Culture Friday - Disney’s not-so-secret agenda

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, April 1st, 2022. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Let’s bring in John Stonestreet. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast and he joins us now. Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning!

BROWN: Well, if you missed it, I’m not sure how you missed it.

Of course, I’m talking about actor Will Smith's onstage attack on comedian Chris Rock. Rock had told a cruel joke at the expense of Smith's wife, referring to Jada Pinkett Smith's medical hair loss.

People are still talking about the "slap" heard around the world, including WORLD Opinions writer Jerry Bowyer.

I thought Jerry nailed it by boiling it all down to God's word—James 3:5 “The tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire.”

Jerry goes on to say… “The only answer to a social contagion of toxic speech is a contagious outbreak of resistance to the devil. This starts with acknowledging the Biblical truth that words matter.”

Is it really that simple, John, do ya think?

STONESTREET: Wait a minute, Will Smith smacked Chris Rock? I hadn't heard about that. No, I'm just kidding. Of course, everyone's heard about it, which is what makes it great for the Oscars. Because suddenly, people cared about the Oscars again. So maybe Will Smith actually made the Oscars great again. Sorry, all jokes aside, it's hard to take this as big of a story as it has become. Because it is happening at one of the annual gatherings in which celebrities congratulate themselves for being celebrities, and we're all supposed to care about it. And America really largely has stopped caring about it. And yet at the same time, what you saw, I think, in that incident was just a lot of sadness, a lot of brokenness. I mean, clearly Will Smith is not okay. I just watched King Richard, by the way, which is the film that he won Best Actor for it, he deserved it. I mean, unbelievable. Unbelievable performance. What an incredible portrayal there. And he is as talented as they get. But Jerry is of course, right. The tongue is this amazingly powerful thing. And Chris Rock’s sharp tongue towards Jada, and Will Smith's, you know, response. And it is this thing, where we're driven as human beings by more than instinct. You can see that in this incident, that there's something about our conscience, there's something about our relationships, there's something about our loyalties and our virtues that drive who we are, we're driven from a center in a way that no other living thing is.

And of course that is a contrast to what so much of the message is coming out of academia and Hollywood in the press, that we are instincts, that we just live by our, you know, our sexual instincts or our emotional expressions or something like that. And this just proves that there's more to it. There's a lot of conversations to be had here. Really, I mean, I joked about how, who cares. But, you know, it really is something that points to a number of things, including, well, you know, 75 years ago, if Will Smith had not defended his wife's honor, he would have been the bad guy. But there's a long history here. You know, a story emerged from a book that Will Smith wrote, I think, in the last year or so, of a time that he remembered growing up in a home with an abusive dad and his dad punched his mom and he didn't do anything. That's a story that came out. And he's regretted that and so here, you have this idea of playing this tennis star dad who fiercely protected his girls and had a plan, you know, as the movie and, and the story goes, and the plan worked for Venus and Serena Williams, just so many things going on here. And it's hard to kind of reduce it down to one because there are so many things.

EICHER: So I’ll take the flip side of this issue, I think.

Because I’d like to talk about how big tech “slaps” people, how it uses its power to silence free speech.

It seems like we can’t go a day without another example of censorship on the part of platforms like Twitter. Take the issue of the public health official Dr. Levine who’s taken the name Rachel, a man who now claims to be a woman.

The Babylon Bee, of course, mocked USA Today for naming Dr. Levine as one of the "women of the year," so the Bee bestowed the award “man of the year,” posted that to Twitter, and promptly got locked out of its Twitter account.

So I think my question is what’s the line between calling out things that are clearly offensive, as in the case of Chris Rock, and standing up against abuses of power, as in the case of big tech?

STONESTREET: You know, I've been thinking a lot over the last couple weeks about something that I have used for years in teaching about post modernism. And of course, when we first started talking about post modernism as a worldview, and as a key to understanding our culture's 25 years ago, and things have changed, in some significant ways, but it's Frederick Nietzsche's parable of the madman, and in it Nietzche has this kind of crazy man jump into the midst of this educated elite group of Europeans and say, God is dead. And you know what that means, and goes on to spout all the various things that that means that there's no longer any up or down, we are getting colder, and it's getting darker and, and my favorite phrase is, “are we not straying is through an infinite nothing”. You know, in other words, we've lost all orientation for up and down and right and wrong. And so all that's left is outrage, and of course, Nietzsche’s parable of the madman ends with the madman saying, I've come too soon, you guys have done this, and it's coming, but you're not ready for it. And that was 120 some years ago, he wrote that. I'm wondering if the thing that was still on its way, as he put it in the parable, the madman is now here, where we've got a culture where the inconsistencies are stunning. And just observably absurd. The NCAA during March Madness, ran a series of commercials celebrating themselves for inclusion a week after giving, especially Title Nine inclusion, especially the all the opportunities, talking about giving opportunities, two weeks after giving a Women's Championship to a man - without blinking.

It's just hard to know where this begins. So I don't know that we have a way forward here, Nick, unless we can find some sort of fixed orientation point for what's right and what's wrong, what's good, and what's bad, what's up, and what's down. What's noble, and what's toxic. And right now, we don't have any of that.

EICHER: I’m sure you heard about this one. I want to play the audio of a video that’s going around from the investigative journalist Christopher Rufo, somehow he obtained video from a Disney zoom call, which has Disney creators bragging about how they insert all kinds of gay propaganda into Disney entertainment products. You’ll hear executive producer Latoya Raveneau talking about how she—her words—adds “queerness” to children’s programming, and nobody stops her. The audio’s a little digitized, but you’ll catch the drift. Have a listen:

RAVENEAU: Our leadership over there has been so welcoming to like, my like, not-at-all secret gay agenda. And so like I feel like I felt like it was I mean, like, maybe it was that way in the past. But I guess like something was to happen in the last like, like, they were turning it around. They're going hard and then all that like momentum, but I felt like that sense of I don't have to be afraid to like, let's have these two characters kiss let's in the background. Like I was just wherever I could just basically adding queerness to like, if you see anything queer. But like, I just was like, no one would stop me and no one was trying to stop me.

Hm, more “likes” in there than a Tweet from the cool kids. Anyway. Again, that’s Latoya Ravaneau, a Disney producer talking about how she and others have put in place a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda”—her words—and how she’s regularly, again, her words, “adding queerness” to children's programming.

STONESTREET: Yeah, I mean, you know, this is an example is anybody really worried about Disney not saying gay. I mean, that they've been saying it nonstop, you know, for years now. And as we saw in the video there, the plan is to say further. And then, you know, this is the thing for all those that have, you know, reacted back and saying, oh, you know, you parents are taking it too far. You know, we're coming after your kids, how ridiculous! Like they're coming after kids! But you know, what that video made clear is that the biggest and most popular franchise for distributing entertainment to children has an agenda, has a gay agenda, a gay and transgender agenda. They have that. That's not you know, it's not a question, it's like, you know, people saying all these parents are going to the school boards overreacting when we have videos of school board members and teachers saying this is what we have to do. And parents need to, you know, stay out or keep them out or you know, whatever. It is time for parents to protect their kids. It won't do us any good to call a bunch of concerned parents, or concerned Christian leaders extreme for pointing out what's actually happening. And right now the Christian community is so intent on rooting out people who were too supportive of President Trump that anybody else who calls out anything is too extreme on another side. This is an agenda that's actually happening, and it's going after our kids, and it's grooming to join a cause that should be considered child abuse by any other name. And I think my guess is, we're going to see it's about time for the Biden administration to start rolling back some of the regulatory things that were put in place by President Trump and issue their own regulatory administration rules out of HHS and other things. And we'll see that this agenda actually has a place in the state, as well as in entertainment and commerce. That's my guess.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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