeed, public reports—including ones based on whistleblower documents—paint a disturbing picture of Disney’s DEI practices. In at least one account, a Disney employee described the company’s decision to launch what would amount to racially-segregated affinity groups and spaces. The company also publicly launched a “Reimagine Tomorrow” initiative, it would appear, as a mechanism for advancing its DEI mission. It also implemented mandatory “Inclusion Standards” across ABC, requiring, for example, that “50 percent of regular and recurring characters” be drawn from “underrepresented groups.” These standards may have forced racial and identity quotas into every level of production—demanding that “50% or more” of writers, directors, crew, and vendors be selected based on group identity. It appears that executive bonuses may also have been tied to DEI “performance,” and ABC has utilized race-based hiring databases and restricted fellowships to select demographic groups.

Kudos to the Trump administration for the most substantial effort to root out race discrimination since Brown v. Board of Education, and sex discrimination as well.

We’ll close with this:

As Chairman of the FCC, it is important to me that the entities the Commission regulates fully adhere to the FCC’s rules and regulations. In order to aid the FCC’s investigation into these matters, the Commission’s Enforcement Bureau will be engaging with your company to obtain an accounting of Disney and ABC’s DEI programs, policies, and practices. The Enforcement Bureau will follow up with more specifics.

For once, a governmental “Enforcement Bureau” is doing valuable and productive work. As one who has always had a middle of the road view of Donald Trump, viewing him as neither a savior nor a villain, I have been delighted by almost all of what he has done in his second term as president, with his anti-discrimination initiatives high on the list.

Meanwhile, it would be quite the irony if the Trump administration prevents Disney from going broke.

Carr Letter to Disney DEI 03272025 by Scott Johnson on Scribd

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/03/race-discrimination-is-illegal-someone-tell-disney.php