There’s a song in the movie Mulan, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You.” You’ve probably heard it; it begins “Let’s get down to business! To defeat the Huns.”
In the ultra-conservative parody version rewritten by Uncuck The Right, the song starts “Let’s get down to business! To defeat the Left.” That version goes on to cheerfully explain to never “punch rightward,” and to never “be afraid to discuss White interests.”
It’s a singalong, one of Uncuck the Right’s increasingly popular parody Disney tunes. The videos are meant to appeal to and unite the alt-right, a loosely defined coalition of self-described racists, Dark Enlightenment adherents, and ardent social conservatives, among others.
The songs, with their discussions of white supremacy and generally racist and sexist lyrics, would be horrifying to most viewers. But when I asked the creator of Uncuck the Right (hereafter UTR) about them, he responded with a provocation:
“What you feel when watching my videos is the same thing I feel when I watch John Oliver”
I don’t know much about UTR as a person. When I contacted him via his YouTube channel and asked if I could interview him he obliged, but said that “for security reasons” ( he couldn’t talk on the phone or over Skype.
What he was willing to say, over email, is that he’s “a young white man who is tired of seeing his people celebrate their dispossession.” Liberal as a kid, reading Austrian economics moved him towards libertarianism; the failure of Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign moved him even farther to the right. He says he’s been posting in /pol/, the 4chan and 8chan’s anarchic, often right-leaning “Politically Incorrect” boards, for years. But his decision to get more actively involved with the alt right came this summer “when the cuckservative meme became big and the Alt Right started to explode.”
That also coincided with a name change from prodicusthegod (a reference to an obscure Greek philosopher) to Uncuck the Right.
“Cuckservative” is a portmanteau, of “cuckold” and “conservative,” which has been around for years, but whose popularity ballooned this summer. As The New Republic’s Jeet Heer explained, it “emerged out of the white supremacist movement as a term of abuse for white conservatives deemed race traitors unwilling to forthrightly defend the interests of white America.” For his part UTR prefers the term “white identitarian” because, as he puts it, “‘white nationalist’ evokes certain imagery in the popular consciousness that is incongruous with my ideology”
In two months he’s posted 12 videos, which have garnered 147,864 views and 2,356 subscribers as of this writing. He’s not the first among the alt right to re-write songs, but he is one of the most successful. So far all his videos are parodies of Disney songs, though he says he plans “to expand to other show tunes in the future.”
(At this point, a disclosure: ABC/Disney is one of Fusion’s parent companies, along with Univision. I contacted Disney for comment on the videos, but they have yet to respond to my request.)
The most popular of UTR’s parodies by far is titled “This is Dildoween,”a re-dubbed version of the opening tune of The Nightmare Before Christmas. In the UTR version the denizens of Halloween Town are caricatures of Latin American immigrants, Hollywood producers, and college professors melodically explaining their promotion of a medley of different alt-right fears that include increasing immigration, “cultural marxism,” and sexual liberation.
