Many days on the playground of my yesteryears were spent fighting over who got to play the roles of Luke, Han, and Darth Vader as we dueled with our lightsaber sticks. The odd scraped knuckle or bruised leg served to build resilience and courage in the face of relatively minor danger. That wouldn’t fly today. This was the old culture, in which boys and girls took turns acting out the archetypal roles in the hero’s journey, a timeless theme found in countless cultures that Joseph Campbell describes as, “the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.”

Those stories have fallen out of style. In their place, we have the Maoist cultural revolution, which has mutated within its American host to become what we call wokeness. This term was derived from Paulo Freire’s concept of critical consciousness, further expanded by Herbert Marcuse, and filtered through the black radical lens of his student Angela Davis. “Consciousness,” for these scholars, means being “awake politically” or, in Davis’ case, “stay[ing] woke.” It has infected the universities, completed its long march through the institution and ultimately embedded itself in corporate leviathans (Disney included) through their HR departments. Maintaining that control is a simple matter of filtering out resistance by screening future hires for political alignment.

“Star Wars” and the larger Disney catalog represent the old order that must be destroyed to make way for the illusory utopian vision.