Stacey Henley, from his Twitter biography.

I will admit it: I had never heard of Stacey Henley before. Mr Henley writes about electronic games, and those are simply of no interest to me. But now he’s telling us that if we choose to go to see Spider-Man: Lotus, we must be horrible, horrible raaaaacists.

Titled Spider-Man: Lotus, the movie was one of the most anticipated amateur movie projects. I say ‘was’, but in a lot of cases, it still is. The reason the movie has become so controversial is because the actor playing Spider-Man, Warden Wayne, has just been outed as having a history of using racial slurs. In particular, casual use of the N-word with an ‘a’, and occasional use with a hard R. He’s white.

What? Does that mean if Mr Wayne was black, it would be acceptable?

This was almost immediately followed by leaks that the movie’s director, Gavin J. Konop also had a history of racial and ableist remarks. This is not just the best boy and assistant grip (with apologies to all the hard working crews out there). This is the star and the director. You could not find two people who better represent the film. Knowing that the two most central people in the project are racists has obviously put a lot of people off from watching and supporting Spider-Man: Lotus. But predictably, a lot of people don’t care.

We do not know, of course, how many other people associated with the movie might hold views that Mr Henley would find objectional, or label racist, or sexist, of homophobic, or transphobic. Whatever all of the other actors, writers, producers, directors, cameramen and other techs, wardrobe people, and whatever might happen to be just isn’t published information. But Mr Henley wants to cancel them all!

That old selfish chestnut is being rolled back out – ‘lots of people work hard on this movie and I want to support them’. I call bull effluence, pal. You just want to watch the movie, and a little racism isn’t going to stop you. If that’s the case, just say that. Say ‘racism just isn’t a dealbreaker for me, I want to see Spider-Man’. We’d understand. It’s so rare to see Spider-Man in movies these days. It’s been, what? Five months since the last one left theatres? A lifetime.

A clue here: if Messrs Konop and Wayne can get ‘cancelled’ by this, other people will lose their jobs. The author either doesn’t realize that, or he doesn’t care; both are possible.

My good (electronic) friend, Robert Stacy McCain, noted that Ezra Miller, the actor who played the Flash in Justice League, has had roles in several other movies, including some big-budget films, and is not starring in The Flash, has run across some serious legal problems:

In June 2022, the Standing Rock Sioux tribal court issued a temporary order of protection against Miller on behalf of 18-year-old activist Tokata Iron Eyes. Chase Iron Eyes and Sara Jumping Eagle, Tokata’s parents, requested the court order due to Miller allegedly using “violence, intimidation, threat of violence, fear, paranoia, delusions, and drugs” to hold sway over their child. The relationship between Miller and Tokata Iron Eyes, which began in 2016 when Miller was 23 and Iron Eyes was 12, also included Iron Eyes flying to London in 2017 to visit Miller on the set of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

Iron Eyes also dropped out of school in 2021, allegedly to follow Miller. Iron Eyes’ parents also alleged in their documents that Miller had caused bruises on their child’s body and that Miller had manipulated their child to believe they are transgender. Tokata later responded by denying their parents’ allegations. As of June 10, 2022, law enforcement has been unable to locate Miller to serve them with the order. . . .

On June 16, 2022, a mother and her twelve-year-old child were granted a temporary harassment prevention order against Miller in Massachusetts, after the latter allegedly threatened the woman’s family and showed inappropriate behavior towards the child. According to the mother and child, Miller, who was originally visiting a neighbor, showed up to the family’s house unexpectedly while wearing a bulletproof vest and brandishing a gun before “pestering” the child by “uncomfortably” touching their hips.

Yeah, you start messin’ around with 12-year-olds, and even the greedy sleazebags in Hollywood might see this as a problem. You can picture the scene in the corporate offices at Warner Bros., with executives asking, “Wait a minute — we spent $200 million on a movie starring a guy with ‘they/them’ pronouns? And now he’s on the lam, accused of diddling 12-year-olds, two weeks before the movie’s supposed to hit theaters?”

Mr Miller came out in 2012 as, well, sexually odd. He stated that he identified neither as a male or a female, and that looking for love in all the wrong places meant there was no place off limits. Pretty serious stuff, when you consider the accusations that he had attempted to manipulate a 12-year-old to believe he was transgender.

Yet, despite Mr Henley’s attacks on the star and director of The Flash, I have yet to find anything by the author condemning Mr Miller.

Of course, transgenderism is Mr Henley’s real concern, and he attacked J K Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter world, because Miss Rowling, very much a hard left liberal, doesn’t seem to accept the quaint notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls:

It’s the same excuse people use for supporting the upcoming Hogwarts Legacy game. JK Rowling, the single most influential person in the Harry Potter franchise, might have said some horrible things, but I really want to support Gary the junior level designer, so I have to support this game (with apologies to our hard working devs). Troy Leavitt? Never heard of him.

Why is it so important to the author? Because he claims to be a “transgender woman.” Of course, in accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, we refer to the author by the appropriate honorifics and pronouns. I have, as yet, been unable to determine Mr Henley’s birth name, but Stacey is a name used by both males and females, so Stacey Henley could actually be his birth name. Mr Henley was born a male, and a male he will always be, regardless of how many medications he takes, or under which surgical procedures he had gone.

So why hasn’t Mr Henley, at least as far as I could find, told us that we must boycott The Flash? After all, the accusations of sexually abusing or ‘grooming’ a 12-year-old are pretty serious, and Mr Miller does not seem to have put up much of a defense against them yet.

JK Rowling matters particularly because she is the acceptable face of transphobia. A few of her celebrity chums have declared for her in this nonsensical culture war, but none have come out with half the degree of erroneous and transphobic rhetoric as she has. A great number of middle-class media columnists seem to agree with her, and they have a significant platform themselves, but there are few other major cultural figures waiting in the wings to replace Rowling as the transphobe-in-chief. She is crucial to the movement.

For a while, it seemed as though she was being locked out of her own legacy. She was not present for the Harry Potter reunion, and again, the developers have deliberately and explicitly distanced themselves from her. However, the latest trailer for Fantastic Beasts promotes itself under her name, fluttering across the screen in huge letters. It’s easy to convince ourselves that she’s a pariah, that she is now divorced from the world she created, but she’s not. She seems to be heading in that direction, but as long as you all support Harry Potter regardless of how hateful and deliberately malicious JK Rowling’s statements become, you’re saying trans people just don’t matter as much as fictional wizards. A boycott got rid of Papa John after his repeated racial slurs, but Papa John’s as a business still exists. There doesn’t seem to have been any serious attempt to remove JK Rowling from the idea of Harry Potter, lest it mean missing out on the next instalment of a series that ended its golden age a decade ago.

I guess that if you buy a pizza from Papa John’s, you’re racist!

I confess: I’ve read all of the original Harry Potter books. I thought it was silly when Miss Rowling said, many years later, that Albus Dumbledore was homosexual, because there was none of that in the books. And I’ve seen Aquaman, in which Amber Heard, the former Mrs Johnny Depp, stars as Mera, because I don’t care, one way or the other, about the ridiculous Johnny Depp/Amber Heard lawsuits. Some people blame the former Mrs Depp, and some people blame her ex-husband, but I really don’t give a darn about the claims and counter-claims of two Hollywood celebrities. When Aquaman 2 comes out, I’ll probably see that, too, though at home, when it comes out on one of the channels I get.^[1]I’m about ¾ deaf, and there are certain consonants I just don’t hear, so seeing movies in the theater doesn’t work for me. At home, I have closed captioning available.

I also haven’t boycotted Jane Fonda’s movies, or Sean Penn’s, though, let’s face it, Mr Penn’s only great character was Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and he’s been going downhill since then. I just don’t care about whatever sins the actors may have committed. Jesus said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

That’s not hypocrisy on my part; that’s me telling you what is, and is not, important to me.

But for Mr Henley, to not tell us to avoid Mr Miller’s The Flash movie, yeah, that’s hypocritical, and it always will be.