Over the last couple of months HE has been observing that the DEI/pro-trans/equity-over-meritocracy/identity-crazed wokies have fled into the forest.

In a 3.20.25 N.Y. Times piece titled “Snow White and the Seven Kajillion Controversies,” Brooks Barnes suggests why.

“[On the Snow White front], Disney hoped that prominent voices on the left would step up to deliver a pushback to the pushback. But it didn’t happen.

“’Really never, but especially right now, no studio wants its movie branded as a D.E.I. lesson,” said Martin Kaplan, who runs the Norman Lear Center for entertainment, media and society at the University of Southern California.

“Disney largely managed to avoid this critique as recently as 2023, when it remade The Little Mermaid with a Black actress in the title role; defenders were plentiful. But last month, when Disney released Captain America: Brave New World, with a Black actor in the title role for the first time, the company had a harder time.

“It’s not an entirely new phenomenon: Think of the male-internet uproar over the all-female Ghostbusters from 2016, or the ongoing fan vitriol around Disney’s efforts to bring diversity to the “Star Wars franchise.

“‘But the ‘anti-woke right’ has grown more powerful‘, Mr. Kaplan noted, while defenders on the left have grown quieter, either because they feel cowed or frustrated or because even they have come to see Hollywood’s aggressive diversity efforts as clumsy.

“’I’m not sure anyone could have predicted that a reactionary force could so quickly and dramatically reverse the cultural winds, but that is certainly what has happened,’ Mr. Kaplan said. “What once were uncontroversial or proud decisions are suddenly somehow un-American.”