I’m not so optimistic as to think the long national nightmare of “woke,” culture-subverting leftism is ending, but there are several signs recently that most good-hearted people, not just a few far-right pundits, are sick of it and eager to move on.
Some black critics now complain about their reputations constantly being yoked to D.E.I. programs, regulators’ and near-robotic corporate H.R. departments’ edicts supposedly promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Indeed, some black critics fear that reactionaries are starting to use “D.E.I.” as a racial insult—the modern, corporate-speak equivalent of the N-word.
Maybe if the p.c./SJW/woke/D.E.I. left-liberal establishment didn’t devote so much effort to playing terminological whack-a-mole over the past four decades—constantly declaring some previously-benign phrase forbidden and offensive and then moving on to a politically-charged new one—they wouldn’t now be paranoid that evil continues lurking behind every casually-spoken sentence that hasn’t yet been muffled. Drop the censorship, political obfuscation, and bureaucratic jargon and much may become not only clearer but, to the surprise of some, more civil.
The truth is that it’s not so much any particular ethnic subgroup of humanity that people hate. It’s these programs and regulatory edicts themselves, along with our bland regulator-overlords—and the even more bland corporate flunkies who turn the regulators’ edicts into long, boring corporate meetings and sudden, ill-explained firings. It’s mere happenstance that leads to, say, Easter, Ramadan, Trans Day of Visibility, and the eve of April Fool’s all being simultaneous, but it takes credentialed, diplomatic-sounding facilitators of therapeutic awareness-raising to turn such a trifling schedule conflict into a full-blown cultural war-of-all-against-all. There are professionals working to keep us at each other’s throats.
I’ll set a good example of the more easygoing, less militant, less jargony kind of tolerance each week this month by incorporating some low-key religious theme into my column despite not being at all religious. Then again, if this week’s prequel First Omen is frightening enough, perhaps I’ll come to believe.
On Earth, the closest thing to eternity may be the length of time it takes for bad bureaucratic rules to get reformed—and not just in government. Luckily, if big companies lose billions of dollars over and over again, there’s at least some small hope they’ll realize they’re doing things the wrong way, meaning they are more educable than government. And so it is that Hollywood may finally be starting to see its chronic left-wing messaging and shrinking audiences as a threat to their profits, even if the cowards fear that deviating from their recent woke path in any way risks running afoul of current society’s broader D.E.I. regime. (Not that racism isn’t real—it’s just not as easily policed as the people who write heavy-handed, spontaneity-crushing rules against it think.)
Disney has become emblematic of struggles over the current cultural regime—and in some unexpected ways.
Who would’ve thought decades ago that the Canadian, culturally subversive, possibly-bi Marvel character Wolverine and the Canadian, comedically subversive, possibly-bi Marvel actor Ryan Reynolds would find themselves becoming heroes to some on the right for giving conniptions to the left-wing head honchoes of Disney, mainly because Reynolds (and even the more easygoing Hugh Jackman, returning to the role of Wolverine), like any true artist, would rather stick to his vision—filled with violence and irreverence—in the imminent Deadpool & Wolverine movie than get distracted by left-messaging or affirmative-action casting?
She-Hulk is one of the characters who will not be appearing in the film despite rumored pressure from Disney higher-ups such as CEO Bob Iger—and despite or in part because of She-Hulk actress Tatiana Maslany’s surprisingly hostile public reaction to fans who want to keep things traditional, including her claim that Marvel doesn’t need Iron Man, since it now has the obscure but black, female, super-intelligent, and teenaged heroine Ironheart, who you can be forgiven for not remembering from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Reynolds has lately even sparred a bit with monstrous, left-liberal TV hostess Joy Behar (at ABC, which like Marvel is a Disney subsidiary). The man playing Marvel’s goofiest character, Deadpool—newly imported to the main Marvel universe from the recently-assimilated 20th Century Fox—is suddenly, as he puts it in the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer, “Marvel Jesus” coming to rescue Disney after a string of box office and TV-ratings disappointments that, coincidentally or not, tended to wear their wokeness on their sleeves.
Don’t be fooled by things like Disney firing X-Men ’97 showrunner Beau DeMayo just days before that show debuted last month. Had he been fired in, say, 1962, we might be justified in thinking a conservative Disney disliked DeMayo for being, as he constantly says, gay, black, adopted, and interested in writing about gay/trans themes, but in 2024, it must’ve hurt like hell for woke Disney to fire him, and they probably wouldn’t have if not for his explicit and thus potentially embarrassing OnlyFans page.
Disney’s so lefty these days, I can’t help wondering if DeMayo would’ve stood a better chance of remaining had he not publicly defended semi-anti-woke Henry Cavill when that actor was fighting in vain (and perhaps obnoxiously) to keep the fantasy show The Witcher true to its (less feminist) source material, a form of artistic integrity hated by the current left-revisionists in charge of most of these franchises. Not being entirely pro-revisionism may have made DeMayo too tolerant for the leftists to rush to his aid in his time of need.
With the original, print version of the Marvel Universe now but a footnote to the larger, more lucrative Hollywood version, the print people, laboring in relative obscurity, can get away with being a lot more overtly combative toward their more conservative fans. Marvel print editor Tom Brevoort just launched a more woke era of X-Men comics this year and explicitly called those fans who don’t like recent changes “cretins.”
At some point, the question has to become why customers put up with this punishment. Might “masochists” be a better epithet for them than “fans”? Or might rebellious fans, actors, and stockholders—not to mention the people silently stewing in countless other institutions—be on the verge of proving to the lefty cowards running these operations who’s really boss?
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey