“Mickey Mouse has to become a Nazi.”
That was the astounding clarion call by far-right host Michael Knowles at The Daily Wire on Wednesday.
We’ve entered the era of right-wing agitators, activists, influencers, and provocateurs setting the agenda for America’s national conversation. They’ve upstaged and supplanted the GOP politicians, political strategists, and pundits who conspire behind closed doors, or in smoke-filled back rooms, targeting their political opponents – like Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Eric Cantor did on January 20, 2009, just hours after Barack Obama was sworn into office.
“On the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration, a group of top GOP luminaries quietly gathered in a Washington steakhouse to lick their wounds and ultimately create the outline of a plan for how to deal with the incoming administration,” PBS’s “Frontline” reported a decade ago, in 2013. “After three hours of strategizing, they decided they needed to fight Obama on everything. The new president had no idea what the Republicans were planning.”
Now, it’s being done out in the open. On camera. On social media. On right-wing websites. And they’re bragging about it.
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Why does Mickey Mouse have to “become a Nazi”?
Mickey Mouse, of course, is the iconic, now 95-year old cartoon character, the beloved brainchild of animators Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks.
And a top influencer of America’s far-right, a “culture war” commentator who wrote the Ted Cruz-endorsed book, “Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds,” now wants his supporters to change the American public’s perception of the anthropomorphic mouse, from a playful, kind-hearted hero to a “Nazi.”
The description of Michael Knowles’ book reads: “A New Strategy: We Win, They Lose,” “The Culture War is over, and the culture lost,” and, “The Left’s assault on liberty, virtue, decency, the Republic of the Founders, and Western civilization has succeeded,” which may help explain why he wants Mickey Mouse turned into “a Nazi.”
“Mickey Mouse has to become a Nazi. He has to. Because Disney is a very, very evil corporation that wants to trans your kids and fill their heads with all sorts of crazy ideas, and Disney’s gotta go,” Knowles declared (video below) Wednesday, which Media Matters first reported. It was not just an attack on Disney, but on the left, LGBTQ people, and especially transgender people, who are now being used as a verb and a slur: “trans” and “transing.”
“Disney’s gotta go, guys. You heard all the Disney executives talking about their not-so-secret LGBTLMNOP agenda. You’ve seen what Disney has done in recent years, so much so that the governor of Florida had to take political action against them to stop Disney from trying to interfere in the democratic process in Florida to stop the libs from transing your kids. OK?” Knowles told his supporters.
Disney was legally (and pretty quietly) exercising its constitutional right to free speech by opposing Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law. The company is now suing the governor in a First Amendment lawsuit.
“Disney is really, really bad,” Knowles continued. “And so, one of the best things that we can do right now is make the Disney characters toxic. And coincidentally, call it providentially, whatever it is, the Disney character is now in the public domain.”
The original, 95-year old version of Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain and no longer protected by copyright.
“And what this means is we need to turn Mickey into a Nazi because Nazis are bad. We’re not gonna turn Mickey into a Nazi because the Nazis are good. You see, I’m quite anti-Nazi. I assume you are as well. In fact, being a Nazi is the worst thing you can possibly be today and for a very long time. So, we need to turn Disney into the worst thing it can possibly be, and it can be done.”
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“In fact, I’m shocked that the mischievous people on places like 4chan and other internet boards haven’t done this already,” Knowles continued, in an apparent call to action. “Mickey Mouse has to become the most odious kind of symbol in the entire world. And we have the ability to do it, not using any major institutional power, just through the power of memes by pseudonymous accounts on random internet boards. That’s what’s gotta happen because Disney’s bad, and Disney’s gotta go down.”
This is, of course, merely the far-right’s latest attack on America, on American ideals of equality, dignity, kindness, and respect. Not to mention what turning Mickey Mouse into a “Nazi” would do to the countless innocent children who adore him.
It’s being done, out in the open, and it’s been done before.
Remember right-wing outrage at “CRT,” something most conservatives had little to no understanding of yet insisted it was evil, racist, and destroying America? Remember all the wild, sometimes violent, school board meetings, where parents claimed their kids were being taught “CRT,” and that being white is bad?
You may remember Christopher Rufo, the far-right activist who intentionally engineered Critical Race Theory (CRT), a college-level school of thought designed to examine social structures for systemic racism, into a fear-mongering right-wing nationwide panic. Rufo, a messaging maven and senior fellow at the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute who’s been called an “avowed propagandist,” publicly schemed to create his CRT frenzy.
He’s proudly said he wants to “have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” and “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
For a while, it worked, until the frenzy wore down and conservatives turned their focus to other non-issue “issues,” like DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), drag queen story hours, “wokeness,” and LGBTQ children.
“Mr. Rufo has taken aim at opponents of a new Florida law that prohibits teachers in some grades from discussing L.G.B.T.Q. issues and that critics call ‘Don’t Say Gay,’” The New York Times reported in 2022. “He declared ‘moral war’ against the statute’s most prominent adversary, the Walt Disney Company. And he has used the same playbook that proved effective in his crusade on racial issues: a leak of insider documents.”
Rufo also bragged about being behind the movement to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay, the university’s first Black woman in that role. He openly admitted to Politico it was his “goal…to topple the president of Harvard University.”
And he openly discussed his plans on social media
We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.
— Christopher F. Rufo ?? (@realchrisrufo) December 19, 2023
He then bragged about his “playbook” to Politico.
“It shows a successful strategy for the political right,” Rufo told Politico’s Ian Ward. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.”
“I’ve stolen some of the earlier tactics from previous generations of the American left and weaponize them against the current regime,” Rufo continued, openly admitting and explaining how he “is teaching conservatives how to hack that system.”
Rufo openly bragged about this in his Wednesday op-ed at The Wall Street Journal, “How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out.”
This is now the far-right’s playbook: openly strategize on how to attack and “topple” American icons and institutions, liberal policies and beliefs, some of the very foundations of what makes modern-day America America. And they’re not just targeting programs designed to expose and combat racism, or programs designed to improve diversity, or university presidents, and not just iconic American institutions like Disney and Mickey Mouse.
They’re targeting truth itself.
Watch Knowles’ “Nazi” remarks below or at this link.
Daily Wire host plots to smear Disney: “We need to turn Mickey [Mouse] into a Nazi” pic.twitter.com/HbuUiUmNBK
— Jason S. Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) January 3, 2024