Why Disney Can’t Stop Beating the Star Wars Brand to Death

Or Hannah Arendt explains why there are transgender clone troopers.

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Earlier this year, Disney boss Bob Iger said that the company had to get back to basics to turn around a long spell of lackluster performance made all the worse by its embrace of ideological extremism.

“Infusing messaging is not what we’re up to,” he said. “We need to be entertaining.” But Disney had been doing just that. Recall that in 2022, an executive producer boasted during a staff meeting that she had been pushing a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” for children’s shows.

Now, with the introduction of a transgender clone trooper named “Sister” into the official Star Wars lore, it seems little has changed since Iger said he’d right the ship. That’s because the progressivism behind creative choices at Disney and elsewhere in the culture resembles a form of soft totalitarianism. It’s willing to absorb financial losses in order to proliferate itself and hold onto what it has taken.