“We’re certainly not going to lessen our core values in order to make everyone happy all the time.”

There was this odd misunderstanding going around conservative circles, promoted by some ignorant influencers, that the Disney coup was a rebuke to the company’s embrace of wokeness.

Exactly the opposite.

Bob Iger, who had championed wokeness, orchestrated the downfall of CEO Bob Chapek, who had tried to take a less aggressive stance on radical politics. Now Iger is back and declaring vocally that Disney intends to double and triple down on its political extremism. That’s even as Strange World, Disney’s big film entry, designed around wokeness, just bombed massively at the box office.

… the corporate giant’s stance on LGBTQ+ inclusion.

The latter was an Achilles heel for Chapek in his roughly two-year run as CEO. After floating the message that Disney should not be involved in politics, employees and content creators led a full-on social media rebellion decrying his silence on issues like Florida’s incendiary policies on trans children and classroom policies in acknowledging queer people.

When asked Monday during an employee Q&A about where the studio would now fall on the matter, Iger said “one of the core values of our storytelling is inclusion, and acceptance and tolerance. And we can’t lose that, we just can’t lose that… how we actually change the world through the good must continue. We’re not going to make everyone happy all the time, and we’re not [going to] try to. We’re certainly not going to lessen our core values in order to make everyone happy all the time.”

The remarks were tweeted by numerous employees at the content studios, as well as parks and stores. One staffer noted that Iger’s answer came with “no hesitation.”

No surprise there.

CEO Iger is warning that Disney will push radical ideologies and anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell. Considering the company’s massive growth under Iger, from a struggling studio, to a dominant monster that has used its IPs to swallow up movie theaters and churn out content, owning everything from Marvel to Star Wars to FOX, it’s no surprise that he’s displaying arrogance and defiance in the face of the backlash.

As Iger puts it, Disney is not here to entertain you or to tell good stories. When he says that “one of the core values of our storytelling is inclusion, and acceptance and tolerance”, what that means is that political preaching is a core value, and “we’re certainly not going to lessen our core values in order to make everyone happy all the time.”

Or at all.

The Variety article references the Disney Adult. That’s what I used in my article, Disney Isn’t for Kids, to help explain the company’s transformation into a militantly family-unfriendly cult.

60% of Disneyland visitors were adults with no children. Only 36.7% of Disney World visitors had children under 18. The largest demographic for the theme parks, like the movies, are millennials. They are also members of the fandoms who are likeliest to spend money on licensed merchandise, and on toys and movie tie-ins that are Disney’s bread and butter.

In 1966, the idea that a single adult would spend more money on Disney merchandise than a family of four would have seemed ridiculous. In 2022, it’s just the new normal. If you doubt that stop by a theme park and see how many of the adults with no children wearing every single piece of Disney merchandise on sale would love to lecture you about queer theory.

These are the people Disney caters to now. Not little girls who want to be princesses. That’s why its theme parks will no longer address little girls as princesses. That’s also why rides like Pirates of the Caribbean or Jungle Cruise are being revamped to be more politically correct. Disney’s new woke demographic is much pickier than even the pickiest child could be.

It’s also sexually creepy.

Disney’s new demographic are adults who have never properly grown up and on some level still think of themselves as children. That’s also the profile for the average child molester. And of the kind of adult who insists that schools force children to “explore their sexual identities”

Iger knows what he’s doing. Whether he’ll get away with it is another matter.

Article posted with permission of Daniel Greenfield