The Left's Fundamentalist War on Halloween

Here in 2016, I’ve been following the Political Correctness Outrage Machine’s latest manufactured scandal, where Disney was attacked recently for selling a “Moana” costume tied to its upcoming cartoon movie. In the film, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson provides the voice of the animated character “Maui,” who is a Polynesian god with distinctive full-body tattoos. Disney has been badgered in recent years to be more “diverse” and to feature more “people of color” in their movies. They’ve been told by the Political Correctness Outrage Machine that they need to make cartoons that are based on something other than European stories about blonde princesses like Rapunzel and Elsa the Snow Queen, and that they must use “diverse” source material from other cultures around the world. Disney also is criticized when it doesn’t make toys featuring every possible niche demographic out there. Yet this is all a big, dangerous catch-22 because when Disney does make a “diverse” movie and sells “diverse” products from that movie, the Political Correctness Outrage Machine revs up anyway and calls the movie “cultural appropriation” and labels the products “brownface.”

I’m at a point of exasperation with all of this ever-changing, nebulous political correctness and I say enough is enough. The Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) howled, clawed, and scratched at Disney because they dared to make a “Maui” costume…which was a brown skin-toned bodysuit featuring Maui’s tattoos from the movie. The SJWs declared this costume to be racist because of its brown skin tone and of course, Disney went into an apoplectic apology death spiral, begging forgiveness for selling this Halloween costume. As widely reported, one unhinged YouTube SJW said,

Disney can’t win, no matter what it does. No corporation can win the political correctness game. In all things here in 2016, the Political Correctness Outrage Machine will fire up no matter what road is taken by a company: make a Maui costume and get called racist; but don’t make a Maui costume and get called racist, too. This is our world today. And it sucks.

So, let’s start addressing the real elephant in the room (before it becomes racist, size-ist, gender-phobic, or culturally appropriative to talk about elephants). We’re faced with the reality that the ideological Left has moved beyond activism and has become a cult-like religion to the fundamentalist SJWs out there. Political correctness is now approached with such all-encompassing zealotry that it feels a lot like radical Islam. The reaction of leftist SJWs to a Disney costume of the cartoon character Maui reminds me of the deranged response that always happens when someone, somewhere, draws a picture of Muhammad. We are devolving as a civilization and going backwards to a scary place where corporations and everyday people need to live in fear of offending someone, somewhere, with something because of the out-of-proportion and punishing backlash that is meted out arbitrarily by the zealous Political Correctness Outrage Machine.

The Left operates as swiftly as the Spanish Inquisition in persecuting political-correctness heretics and leftists very capriciously decide who gets targeted for persecution on any given day, without any real rhyme or reason or thought process. They operate with pure, blind, emotional fury.

This feels like totalitarian neo-Puritanism to me. Anyone who offends the sensibilities of The Deciders (whoever these unseen, shadowy people are…the ones who declare something offensive and deserving of Social Justice Outrage on any given day) receives the 21st-century equivalent of a tarring-and-feathering and fanatical fatwa-like mob punishment. It is strange to me that the Left, which claims to hate religion, now behaves like it is a fundamentalist religion with merciless adherence to obsessive (yet ever-changing) rules. Why did we allow this to happen to our society?

The War on Halloween is only just beginning. It’s not as prominent as the War on Christmas (yet), but the Left is pushing hard to wipe out pretty much all of our holidays. With Halloween, the Left is declaring more and more things off-limits for costumes and taking upon itself, as The Deciders, to determine what you are allowed to wear and what you can never wear as a costume. Anything Native American is off-limits now, even if you are Native American yourself. No one can wear a sombrero or poncho, because that is “cultural appropriation” — again, even if you are of Mexican descent yourself, because The Deciders have declared that NO ONE is allowed to wear these costumes. Can you still dress up like Cleopatra this year? Pocahontas is now off-limits and you’ll be stoned by The Deciders if you dress up as her, but is Cleo still an option? Historical figures are problematic because some Social Justice Warrior somewhere will take offense to something in the historical figure’s biography, which means that the historical figure now needs to be purged from history and erased (along with all statues of that person and mentions of that person anywhere). Right now, the SJWs are doing this with Confederate generals and Andrew Jackson…but the next wave seems to be poised to target Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and other Founding Fathers. The Left is a hungry monster that gluttonously eats its own tail: it won’t stop until all costumes are off limits and Halloween is outlawed, so as not to offend anyone. Let’s be real: the Left really won’t stop until all holidays are removed from the calendar…or replaced with new holidays of the Left’s own invention, because everything that has ever existed must be wiped out and replaced, according to the Left.

The irony in all of this is that the Left will aggressively persecute anyone who chooses any costume that is not European-based or generically “white”…while at the same time moaning that there needs to be more “diversity” everywhere. If you dress up as Cinderella, there’s a chance you will get to enjoy your Halloween without persecution…but if you really loved the movie Moana and wanted to be a hula girl for Halloween, you’d better brace for having red paint thrown on you or something else crazy (like the Left used to do to women on Fifth Avenue in New York who wore fur coats the Left didn’t want them to wear). The leftists don’t see that they make corporations like Disney terrified of manufacturing anything other than blonde Elsa wigs, because when Disney makes a brown-skinned Maui costume the Political Correctness Outrage Machine declares open war on Disney for diversifying. The Left gnashes its teeth that American culture is “too white,” while at the same time punishing anyone who is inspired by other cultures or characters from other lands. The Left really is an apocalyptic death cult whose rules make no sense and whose actions are pushing us towards a future where people will be afraid of leaving their houses at all (let alone going trick-or-treating), lest they offend someone else merely by existing.

The War on Halloween is the strangest and most baffling thing I could have ever imagined, but the new religion of leftism is more radically fundamentalist and Puritanical than anything the Pentecostals ever dreamed of.