Star Wars continues down an unfortunate path of ruin and bad storytelling. The latest entry in this journey to the Dark Side is a new show called “The Acolyte.” The creators say it is the “gayest” yet. Matt Walsh has thoughts.

After recounting a series of rough financial numbers, Walsh says:

Faced with this brand collapse, Disney had two options. One option was to retool their content to focus on entertainment and family values instead of activism, which is what Disney used to do, when it was a universally beloved and much more financially successful company. They could get back to their roots. Not in the sense of churning out more remakes, but in the sense of being a company that makes wholesome family films that capture a sense of wonder and imagination.

The other option was to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing, and continue to shove the same agenda — the equity/representation/LGBTQ approach — that they’ve been pushing for years now.

Eight months ago, Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, publicly pledged to pursue the first option. He declared that Disney would refocus its efforts on entertainment, not political messaging. That was the plan, or at least the plan that was shared with the public. But that’s not what happened.

Disney, over the past eight months, has apparently decided to double down on agenda-driven content, to the point that they’re openly attacking their own fans. It’s a remarkable turn of events.

However, Walsh says, wokeness “may not be the best way to describe what we’re seeing at Disney and other major corporations like it.”

[“Acolyte” creator] Leslye Headland is gay and has no respect whatsoever for her audience or her own show. This is how Disney is promoting the latest entry in a franchise they spent $4 billion to buy a decade ago. And that has a lot of fans wondering how exactly she was chosen for the role of showrunner. If her role is to push some subversive woke ideology, she’s not being very subversive about it. She’s just angering as many fans as she possibly can. That’s all this is.

And she’s not the only one doing it. The CEO of Lucasfilm — a woman named Kathleen Kennedy — just came out in defense of her showrunner. Kennedy declared that if you’re not a fan of how Leslye Headland is handling herself, then you probably hate women.

After considering other Star Wars and Disney products, as well as even things like Cracker Barrel, Walsh concludes:

All the combined efforts of feminism and diversity and equity and wokeness have brought us to this point. But it’s bureaucracy and inertia that’s keeping it alive, long after everyone’s tired of it. That inertia is the reason why — whether you’re going to a restaurant or a movie theater — you’re now guaranteed a product that’s as mediocre as the people who created it.

Read the whole thing here.