Tag: disney

Police are Still Weaponizing Copyright to Prevent Transparency

YouTube and other social media websites have strict rules on playing copyrighted content. Police have been using that to prevent embarrassing videos from being posted on the platforms.

Residents in Santa Ana, California were woken up by blasting music around 11pm on April 4, a Monday. But the music was not a bass bumping rap song or a heavy metal piece with screaming vocals, it was “We Don’t Talk about Bruno” from the animated Disney film “Encanto.” And it was not being played by a teenage house party or an inconsiderate driver with a loud sound system, but a police vehicle.

Police responded to a stolen vehicle call in the neighborhood when an observer who runs the YouTube channel Santa Ana Audits started recording the activity. That’s when officers started blasting the Disney owned track, in an apparent attempt to prevent the video from being posted on YouTube and Instagram. Thanks to those platform’s algorithmic copyright enforcement, any video that includes a copyrighted song is susceptible to being removed. Its channel owners are also subject to warnings and even getting banned from the platform.

Unfortunately for Santa Ana Police, they happened to be in the neighborhood of city councilman David Penaloza who, like many of his neighbors, was awakened by the ruckus caused by the city’s police department.

Penaloza came outside and confronted the officer, who admitted that what he was doing was intended to prevent the video captured by Santa Ana Audits making its way onto YouTube.

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Confessions of a Disney writer

For many years, I made my living writing TV shows for Disney. I was proud of my work, considering it a privilege to make kids laugh all over the world. But in light of Disney’s disastrous embrace of pro-pedophilia policies, I’m glad that I grew disillusioned with kids’ TV and walked away from the field.

Every kids’ TV writer knows that, when crafting a story, you have to be careful about “modeling behavior.” Whatever kids see, they imitate, so you should “model” positive traits in your scripts, particularly when writing for preschoolers. Imagine inserting a pint-size Larry David character in your story who is obnoxious, argumentative, and sneaky. Inevitably, you’d get back notes from the story editor telling you to revamp the script to avoid modeling negative behavior.

So Disney’s recent commitment to “add queerness” wherever possible can’t be explained as just trying to teach tolerance and inclusivity. The executives know that by showing “queerness,” they are modeling queerness and encouraging kids to imitate that behavior.

In fact, Disney has had issues with sexualizing children for a long time. Cole Sprouse, a former Disney Channel star, recently noted that he and his co-star brother both suffered trauma from their acting career. He added, “The young women on [Disney Channel] were so heavily sexualized from an earlier age than my brother and I that there’s absolutely no way we could compare our experiences.”

You only need to witness the spectacular flameouts of Disney child stars Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan to wonder what traumas changed them from adorable ingenues into hypersexual vixens. Tracking the endless legal troubles, destructive addictions, and mental breakdowns of former Disney stars has become almost a parlor game, as in this depressing article, “20 Child Stars Ruined By Disney.” What on Earth happened to those beautiful kids that destroyed their sanity?

We do know that Disney has a history of exposing its young actors to convicted child molesters. Brian Peck served 16 months in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of molesting a Nickelodeon child actor. One year after his release, Disney hired him to work on the children’s series Yay, Me! Starring London Tipton and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. Victor Salva served 15 months in jail for raping and videotaping a boy who was acting in a film he directed. Nevertheless, Disney hired him to direct the film Powder.

And then there’s the case of James Gunn, the hugely successful writer-director of the first two Guardians of the Galaxy films. Disney fired Gunn in 2018 after his disgusting sexual tweets about young boys prompted an outcry. Disney’s honcho publicly proclaimed that Gunn’s tweets were “inconsistent with our studio’s values, and we have severed our business relationship with him.” But that didn’t last long. A few months later, Disney quietly rehired Gunn to direct Guardians of the Galaxy 3, after various stars of the series wrote an open letter begging for Gunn to come back. So much for studio values.

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As Disney Employees Protest Florida for Protecting Kids, Dozens Have Been Arrested for Child Sex Crimes

“So far, a total of 32 have been convicted, with the remaining cases pending,” is not a comment you want to hear when it comes to an entertainment company. But the fact remains that dozens of Disney employees have been arrested for child sex crimes in the past and this is alarming.

Disney’s lengthy history of hiring individuals jailed for a multitude of child sex offences has fallen into criticism via the company’s resistance to Florida’s inaccurately labeled “Don’t Say Gay” policy, which tries to safeguard children from exposure to damaging gender ideology and activism.

Disney officials first remained neutral on the measure, which prohibits instructors from promoting alternative gender identities and LGBTQ activism to pupils in kindergarten through third grade, before being persuaded by their left-wing employees to condemn it.

“Florida’s HB 1557, also known as the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, should never have passed and should never have been signed into law,” claimed the company in a public statement.

“Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that,” in a gesture presumably geared at calming its disgruntled staff, Disney added.

Workers at Disney, on the other hand, have been convicted for a range of sex crimes against children, such as attempting to have sex with kids and possessing child pornography.

In a 2014 CNN article, the company’s pedophilia issue was exposed, with at least 35 Disney World personnel jailed in the eight years since 2006 for alleged child sex crimes.

“So far, a total of 32 have been convicted, with the remaining cases pending,” explained CNN at the time of publication.

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Disney’s ‘secret gay agenda’ caught on camera

In a virtual meeting of Disney executives in response to Florida’s controversial parental rights bill, an executive producer for the iconic entertainment giant disclosed that her team has implemented her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda.”

Latoya Raveneau said she and her colleagues are regularly “adding queerness” to children’s programming.

The video was publicized exclusively by Christopher Rufo, whose research on Critical Race Theory in K-12 public schools has prompted parental activism across the nation.

Rufo also posted video of Disney corporate president Kathy Burke saying that “as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child,” she supports having “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories.” She said she wants a minimum of 50% of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities.

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Disney censors The Simpsons episode with Tiananmen Square reference in Hong Kong

Disney+ has censored an episode of The Simpsons in Hong Kong, where the streaming service recently launched. The episode was censored over references to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Until June last year, Hong Kong operated separately from China. Hong Kongers enjoyed more freedoms than the mainland.

However, since Beijing enforced the national security law in Hong Kong, the censorship laws enforced in China started applying on the island. 

On social media, Disney+ subscribers began reporting that an episode in Season 16 had been removed in Hong Kong. 

We’ve managed to confirm that the Season 16 episode “Goo Goo Gai Pan” has been removed in Hong Kong.

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It’s High Time For A Third ‘Save Disney’ Campaign To End Its Racial Segregation

“I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing — that it was all started by a mouse.” So said Walt Disney in a 1954 television special, referring to Mickey Mouse, which brought his eponymous company enduring success. Nearly seven decades later, executives at The Walt Disney Company apparently think everything stems from race. Disney’s embrace of critical race theory has turned a company created by its namesake to provide wholesome entertainment for the entire family into a hotbed of division.

Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute recently obtained a presentation given by Disney to its employees regarding its “Reimagine Tomorrow” diversity initiative. The presentation instructs Disney cast members to “challenge colorblind ideologies and rhetoric,” and “avoid conflating the black experience with other communities of color,” because of “a unique history that has led to anti-black racism.”

The presentation does not merely attempt to define employees by race and gender, or reference concepts of critical race theory like “white fragility,” intersectionality, and microaggressions. It goes further, actively indoctrinating cast members by telling them to “examine and work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness to understand…what needs to [be] healed.” And it pits workers against each other, encouraging cast members to “be accountable” by flagging “problematic posts” on company message boards.

The presentation’s obsessive focus on race, racial and cultural divisions, and America’s flaws directly contradicts the image of a company firmly rooted in Americana. One cannot easily reconcile the images of “Main Street, U.S.A.” — fashioned to resemble Disney’s boyhood home of Marceline, Missouri — with language instructing employees to “reflect” on the country’s “racist infrastructure.” Does CEO Bob Chapek consider America a racist country, and if so, why does the company promote nostalgia for a nation with “a long history of systemic racism and transphobia?”

After Rufo’s reporting was published, Disney issued a statement but then removed the entire diversity and inclusion program from its internal company portal.

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KERMIT CANCELED? Disney Slaps ‘Offensive Content’ Label On The Muppet Show

Disney has decided that “The Muppet Show” — featuring Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy — contains “offensive content” and can now be seen only on an adult account.

When viewers open the streaming service, which made five series available last Friday, viewers are greeted with the disclaimer: “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” The Daily Mail reported.

“Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe,” the statement says.

Said the Mail: “The warning is believed to refer to Muppet characters designed as stereotypes of Native Americans, Arabs and East Asians.”

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