We’re going to focus on the “quick” part of the Five Quick Things label for today’s entry, for a number of reasons.
Mostly, because your author is both slammed and pooped at the same time. It’s perfect that it’s Friday, because if this is what a week in 2024 looks like, I might have to take up amphetamines.
Hey, look what they’ve done for Biden. Other than those satanic dark pupils of his, he’s nearly able to make himself understood when they hop him up on uppers.
Too mean, you say? I’m just getting started.
1. Disney’s Just Begging for It, Aren’t They?
Hey, Star Wars fans! Aren’t you excited about Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy as the new director for the $67 billion movie franchise?
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. Come on, you know her, right?
No?
Well…
Obaid-Chinoy is the “first woman of color” to direct a Star Wars movie, as though you’re supposed to care. She’s Pakistani, though what she really is can be defined by the fact she went to Smith and Stanford. Obaid-Chinoy made a bunch of documentary films about how terribly women were treated back home in Pakistan, which led to an animated feature film, and that got her a gig at Disney as the creator of the six-episode Ms. Marvel miniseries for Disney+. Ms. Marvel, as you might know, turns out to be a 16-year-old Pakistani Muslim immigrant girl who beats the hell out of all the men (because that’s definitely new, and fresh, and a sure-fire hot seller).
You aren’t impressed yet? Well, this might not move your needle:
Disney hands over the $67 billion Star Wars franchise to a Pakistani feminist activist
Obaid-Chinoy on the new film she will be directing for the franchise:
"We're in 2024. It's about time we have a woman shape a story in a galaxy far, far away." pic.twitter.com/inhZHZrpHV
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 3, 2024
George Lucas’ wife was the editor of the first Star Wars movie. Women have shaped the franchise from its very beginning. It’s certain that Obaid-Chinoy had no idea about that fact at all.
Oh, and then there was this:
Here’s the feminist director of the next Star Wars film saying that her goal is to “make men uncomfortable.”
This movie is destined to be Disney’s biggest flop yet. pic.twitter.com/KaihbiA7Oj
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 3, 2024
Say goodbye to half the audience, Sharmeen! Or more than half, because Star Wars was never all that popular a franchise with women.
Anybody think that whatever this latest sequel Obaid-Chinoy presents us with — space Muslims, or feminists in orbit (nobody needs to go to the movies to see that!) — will make for a compelling story the non-woke will find interesting? Me neither.
This idiocy can’t continue. Disney, as currently constituted, can’t continue. The institutional capital mob has kept that stock propped up so far, but that’s only going to last so long as the losses mount. At some point, the hostile takeover will come — and when it does, it’ll be glorious to see the firings.
2. Who Did This?
Y’all are sooooo mean.
Come on, people. Everybody knows that Claudine Gay has never written a book.
3. They Keep Going
There is a whole lot of this on Xwitter this week:
So black students can’t learn stuff that makes white people uncomfortable but they also gotta make sure we correctly cite our sources?
Got it.
— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) January 2, 2024
I said in yesterday’s column that the DEI mob and the Obama Left weren’t going to back down on the Claudine Gay debacle. And they aren’t.
White people that say, “My family did not own slaves, and you were not a slave either; stop complaining, you have it good.” Have missed the entire “Impact” of slavery, along with segregation and how it's taken/ing an effect on Black Americans today.
— Kenny Akers (@KeneAkers) January 3, 2024
It’s hard to say this excuse-making is going to be very attractive, or that it’ll persuade anybody. But these people don’t try to persuade. They’re trying to whip up their supporters and create that hyper-racial cloud atmosphere they created in 2020.
As I’ve written in Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, this is the game plan and the key to everything.
The thing is, though, people are tired of all that. I don’t think it’ll work all that well. They need some new tricks, because Claudine Gay As Rosa Parks is not an A-list entry.
4. Thank You, Konstantin
Don’t you just love this guy? Konstantin Kisin is the Russian-born liberty advocate who made such waves with that amazing speech at Oxford a year or so ago (if you haven’t seen it, it’s here).
Now he brings us this, which is fantastic:
Let me say it again for the slow ones at the back:
There is no such thing as "positive" discrimination. There is only discrimination and it's always harmful, including to the people who are its supposed beneficiaries.https://t.co/FV2A7wRr0n
— Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) January 4, 2024
We need more Kisins. Let’s go make some this year.
5. The Announcement
If you saw this week’s episode of The Spectacle, you know that we’re going to try something fun in the coming weeks in this space.
Namely, The American Spectator is going to serialize a novel. The working title is King of the Jungle, and it’s about a reclusive red-pilled billionaire who runs afoul of a detestably left-wing presidential administration and its weaponized bureaucrats and law enforcement personnel, and that billionaire decides he’s had enough and decamps for a sanctuary in the wilderness along the Essequibo River in Guyana…
…just in time for the Venezuelans to invade.
The story will examine what happens if our man decides he’d rather slug it out with the Chavistas in the jungle than take a powder, and, as you can imagine, it’ll be the platform for a great deal of social commentary.
If it works out, this will fulfill all of the requirements Jim Valvano laid out for us in his famous Espys speech — it’ll make you laugh, it’ll give rise to thought, and it’ll move you to tears.
Well, at least you’ll get slightly pissed off. Or greatly pissed off.
When Melissa and I were committing to this project and I sent her the chapter outline, she said it made her mad, in a good way. Because this story will be fiction, but it’ll also contain a great deal of truth — truth that we would rather not have to accept.
Which I think is a, if not the, mark of good fiction.
Anyway, the first installment will make its way here toward the end of the month.
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