Cancel culture. The great evil of our time—at least, that’s what conservatives want you to believe. According to them, cancel culture is a leftist plague: silencing free speech, destroying careers, and eroding the very fabric of American society. They rage against it on cable news, rant about it in congressional hearings, and cry victim whenever someone faces consequences for saying something bigoted or idiotic.
And yet, when the target of outrage is something they dislike, when it’s a company, a celebrity, or a movie that doesn’t fit into their narrow worldview, suddenly cancellation is a moral duty. Suddenly, boycotts aren’t censorship, they’re justice. And nowhere is this hypocrisy more ridiculous than in the meltdown over the upcoming live-action Snow White.
We’ve seen this before. When Disney announced Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid, right-wing commentators lost their minds. They ranted that a Black actress playing a fictional mermaid was somehow an attack on tradition, a betrayal of the source material. Suddenly, grown adults who hadn’t thought about Ariel since childhood were deeply concerned about accuracy in mermaid representation.
And now, it’s happening again with Snow White. The right’s talking heads have latched onto the film with a fury usually reserved for actual policy issues, dissecting every casting choice, every rumored plot change, every second of promotional footage—all to mask what is obvious to everyone watching:
They just don’t approve of a Latina Snow White. Of course, they can’t say that out loud, so instead, they invent new reasons to be furious.
• Rachel Zegler is “woke” and doesn’t respect the original. (Translation: She’s not sufficiently grateful for being cast.)
• The movie has changed the seven dwarfs. (A bizarre controversy that dwarfs (nope, not sorry) any real issues affecting Americans.)
• It’s all about woke feminism now! (Because a female lead expressing opinions is apparently an existential crisis.)
But let’s be real. If the exact same movie had cast a white, blue-eyed actress as Snow White, none of these people would care. They wouldn’t be angrily dissecting interviews, they wouldn’t be demanding a boycott, and they certainly wouldn’t be screaming about how the sanctity of a German fairy tale is being desecrated.
The hypocrisy is staggering. The same people who claim to hate cancel culture—who whine endlessly about how the left ruins everything with its oversensitivity—will cancel anything the moment it doesn’t align with their worldview.
• The right proudly canceled Bud Light because the company had the audacity to work with a trans influencer.
• The right tried to cancel the NFL because players kneeled for the national anthem.
• The right canceled M&Ms because the green one wasn’t sexy enough.
• The right canceled Target because the store sold Pride-themed merchandise.
They boycott, rage, and demand corporate punishment at the slightest provocation, all while claiming the left is the real threat to free speech.
What’s even more absurd is that many of these same people will turn around and mock liberals for boycotting companies that donate to anti-LGBTQ groups or for calling out racist, sexist, or homophobic content. Or, say, an electric car company owned by an unelected bureaucrat threatening to slash and burn everything he can.
Their entire worldview is built on the idea that their outrage is righteous, while everyone else’s is cancel culture.
Here’s the truth: this isn’t about artistic integrity, tradition, or loyalty to the source material. It never has been.
No one cared when Disney made a live-action Cinderella in 2015 that changed plenty from the animated version. No one cared when Maleficent completely rewrote Sleeping Beauty’s story. No one had a meltdown over Emma Watson’s feminist take on Belle in Beauty and the Beast (or the fact Emma Watson absolutely cannot carry a tune).
The difference? Those movies didn’t challenge their vision of who gets to be the hero. Those movies fulfilled the white safe expectations for their leads.
The Little Mermaid backlash was never about mermaids—it was about a Black woman being the lead and the Snow White backlash isn’t about faithfulness to the Grimm fairy tale—it’s about a Latina actress playing the fairest of them all.
The anger is a cover, a convenient excuse to mask the same tired outrage about diversity, about women speaking up, about anything that suggests the country isn’t exclusively controlled by historically dominant white culture anymore.
The right’s obsession with turning every casting choice into a political battle isn’t just embarrassing—it’s revealing. It shows that they don’t actually hate cancel culture. They love it. They rely on it. They just want to be the ones wielding it.
They are fragile, unable to handle any challenge to their self-righteous authority. They are weak, refusing to fight for what most of them know is right and preferring instead to settle for what is comfortable and easy.
So let’s stop pretending this is about principles. It’s about power—who gets to be the hero, who gets to be seen, who gets to exist without facing a coordinated outrage campaign from people who claim to hate outrage culture.
If conservatives want to keep canceling movies, fine. Let them. But they should at least drop the pretense that they stand for free expression. Because when your entire movement is built on screaming at a children’s movie, you don’t get to lecture anyone about sensitivity.