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A ride based on the story of Disneys first Black princess opens to the public on June 28 in Orlando, Florida, replacing the decades-old Splash Mountain attraction that was beloved by many Disney fans yet also widely criticized.

Walt Disney Worlds new ride, inspired by the movie The Princess and the Frog and its heroine Tiana, is currently in preview mode for groups including employees and annual passholders and has already elicited mixed reactions in the midst of the culture wars.

The structure of the log-flume ride has not changed, but the theme has been completely redone four years after Disney first announced the project in 2020, during the same season of nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd.

The original Splash Mountain ride which first opened at Disneyland in 1989, and at Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland in 1992 was based on characters from Song of the South, a 1946 Disney movie that has long been criticized as racist for its stereotypical portrayals of African Americans and a romanticized view of the antebellum South.

Turning Splash Mountain into Tianas Bayou Adventure is also happening at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, with an opening date yet to be announced. Tokyo Disneyland is also home to a Splash Mountain ride, but the theme in that location is not changing.

Disney has kept Song of the South from being re-released and has even kept the movie off its streaming platform, Disney+.

Victoria Wade, a theme park content creator, got to try Tianas Bayou Adventure in early June as a guest of an employee.

Wade, who is Black, told CNN it was powerful to finally experience a Disney attraction where the characters look like her.

I got very emotional immediately towards the finale scene of the ride in particular it was just nice to be seen,she said.

She added that she would have loved to see that kind of representation when she was a child. For her little cousins and the children she babysits, They can just go there and see themselves in a positive light in a positive representation. So it just, it warmed my heart. It was just like, finally, we had to beg for all these years for this to happen. And its finally happened.

Wade said she found the scenes colorful and vibrant, and she could tell how much the Disney team had researchedLouisiana culture to create the new theme.

You can even see bits and pieces of that within the queue, Wade said, referring to the area where riders wait in line and see fictional letters written during World War I, when Princess Tianas father, James, served in the military.

In a blog post, Disney has said the photos that served as reference for the expanded backstory of James were those of soldiers who served in 369th Regiment, one of the first African American regiments to serve with the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. This unit was renowned for its bravery and many members were awarded the prestigious Croix de Guerre medal by the French government for their valiant service in action.

That reference had special significance for Disneys project lead Charita Carter, whose father served in the US Air Force.

She and a team of Disney staff had visited New Orleans to create an authentic visual style for the ride. They met with Stella Reese Chase, whose mother Leah Chase was a renowned New Orleans chef and TV personality.

Chase visited Walt Disney Imagineering in April alongside CNN and other mediato see this rides advanced animatronics, the likes of which had yet to debut in a US Disney park.

As Chase watched Princess Tiana wave and talk for the first time in 3D, she said, Im just amazed, you know. What can I say? Ive never seen anything like it. This is really a wild experience.

While fans have agreed that the new technology on the ride, including projection mapping and the fluidity of characters movements, is far superior to the prior version, criticism has centered around lack of plot.

Disney has said that the rides story takes place chronologically after the movie ends and involves Princess Tiana inviting guests to a big celebration in the bayou.

Jack Kendall, host of the theme park fan podcast DSNY, also experienced the new ride recently as a guest of an employee.

He said that for an attraction based on the suspense of a 50-foot drop, theres no kind of antagonist within the attraction to have that kind of push and pull of that trepidation building up the lift hill and going down the other side, noting that people are saying theres no real story to it.

Kendall added, To be honest, its a lovely collection of scenes, of show scenes, very beautifully put together, but theres not really much of an impetus for why were going on this journey now.

But online vitriol has sometimes gone far beyond the merits of the ride.

Several petitions on change.org over the years have attempted to save Splash Mountain.

One such petition organized by Eric Thibeault stated: It is absurd to pander to a small group of Disney haters that dont [sic] understand the story, and re-theme such a nostalgic ride. The characters in Splash Mountain do not specifically generalize any race or group of people, they are nothing more than caricatures based on the turn-of-the-century America.

Modifying Splash Mountain will not change history and will only encourage the easily offended to continue making desperate attempts at finding offence in additional attractions.

Disney has rethemed or modified old rides before, garnering similar attention from fans who resisted change. In recent years, for example, a woman in red featured in a Pirates of the Caribbean ride scene was changed from a wench for sale to a pistol-carrying pirate.

Kendall said that the opening of the rethemed rideis a culmination of the culture wars in which the Disney company has been entangled over the last several years, including a battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over a controversial bill that restricts certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom.

He said he thinks that those who were upset at losing the Splash Mountain theme had largely already decided they would dislike the new theme.

If you took the attraction of Tianas Bayou Adventure, all the theming, all the scenes, all the technology behind it, and put it in its own new attraction building, people wouldnt be speaking about this attraction like they are, Kendallsaid.

Theyd be saying its fantastic. One of the best things that Disneys done But its because its being somewhat unfairly compared to what was there before. So I think thats where a lot of this online discourse is coming from.

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A new Disney ride opens soon, splashing right out of the culture wars - AOL

Its that wonderful time of the year again.Rainbows are everywhere and much of the world takes a moment to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Like clockwork, brands also look to show their support for Pride month with rainbow logos and branding. While, I admit, this has never been the most effective marketing tactic, advertisers now find themselves navigating a cultural and political landscape that is turbulent at best.

A month once celebrated in the corporate world, we are now observing even the loudest and proudest brands going silent amid boycotts strong enough to impact brand image and revenue even a year down the line, due to shifting political landscapes against LGBTQ+ communities in the US, and a growing backlash among fringe groups.

The threat of being the centre of a culture war means brands are rethinking their role in Pride. This could mean a shift from stand-out purpose-driven marketing back to a focus on value proposition and quiet campaigning.

View original post here:
Stand up or sit down: are culture wars changing the way brands support Pride? | shots - Shots

(CNN) A ride based on the story of Disneys first Black princess opens to the public on June 28 in Orlando, Florida, replacing the decades-old Splash Mountain attraction that was beloved by many Disney fans yet also widely criticized.

Walt Disney Worlds new ride, inspired by the movie The Princess and the Frog and its heroine Tiana, is currently in preview mode for groups including employees and annual passholders and has already elicited mixed reactions in the midst of the culture wars.

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A new Disney ride opens soon, splashing right out of the culture wars - The Albany Herald

Sir Keir Starmer has promised to end the culture war if he becomes the UKs next prime minister.

Speaking to the Huffington Post yesterday, the Labour leader lamented that the public is exhausted by culture wars. The Tories have got nowhere else to go but this divisive culture-war area, and I do think that if we do win the election, I do want it to be a reset moment for politics, he said.

You can certainly understand why Labour might be keen to play down the culture war during the General Election. After all, Labours positions on all manner of cultural issues from the trans debate to racial identity politics have tended to place it on the wrong side of public opinion, common decency and objective reality in recent years.

Indeed, even when the allegedly sensible Starmer has tried to sit on the fence, he has ended up impaling himself on it. Who could forget his outlandish claim last year that 99.9 per cent of women dont have a penis? This was supposed to be a compromise between sex realists (who correctly say that no women have penises) and trans extremists (who say that people with penises can be women if they identify as such). But it still implied that potentially one in 1,000 women could well have a penis. Go figure!

Starmers promise to end the culture war should not be seen as some kind of peace offering to the unwoke. It is not as if Labour has seen the light on these issues and will now leave us all alone.

In truth, when Starmer says he will end the culture war, what he really means is that he will have zero tolerance for this kind of pushback. The woke will be free to run amok in our public institutions, but any dissent will be silenced, ignored or condemned. To this end, Labour has even mooted making it a crime to misgender that is, accurately describe the sex of trans people, which would make it harder still to defend womens rights from the gender ideologues.

The end of the culture war? No chance. If Starmer enters Downing Street on 5 July, the culture war will just be getting started.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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Keir Starmer will not end the culture war - Spiked

(Image: Alexander Grey/Unsplash.com)

The term culture warrior is often invoked, usually pejoratively, to describe a certain kind of conservative Catholic who fights in the political sphere for the Catholic viewpoint to be enshrined in law on certain hot-button issues. I say pejoratively since the charge is often made that these issues are best fought on the cultural level, via the path of persuasion rather than on the political level. Conservatives are thus accused of being simplistic and nave in trying to impose by law points of view that have not prevailed in the cultural domain on the level of argument.

As with all caricatures, there is a modicum of truth in this assessment. And it is indeed true, by and large, that the conservative viewpoint on these issues has lost the cultural battle. This fact makes all political moves seem oriented toward an oppressive curtailment of activities that a majority have come to view as basic civil rights. This is certainly how the mainstream media do portray things, as we saw after Roe v. Wade was struck down. Conservatives were, and are, portrayed as coercive bigots intent on imposing a narrow sectarian view of abortion through draconian laws.

Obvious double standards

Nevertheless, I firmly reject this caricature, and for several reasons. First, while it is accurate to say there is a modicum of truth in the caricature, there is also more than a little deflection at play here. Quite often, when employed by NCR(eporter) Catholics it is used to justify paying no attention whatsoever to the public importance of these issues, relegating them to the putatively private realm of sexual morality, with the use of the utterly crass and inaccurate term pelvic issues. They may pay lip service to the importance of abortion, for example, and claim that it is indeed a part of the seamless garment of life ethicbut then proceed to put it on a back burner as an embarrassment.

Eventually, the mask drops entirely and we see that, for them, not all pelvic issues are equally apolitical and private. How many Pride flags will we see flying outside of Catholic institutions in June? How many comments on X from Fr. James Martin will we see celebrating the political gains made by the LGBTQ+ movement (or community) over the past twenty years? Apparently, the private sexual lives of same-sex attracted persons are a matter of deep public concern and importance. So important, in fact, that those in the Church who fight for this cause are never dismissed as mere culture warriors. Nope. They are instead lionized by leftist Catholics as champions of human rights.

This brings me to the second problem with the caricature. Who within the Catholic world gets to decide what counts as a culture war issue and what doesnt? For example, abortion is a form of homicide, a form of premeditated murder, and yet we are told that we should not agitate in the political sphere to end it and to stick to purely cultural forms of persuasion. But when it comes to a fundamental question of human rightsin this case, the very right to lifethere can be no question of kicking the political can down the road until such time as a more favorable cultural situation emerges.

Meanwhile, we are told that there can be no compromise with the forces of bigotry when it comes to LGBTQ rights. In almost every state where gay marriage was put up to a vote of the people, including deeply Blue California, it was voted down. The LGBTQ revolution happened in large measure as a result of top-down judicial imposition. So it would seem that the very designation of what counts as a culture war issue and what doesnt is largely an invention of the Catholic Leftand is actually a form of rhetorical violence since its aims are malicious and deliberately tendentious. In other words, it is a form of propaganda. Culture has changed as a result of judicial decisions and nobody on the Catholic Left is arguing that these issues should have been resolved apolitically on a cultural level only.

Roe v. Wade is yet another example of a new class of rights, nowhere envisioned by the Constitution, suddenly emerging by judicial fiat. While it is true that a large segment of the American electorate was open to this liberalization, a large segment was not. The imposition of Roe v. Wade created an immediate, massive and ongoing backlash on the cultural level that poisoned our politics at its root, turning every Supreme Court nomination into a cage match, to the death, between deranged political pit bulls. And yet nobody on the secular Left opined that maybe the culture was not ready for legal prenatal homicide via judicial authority alone.

Polluting culture with trendy politics

What these two examples show us (specifically, Obergefell and Roe) is that the law has pedagogical value and that, once enacted, laws can change the culture in deep and profound ways.

A few years ago, Georgia passed a law saying that, in the public schools, there are to be two and only two kinds of bathrooms: one for people with penises and one for people with vaginas. Which is, of course, the pure commonsense realism of the entirety of human history and culture. The Left went berserk, including the sex-and-circuses Catholic Left, and threatened economic boycotts against Georgia and so forth. It was the usual bilge. Yet, today, with only small pockets of dissent, the law has had its effect, which (at the very least) means it has depoliticized bathrooms and returned them to the genuinely private sphere. And if there ever was a mere pelvic issue, bathroom usage, from toilets to urinals to bidets, would certainly be near the top of the list.

Along these lines, do I even need to mention the entire march of civil rights for African Americans? From the Civil War to the post-war constitutional amendments, on through the battle against Jim Crow laws and segregation, there is no way one can say that America waited until there was a deep and broad public, cultural consensus before it sought political and legal remedies to our racial sins. And why is that? Because the issue was deemed far too important, too foundational, and too constitutive of who we are as a people to be left to cultural drift as the only proper remedy.

This is why I think one of the most misused phrases, often employed by those who would dismiss us as mere culture warriors, is politics is downstream of culture. But this is only partly true and when it is elevated to some lofty status as an ironclad law of human nature it is deeply misleading. Because the lines of causation are not just one way, and quite often in our history the reverse has been true. Culture is, in fact, very frequently downstream of politics.

There is also the phrase, You cannot legislate morality! Tell that to Rosa Parks! Furthermore, it is sheer lunacy to suggest there isnt a core moral claim in almost every piece of major legislation. Laws are by nature coercive. A stop sign is coercive. And thank God it is. The purpose of the coercive aspects of the law is to foster a moral vision of the common good on this or that issueno matter how seemingly mundane. I am a notoriously impatient driver and I hate stop signs and red lights. But I am pleased to be coerced into safe driving since I value my life and the lives of everyone else on the road.

But we have gone so far down the path of caricaturing cultural conservatives as potential fascists intent on criminalizing everything fun and pleasurable, that my words here will be construed by many as a call to turn America into Catholic Sharia land. Never mind the Left has turned America into a pornified septic tank and a circus freak show of the dragification of everything. Never mind it is now the case in many States that parents can lose custodial rights to their children if they misgender them. Never mind it is now considered to be a form of rank bigotry if you think eight-year-old boys and girls should not have their bodies surgically mutilated beyond repair. Never mind the Left opposes all laws intended to prevent the soft infanticide of letting babies born alive after an abortion die of neglect. Never mind the modern Left doesnt even have the virtue any longer of being the anti-war party. Or the anti-wealth party. Or the anti-surveillance State party.

Never mind all of that. Because, according to them, the Catholic culture warriors are here to turn all of our daughters into bipedal, ambulatory baby incubators for churning out the future fascists of America.

Rejecting the Catholic Lefts push for political and cultural hegemony

Finally, there is also the fact that many Catholic liberals, not content to criticize the politics of pro-life Catholics, are now moving the goalposts even further and claiming that even focusing on these issues in a purely cultural way, via the path of persuasion and evangelization, is deeply suspicious.

Returning to my last essayon Massimo Faggiolis fever dream of a new Trump-Catholic axis emergingwe see how Faggioli originally lumped Bishop Barron and Word on Fire into that axis. His evidence was that Bishop Barron likes to interview social conservatives, including Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. I guess Professor Faggioli was counting on nobody noticing that in none of these interviews is there even a hint of political advocacy for Trump. But, for him, being a socially conservative Catholic in and of itself is evidence enough of a closeted support for Trump, which (it goes without saying) he believes is awful.

Ponder that fact for a minute. Let it sink in. Because the claim is that not only is it wrong to be a culture warrior in a way that focuses on electoral politics, but it is also now deeply suspicious to focus on socially conservative issues in a way focused on the broader politics of the cultural polis and its many venues for public dialogue and conversation. We are damned if we focus on electoral politics. And now we are damned if we simply focus on the politics of culture, the latter being viewed as a mere cover for the former.

Therefore, it would seem that what the Catholic Left wants is both political and cultural hegemony. What they want is for all of the Catholic deplorables (indietrists!) to crawl back into their buried school buses on their Fatima survivalist compounds and to shut the hell up. But this is how Catholic liberals have always acted and so it should come as no surprise. They have a dead-end ecclesial project, which has failed spectacularly wherever it has been tried, and a theology that is little more than a warmed-over Kantian/Marxist/Mall Rat confluence of faculty lounge pretentiousness and the idolatry of the culture of sex and Mammon. Which is why they resort to the authoritarianism of the ecclesial bureaucratic apparatus. Synodality via Motu proprio. The typical faux democracy of the totalitarians.

While I am at it, I may as well address the fact that the combox attached to this article will remind me I am not a fan of Donald Trump. So how, it may be asked, can I offer up an apologia for pro-life politics all the while dismissing the man who really, more than any other, engineered the overturning of Roe? All I can say is that I give him kudosand big onesfor that, and I harbor no ill will toward any Catholic who will vote for him for that reason. But my overall politics and my reasons for not voting for him or Biden are too complex to parse out here. It has something to do with my post-liberal soul; in fact my opposition to both candidates is not grounded in an indifference to politics at all, but the opposite. That will have to suffice for now until, perhaps, a future essay.

I will end with a proposal. Let us retire the use of the term culture warrior since it is at best a vacuous term meaning whatever we want it to mean. At worse it is a derisive term designed to malign in order to dismiss. I propose instead that we call ourselves by a different name. I would propose we call ourselves Catholic sanity activists.

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On culture wars and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Left - Catholic World Report