The Left has raised quite a stink over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which forbids “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” through the third grade. Although the bill is popular across demographics, the Walt Disney Company, which has a large presence in the state, has been bullied by a small but loud group of obsessive progressives inside and outside of the company to take a foolish stand against the bill, one that will likely prove counterproductive (if it hasn’t already).
Entertainment behemoths such as Disney are happy to throw their political weight around in the United States. But in China, it’s a different story. (For more on this story, read Eric Schwartzel’s excellent Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.) Disney itself has altered films with the Chinese market in mind — to say nothing of its Mulan remake, a production filmed in Xinjiang that thanked Chinese-government agencies complicit in Uyghur genocide its credits. And now fellow film studio Warner Bros. has removed lines of dialogue from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Secrets of Dumbledore establishing that dark wizard Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) and his foe Gellert Grindlewald (Mads Mikkelsen) once had a romantic relationship. Per Variety:
Warner Bros. accepted China’s request to remove six seconds from the movie. The dialogue lines “because I was in love with you” and “the summer Gellert and I fell in love” were cut from “The Secrets of Dumbledore” release (via News.com.au). The rest of the film remained intact, including an understanding that Dumbledore and Grindelwald share an intimate bond.
In a statement, the studio said that “we want audiences everywhere in the world to see and enjoy this film, and it’s important to us that Chinese audiences have the opportunity to experience it as well, even with these minor edits.”
This double standard — Republican governors can’t make reasonable and popular policy changes in this country, but the Chinese government’s whims must be respected, even they violate progressive pieties — is untenable. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is among the many who have realized this. As Brittany Bernstein reported in March:
“You have companies, like at Disney, that are going to say and criticize parents’ rights, they’re going to criticize the fact that we don’t want transgenderism in kindergarten, in first-grade classrooms,” he added. “If that’s the hill they’re going to die on, then how do they possibly explain lining their pockets with their relationship from the Communist Party of China? Because that’s what they do, and they make a fortune, and they don’t say a word about the really brutal practices that you see over there at the hands of the CCP.”
The more people who realize this, and act on it, the better.