One of the great rhetorical weapons in the activist investor’s arsenal is to blame the target of their ire—a CEO, a board of directors or both—for causing “disruptions.” And not the good kind those Silicon Valley types are always talking about, but the kind that arise when regulators, who have already expressed their mild irritation at transatlantic vigilante campaigns against whistleblowers, decide to dig a little deeper into your ties to a dead pedophile. This can be effective, if really somewhat beside the point, when you are seeking the firing of said disrupter. The problem arises when a pandemic shuts down the global economy, which would make said ousting of said disrupter a disruption in and of itself, and at a very delicate time, to boot, and thus make the activist the bad kind of disrupter that said activist has been railing against.