Entertainment

archive.is link

For most of her life, Disneyland was Stephanie Cuevas’s happy place. But the news on Wednesday, September 17, about Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show being suspended “indefinitely” was her breaking point with Disney.

The next day, Cuevas made an announcement: She is going to dump the mouse. Her Instagram and TikTok accounts, which had grown to tens of thousands of followers based on her Disneyland-themed content, would be pivoting. As a queer and Latina woman, she could not abide by the company’s decision to suspend the late-night host for comments he made about Donald Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death.

To Cuevas, it seems clear that the company to which she’d spent so much time, energy, and money supporting does not “care about their community or the people who visit their parks.”

“By silencing someone for expressing an opinion he has every right to voice, Disney showed just how far this administration will go to censor people,” she tells me. “If a wealthy, white, male celebrity can be forced into silence, what does that mean for the rest of us? That’s absolutely terrifying.”

Jimmy Kimmel and Disney’s battle over what many have deemed as undemocratic censorship has not only taken over the news cycle, but it’s also sent the Disney internet into shambles.

Shortly after the news of Kimmel’s suspension was announced, people online began calling for those against the move to cancel their Disney +, Hulu, and ESPN streaming services in protest. For a lot of people, even those who don’t identify as Disney superfans, doing so has been a tough pill to swallow. After all, what are the nation’s children going to do without easy access to Bluey or Frozen?

But while parents practice their script for how to explain to a three-year-old that Elsa no longer aligns with the moral values of their family, Disney creators and proudly self-identified Disney adults have a much stickier moral quagmire to unravel.