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<\/a>Disney’s \u2018The Lion King\u2019 is insidious fascist propaganda for kids, according to a Washington Post editorial that consigns the beloved children\u2019s film (and its sure to be less-beloved CGI remake) to the bonfires of wokeness.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Lion King \u201coffers us fascist ideology writ large<\/em>,\u201d according to Dan Hassler-Forest, a Dutch academic who has been delivering achingly PC reviews of Disney films for WaPo since last May. Capable of finding \u201cproblematic<\/em>\u201d elements in every film he\u2019s reviewed thus far, Hassler-Forest certainly has a talent for this sort of thing, and the fact that he\u2019s a media studies professor is no surprise, though one must pity his students.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to take seriously an article that refers to the lions’ home, a rock jutting out over a clearing, as a \u201cTrump Tower of the African savanna<\/em>,\u201d and the analysis goes downhill from there. The film \u201cintroduces us to a society where the weak have learned to worship at the feet of the strong<\/em>,\u201d Hassler-Forest writes, apparently forgetting that there are no safe spaces in the savanna. Anthropomorphized lions are still lions, and in fact, the big cats’ easygoing relationship with the other species they encounter is quite a bit warmer and fuzzier than tooth-and-claw reality. While the film\u2019s lions have respect for the other creatures, in reality every pompous bird, happy-go-lucky meerkat, and probably the wise old monkey too would become a quick snack as soon as Simba\u2019s stomach started rumbling.<\/span><\/p>\n Hassler-Forest, however, insists the film merely uses the animal-kingdom relationships of predator and prey to smuggle in \u201cthe white supremacist’s worldview, one in which some groups of people are inherently superior to others<\/em>.\u201d It’s unclear where he sees race in creatures with no hint of human characteristics \u2013 indeed, the naive viewer might even think that, like many fables, the film uses animals instead of humans to more easily communicate its message without the interference of human social factors \u2013 baggage like racism, patriarchy, and other intersectional mainstays.<\/span><\/p>\n Tropes which on the surface appear benign, wholesome even \u2013 the Circle of Life is all about environmental sustainability! \u2013 are actually the most evil of all, according to Hassler-Forest, who humansplains lion king Mufasa\u2019s talk with his son about how the kingdom must be kept in balance as no mere call for natural equilibrium, but instead an insidious dogwhistle for \u201cwhy it’s perfectly fine to behave dictatorily<\/em>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Indeed, he claims, the film \u201cidolizes bullies by mythologizing the most brutal social principles: only the strong and the beautiful triumph, and the powerless survive only by serving the strong.<\/em>\u201d Except the warthog and meerkat duo, whose irritatingly-catchy theme song became a mainstay of an entire generation of American youth, are hardly leading-man types \u2013 and they share their wisdom with the young lion cub not out of fear or servitude but because of a genuine cross-species friendship.<\/span><\/p>\n