A new documentary on the Walt Disney Company is making crystal clear how the once family-friendly company is today one of the most serious peddlers of radical ideology in America.
Released last week by the Catholic League, “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” is a 50-minute film that highlights how Disney went from entertaining and inspiring kids to indoctrinating and grooming them as it embraces and advances the radical agenda of a very small yet vocal minority that even a growing number of liberals feel have gone too far.
“They want to go after the little kids,” Catholic League President Bill Donohue said during an interview Tuesday on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “As I pointed out in the movie, they just got off their tricycle. And now they’re trying to sexually engineer them.”
The idea for the documentary came after Donohue and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins were unable to arrange a meeting with then-Disney CEO Bob Chapek to speak on behalf of conservative Catholics and evangelicals in America amid the tumult over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill last year.
Opponents of the legislation labeled it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill because it prohibits classroom “instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity … in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
More broadly, the legislation reinforces the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children.
Though Disney initially chose not to take a public stance on the bill, its CEO later condemned the legislation following an outcry from pro-LGBTQ+ activists.
“You listened to one side. Will you listen to our side?” Donohue recalled asking Chapek, paraphrasing his joint letter with Perkins to the Disney CEO. “I’m a Catholic leader. Tony’s an evangelical leader. We represent a good swath of the country.”
“Well, they blew us off,” Donohue said.
So Donohue ran with the idea of a documentary, enlisting Jason Killian Meath, CEO of Meath Television Media LLC, who wrote and directed the film. They also brought in an all-star cast, including Perkins, renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, conservative columnist Miranda Devine, media watchdog Brent Bozell, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Jewish activist David Horowitz, film critic Christian Toto, media personality Will Witt, and conservative political commentator Mercedes Schlapp, who hosted the documentary.
“I want to get the word out — to disseminate it to Christians and to observant Jews, Muslims, Mormons, people of no faith, people who are concerned this has gone too far,” Donohue said.
“I also would like to persuade at least some of the shareholders and other people at Disney to say, ‘Wait a minute! Maybe we have gone too far.’ ‘Can we get back to our roots?’ ‘Can we have a family-friendly institution?’ ‘Why are we trying to do this to kids?’”
“There are aspects of this movie — when the viewers take a look at it … your head’s going to spin at certain points. But it’s something that needs to be said,” Donohue said.
Among the concerning revelations about Disney highlighted by the documentary is how members of its entertainment producing teams are injecting “queerness” anywhere and everywhere they can.
“Our leadership over there has been so welcoming to my not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” Disney child programming producer and writer Latoya Raveneau said in leaked virtual meeting footage that is highlighted in the documentary.
“I don't have to be afraid to like, ‘Let’s have these two characters kiss … in the background,” she said. “I was just wherever I could — just basically adding queerness.”
“No one would stop me,” she recalled.
And with radical gender ideology being thrusted upon children through media and in classrooms at increasingly younger ages, critics of the harmful crusade say there should be no surprise when there is a rise in cases of gender dysphoria — the clinical term describing the conflict some experience when they feel as if their biological sex doesn’t seem to conform with their sense of identity.
“The reason you see gender dysphoria rates now skyrocketing is in part because kids are impressionable,” Ramaswamy points out in the documentary. “They are going to respond to their adults and their cultural leaders in their schools and so it’s no surprise that we are creating the very problem that supposedly the companies like Disney were aiming to solve.”
“And it’s much worse than that,” adds Donohue in the documentary, “because, as we know in these elementary schools, they’re taking kindergartners and first graders, teaching them that they’re ‘gender fluid,’ encouraging them to be chemically castrated, to have puberty blockers — pre-puberty kids — to alter their lives forever.”
“This is an atrocity against children and Disney has allowed itself to become part of it,” he adds.
During his interview with Perkins on Tuesday, Donohue noted that even Erica Anderson, a transgender psychologist who has worked with hundreds of transgender teens, has acknowledged, “This has gone too far. It’s going to get worse. I don’t want any part of it.”
“I'm hoping, at the very least, Disney will tap the brakes and rethink this whole idea of going down the lane of the woke agenda,” Donohue added.
To get the message out, the Catholic League has made the documentary free to view on public platforms such as YouTube and Rumble. It is also accessible on SalemNOW and Amazon Prime.
Notably, on Tuesday, Catholic League was informed that its video has been marked by YouTube as “age-restricted” and not appropriate for viewers under 18. Types of content that is considered “age-restricted” include content with harmful or dangerous activities, nudity and sexually suggestive content, violent or graphic content, content with vulgar language, and content “that endangers the emotional and physical well-being of minors.”
While Donohue noted that the documentary doesn’t contain any of YouTube’s categories of “age-restricted” content, Perkins suggested that it may be in violation of the Left’s terms and conditions.
“You told the truth and you put the information out. Now that violates the terms of the Left these days — when you tell the truth,” Perkins said.
In response, Donohue said, “I couldn’t agree more. And I want to punctuate that. That’s what this is all about. A man can’t become a woman. A woman can’t become a man. We need to tell the truth and stop with the fiction.”
Kenneth Chan is Director of Communications at Family Research Council and serves as an editor at The Washington Stand.