I'm So Old I Remember When Disney, the NFL, the Military and Massive Corporations Weren't Considers Havens of Communist Extremism!
If you had told the ten year old me that in 2023 our country would be seemingly more divided and dysfunctional than ever before and that Disney, the NFL, the military and huge corporations would be at the center of the conflict I would have believed you.
That’s because I grew up in the 1980s when Disney, the NFL, the military and huge corporations were all seen as not just innately conservative but also cornerstones of an old-fashioned conception of American life that stressed tradition, family values and physical as well as military strength.
If you would have told the ten year old me that in 2023 Conservatives would see Disney, the NFL, the military and huge corporations as unforgivably Liberal, even Communist in their extreme, anti-American, anti-white politics I would, however, have been deeply confused.
That’s because in a pre-social media age if you wanted to ascertain the politics or worldview of an organization you looked at them in their entirety. You looked at their history and who they supported over time.
You took a macro view, in other words. That, alas, was in a pre-social media age.
For easily offended conservatives, however, every organization can be meaningfully reduced to their most ostentatiously progressive gestures.
Take that, woke Hollywood!
Within this context the military’s centuries-long tradition of Neo-colonialism, racism of both the institutional and individual variety and empire-building is irrelevant because it has taken tentative steps to promote diversity and inclusion and make trans soldiers feel welcome.
To you and me that might seem like basic decency/keeping up with changing times/the bare minimum. To the right, however, the military is now a freaky deaky haven of Communist decadence more interested in making everyone trans than in protecting our country.
A Ben Garrison cartoon captures this crazed hysteria with an image of a rage-filled George Patton slapping figures helpfully labeled China Joe, Milley, Wokeism and “Trans” Nonsense.
There are only four figures in the cartoon , however, so Wokeism and “Trans” Nonsense are represented by a single crude, transphobic caricature of a blue-haired trans woman being righteously and correctly physically assaulted by a famously barbaric relic of the military’s distant past.
When I was a kid Disney wasn’t just a movie studio. It was a sensibility. It was an aesthetic. That sensibility and aesthetic were inherently Conservative in their nostalgic, backwards-thinking romanticization of an idyllic small town America that no longer exists and probably never did.
Then, in a tepid display of progress, a same sex couple kissed in the background of a Pixar cartoon and Republicans became convinced that the House of Mouse was now as debauched as Caligula, as sex-crazed as Jeffrey Epstein and as left wing as Karl Marx.
In the 1970s there was an acclaimed, Oscar-winning documentary called Hearts and Minds that drew an explicit link between the jingoism and male aggression of football and the jingoism and male aggression of the Vietnam War.
Football was seen, like Disney and the military, as one of the cornerstones of wholesome, folksy, old-fashioned America. Then a black man named Colin Kaepernick knelt during the National Anthem as a protest against police brutality and the NFL joined the military, Disney and the monsters over at Coors Lite as woke bogeymen for the easily offended right.
It somehow doesn’t matter to these lunatics that COLIN KAEPERNICK WAS BLACKBALLED FROM THE NFL FOR HIS POLITICAL GESTURE.
The quarterback literally sued the NFL for colluding to keep him out of the league and only dropped the suit after a settlement was reached.
Making enemies of institutions that have historically been allies allows the right to pretend that they are righteous underdogs who are being relentlessly persecuted by a “Woke” agenda pushed by extremists who hate America.
It also creates a market for alternatives to “Woke” products from various grifters on the right (such as Ben Shapiro, Candice Owens, Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson) eager to make a quick buck selling wildly inferior knockoffs of Pixar and Disney fare.
None of the organizations I’ve written about here is anywhere near as “woke” as the right pretends but acting like the enemy is everywhere and is after their children, their precious, precious children, feeds into the right’s persecution complex and sense that they are the only righteous souls in a high tech Sodom & Gomorrah.
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