A unique confluence of events has kept me offline for most of September and it’s just as well. From a mental health perspective, it is far better to focus on painting the house than the latest online ravings of the unhinged left. That being said, attention must be paid to Disney’s decision to reinstate Jimmy Kimmel, thereby passing up one of its last available off-ramps before its almost certain destruction.
From Woke Business to Woke Hostage
Like many mega-corporations, Disney decided that the easiest way to deal with the woke outbreak was to capitulate. After all, adding a few diversity hires and moving branding in what appeared to be the clear direction of the popular culture seemed like a no-brainer. That the culture was actually sharply divided never seemed to occur to the upper management, nor did anyone in the marketing research department grasp that Disney’s core customer base was in fact on the opposite side of that division.
Nevertheless, Disney plowed ahead, buying and destroying Marvel Comics, Star Wars and also wrecking its legacy properties with woke garbage. The magnitude of these financial mistakes is staggering. Star Wars cost $4 billion and is effectively worthless. It has zero market pull, having been reduced to made-for-VHS movies and community access-quality TV shows.
Other businesses did the same, but because they were grounded in merchandise rather than entertainment, making a course correction was relatively simple: fire the marketing agency, shut down the DEI division, and go back to profitability. American Eagle is still printing money courtesy of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans.
But Disney is in the entertainment business, which is almost entirely run by dim-witted theater kids steeped in Marxist theory and Satanic influences. This makes changing direction hard, even when the costs of maintaining the status quo seem prohibitively high. Put simply, Disney is finding that once one is riding a tiger, it’s devilishly difficult to safely get off.
The Truth About Antifa
The historical roots of Antifa go back to the street brawls in Weimar Germany, and its greatest moment came during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). Antifa was a motley collection of leftist groups, the military arm of the Popular Front movement (“No enemies to the left!) that combined socialists, anarchists, Trotskyites and Stalinists into an uneasy coalition. Contrary to most histories, the war in Spain wasn’t between an “embattled democracy” and fascism but radical leftists versus everyone else. The Nationalists were a grab-bag of moderate socialists, centrists, monarchists, militant Catholics and yes, a tiny fascist movement (Falange Espanola) led by mostly apolitical generals. As my book on the topic (Long Live Death) documents, the biggest difference was that the Nationalists didn’t really want to do anything to Spain, they just wanted to stop Antifa from burning the place to the ground. Wherever it was in control, Antifa went on a spree of looting, burning and lynching – so much so that the famed Prado Museum staff crated up its priceless works of art and hid them lest they be caught up in the storm of destruction.
All well and good, but the key point is that Antifa was so violent that it couldn’t even get along with itself. After the initial show of unity and the seizure of power, the tensions within the leftist coalition was too much, and the result was the famous May Days of 1937, when the Stalinist wing seized total control, killing or imprisoning dissidents. George Orwell, a volunteer who thought he was fighting fascism, narrowly escaped death during the upheaval and later wrote about it in Homage to Catalonia.
So yes, Antifa has always been violent, always committed to destruction and always used force (or the threat of it) to enforce its will. It is “an idea” in the sense that Jihad is an idea, and it relies on an international web of affiliate organizations to sustain it. These are the people Disney has effectively aligned itself with.
Jimmy Kimmel’s Pyrrhic Victory
Disney blinking in the face of a leftist backlash and returning Jimmy Kimmel the airwaves seals its fate. The current boomlet of ratings will fade then plumb new lows, but firing him will now be impossible. The wokes have learned that violence works, and more affiliates will be attacked or threatened with violence. Expect these tactics to also be used in terms of renewing unwatchable streaming series. Review bombing will be replaced with bomb threats, encouraged by Disney’s own employees.
Antifa’s long-term goal is the destruction of modern society and its replacement with a dictatorship of the proletariat. The “moderate wing” consists of people who have run out of Molotov cocktails. There is no way a business can survive with allies such as these.
I expect the sponsors will nominally remain onboard, discretely and gradually cutting their ad buys without making any public announcement, lest they be caught up in the turmoil. Nevertheless Disney’s bottom line will continue to suffer as the armed woke mob take a more vocal and high profile role in determining what projects are greenlighted and what shows Disney is permitted to cancel.
The more Disney concedes, the greater the demands will be. Dropping Kimmel would have carried costs in the short run, but it would have shown the company is willing to stand up to the militant left. The stakes for the next confrontation will be much higher.
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English (US) · 