If you’ve been watching any significant amount of Disney content over the past few years, there’s a question that’s probably crossed your mind at some point. As you gazed upon the two lesbian mothers in the kids’ show “Young Jedi Adventures,” or the nonbinary Jedi in “Tales of the Empire,” or the gay kisses in “Lightyear” and “Rise of Skywalker,” or the communist lesbian witches in “The Acolyte,” or the prominent trans character in “Baymax,” or the nonbinary “Lake” character in “Elemental,” or the gay moment in “Endgame,” or the purple gay cyclops police officer in “Onward,” or the first-ever biracial gay cartoon character in “Strange World,” you may have caught yourself thinking: What the hell is going on inside this company, if this is what they’re producing as entertainment for tens of millions of people? How dysfunctional are the inner workings of Disney, if they’re so fixated on sexuality and race that they have to ram so-called “marginalized” identities into every orifice of their films and streaming shows? What would it be like to actually work at a place like this?
We don’t have to ask those questions anymore.
Yesterday, James O’Keefe — formerly the head of Project Veritas, and now the CEO of O.M.G. media — provided an exclusive window into the inner workings of Disney. One of O’Keefe’s undercover operatives recorded an intimate conversation with a senior vice president at the company named Michael Giordano. And it’s simultaneously an incredibly shocking piece of footage, as well as everything you’d expect it to be.
In this clip, Giordano appears to admit, on multiple occasions, that Disney discriminates against job applicants on the basis of their skin color and gender. According to Giordano, the company will look at a white man and decide, because of immutable characteristics that he can’t control, that he’s disqualified from employment. In fact, on at least one occasion, this executive says that Disney higher-ups disqualified a half-black applicant because he didn’t look black enough.
I’ll provide the usual disclaimer here that I haven’t personally seen all of O’Keefe’s unedited footage. But here’s some of what O’Keefe aired. Watch:
When civil rights laws were first passed — laws that mandated that businesses stop discriminating on the basis of race — there were quite a few businesses in this country that had to close. In some cases, the owners simply didn’t want to serve black customers or hire black employees. In other cases, the business did attempt to integrate, but their clientele wouldn’t stand for it. They wanted to see certain races excluded from the whole operation, and when that was no longer allowed, they stopped patronizing the business entirely.
After watching this footage, for the first time, it’s not hard to see how a major entertainment juggernaut like Disney could some day meet the same fate as all those businesses that crumbled in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. If what this executive is saying is true, then there’s a very strong case to be made that Disney is flagrantly and systematically violating civil rights law. In this country, in pretty much every case, businesses are not allowed to deny employment on the basis of race or gender. Race or gender can’t even be one of the reasons why an employee is promoted or rejected, or hired or fired. And Michael Giordano appears to realize that, which is why he says on tape that Disney is likely to face a massive lawsuit in the near future.
Will the law actually be enforced against Disney? That remains to be seen. We all know that, for the most part, civil rights law works in one direction. It’s rare — though certainly not unheard of — for white plaintiffs to successfully sue for workplace discrimination. But in this case, there’s a Disney executive saying explicitly on tape that, in his estimation, the company discriminates on the basis of race or gender. And as of now, the only response from Disney has been that Michael Giordano has taken down his LinkedIn page. They haven’t put out any kind of explanation for why one of their senior executives would say that the company is systematically discriminating against white people. Of course, from internal Disney footage previously released by Chris Rufo, we know that Disney executives generally want to advance a culture of “racial equity” and so on. So it’s not exactly a stretch to assume they’re on board with this, at the highest levels.
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This is a very big problem for Disney. And it only gets worse when you look closely at the content they’re putting out lately. It certainly seems to back up everything this executive says, which is that Disney is a weirdly race-obsessed (and anti-white) corporation. When I last spoke about Disney’s brand collapse a few weeks ago, I hadn’t seen any footage from “The Acolyte” because it wasn’t available yet. But now that the show is out, and several episodes are available on-demand, there really is no way to sugarcoat this: Disney has produced a show that’s so bad, in every way, that it’s unwatchable. It has a 14% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes for the same reason it has an 85% Critics’ Score. This show is propaganda that’s written for activists — people who care only about “representation” and “feeling seen” — not people who actually want good entertainment.
I won’t go through a ton of scenes from this show because several other YouTube channels have already done so. “The Critical Drinker” on YouTube is maybe the single most effective critic of the plotting and characterization of this garbage show, in case you’re interested in that. Instead, I’ll show you a few clips of some of the worst scenes — the ones that highlight the extent to which identity politics now consumes Disney. The scenes include a shackled white Jedi killing himself because of his guilt, a reference to another characters’ pronouns, and a lesbian cult’s chant that has all the gravitas of a high school play. Watch:
I’ll admit I’m not up on my “Star Wars” lore. I’m not exactly an expert on the “canon.” But as I understand it, this stuff is not exactly consistent with the original vision for “Star Wars.” Basically, “The Acolyte” advances the idea that lesbian space witches are capable of conceiving a child with dark magic. But previously, in “Star Wars” canon, Anakin (who eventually becomes Darth Vader) was immaculately born through the Force. Which is a fact about “Star Wars” mythology that I just learned as I was preparing this monologue. It feels vaguely sacrilegious, to be honest, but anyway that’s apparently what made him special and unique. Except that now the lesbian space witches are doing it willy-nilly.
Not that this will surprise anyone, but I don’t personally care about this show “breaking” “Star Wars” lore. At the same time, I can understand how this whole debacle is frustrating to “Star Wars” fans. Disney continues to pilfer and mutilate its own intellectual property for the sake of “updating” it and making it progressive and feminist. Whatever made a pre-existing white male character special or interesting now needs to be undone, essentially — even if it completely upends the established narrative that people are supposed to become invested in. These people are not artists. They are activists. They view everything they do in the context of being brave resistance fighters against their white oppressors.
We don’t really have to guess about this. Listen to Disney’s own employees, and they’ll tell you. I’m not just talking about the vice president in O’Keefe’s video. The lead actress in “The Acolyte,” Amandla Stenberg, has just responded to the poor audience reviews of her show — as well as her unearthed viral interview with Trevor Noah about wanting to make white people “cry” — with some kind of bizarre song doubling down on her hatred of white people and men. She posted this music video on her Instagram to celebrate “Juneteenth.” Watch:
Now if you can somehow get past just how truly godawful the song is from an artistic perspective, the message is even worse. This wealthy, famous actress is the victim, and you the audience member — who just wants to watch a good “Star Wars” show — is the oppressor, because you’re downvoting her on Rotten Tomatoes. So she won’t “F— with your discourse” and your “misinformation.”
But it’s not misinformation, and to demonstrate that, it’s worth analyzing what Stenberg says about her interview with Trevor Noah. She claims in this music video that her Trevor Noah interview is being taken out of context. She says she really just wants white people to feel the same empathy that other audience members were feeling.
Of course, already, she’s saying that white people — solely by virtue of their skin color — lack empathy. And yes that’s an explicitly anti-white statement. But if you put that aside for a second, and watch a longer clip of her interview, you’ll see that she’s not even really upset that white people supposedly lack empathy. Instead, she’s upset that they don’t buy the media’s false narratives about black victimhood. Watch:
So in context, this footage is actually a lot more damning than the short viral clip where she says that she wants to see white people crying. What Stenberg is saying is that white people need to accept the media narrative that black people are murdered by police all the time, even when they do nothing wrong. Even when black people do everything right at traffic stops, they’re gunned down by all those white supremacist police officers. That’s what she’s saying.
In order to think that, you’d have to be completely ignorant of the statistics on police use of force, as well as wildly misinformed about the handful of high-profile incidents where the police have actually shot black suspects during traffic stops. But according to Stenberg, unless you agree with her on this point — as false as it is — then you lack empathy, like so many other vile white people.
This is apparently the only response we’re going to get from Disney and the media about the disaster that is “The Acolyte,” or their race-obsessed company culture. They’re just going to continue to attack their own fans for being racist and ignorant and misogynistic. And they have some support in the media for that position. A black supremacist website called The Root, for example, just published an article blaming the low audience scores on “racism and misogyny.” Kathleen Kennedy at Lucasfilm has already said the fans are misogynists. And now the lead actress is saying that she’s oppressed by all these horrible bigots who misunderstood her when she said she wants white people to cry.
In reality, all she’s really proven with the song is that her artistic mediocrity extends into multiple mediums. To be clear, the only person that Amandla Stenberg has to blame is herself. She’s the one who read these idiotic scripts — with the fires burning in space and the emasculated Jedi and the space lesbians — and decided to appear in this film. And she’s the one who decided to give this interview where she acted like a child, talking about how gay “Star Wars” is. I played this clip before, but it’s worth repeating because future business school classes will study this footage to learn how quickly a brand can destroy itself. Watch:
Leslye Headland and Amanda Stenberg talk about how ‘STAR WARS’ has always been gay
— Geeks + Gamers (@GeeksGamersCom) June 5, 2024
The lesbian showrunner in that clip, Leslye Headland, is responsible for hiring all the incompetent writers on “The Acolyte” who don’t remotely understand “Star Wars” or even pretend to. She’s the one who insisted on the diversity casting, and who hid behind her boss’ disgraceful attacks on her show’s fanbase. She also happens to be a Left-wing activist and former Harvey Weinstein protege. Alongside Amandla Stenberg, she’s decided to make a show that leans into all of the things that the audience hates about every “Star Wars” show or film since the prequel trilogy.
With the latest video from James O’Keefe, there’s some consolation, at least. Now we have a better idea of how an artistic catastrophe like this may have occurred in the first place. And if there’s any truth to the claims in that undercover video, there’s also some very good news for “Star Wars” fans — which is that Disney could soon face very real consequences for what they’ve done.
