Out of that place, following the wave of excitement at the release of the new trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, emerged the Twitter hashtag #BoycottStarWarsVII, encouraging filmgoers to shun the highly-anticipated upcoming movie. Why? Because, according to several deep-thinking internet clowns, it, and its Jewish director express hate towards the white race.
At the head of this unpleasant choir sits a cultural-political blog called End Cultural Marxism. A post on the blog's Twitter account said, "#BoycottStarWarsVII because it is anti-white propaganda promoting #whitegenocide."
Another of its tweets directly attacks the film's director, J. J. Abrams, saying, "Jewish activist JJ Abrams is an anti-white nut. #BoycottStarWarsVII."
The vast majority of people have come out against the blogger and his hashtags, but there are a few supporters joining in on the ugly wave. One of these is the twitter account NFSupporterSouth, whose owner called Abrams a "Typical anti white Jewboy, but we must not criticise. Remember the holocaust and all that bollocks."
Abrams in generally the main target for the internet's fringe members. The director is putting a black actor (John Boyega), a Hispanic actor (Oscar Isaac) and a white actress (Daisy Ridley) on the good-guys' side, and three white actors (Adam Driver, Gwendoline Christie, and Domhnall Gleeson) on the bad-guys' side.
Add to that Lupita N'yongo, another dark-skinned actress, and you get a racially diverse cast, which leads paranoid voices to say the film is an anti-white statement, using a huge American franchise. And so, there are those who are calling for a boycott of it.
This recent wave of criticism can be seen as a kind of closure, since some of George Lucas's greatest critics when the first Star Wars film came out were culture researchers and leftist philosophers. Famed Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson complained about all of the human characters being white, and that the plot of the film was praising American colonialism.
These days, with a much more ethnically varied cast, the critics come from the extremist right, and they're decidedly less intelligent and more belligerent. Abrams' reaction to this has been fairly elegant, celebrating the trailer with an intergalactic note, saying, "I don't care if you're black, white, brown, Jawa, Wookie, Jedi or Sith. I just hope you like it!
"Apparently people are mad because blah blah black dude protagonist with a lightsaber, or girl protagonist, or Latino X-Wing pilot protagonist, and not enough straight white dudes," said author and screenwriter Chuck Wendig who received some criticism of his own when he wrote a Star Wars book that had a gay protagonist. "And folks are mad enough to join in on the hashtag and — nngh. Bleh. Meh. Gnarrgh.
I mean, what version of Star Wars did you watch? The one where Luke Skywalker is a racist hick sh*tbird? The one where the Empire are the good guys because yay oppression and fascism and totalitarian chic?"
So far, it looks like Lucasfilm (the longtime Star Wars production company) and Abrams himself are ignoring the hashtag for the most part. Even with it gaining some visibility, its biggest effect is keeping the film in the public's mind.