Nevada DA Dragged For Op-Ed Claiming “Wokeness” Ruined Disney World For Him

Jonathan Van Boskerck next to some Mickey Mouse figurines

Photo via @orlandosentinel/Twitter

April 23, 2021, 10:14 am

The chief deputy district attorney for Clark County in Nevada isn’t having fun on the pirate ride at Disney World anymore because they changed it in a way he doesn’t like and thinks this should be everyone’s problem, according to a recent opinion piece he wrote for the Orlando Sentinel.

Jonathan Van Boskerck says that “wokeness” has infected the park (which recently re-opened despite worries about real infections) and is moving away from the “values and vision of Walt Disney.”

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“Disney proclaims that Splash Mountain must change because of its association with ‘Song of the South,’” he writes. “Disney owns Splash Mountain so it can do what it wants. But if Disney screams at the top of its corporate voice, which is pretty loud, that it is changing it to appease a certain political point of view, now every time I look at the ride I am thinking about politics.”

Sucks to be Jonathan Van Boskerck, but he might broaden this sentiment a bit to consider the fact that whenever Black folks used to look at Splash Mountain, they were reminded of how Walt Disney viewed them and the continuing problem of systemic racism in the U.S. What about their sense of immersion and magical wonderment, Jonathan?

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These are the kinds of questions people started asking after the op-ed took off, and it wasn’t long before they discovered that his life isn’t all about cartoon mice and splashing mountains. In 2018, Van Boskerck was hard at work pushing for the state of Nevada to carry out its first execution in 12 years with a never-before-used cocktail of drugs that human rights activists argued could lead to immense suffering for the victim.

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The execution was successfully postponed as the case dragged on, but unfortunately, Scott Raymond Dozier died by suicide in prison in 2019 after many months of deprivation from any contact with the outside world.