Megan McArdle’s World Magazine exposé reveals how Hollywood’s DEI mandates—pushed by BlackRock-backed quotas and activist pressure—now force studios like Disney to tokenize roles, sidelining white talent despite box-office success (e.g., Spider-Man vs. Eternals). A retired agent’s last client was Andrew due to his alignment with right-wing outlets, while a filmmaker faced demands to include a non-contributing Black actor for "cover." Jordan Peterson’s UofT resignation over BIPOC hiring quotas mirrors corporate bullying, with Shamath Palapatiya admitting woke stances hurt profits. Tech firms like Coinbase reject DEI mandates due to workplace backlash, yet Hollywood’s forced narratives risk alienating audiences, echoing Putin’s warning that such ideologies breed societal distrust—just as Stalinist policies did. [Automatically generated summary]
So I wanted to talk today to Daily Wire's own Megan Basham because of an article she wrote called How Hollywood's New Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Executives Are Shaping What's On Your Screens.
This is a Reader's Pass article, so you've got to be a Reader's Pass member to get it.
But I met Megan when she interviewed me.
She was with World Magazine, a Christian outlet, and she interviewed me.
And I immediately called up the Daily Wire and said, wow, I just met this really talented young culture reporter.
And what I meant by that was that she was a good on-air personality, had obvious poise and charm.
And I thought she would do well, but I had no idea that she was a journalist at this level.
This is a terrific article, and you should get a Reader's Pass and take a look at it.
Megan, are you there?
I am here.
Thanks so much for having me.
It's a real pleasure.
It's a pleasure to talk to you again.
And I was really taken with this.
You know, I should mention, I didn't actually give you a full introduction.
I should just mention that you have a book called, what is it called?
Beside Every Successful Man.
Yeah, it's been a few years Beside Every Successful Man.
It was actually about how wives, women, moms, I stayed home for some years, can help their husbands get ahead in the workplace so that they have a little more flexibility with their life choices.
That's a big theme on the show of the importance of wives and moms and homemakers as well.
You know, there was a piece going around that was on Barry Weiss's substack or whatever it's called called Hollywood's New Rules by Peter Kiefer, Kiefer and Peter Savodnik.
And everybody sent me this.
Like everybody and his mother sent me this article.
And I was laughing at it because I lived through this.
I mean, I didn't need them to send me the article.
I said, you know, I told Jenna Ellis, she sent it to me.
I said, this is like me sending you an article saying there's such a thing as a constitution.
And it was talking about the new iron fist of diversity that has entered Hollywood.
Can you describe it a little bit for people who don't know?
Well, yeah, you know, and I think when people hear that, I quoted David French in the article because he sort of represented what people think of when they hear about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
Hollywood's New Rules Redux00:12:20
They're like, oh, it's just a seminar you go to.
It's just some of this, in some cases, you know, really upsetting training, but it's just some training you have to listen to.
When you actually dig down into it, you go, no, it's not just some training.
It is now hard racial quotas.
And it's not coming from the outside.
They are now hiring DEI executives.
So then again, that stands for diversity, inclusion, equity.
So these executives are now the fastest growing title with chief in the title.
So if it's chief job title, if it's C-suite, if it's, you know, that high-level executive, they're now the fastest growing in the market.
I mean, this is just worming its way into every element of corporate America, but we're also especially seeing it in Hollywood because in Hollywood, you see the immediate impact.
You go, I can tell what's happening based on what I'm seeing on my screen.
So, you know, I spoke to some people who work for various studios at Disney.
I spoke to an entertainment lawyer just trying to get a sense of, okay, so how far gone is this?
And the answer is, it's really far gone.
You know, one of the best agents I ever had retired recently because the only client, he was a hugely successful agent.
And the only client he had who was still working was me because I was being hired by like the Daily Wire and other right-wing outlets to do screenwriting.
But all his other clients who were mostly white and male were suddenly out of work despite their incredible talent.
So this is not, I mean, this is a real thing that they're telling you.
I have just one more anecdote.
I have another friend who has been forced to put a female, a black woman on his project, even though she's not going to do anything.
She's going to get credit on the film, but she's not going to do anything.
It's just for cover.
It is just, what do they call it, cosmetic?
So one of the points, though, about of your piece is that this is not a Hollywood thing.
Hollywood is just, as you said, just the tip of the spear, but this is everywhere.
So why is it spreading so fast?
Why is corporate America so enamored of this idea?
Well, you know, one, I think they're being sold a bit of a bill of goods by some of these activist groups that are, you know, I mean, look, it's a bit of a shakedown.
They're going, either you do this or we come after you and say that you are not allies of BLM.
You are not allies of diversity.
You do not want to see black success.
So that's one thing.
They don't want that at their doorstep.
And they'll do just about anything to avoid that type of charge.
But I also think, you know, there's also some real murky dollars and cents angles to this.
If you look at how these investor groups, there's been some really interesting reporting on BlackRock and how they are pushing for if you don't meet a certain metric of showing that you care about DEI, then they will steer investors away from you.
And look, companies don't want to lose investors.
They don't want shareholders pulling out.
So, I mean, it gets really deep in the weeds and really complicated.
So, I mean, to answer just one of your question, there's that.
But I don't think it's just that.
I think you have a lot of true believers also in lower levels, and they are bullying the executive class.
And that's a little hard to understand, but you've got a lot of older guys who are like, I don't want it to be me.
I don't want to be the guy who's at the podium next, having to lose my job and make a speech about this.
Wow.
You know, I kind of wonder, too, when you talk about the economic aspect of this.
There was that guy, the woke billionaire, Shamath Palah.
I don't even know how to pronounce his name, but he was on a podcast.
Palapataya.
Very excellent.
But he was on a podcast and he said, you know, I don't really care about the Uyghurs.
Nobody really cares about the Uyghurs.
What he was saying was, I do care about supply chain issues, climate change, America's crippled healthcare system.
But all those things actually help his bottom line, you know, to basically consolidate power, to go global, to become globalist, all of that stuff helps his bottom lines.
We're actually worrying about the Uyghurs doesn't help his bottom line because it means he can't do business in China for moral reasons.
And so it really, a lot of this kind of is being portrayed as morality, but seems to me to be dollars and cents.
Well, and I think, right, that was such a perfect illustration of what's really going on because you go, here is one of the starkest moral crises of our time.
And he doesn't see that.
But on the flip side, you go, look, I don't think anyone could argue before now that people were not interested in promoting minorities in any business, right?
I mean, Jordan Peterson had a great piece on that when he spoke about his reasoning for resigning from the University of Toronto.
And he said, we had done everything reasonably possible to promote minority candidates.
And I think you see that in every field.
So now you're just creating this sort of fake spectacle of, well, minorities can't get ahead.
By what metric?
There's no actual hard evidence that a minority candidate who is qualified cannot compete in any industry.
So we're creating just sort of fake narratives.
On the flip side, you have something very real.
And they're going, we don't want to talk about that because, yeah, just like his company, Disney also goes, man, we stand to lose a lot of money if we say anything negative about China.
The NBA stands to lose a lot of money if they say anything negative about China.
So when it actually is a real moral question, they don't care.
You know, it really is interesting.
When you mentioned that Jordan Peterson piece, which is just a heartbreaking piece because he gives up a tenured professorship at a job he loves.
He has quit the University of Toronto where he was a tenured professor, which is one of the most valuable kind of positions you can be in because it's, you know, it's unassailable.
And he gave it up because he simply could not promise a talented white protege that he had that he would get a job.
You know, anytime he would hire people.
And the other thing that he says, and being very honest, is there's a shortage.
There's a shortage of qualified, what do they call them, BIPOCs, right?
They're black, indigenous, people of color.
There you go.
Thank you very much.
I would never raise it.
It always sounds like a robot from a Star Wars film as the BIPOC, you know?
But he said there's a shortage of qualified BIPOCs who can do the job.
So they're actually hiring people who are not qualified.
The other thing about this, now you're one of the very few conservative journalists who actually does have an understanding of the culture and the understanding of certainly the arts.
There is a line from a prominent director in this Barry Weiss piece where he says, the fear is that the audience stops trusting us.
They begin to see us as a community twisting ourselves into a pretzel to make every movie as woke as possible, every relationship mixed racially, every character sexually fluid.
And they decide that we are telling stories set in a fantasy land instead of a world they know and live in.
And if that happens and they decide to throw themselves instead into video games 24-7, we'll lose them.
Netflix just had opened with a terrible, terrible year that has really cost them in the stock market.
Netflix has turned me into a into made me racially aware for the first time in my life in a negative way.
I never used to care who was the hero.
I like action films.
It's Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington.
Who cares?
I never even thought of it.
But now I turn to Netflix and says the Black Lives Matter collection, I think, well, I'm not watching that, you know, because I hate those guys.
This may really hurt the bottom line in Hollywood.
It may actually destroy the film industry.
Well, I think we can show that from some really hard metrics, it is.
Like we've talked about on the Daily Wire, go read it.
What's happening with Marvel that you go, Spider-Man was the first non-overtly woke MCU production in like the last few years, and it blew everything else out of the water.
Everything that they marketed as very specifically woke, Eternals, Shang-Chi, those movies did not perform as well.
But I think, you know, having come out of the Christian world and having listened to you a lot on this topic, Andrew, I've seen a lot of bad Christian movies, right?
Because they're moralizing, they're platitudes, they're inauthentic.
And you look at this woke stuff and you go, it's the same thing, just coming from a different direction.
It's inauthentic.
It's moralizing.
It's trying to teach the audience how to be a good person rather than telling them an authentically artistic story.
You know, that's a brilliant point.
That is a really good point.
I hadn't actually thought of that, that actually they're making the exact same mistake and they're going to find that maybe they can make money off that niche audience, just like the Christian filmmakers do, but they are not going to create an industry that, you know, the movie industry for many, many years was actually the American art form.
It was actually doing something that spread the American values everywhere because everybody wanted to be Gary Cooper.
Everyone wanted to, I talked, I was talking to a Danish director who was interested in a script of mine, and he was saying, I just love the Western.
All I want to do is make Westerns.
This is the kind of thing that inspired me to be a filmmaker.
That was a great power.
They're not going to have that kind of power anymore.
They're just going to be corporate stooges, basically.
And it's a really good point that they're falling into the same, well, because it is a religion, I guess.
You know, the other thing, you talk about this a little bit in your piece, How Hollywood's new diversity, equity, and inclusion executives are shaping what's on your screens.
And one of the things I really liked about this piece is that it broadens out the subject beyond Hollywood, and it talks about all of this.
You say that there's starting to be some pushback.
Yeah.
Well, it's been interesting because you're seeing the pushback in the same sector that sort of brought this to everyone's doorstep, which is, you know, big tech, crypto, these sort of very on-the-cutting edge industries.
So, and I also earlier last year reported on this, Coinbase, one of the very first companies, it's a crypto company, to say, we're not going to do this anymore.
We are not going to bring politics into the workplace.
We are not going to be interested in, you know, furthering your political views through this stakeholder capitalism.
We're not doing that anymore.
We're a mission-focused company and our mission is providing crypto to the whole world.
I can't remember what their mission is, but it's something very crypto focused.
It doesn't care at all about progressive politics.
And so you've now seen that company and a few others in this very cutting edge tech world, they've already been through it.
They've already come through the other side and gone, here are the major problems that this causes.
It causes division in the workforce.
People were spending all their time on Slack arguing about politics and not getting their jobs done.
It causes distrust among team members.
You go, I don't want to work with someone who I am afraid is always looking to be offended by slightly off phrasing that I might use or something I might say that is totally innocuous, but they've decided that there is racial intent.
Who can get their jobs done like that?
You know, I started off the show today talking about having a moral vision and being able to explain a moral vision and not just getting caught up in making money.
But one of the things about capitalism is that doing your job, doing the job that you set out to do, if it is a good job, is actually the moral thing to do.
Antonin Scalia said people would ask him what it means to be a Christian judge, and he would say, it means being a really good judge.
That's what it means.
You know, if you're a Christian cook, it means making really good meals.
That's what it means.
And doing your job first and not trying to change the world is actually the best way to change the world.
One of the things in this Jordan Peterson article that really stopped me cold, and I did not know this, is Jordan finds a speech by Vladimir Putin at Memory, where they translate speeches so they don't slip by.
Here's what Vladimir Putin was telling people.
He says, the advocates of so-called social progress believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness.
Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead.
The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all.
It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already.
And he talks about the failures of Stalinist communism and how this is exactly, they're going down exactly the same road.
Do you think that there's a way in which our fascination with this, our kind of religious cult-like following of this, is actually hurting America in a broader way?
Exactly The Same Road00:01:35
Is that too big a question?
Or is that a fair question given that speech?
No, I think it's absolutely hurting America in some really clear ways.
I go, look at the hostility and distrust you're seeing amongst groups now.
I go, I don't remember that.
I mean, you know, I'm a child of the 90s, and I just don't remember having these discussions where people, it is not good to be a culture where people are, one group is constantly on the lookout for offense to be offended, to be told that you should always be suspicious that something that happens to you that may be common to humanity is because of your race.
And the other side is completely terrified to have authentic conversations, to ask real questions, to how can you have a friendship with someone when you're living under this kind of fear?
You can't.
There's no real relationship there.
It's terrible.
No, it's true.
It's also true that when it's a power thing, you know, and who wants to be friends with a guy who's always pulling a power play on you?
I mean, I know guys like this in the writing business, novelists who are black and they just, every word out of their mouth is to remind you that their life is hard because if they get in an elevator, women clutch their purses.
And my feeling is, you know, all God's children got problems.
I'm not telling you mine.
Don't tell me yours.
Megan, I got to tell you something.
I'm really glad you came on.
I forgot why I called the Daily Wire after I talked to you, but I hope you will come on regularly and talk about these issues.
I think they're really important.
And I think you're doing great work.
The article is great.
It's called, again, How Hollywood's New Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Executives Are Shaping What's On Your Screens.