Inside the Disney Civil War: Ties to the Walter Kaitz Foundation

Many people have been wondering how it is that The Walt Disney Company went from a desire to moderate and remove itself from politics, all the way to where the company is just a few weeks later. After all, Disney was planning to make a company-wide policy that the company would stay away from modern issues that had nothing to do with the corporation’s bottom line. That message was intended to happen directly from CEO Bob Chapek in April of this year. Is it any surprise then that the forces inside Disney opposed to deescalating politically would strike out in March?

However, when the average person looks into who is behind the push for Disney to be politically active and why, they often find it difficult to gather any information. That’s why I have taken it upon myself to being releasing information in regards to where this is coming from. Today, we look at the Walter Kaitz Foundation.

The non-profit organization that has some of the biggest names in Hollywood serving on its Board of Directors (including Peter Rice, Chairman of Disney General Content, and James Pitaro, Chairman of ESPN — both major Disney execs). As such, despite its relatively meager budget and donations, the organization is tremendously powerful and filled with powerful people. Here’s how the WKF describes itself:

As the entertainment and telecommunication industry’s leading national foundation dedicated to advocacy around diversity, equity and inclusion, the Walter Kaitz Foundation provides resources and significant funding to key organizations that support vital programs and initiatives that further diversity’s impact. The foundation was initially established in 1980 as a non-for-profit with the purpose of advancing the contributions of women and ethnic minorities in cable telecommunications and today serves the broad embrace of diversity and inclusion across the entire industry.

In reality, the organization has become something of a trailblazer in promoting identity groups over individuals. Not only does the organization promote diversity, equity, inclusion… but it goes so far as to advocate for “belonging”. That’s a new category you might not hear much about from other organizations and which borders on the edge of a religious or spiritual concept. For the WKF, it’s no longer just DEI, it’s DEIb. The organization advocates for an idea known as the “Renaissance of Identity”, or as I understand it, the reemergence of tribalist thinking over individual meritocracy.

The non-profit isn’t a major player in giving monetarily towards its causes, but it is a huge component of corporations inside Hollywood grading themselves on human resources initiatives. While I am fully on-board with the need for entertainment to be reflective of society, as well as the clearly obvious necessity of tearing down systems of negative bias towards individuals based on immutable attributes (i.e. skin color, ethnicity, accent, country of origin, etc), I find that the Walter Kaitz Foundation’s means for achieving this — and far beyond — are intrinsically flawed. For example, the organization puts out reports for the industry but these reports seem to create a system by which corporations are always trying to find more ways to include “diverse representation” even when that representation goes beyond a natural reflection of society.

That is likely how one arrives at the conclusion of Karey Burke at Disney, she the former president of ABC:

SCOOP: Disney corporate president Karey Burke says, "as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child," she supports having "many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories" and wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities. pic.twitter.com/oFRUiuu9JG

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022

There’s a very important question to be asked of Karey Burke. If Disney is a global organization (and it is), is the racial minority statistic referring to global minorities or is the statistic she wants to achieve solely based on American minorities? If it’s solely based on American minorities, doesn’t that mean that the distribution of inclusion in Disney-produced material will be ethnocentric rather than globally cognizant?

But you see, they’re not thinking in that regard because much of this is tied back to the Walter Kaitz Foundation, a non-profit almost no average American has heard of, but which is shaping American culture behind the scenes via media audits. And if you’re thinking the WKF is politically linked, well… I won’t say you’re wrong. And remember, this is an organization with two of Disney’s biggest players on its board, as well as other huge names. I mean, we’re talking about the CEOs of Paramount and Fox Entertainment sit on the Board of Directors. This is not a small or uninfluential organization.

So let’s take a look at one of the organizations this non-profit empowers through a partnership called “Staff Me Up“. Sounds benign, right?

One is the QWOCMAP Organization whose self-description reads as such:

QWOCMAP creates, exhibits, and distributes films that authentically reflect the lives and address the social justice issues that concern African Descent/Black; Native American; First Nations & Indigenous; Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander; Southwest Asian, Middle Eastern, Arab, North African, South Asian; Asian, Southeast Asian, Central Asian; Latinx including indígena and afrodescendiente; and multi-ethnic lesbian, bisexual women, queer women of color (both cisgender & transgender), Two Spirit, intersex, and nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and transgender people of color (of any orientation).

Now you may agree that all of those different people groups need films that promote social justice issues. However, if you’re a major Disney executive partnered with an organization that promotes this, you can see how that would put you at odds with what Bob Chapek was about to attempt. If QWOCMAP is partnered with an organization which you serve on the Board of Directors to assist, and they would very much like gender nonconforming programming for children, you can see how that would not fit in the direction Disney’s current CEO wants to go.

Of course all of this has political and ideological connections, right? We’re not going to get into that because this isn’t a political or ideological website, and frankly that’s not what I want to go into day after day. I want to write about entertainment, theme parks and Disney. But to understand what is going on inside the Disney Civil War that is tearing the company apart, you have to understand the Walter Kaitz Foundation and its partnerships. So, there you have it. If you, the reader, want to look more into all of this, I’ve provided ample links now for you to begin your journey. You’ll probably find that not all the WKF and its partners are involved in is bad… that’s what I found. But some of it is. And some of it is very much at odds with Chapek. None of this is to say that representation or equality are bad things — far from it! But sometimes we need to be very thoughtful about how we achieve important goals. If I say I need to go to work fast and you provide me with a missile to ride, we’ve achieved the goal but in a way that doesn’t result in a better situation. Going towards entertainment that represents society by reverting to tribalism and identity groups over the importance of the individual… I’m not sure that’s taking us to a better tomorrow.

Anyway, that’s the story. For all the latest on the news that should be fun, keep checking out That Park Place. And, as always, drop a comment down below if you enjoyed or disagreed with this article. I try my best to respond when possible.

Update: 1:15 PM EST: If you are interested in an even more in-depth look at the conflict inside The Walt Disney Company, check out the latest interview between WDW Pro (the author of this article) and YouTube channel Valliant Renegade. Click here to watch.