Disney+ to America’s Children: Lincoln Didn’t Free the Slaves
“Proud Family: Louder and Prouder,” a recent Disney+ reboot of the original “Proud Family” children’s cartoon (2001–05), was always going to be a social-justice routine. The franchise’s addition of new characters such as “Maya Leibowitz-Jenkins, a 14-year-old activist who isn’t afraid to use her voice for good” (per Seventeen) and singer-activist Lizzo — playing, for some reason, herself — had all the trappings of the ongoing effort to politicize even the most innocuous and innocent cultural products. As the Disney Channels Worldwide president said during an interview in early 2020, the company wanted the reboot to renew the original show’s “brilliant social commentary on our life and times,” delivered “under the guise of a family comedy.” Parents may be surprised to hear that “family comedy” needs to be a “guise” for anything at all, but such is the state of American culture.
The Daily Wire reports that the scene is from a recent episode that “reviews the history of Juneteenth when the kids discover their town’s founder was a slave-owner.” And of course, the logical conclusion is a sweeping indictment of America itself — “a systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for” — that includes “plantation owners, northern bankers, New England ship-owners, the Founding Fathers, and current senators among those who had profited on the backs of slaves,” the Daily Wire notes. Pictures of Black Lives Matter protests, repeated demands for reparations, and the debunked Michael Brown “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra make guest appearances in the rant. Bizarrely, references to the Illuminati, the New World Order, and the idea that Abraham Lincoln didn’t really “free the slaves” — because “only we can free ourselves” and “emancipation is not freedom” — slip in, too.
Is America tired of this yet? Is inculcating self-hatred in your children why you’re paying $7.99 a month for Disney+? It’s an exhausting routine, but its survival is sustained by that exhaustion itself — normalizing the outrageous to the point where most people no longer have the energy to be outraged. But outrage is more than merited. And parents should be taking their money elsewhere.
