Bad Ideas

Of Course A Lawyer Is Behind That Idiotic Anti-Woke Disney Rant

Plenty of Disney fans are happy about the changes, no matter what this lawyer says.

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(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Full disclosure: I’m what they call a Disney person. I love it all, the movies (obvi, I’m not heartless), the parks, the rides, the pure magic of the experience. Yes, I go to Disney World as an adult and I enjoy the hell out of it. But one thing I don’t like is the racism in some of the attractions. The outdated and offensive Jungle Cruise is cringeworthy, and the ode to Song of the South — a movie that glorifies slavery and is so racist that Disney won’t release it on DVD or Disney+ — that is Splash Mountain is a hard pass for me.

So, I was thrilled last year when Disney announced that Princess Tiana (a character previously ignored in attractions) would be the star of an updated Splash Mountain experience. And I was similarly happy when this year they announced changes to Jungle Cruise.

But I’m not naive. I’ve spent enough time on Disney message boards and Facebook groups to know there’s an annoyingly loud group of so-called fans that protest whenever changes are made. They got their panties in a bunch when Disney took out a scene from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride that celebrated a bride auction (a deeply unsettling vignette with a sign proclaiming “take a wench for a bride” with crying women tied together by ropes), because sexual slavery is something they enjoy talking to their children about, I guess? Anyway, the point is these people are out there.

So suffice it to say, I wasn’t surprised that an eye-rollingly bad take on recent Disney changes made its way into the Orlando Sentinel over the weekend, entitled “I love Disney World, but wokeness is ruining the experience.” The author, Jonathan VanBoskerck, claims to be a Disney superfan but laments Disney’s decision to now allow cast members (Disney-speak for employees) to have visible tattoos and non-traditional haircuts, in addition to bitching about the ride changes described above.

But VanBoskerck is more than just a white privilege-defending amusement park enthusiast, he’s also a chief deputy district attorney in Clark County, Nevada. Sigh.

I guess it’s too much to ask for a lawyer to have more honed argumentation skills than just loudly screaming “change is scary” and refusing to have an iota of sympathy for any experience that doesn’t exactly mirror his own. Oh, who am I kidding, this is utterly unsurprising; VanBoskerck was previously most famous for pushing for his state to administer the death penalty using an experimental cocktail of drugs that opponents argued could cause great suffering.

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His tribute to white fragility ends with a plea, “Disney, please return to the values and vision of Walt. The customer experience should be the core of your business model.” To be clear, by “customer experience” he means his own — because the experience of those uncomfortable watching a simulation of a slave auction or a ride that perpetuates minstrel or other offensive stereotypes isn’t something VanBoskerck is concerned at all about — he doesn’t even acknowledge these different viewpoints exist in people who love Disney as much as he says he does. Instead, he wants the Disney experience to be crystalized in the exact form as it was when he was a child, problematic viewpoints and all. I guess this so-called Disney fanatic isn’t familiar with Walt’s own quote that “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” Or is the self-described conservative not much of an originalist?

In any event, VanBoskerck is getting dragged for his archaic piece. And I, for one, am here for it — people like VanBoskerck are the reason Disney fans get a bad rep.

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headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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