Cancel Your Disney Subscription and Boycott Sinclair, Nexstar Advertisers
Keep Fighting for Free Speech
Full disclosure: I never liked Jimmy Kimmel.
Many remember Kimmel as just the old-school sexist sidekick to what’s-his-face on The Man Show. With its “Juggy Dance Squad” and “Girls on Trampolines”, the basic cable “sketch comedy” show was light on actual comedy and heavy on maintaining and mainstreaming that winking male chauvinism of the good ol’ days. The vicarious thrill didn’t end with merely objectifying women.
Just a generation after the pesky proclamations for gender equality reverberated from the sexual revolution, The Man Show didn’t create sexism any more than its era was the sole germplasm that would spawn incels, their online manifestos, or real-life mass shootings. But it offered a reprieve from the demands that actual equality would require and reassured angsty men with a comforting armchair misogyny that nothing needed to change.
It showcased a vortex in which two completely average-looking dudes with no particular charm or talent enjoyed a harem of curvy beauties who literally just smile and bounce. And it offered the time-honored Beauty-and-the-Beast double standard that you don’t have to look like a Chad to get a Stacy, to use incel parlance. Like so many Judd Apatow movies, The Man Show sold millions of men an idea as a product - that you can get a Katherine Heigl even if you look like Seth Rogen. But The Man Show implied a more appealing shortcut: what if you didn’t have to earn (or grovel, as bitter entitled men saw it) the affection of beautiful women? What if, as a man, access to gorgeous girls were your unspoken birthright?
Are you too a talentless average dude who meets none of the physical beauty standards you think you deserve in a woman? In multiple women? Are you a five or a six who feels entitled to 10s? Welcome to a fun fantasy world where crass is championed, where men don’t have to cultivate a personality to be rewarded by the opinion-less proximity of stunning women with bikini-perfect bodies. Women exist for your visual consumption. And your basest, raunchiest impulses are intrinsically your most masculine, and therefore your best. So fuck feminism! Put your feet up, grab a beer, and indulge yourself.
The Man Show deliberately perpetuated an adolescent sexuality with almost halcyon nostalgia. It held up the “mistletoe belt buckle” as peak creativity. Convincing exactly no one, they claimed they were actually satirizing sexism to lampoon it and the simpleminded men who relish it. Sure. Congrats on the tremendously clever and successful long game, boys. Women of the world, rejoice.
Whatever. If a beers-and-boobs “comedian” who stopped women in the streets with “Guess what’s in my pants”, the decidedly not fit or athletic chucklehead who filmed “Let me guess women’s weight” segments wants to rebrand himself as a savvy political progressive, let him. At least he publicly apologized for his numerous sketches in blackface. Even hypocrites are entitled to their free speech. They’re also entitled to sue for breach of contract.
Kimmel is no Jon Stewart or George Carlin. He’s just some guy who got lucky and landed a gig with a big platform and a team of comedy writers smarter than he is. Dozens of comedians are more qualified but few networks are interested in hiring non-white comedians with satirical news anchoring experience like Roy Wood, Jr., Ronny Chieng, or Hasan Minhaj. Even male privilege can’t get them in the door or keep them at the table.
Stephen Colbert is inarguably the more sophisticated, relevant social critic and ally, but neither talk show hosts, nor their staffs deserved to lose their jobs. Though more affable and erudite than Kimmel, Colbert’s entire show was cancelled, or “not renewed”. Since he wasn’t fired he doesn’t have the option to sue from wrongful termination.
Whichever comedians you prefer, even a turd in a suit who started his career with, in his own words, “ the joyous celebration of chauvinism”, progressive and satirical free speech is unmistakably under attack. Free speech critical of the MAGA administration or MAGA values is being fired, “suspended indefinitely” in Kimmel’s case, not renewed in Colbert’s case, and threatened as is the case for Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. Dissent is being silenced while MAGA speech is being elevated by media conglomerates consolidating power for white Christian nationalism.
“Historically, autocrats are a mirthless bunch. Augustus, Napoleon Bonaparte, Tsar Nicholas I, Francisco Franco, and countless others — they all cracked down on satirists,” The New Yorker’s David Remnick writes. “Donald J. Trump has always been obsessed with television, particularly when the subject matter is Donald J. Trump ... Investigative reporting is bad enough; often what really infuriates him is jokes. Jokes aimed at him.”
What can the average American do to protect and promote free speech in a country figurehead-ed by a humorless attention monger and his power-hungry kleptocrats?
Nothing speaks louder than money. We can’t afford to get distracted by what Melania wore to Windsor Castle this week. Do not waste your words on some yellow dress. Invest your words in democratic, legislative, and consumer change.
We must exercise our constitutional right to free speech to demand the full release of the unredacted Epstein files and the reinstatement of everyone illegally fired, suspended, or “released” from their jobs and positions for merely quoting a podcaster’s own intentionally incendiary words.
But before you cancel your Disney+, exercise your power as a consumer as suggested in the above post. Boycott the companies that pay for advertising on a network that censors free speech and threatens those who exercise it and protect it.
First, we have to navigate the tangled corporate web of ownership and distribution.
Nexstar owns network affiliates across ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, The Hill, a third of the Food Network, big-city stations in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and LA, as well as smaller stations throughout the country. They own 28 ABC affiliates. If you watch one of their more than 200 stations in 116 markets, you’ll see who pays for airtime to advertise.
Sinclair owns 38 ABC affiliates and “owns, operates or provides services to 178 TV stations in 81 markets affiliated with all major broadcast networks” in the U.S. It was Sinclair’s stations that were famously stitched together in a viral 2018 video depicting dozens of local anchors simultaneously reading a verbatim script warning about censorship.
Boycott the companies that advertise on Nexstar and Sinclair stations. And let those companies know you’re boycotting them and why.
Then contact Disney+ and tell them you will not finance censorship with your subscription and that’s why you’re cancelling. Click here to cancel your subscripition.
Yes, that currently means Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, ESPN, and ABC.
Their cancellation policy fine print is predictably convoluted. It seems you can cancel just ESPN or just Hulu but the point is to vote with your wallet. Megacorporations big enough to buy up juggernaut companies and then just refer to them as brands, (Nat Geo and ESPN are now just Disney “brands”) only make decisions based on profit. Speak to their bottom line.
As with most companies these days, Disney buries their contact info deeply. But you can always comment on their social media platforms and tell the world why everyone should #CancelDisney.
Call 888–905–7888 to tell them you will not subsidize or finance free speech censorship with your subscription. Or use their online chat option.
If you can find an email address or snail mail address for the folks who still buy stamps, please share them below as a comment.
Their feedback form where you can “Report a problem with Disney” is solely for UX issues, not consumer advocacy for free speech and social justice.
Innocent civilians are being disappeared. Immigration judges are being fired. Legislators are being forced out of public hearings and arrested. Today, an ICE agent threw a peacefully, silently demonstrating woman to the ground, shot her with rubber bullets, and put her in a chokehold while she held up the peace sign.
Yes, the stakes are absolutely terrifyingly high enough to sacrifice our entertainment. No final season of the Handmaid’s Tale, a prescient mirror that’s taking the fiction out of dystopian fiction. No Bluey. No football just as football season kicks off.
When your friends around the world are asking you what in the hell is going on in our country, do you really want to tell them, “I stay out of politics” just to numb ourselves with our shows? Entertainment brought to us by the same conglomerates that are exacerbating all of our problems, that are consolidating power for white nationalists?
When your grandchildren ask you what you did to fight back, don’t you at least want to be able to say, well I cancelled my Disney subscription? Or do you want to be one of the people who looked away from the planned demolition (not a faultless collapse) of our hard-fought, hard-won democracy and only be able to say, but my shows …
Everyone is busy. Everyone is scrambling to keep pace with their daily lives. Our health insurance depends on our jobs. And at the end of a long day, entertainment can be such a restorative decompression. We can share the medicine of laughter and keep our kids occupied while we try to get one more damn meal on the table and another damn load of laundry done. But other people’s kids are being torn apart from their parents and disappeared into labyrinthine systems with no transparency. Other people’s toddlers are being forced to “testify” in languages they don’t speak, without legal representation. Other people’s babies are enduring trauma that will change their life trajectory. If they survive at all.
A right-wing agitator/podcaster should not have been shot in the neck for his hateful speech. Left-leaning comedians, (and their entire staffs) shouldn’t be fired for their satirical speech. Both of those truths can coexist. And free-speech supporting Americans shouldn’t support or finance either.