Late last November Disney CEO Bob Iger reportedly stated that Disney films had over–invested in woke messaging and that henceforth it needs creators to lean more toward traditional (non–agenda–driven) entertainment content.

Isn’t this more or less what major Disney shareholder Nelson Peltz, a billionaire businessman and centrist Republican, has been advocating as part of an attempt to get himself elected to Disney’s board of directors on Wednesday, April 3rd?

I agree that a guy whose last name rhymes with a term for skinned mammal fur…a term commonly used by trappers and hunters (Tom Hardy barked it out a dozen times in The Revenant…”we’re gatherin’ pelts!…pelts!…we need more pelts!”)…I agree that it feels slightly inelegant for a time-honored, milk-and-honey U.S. entertainment corporation like Disney to be strongly influenced by a guy with a vaguely coarse-sounding eastern European name…and Peltz being a Florida-residing Republican on top of everything else…I get it…not cool.

And yet Peltz has a point, and it’s one that the Critical Drinker has been hammering home for a long while, and yet two days ago The Hollywood Reporter’s Caitlin Huston ran a story about Peltz that was basically a woke hit piece.

It didn’t hint that Peltz doesn’t belong on the Disney board because he sounds like a meat-and-potatoes guy who doesn’t “get” the vagaries of showbiz, although that’s been implied here and there. It did, however, indicate that his thinking is tinged by racism and sexism, and this strikes me as cheap urban-progressive character assassination.

Tens of millions of average Americans despise the way Disney has woke-ified its brand over the last several years, and Peltz is simply saying “c’mon, this stuff has gone too far, time to roll it back.”