Disney has abandoned heroism. In fact, instead of just ignoring heroes, Disney has taken the extra step of eviscerating established ones. Since 1981, Indiana Jones, like Superman and John Wayne, has been a symbol of America and the American man. He is smart, tough, and a fighter who does the right thing. Disney’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” turned him into an old, feeble man who cowers in the corner while his goddaughter saves the day. Not even “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” did that.

Luke Skywalker was the most optimistic character in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, a warrior who defeated the emperor, saved the galaxy, and rescued his father’s soul from the Dark Side. Disney Luke is a paranoid, cynical, broken old man who has to be coaxed back into the good fight by a Mary Sue and then dies, not in a blaze of glory but by concentrating too hard. There are other examples: fat Thor, an emasculated Nick Fury, and the growing host of “diverse women of color” who have taken the place of the traditional hero and, more often than not, have to fight — surprise, surprise — a straight, white man. If you are an example of the SWM, Disney wants you to know that you are either a villain or a comically castrated clown.

Part of the reason for this new campaign against heroes is that Disney is now thoroughly behind what YouTube’s Critical Drinker has simply dubbed “The Message,” the current web of racialism, rainbow mafia, DEI, and general hatred of Western civilization. //

It may come as a shock to Disney executives that people resent it when they are blamed for not seeing a movie that doesn’t deserve to be seen. This then creates a doomsday loop: The more failures Disney has, the more it will blame what’s left of its audience, whittling down that audience even more.

Disney is not just chopping away its audience but also its brand. And that is the foundational issue in all of this. Since 1937, Disney has been a name not just loved but trusted. //

But now, the sleeping giant of the American public is awake, and it knows those days are gone. And once that trust is gone, it may prove impossible to win back. That should be the nightmare keeping Disney’s leadership up at night.

No film from Angel Studios makes it to the big screen without the approval of the Angel Guild.

Over 21 films a week are submitted to the Angel Guild, “and then the guild goes through those and they’re picking their favorites and they’re greenlighting them and then Angel Studios can only pick from the list that they greenlight,” explains Jeff Harmon, chief content officer for Angel Studios. //

Neal Harmon: Once we started thinking about the media and storytelling, from perspective of our own children, we said, “We’re not happy with where the world’s headed and how are we going to solve this problem or has someone solved this problem?” When we realized no one had and that there were other parents that were interested in solving this problem, we decided to do something about it. //

Neal Harmon: The core premise of Hollywood is two things, from our perspective.

One is that if you collect a group of people and have them work together in storytelling, that you’ll create a vibrant community that can tell stories better than anyone else in the world. We think that Hollywood actually is performing well on that premise, like that they tell a story better than anyone else in the world.

The second thing is that Hollywood has consolidated the decisions of what stories to tell into very few hands.

Jeff Harmon: Gatekeeper model.

Neal Harmon: Gatekeeper model, yeah. And that’s what’s different, is Angel’s fine with the craft of Hollywood and the capability, but then the gatekeeper and the decision-making we feel like has lost its way, it’s trapped in a bubble. And we’ve flipped the power structure so that the Angel community, the Angel Guild makes the decisions, rather than a few elite decision-makers.

Jeff Harmon: We don’t make the decisions. We can’t pick a film unless it goes through the Angel Guild first and the Angel Guild is over 100,000 people—

Neal Harmon: And growing. //

You can join it by investing or you can join it by subscribing, so anybody who goes to angel.com/guild can join the guild.

They get a vote on the content that goes to theaters. They get two free movie tickets to every single movie that comes out. //

Neal Harmon: And why are we doing it this way instead of the way Netflix does it? We have learned that the community aspect of watching films creates an experience that shapes culture. It becomes part of the culture.

There’s lots of things that have come to Netflix that nobody hears about. They hear about it if they’re on Netflix, but they don’t become part of the cultural conversation the way that “Sound of Freedom” did. “Sound of Freedom” is arguably the most talked about story in this decade. And that’s what the Angel Guild wants. That’s what we all want, is we want to shape cultures.

Ali has come to the realization there can be no liberalism apart from the Christian faith from which it emerged. She’s right. //

Over the weekend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali revealed in an essay at Unherd that she has become a Christian. For Christians, this is welcome and joyous news. But it’s also instructive. A former Muslim who very publicly rejected Islam and became an avowed atheist in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Ali has been speaking and writing in defense of Western civilization and liberal values for decades.

Now she has come to the conclusion that there is no way to maintain Western civilization and no way to preserve its liberal values apart from Christianity. Just as she came to discover the fundamentalist Islam of her youth was a dead end, she has also discovered the atheism she adopted in response to it is also a dead end. //

She’s also right about that but wrong to think Christianity is primarily about countering those forces or preserving a particular civilizational or political project. As great as Western civilization is, it arose as a byproduct of the Christian faith, the sole object of which is communion with Almighty God by means of salvation through Jesus Christ. Things like freedom of speech, rule of law, and human rights are fruits of the Christian faith, but they are not what Christianity is about. '//

There was a lot of discussion after 9/11 about how Islam needed its own Reformation to tame and secularize it, as Christianity had supposedly been tamed and pacified by the Protestant Reformation (never mind the century of continental war that it triggered). What the atheists promised Ali and other disillusioned Muslims was rationalism, freedom of inquiry and expression, and scientific objectivity — all of which would flourish in Muslim societies just as it had in the West, if only Muslims would set aside their backward religion and embrace the secular humanism of Western elites.

According to this theory, Christianity itself had served its purpose in the West, bestowed all its gifts, and could safely be discarded. We could live forever, drawing on its capital, which we assumed would never run out. The Islamic world needed to do likewise, and all would be well.

But something very different happened instead. It turns out, the capital was gradually spent and never replenished. Liberalism always depended for its vitality on something it cannot itself supply: the Christian faith, active and alive among the people. As the French philosopher Rémi Brague wrote back in the 1990s, “Faith produces its effects only so long as it remains faith and not calculation. We owe European civilization to people who believed in Christ, not to people who believed in Christianity.”

Ali’s conversion, which is laudable on its own (even if she doesn’t quite yet grasp the true object of her new faith), is a stark reminder that the liberal, secular West cannot survive without the Christian faith from which it emerged. Indeed, the secular elites who once promised apostate Muslims like Ali that they could have all the benefits of Christianity without Christianity itself are now abandoning the principles they once espoused.

In recent weeks, we have seen this abandonment most potently in the Red-Green alliance between the global left and the pro-Hamas crowd, who have been marching through the streets of Western cities in a show of force reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The naked antisemitism of the Hamas people, together with the deafening silence of the elites of the global left, tells you everything you need to know about the durability of secular humanism.

There is no room anymore for freedom of speech, open inquiry, or rational debate among the people and institutions that once espoused these ideals. There is only the brute force of the mob. It’s easy to see this at work throughout Western society, not just on the Israel-Hamas issue.

The emerging Red-Green alliance is poised to plunge the country into a spat of civic violence comparable to the summer of 2020, or worse.

How can coddled, “sensitive” minds so callously defend unthinkable cruelty and torture? How does a generation supposedly committed to tolerance and racial equality support mass genocide?

The answer is actually simple. While Gen Z-ers may have been coddled, they have also been trained to believe that the end justifies the means. This is the consequentialist approach to social action famously proclaimed by Malcolm X in 1965: “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary” //

“By any means necessary” thinking is blind to justice. It’s all about the end game — achieving the final goal, whatever it takes, no matter how much pain and misery is required.

And this, let us take note, is essentially the rationale for terrorism. //

If significant numbers of students at major U.S. colleges and universities are part of this movement, we have reason to fear for our future. And if, as Lincoln would say, we are not somehow touched by the better angels of our nature, this is not going to end well.