Elon Musk Spearheads Push Among MAGA Culture Warriors To Cancel Netflix for Transgender Messaging in Children’s Show

The MAGA world’s online culture warriors, egged on by billionaire Elon Musk, have settled on a new target for their ire — the world’s largest streaming service, Netflix.The ostensible reason for that ire is outrage over a cartoon accused of pushing transgender messaging to children, but it has now evolved into complaints about the streaming service’s diversity initiatives and the political contributions of its employees.Whether the campaign to get conservative Americans to cancel their Netflix accounts is having any impact remains to be seen. But the company’s stock is clearly showing some stress at a time when the rest of the market is at all-time highs.At the beginning of the week, before the campaign began, Netflix’s stock was hovering around $1,200. By Thursday morning, after thousands of irate social media posts, Netflix’s stock had dipped about 5 percent to roughly $1,134.The boycott push began when a right-wing X account, Libs of TikTok, shared a video from the Netflix show “Dead End: Paranormal Park,” in which the blue-haired protagonist, Barney Guttman, states, “I’m trans … and everyone at school knows and everyone at home knows.”“OMG. Dead End Paranormal Park, a show on Netflix, is pushing pro-transgender on CHILDREN. This show is advertised for 7-YEAR-OLDS It’s being promoted on @netflix kids now,” Libs of TikTok said. The show has a rating of TV-Y7, meaning it is deemed suitable for children 7 years old or older.The show was first released in 2022 and only ran for two seasons, ending in 2023. The creator of the show, Hamish Steele, posted on the left-wing alternative to X, BlueSky, that the show was canceled and said it was “all lies and slander” to suggest Netflix was promoting the show.Despite Mr. Steele’s insistence that Libs of TikTok misrepresented the status of the show, social media users began cancelling their Netflix accounts, and soon afterward Mr. Musk, who has a child who was allowed to transition despite his objections, started actively encouraging his more than 200 million followers to do the same. “Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids,” Mr. Musk wrote on X on Wednesday.Throughout the day, he re-posted users sharing screenshots of confirmations that they canceled their subscriptions, often writing, “Cancel Netflix.”It did not take long for conservatives to find even more reasons to cancel Netflix. Some users dug up a post on BlueSky that Mr. Steele wrote about the shooting of Charlie Kirk, calling the conservative activist a “random Nazi” and asking why people were expressing sympathy. Mr. Steele has denied that he was celebrating Kirk’s death. Mr. Musk shared a post from one user who wrote, “If you employ someone who celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk and makes content that pushes pro-trans content on my kids…you will NEVER get a dime of my money. It’s as simple as that.”Mr. Musk also shared a post that criticized Netflix for touting the percentage of its employees who come from “underrepresented” racial or ethnic groups and accused the streaming service of hiring based on race instead of “qualifications.”Another post shared by the billionaire businessman included a graphic that said 100 percent of political donations made by Netflix employees went to Democratic candidates during the 2024 election cycle.Netflix has survived several conservative boycotts in recent years. Last year, supporters of President Trump called for a boycott as they fumed over news that the chairman of Netflix, Reed Hastings, donated $7 million to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign. The rate of users canceling their subscriptions tripled to 2.8 percent following the kerfuffle, according to Bloomberg. The business outlet attributed some of those cancellations to Netflix’s decision to phase out its lowest-tier subscription, but noted that the cancellation rate was “unusual.”The most intense backlash to Netflix in recent years was in 2020 over its film “Cuties,” which sparked backlash over scenes of minors performing sexually explicit dance routines and a promotional poster featuring the young girls in the movie dressed in skimpy outfits.Netflix eventually apologized for the “inappropriate artwork” and said it was “not representative” of the film. Data from a research firm, YipitData, showed that cancellations reached 8 percent after the “Cuties” controversy.Netflix did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Elon Musk Spearheads Push Among MAGA Culture Warriors To Cancel Netflix for Transgender Messaging in Children’s Show

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