Posted on October 29, 2015

Uncuck the Right Is Fighting a War Against the Left with Racist Disney Parodies

Ethan Chiel, Fusion, October 29, 2015

There’s a song in the movie Mulan, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You.” You’ve probably heard it; it begins “Let’s get down to business! To defeat the Huns.”

In the ultra-conservative parody version rewritten by Uncuck The Right, the song starts “Let’s get down to business! To defeat the Left.” That version goes on to cheerfully explain to never “punch rightward,” and to never “be afraid to discuss White interests.”

It’s a singalong, one of Uncuck the Right’s increasingly popular parody Disney tunes. The videos are meant to appeal to and unite the alt-right, a loosely defined coalition of self-described racists, Dark Enlightenment adherents, and ardent social conservatives, among others.

The songs, with their discussions of white supremacy and generally racist and sexist lyrics, would be horrifying to most viewers. But when I asked the creator of Uncuck the Right (hereafter UTR) about them, he responded with a provacation:

What you feel when watching my videos is the same thing I feel when I watch John Oliver”

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What he was willing to say, over email, is that he’s “a young white man who is tired of seeing his people celebrate their dispossession.” Liberal as a kid, reading Austrian economics moved him towards libertarianism; the failure of Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign moved him even farther to the right. He says he’s been posting in /pol/, the 4chan and 8chan’s anarchic, often right-leaning “Politically Incorrect” boards, for years. But his decision to get more actively involved with the alt right came this summer “when the cuckservative meme became big and the Alt Right started to explode.”

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{snip} For his part UTR prefers the term “white identitarian” because, as he puts it, “‘white nationalist’ evokes certain imagery in the popular consciousness that is incongruous with my ideology”

In two months he’s posted 12 videos, which have garnered 147,864 views and 2,356 subscribers as of this writing. He’s not the first among the alt right to re-write songs, but he is one of the most successful. So far all his videos are parodies of Disney songs, though he says he plans “to expand to other show tunes in the future.”

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The most popular of UTR’s parodies by far is titled “This is Dildoween,”a re-dubbed version of the opening tune of The Nightmare Before Christmas. In the UTR version the denizens of Halloween Town are caricatures of Latin American immigrants, Hollywood producers, and college professors melodically explaining their promotion of a medley of different alt-right fears that include increasing immigration, “cultural marxism,” and sexual liberation.

A few of UTR’s videos take this generalist approach, but many are more specific. One prominent target is the conservative magazine National Review, which comes under fire by UTR (and others on the alt-right) for not openly espousing, among other things, white nationalism, or white identarianism, or whatever their preferred nomenclature is. The video is titled “The National Review” and is set to the tune of “The Bells of Notre Dame.”

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The choice to start with Disney songs began on a whim, when he made “Friends on the Alt Right,” a takeoff of The Princess and the Frog’s “Friends on the Other Side.” That song, it’s worth noting, is sung by a character who’s a black man voiced by Keith David. In fact, several of UTR’s videos put white nationalist talking points in the mouths of characters who are people of color. But UTR says he likes Disney because he “grew up with it,” and he’s seen the tactic work before:

it has a lot of emotional currency for Millennials. Most people of my generation love Disney songs, remember all the characters and voices, etc., so I feel it makes an effective basis for propaganda. I was also inspired by a series of similar videos done by the Gamergate movement in 2013, which had a generally higher production value than my videos, but in my opinion shoddier lyrics.

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But, regardless, it’s important to understand the videos and their maker as part of a larger, though not necessarily large, ideological movement. UTR is also active on Twitter, where he says he’s “generally more straightforward,” but does “enjoy trolling leftists with deliberately inflammatory language.” He’s participated in a number of hashtag campaigns, including a recent push to boycott the new Star Wars movie, but adds that he “wouldn’t formally defend everything I say during a big hashtag campaign.”

Nonetheless, UTR believes he and his cohorts are “the future thought leaders of the Right, once all the Boomers die off.” (There are compelling arguments that perhaps he’s correct, though not because of the help of his memes). He explains this with reference to a mixture of youthfulness and ideology:

We’re actually edgy, funny, and relevant. We understand how the Left fights . . . how the Left seizes control over the mainstream historical narrative, and how they use language to subtly define the parameters of the debate. We know that cuckservatives are just liberals from the 70s . . . The Alt Right does not comprise obese low church Protestant Baby Boomers with 103 IQs. We’re a bunch of eccentric hipsters and neckbeards who understand how the Left works, and how to create legitimately subversive and effective propaganda.

A preoccupation with historical narrative and the political left runs through UTR’s output. After explaining that the alt right is the future, he added that he thinks “Leftists in the media understand what we’re doing and why we’re successful, because you’ve employed our tactics–consciously or not–for generations.” The way UTR sees it, he and his compatriots “can actually out-meme the Left.”

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