Sony Refuses China’s Demand to Remove Statue of Liberty from Spider-Man

CLAY: So, this woke politics era that we’re in where you have Disney, for instance, lecturing the American public but they’ll do whatever China wants, basically — and let me give you, by the way, a shout-out, a positive thing here. Did you see the story Sony refused to take the Statue of Liberty out of the new Spider-Man movie and as a result, Sony — which is a Japanese company and has no love lost for China and as a result they wouldn’t allow the new Spider-Man movie to be released in China but Sony stood up more for America I think…? Is that not true? You don’t buy it?

BUCK: I don’t know. This is just based on what I’ve been reading but it actually would have been super expensive to do that.

CLAY: You’re not giving them the benefit of the doubt here? Have you seen the most recent Spider-Man?

BUCK: No. How much is the Statue of Liberty in it?

CLAY: It’s in it a decent amount.

BUCK: Then it does make me think that cost may have been because doing the pixelation or whatever they do to remove — I don’t work for Pixar. I don’t know how this stuff goes. But doing the things that they would do to remove it I think there’s an expense factor. Look. Maybe it was a combination of factors. I also do think they realize, if you remove the Statue of Liberty from a movie and the American people find out about it and you’re an American company, you’re going to get heat. I do think that there’s a little bit of a change in perception in corporate America about that now. I think the Disney —

CLAY: There’s a cost.

BUCK: I think sometimes you throw one punch in the school yard and all of a sudden all the bullies go, “Ooh, ooh, that doesn’t look like it’s much fun.”

CLAY: That’s true.

BUCK: But also, Clay, on the hypocrisy point: Yes, it is hypocrisy when lib companies or the directors, the CEOs of powerful media companies in America — or, in this case, sports, right, in the case of playing… They’re playing in the UAE, right?

CLAY: Yeah, the NBA, which pulled its All-Star Game out of Charlotte over a transgender bathroom bill is now going to play games in the UAE which punishes at times homosexuality with death.

BUCK: The reality of why this keeps happening. First of all, hypocrisy doesn’t bother liberals, right, because part of their mentality is, “We do what we want to do when we want to do it, and so if we change our mind because we prefer this outcome, we don’t pretend…” Meaning the leftists mind-set is, “We don’t pretend to have consistent standards, really.”

But if you want to even get beyond that, did they take action domestically in favor of wokeness? Because that’s what gets their preferred constituency fired up. The left-wing Biden voters who see this stuff and say to themselves, yeah, that’s right, show the state of North Carolina what’s going on, they don’t care about what happens in China. They don’t care about human rights in China. It’s all just virtue signaling to them.

It doesn’t really matter. So that’s why it’s not surprising. Still worthwhile for us to point out the hypocrisy. But when you understand the motivation of companies taking that action to punish, let’s say, North Carolina over the bathroom bill, the NBA doing that, is not because they really fundamentally care about human rights. It’s because they want people who are left of center to think well of them, and it doesn’t have the same calculation for what’s going on in China every day. It’s not really about human rights. It’s about virtue signaling.

CLAY: Yeah, I think that’s right. And this, to me, is the lesson that comes from that. When you throw a punch like DeSantis threw a punch at Disney and it lands squarely on their chin and suddenly… Your analogy of the bully and the fight in the schoolyard I think makes sense. Suddenly you realize that you have to be conscious that that punch may be coming, I think the NBA has been knocked down a couple of times over this hypocrisy and going to the UAE…

If the NBA would just come out and say, “Hey, you know what? We’re a for-profit company and we’re trying to make as much money as we possibly can,” I would say, okay. Right? But when you lecture us domestically, I think there’s a huge segment of the population that sees stories like these and the NBA is leaving its chin open, and they are taking some massive punches. So I think it does register with that 20% persuadable middle.

BUCK: But they’re taking those punches because people like me refuse to watch the NBA anymore.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: That’s a part of this.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: It’s that conservatives have finally said — and it’s even more of just a a content consumption decision, I think, than one you think of as overtly political. I just get so… I’m not saying I’m a part of a boycott or I was a huge NBA watcher at one time although I did grow up watching NBA games pretty regularly, but they just annoyed me too much after a while with this stuff with the nonsense with the standing in the middle of the court with the hoodies up and all the social justice stuff —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — nd then, of course, the same thing at some level with the NFL. The reason that this has changed, the reason calculation is hanging is a lot of people listening to this show have said, “I’m just not gonna support them anymore.” Now, that doesn’t mean you can never support them, but it does mean that they have to feel, you know, the same thing, right?

You can cut your Disney+ subscription and if Disney puts out a statement in six months or a year or changes its behavior in a way that shows that they take the concerns of parents who, you know, don’t want this indoctrination stuff seriously. Well, then, yeah, go to Disney. I know just got back from Disney World, but I’m saying —

CLAY: We already had the trip scheduled but, yeah, for one day.

BUCK: You know what I mean. There has to be some cause and effect, right? It’s meant to bring about a certain outcome, and we actually want Disney to be a company that’s making great stuff for kids and allowing kids to have a lot of fun. But that means that the right has to have their voices heard too. That’s all. It can’t just be that the left boycotts, the left mobilizes, they get their way with all of this stuff, and I think it’s been true with sports. It’s now true in, really, all aspects of entertainment media. It’s all over the place.