On April 6,  hundreds of protesters convened outside the Walt Disney Company’s headquarters in Burbank, California. Their message: Boycott Disney.

Disney’s having a moment at the center of the latest culture war dust-up, with the allied forces of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base and the old “religious right” arrayed against an equally motley crew of something they call the “radical woke left.”

Under pressure from the latter, Disney spoke out against Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, a bit of fentanyl-laced red marketing meat tested on the former’s support base there, and now spreading to other states.

Disney’s General Entertainment Content president, Karey Burke, followed that up with a stated intention to boost the presence and centrality of  queer characters in Disney productions: “We have many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories and yet we don’t have enough leads and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters and not have to be about gay stories.”

Right-wing response: Avengers! Assemble!

It seems that the American right has already forgotten, and is about to re-learn, a lesson it’s only recently given to what passes for an American “left”: It’s easier to implement and sustain a “buycott” than a “boycott.”

When Chick-fil-A came under attack for donating money to anti-LGBTQIA causes, its revenues didn’t fall. In fact, they soared to new records as Chick-fil-A became religious conservatives’ fast food chain of preference.

The Chick-fil-A boycott/buycott scenario had clearly drawn lines. You avoided it because you supported e.g. same-sex marriage, or you patronized it to “own the libs.”

With Disney, the lines aren’t nearly as clear. Disney is easy to buycott, hard to boycott.  Why? Because Disney owns and makes a LOT of stuff, not all of which is obviously Disney-branded. Let us count the ways:

Walt Disney Pictures and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Pixar. Marvel Studios. Lucasfilm. 20th Century Studios and 20th Century Animation. Searchlight Pictures. The ABC television network. The Disney Channel. Freeform. FX. National Geographic.  A&E. ESPN. Hulu. Then there are its theme parks, hotels, and cruise line.

If you consume entertainment content, you almost certainly consume Disney content whether you notice you’re doing so or not.

Buycotting  Disney is as easy as continuing to do what you’re probably already doing.

Boycotting Disney? Well, that’s significant and probably unpleasant work. How many sportsball fans even notice that Disney owns ESPN? How many of them are going to give up watching their favorite teams’ games over it? Probably not many.

The proposed Disney boycott is essentially Old Yeller, except that few will likely notice or mourn when it’s put down. And frankly, I’d be happy to see all of these “culture war” battles end that way.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Genocide.” That’s the announced verdict of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy as images of hundreds of civilian dead — some with their hands bound, apparently executed — emerged from the city of Bucha following a withdrawal of Russian troops.

“You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” says US president Joe Biden. “Well, the truth of the matter — we saw it happen in Bucha — he is a war criminal.”

What actually happened in Bucha is uncertain  and may remain so forever. The Ukrainians claim that Russian soldiers murdered the civilians. The Russians seem to alternately claim the entire scene was staged, or else that the victims were suspected Russian sympathizers/collaborators killed by fellow Ukrainians.  Probably mass murder, but who did it?

Unfortunately, absent total defeat a la Germany and Japan in World War Two — an unlikely outcome for either side in Ukraine  — such crimes will almost certainly go unpunished.  Neither the actual perpetrators (whoever they are), nor their commander in chief (whoever he is), will suffer significant consequences for their actions.

Biden’s call for Vladimir Putin to face trial –presumably in the International Criminal Court — is a combination of political grandstanding and gross hypocrisy. His own government refuses to recognize that court and threatens to sanction its judges and prosecutors if they investigate US war crimes.

But he does have a point.

“To initiate a war of aggression,” reads the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal, convened to prosecute accused Nazi war criminals at the end of World War Two,  “is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

By that standard, Vladimir Putin is a war criminal for his order to invade Ukraine. The Bucha massacre, if perpetrated by Russian troops, is just a subsidiary crime.

So is Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s predecessor, who oversaw Ukraine’s war of aggression against two seceded republics in the Donbas region along the Ukraine-Russia border.

Zelenskyy himself, as well as Biden, are guilty of continuing wars of aggression initiated by their predecessors — Zelenskyy in the Donbas; Biden in, among other places, Syria.

Harry Truman never faced trial for two of the largest terror attacks in history (the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima). George W. Bush and Barack Obama will probably never pay for their war crimes. Ditto Putin and Zelenskyy.

Occasionally, if the heat’s really on, the world’s political class will toss a few small fry under the bus. Absent total state collapse, the ringleaders usually skate.

Which is a very good reason to support total — and universal — state collapse. War itself is the crime, and the state is the perpetrator.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On March 28, US president Joe Biden unveiled his 2023 budget proposal. It totals $5.8 trillion, which would bring federal spending and deficits back below their pandemic-era heights (although not back to 2019 levels). Biden’s ask comes to nearly $18,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.

Oddly, The Hill reports, the White House’s big brag on the proposal is that it would  reduce the deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next ten years.

Usually when a politician pitches a plan to do something over the  course of a decade, I expect a bunch of rosy projections that won’t ever come to pass. It’s easy to make promises now and leave them to another president and other Congresses to keep.

This proposal doesn’t even bother with the rosy projections, though. Its  tables, which run through 2032, project higher, not lower, deficits. The 2023 deficit would come to $1.154 trillion, the 2032 deficit to $1.784 trillion. The cumulative projected deficit for the period 2023-2032 would increase the national debt to nearly half again its current total of $30 trillion.

Then again, perhaps those projections ARE rosy.  They assume ever-increasing federal revenues and spending, with no obstacles to the US government’s ability to borrow as much as it feels like borrowing. None of those are safe assumptions.

Of course, presidential budget proposals are just that — proposals. Since the 1920s, the president has been legally required to submit one to Congress each year. But Congress isn’t required to pass it. It’s always modified, and the modifications are almost always upward.

The problem is exacerbated by the US government’s “baseline budgeting” accounting method, under which the starting point for all spending is the current level and it’s assumed spending will increase from that level to account for inflation and population growth.

In other words, spending increases are automatic, while spending cuts (even cuts to the projected increases!) require explicit congressional action. And cuts to projected increases are always portrayed by their opponents as actual cuts in the fights over such action.

American politicians don’t fight to cut spending, borrowing, debt, or deficits. They just fight over how much to increase all four. They’re building a house of cards, and one day a stiff breeze will come along and blow that house — and them — over.

Could this be fixed? Well, maybe. A good start would entail two elements.

The first would be actually ending, not just promising to someday reduce, deficit spending. That is, plausibly estimate revenues and budget to spend less than those revenues.

The second would be to eliminate “baseline budgeting” and require every department to justify every dime it asks for every year.

Will that happen? Almost certainly not. The American political establishment’s deficit disorder is chronic, probably incurable, and eventually fatal.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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