The Gay Agenda? Or the Disney Agenda?

I saw an ad with Ben Shapiro in it on YouTube. I was quick, I only saw 5 seconds of it before I clicked it off. But wait, what was he complaining about? Disney? Disney, mega-corporation, monopolist, and enforcer of traditional values, is a radical leftist organization? That high-pitched, rapid-fire, nasal voice had succeeded in drilling into my brain. I had to look it up.

So I read a Shapiro op-ed.

In late March, reporter Christopher Rufo…

Yikes, I only got six words in before I had to use the puke bucket next to my desk. This is going to be hard. I’ll try again.

In late March, reporter Christopher Rufo released footage of top Disney employees vowing to inject their radical LGBTQ agenda into children’s programming.

Disney producer Latoya Raveneau told an all-hands meeting that her team works to push a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” in programming aimed at kids and sought to add “queerness” to such content. Disney corporate president Karey Burke announced that she was the mother of “one transgender child and one pansexual child” and that she would try to achieve a quota system whereby half of all Disney characters would be LGBTQ or people of color. Disney diversity and inclusion manager Vivian Ware stated that Disney’s beloved theme parks would be eliminating any mention of “ladies and gentlemen” or “boys and girls.”

Oh, really? You mean Disney is trying to broaden their reach and convince gay people to spend money on their product? I thought Shapiro loved capitalism! That’s all this is! Diversity pays, you know.

OK, look, I got through a whole two paragraphs of Shapiro. Let’s take a break and look up this terrible “queerness” video, and also get refreshed with the happy enthusiasm of Latoya Raveneau.

That’s on the channel of a right-winger and the comments are full of people talking about “groomers”, but ignore that. This is a Disney-branded promotional video. Shapiro talks about this as if it is a deep dark secret that Ace Reporter Rufo broke to the public, but it’s no big deal. It’s something Disney was proud of. What’s the problem?

It’s an opportunity for Shapiro to ramp up the hysteria.

This prompted a well-deserved firestorm for the Mouse House. Disney has long been left-wing on social issues — but in the aftermath of ginned-up controversy surrounding Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which protects small children from indoctrination on sexual orientation and gender identity, an angry coterie of employees pushed management to signal fealty even harder. So Disney’s brass did, announcing that they opposed the Florida bill and then turning over the company to its most radical contingent.

For indoctrination on sexual orientation and gender identity, read “teaching tolerance and acceptance”. Shapiro hates that. It’s not radical for people to reject the screaming homophobia of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, it’s actually a minimally humane position to take. Also, the “Happiest Place on Earth” would kind of like to avoid being identified as the “hatefulest place in America”, a title Florida and Texas are vying for.

The Left, caught with its hand in the kiddie jar, immediately swiveled and accused the Right of initiating this culture war. Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times lamented that she felt terrible for Raveneau, who, after all, was just “step[ping] up to defend the company’s queer friendliness, only to become a national object of right-wing fury and disgust,” and whose injection of LGBTQ propaganda into children’s content was “sweetly anodyne.”

Yeah. Watch the video. She was talking about allowing two cartoon characters of the same sex kiss in the background. It is pretty anodyne stuff, unless you’re one of those frothing fanatics who gets upset at the sight of two men possibly holding hands. Disney is not ever going to promote, say, a line of gay porn children’s cartoons.

For decades, the social Left has made inroads by arguing that they simply want to be left alone. The Right, by contrast, has argued that the Left’s agenda is far broader, that the Left demands cultural celebration of its sexual mores and that it will stop at nothing to remake society in order to achieve its narcissistic goals. Disney’s latest foray into the culture wars proves that the Right was correct, that the Left’s stated agenda was a lie and that its “not-at-all-secret” agenda targeted the most vulnerable Americans.

Disney shows no signs of backing away from the extremism its all-hands meeting unmasked before the world. And other corporations are following Disney’s lead, pushing wild Left advocacy instead of catering to the broadest possible market.

For narcissistic goals, read “request that you stop killing gay and trans people”. The most vulnerable Americans are the kids who don’t fit the conservative norm, who are bullied and abused, sometimes rejected by their families, treated as evil by people like Shapiro. Normalizing being different is not an attempt to recruit more people into a gay lifestyle — you can be whoever you want to be, which used to be an American ideal — it’s to get the people poisoned by the Shapiroesque mentality to stop harming them.

Society is already diverse, it’s not extremism to recognize that fact, nor is it wild Left advocacy. Cranky ol’ Ben is just going to have to wake up to the reality-based truth that 13% of the population are black, 13% are Hispanic, 7% are openly gay, 9% do not believe in gods, and that they all have a right to pursue happiness in America.

Disney and all those other corporations aren’t being Leftist, they see those percentages as slices of market share that they must absorb. Nothing more. They are steps on the path to total capitalistic domination.

You are meddling with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Shapiro. And also being kind of an ass.