rest of the world and warn us about it and tell us where to do business and where not to do business. That's exactly what they should be doing. I want more of that, not less.

Now if they told me not to do business in a place that didn't have any reason not to do business, then I would say, oh well, that's inappropriate. I want to do business with this country. You don't have any good reasons. Don't tell me not to do it. But if they know that the United States is likely to continue pressuring China and vice versa, if we know that, don't you think a little bit of heads up to our corporations is appropriate? A little bit of heads up, you know.

And the question was not will the government make it illegal to expand in China. That wasn't the question. If the question had been should the government make it illegal to expand, then I think the answer we're going to let corporations decide would be appropriate. But I think at least a warning would be fair.

And what do you think about this question of whether private companies will make their own decisions? Let's say the government doesn't get involved. Is it still true that private companies make their own decisions? I would add a caveat to that. Private companies do make their own decisions as long as I'm not interested. If I'm interested, and I am in the case of China, then they're not going to make their own decisions. I'm going to make China so toxic that they can't decide to work there.

So you have to ask yourself what is free will and what's their own decisions. There's some gray area here because I do think that I can pollute China enough in terms of people's opinion about how smart it would be to do business there. I do have the platform. I have a big enough platform. And because I'm the Dilbert guy, I have enough of a track record of telling businesses what they can't do. I've been doing it for years, for probably 30 years now. I've been telling corporations what they can't do, and then they stop doing it.

Do you know how many companies have told me that they stopped a policy because they saw it getting mocked in a Dilbert comic? A lot. A lot. It's not a random rare thing. A lot. The entire business management business book market fell apart when I started mocking it. I don't know if there's anything in business anymore that I've mocked that has survived. I mean even dress codes. Dress codes have largely gone away. I mean I was mocking those in the 90s. Cubicles started to go away. Pretty much anything I mock ends up being at risk.

So no, the companies do not have their own say about China. I will make it so difficult to do business in China because of the risk. It's a real risk by the way. I'm doing you a patriotic positive thing here, so there's no negativity to this. I will make it impossible.

What about ESG? The only reason ESG still exists in business is that I haven't taken it on yet. But when I do, I'll give it six months and that's gonna get really embarrassing. Now Dilbert doesn't have the same clout it used to have. Right in the 90s I could pretty much take something out in a week. Right now it would take a little while. But mockery is a really powerful force in the corporate world. No CEO wants to be on the receiving end of mockery. It's really terrible.

Now somebody, I was waiting for this comment. What took you so long? Somebody at YouTube said I'm drunk with power. I was looking for a little more pushback. I was looking for somebody to say, Scott, you're dreaming. You can't actually cause corporations to... Yeah I can. I actually can cause corporations to act differently. That is absolutely demonstrated in my history, and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't continue happening. So I'll only use my powers for good.

Speaking of power, Ron DeSantis has suspended a Tampa state attorney for being too woke, I guess. The attorney wasn't going to act on the state's new abortion restrictions, and DeSantis suspended him without pay for basically just not doing his job. What is the point of hiring a state attorney who doesn't believe the laws of his own state? No matter what you think about the abortion laws, no matter what you think about social justice and wokeness, no matter what you think about any of that, if a person gets hired to do a job and then says I'm not going to do it, I don't think there's any question about whether they have to go. I love this.

The other thing we learned is that DeSantis claims that he was not aware that his staff turned down the invitation to be on The View. Now I think he agreed with their decision, but what kind of staff tu