No matter how ‘woke’ your company is, it’s never woke enough.

Take Disney, currently the wokest non-Netflix movie and TV production machine, which, somehow, still isn’t woke enough. As part of its effort to spam as many unnecessary live action adaptations of its classic cartoons as possible, it ran into problems with Aladdin which (despite its diverse cast) was accused of Islamophobia. Mary Poppins was accused of blackface, by another white guy, for getting coal dust on her face.

The Lion King has kept its cast as African-American as possible, but it still gets accused of white supremacy.

The funny thing is that the accuser is Dan Hassler-Forest, as you can tell by the name, a very white man. And it’s indistinguishable from trolling.

“‘The Lion King’ is a fascistic story. No remake can change that,” the headline of this freshman class paper/editorial declares.

Once upon the Washington Post was a serious national power. Under Amazon’s Jeff Bezos it became a social justice tabloid.

“In other words: “The Lion King” offers us fascist ideology writ large,” Hassler-Forest writes, while, hopefully, giggling to himself. Because it’s hard to picture a human being so broken that he takes those words seriously.

But leftist politics specialize in creating minds just that broken.

“The film almost inevitably incorporates the white supremacist’s worldview, one in which some groups of people are inherently superior to others,” Hassler-Forest writes, in a piece that the Washington Post saw fit to print. Perhaps hoping to top the New York Times’ claim that Mary Poppins getting coal dust on her face while dancing with chimney sweeps is racist.

“Doubling down on Disney’s historical obsession with patriarchal monarchies, it places the audience’s point of view squarely with the autocratic lions, whose Pride Rock literally looks down upon all of society’s weaker groups — a kind of Trump Tower of the African savanna,” Hassler-Forest claims.

Orangelion bad.

“With the lions standing in for the ruling class and the “good” herbivores embodying society’s decent, law-abiding citizens, the hyenas transparently represent the black, brown and disabled bodies that are forcefully excluded from this fascist society. Noticeably marked by their ethnically coded “street” accents, the hyenas blatantly symbolize racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes of “verminous” groups that form an inherent threat to society.”

I like how leftists insist that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic slurs aren’t a problem, but the Lion King’s hyenas are anti-Semitic.

Also, apparently, Scar is gay.

“Simultaneously, his effeminate gestures and lack of interest in heterosexual reproduction mark him as queer, like the vast majority of other villains in Disney’s exclusively heterosexual world.” 

I hadn’t realized all the other Disney villains were gay. Or that the Washington Post was a joke. Okay, I was aware of one of those.

Adding insult to injury, the social outcasts’ rebellion against Mufasa’s autocratic regime is explicitly associated with the imagery of goose-stepping Nazis. But as so often in Hollywood films, the explicit Nazi iconography serves primarily to distract us from the heroes’ own fascism. 

Simba’s final ascent to the throne, his masculine roar returning Scar’s dystopia to its Edenic natural state, is nothing less than the Führer Principle at work

Leftists really do believe that everyone who isn’t them is Hitler. Especially the lions.

What else can you do when you’re a hyena?