Before Kamala Harris got past the Obamas (who delayed endorsing her), before the permanent bureaucracy was complicit in allowing an assassination attempt, and before Joe Biden, worshiped by the media for his brilliance and energy before they decided he was too old and frail to keep going, withdrew, the outrage that conservative cultural commentators on Substack and talk radio were concerned with was lesbian witches, particularly black lesbian witches, on the new Disney+ Star Wars series The Acolyte.
Most of this broke out before the third episode was released, the episode where a black witch, Mother Aniseya, who leads a coven on the planet Brendok, strokes the face of her female lieutenant. The lieutenant was a surrogate for black twin girls, the only children in the all-female coven, who are the daughters of Mother Aniseya. Conservatives were reacting to interviews with the series’ writers and cast, who enjoyed poking anyone in the eye who’d be irritated by “queerness” injected into the script.
The Acolyte does have an incestuous lesbian element in its creation. The creator/head writer/showrunner, Leslye Headland, has been married for eight years to actress Rebecca Henderson, who plays the mother superior Vernestra Rwoh to an order of Jedi who are sent out to investigate the witches, resulting in the death of everyone in the coven except the twin girls.
Conservative critics are upset not only with the lesbianism (the black lesbianism!) in the plot, but by the absence of white men. And there’s only one white male actor in the cast, who plays a very subservient, lisping Jedi, who’s a servant of Vernestra Rwoh. Henderson—who looks when blonde like Barbara Eden’s quirky, much less beautiful, little sister—gives off heavy lesbian vibes, but she’s not a black lesbian. She’s an alien and she’s green. As for the absence of white males, Headland does have a kind of excuse. She was Harvey Weinstein’s personal assistant for six years. Which seems both long enough to be traumatizing but also long enough to suggest (silence=) complicity.
I was defending The Acolyte in the beginning. The first few episodes were as well-done as most other Disney+ Star Wars fare. Not as good as The Mandalorian but not much worse than any of the other series. Now that The Acolyte has had its run, it was something of a snooze. It was somewhat interesting in establishing three different spiritual or ethical approaches to The Force. The Jedi believe they’re servants of the Light side of the Force, by never using it out of anger or hatred. The witches believe there’s no good or bad, just taking power and using the Force (which they also call the Thread) for your own ends, and then paying whatever consequences come due as you re-weave the threads of fate. “This isn’t about good and evil,” Mother Aniseya tells her daughters at one point. “This is about power, and who is allowed to use it.”
The series introduces more about the nature of Sith Lords, who view tapping into dark emotions as the true way to become stronger in the Force, in opposition to what they view as the treacly false religion of the Jedi. Much as happened in the “multicultural” Star Trek: Discovery, where Michelle Yeoh outshone the various black, gay, nonbinary, Latino etc. actors once white actors were largely removed from the cast, Asian actor Manny Jacinto as a Sith Lord behind all the attacks on the Jedi is the most interesting character—visually and in terms of action—in the show. If you want black characters as the heroes, and don’t want white men in the cast, Asians get all the juicy villain roles by default.
I think what critics of the anti-white Jihad at Netflix and Disney+ should complain about is not that these shows are infected with the DEI mind virus, but that they’re boring, and end up with characters who are short and frumpy. Amandla Stenberg, the biracial (Danish and African-American) actress (who played the child Rue in The Hunger Games) plays the young black twins who are “the acolytes” and the producers make her look as interesting as a stale potato, though in other appearances outside the show she has a lot more rizz.
Similarly, smarter commentators on Twitter are pointing out that criticizing Kamala Harris, recently re-classified from a moon to a star, should concentrate on how she’s a nullity with no accomplishments, not on her having been hired just for checking the DEI boxes. Abigail Shrier had two great tweets this week.
First: “But here are four attacks on Kamala that will backfire disastrously: 1) She is a dumb ‘DEI hire. 2) She's a slut who used sex to get ahead. 3) She has an awkward laugh and a goofy dance. 4) She locked up too many people for drug offenses.”
Second: “Here are four things about Kamala that swing state voters will care to know: 1) She is deeply hostile to American energy, calling to ban fracking and off-shore drilling. 2) She had no interest in securing our southern border, even when it was made her unique responsibility. 3) She fully supported Biden's policy of making gender medical transition *more accessible* to minors and Biden's push to include males in girls' sports. 4) In June of 2020, she urged her supporters to post bail for BLM rioters, even tweeting [a] payment link.”
Critics of these intersectional flops should point out how they fail as entertainment (or policy), not their DEI agendas. As the featured review at the International Movie Database begins: “This felt like the most un-Star Wars product released since Disney took over. Super bland characters, extremely predictable script, and poorly written dialogue.” I wonder if many voters won’t be saying the same by November about Kamala Harris? Will Planet Kamala, elevated from a moon to a star, prove to be just space debris?