The left’s control of the big stage has come with many issues, namely the fact that it’s run out of ideas and must rely on previously established IPs, franchises, and characters that can be remade and retooled for “modern” audiences. Those who control the big stage are hell-bent on inserting their political values into everything from Ghostbusters to Lord of the Rings.

(READ: The Media Is Getting Desperate in Its Defense of the Woke Lord of the Rings)

One of the increasingly common injections is the gender or race swap. There are many cases when this matters little, but there are times when it absolutely does, and when people point this out they’re deemed racists despite not making any points disparaging races at all.

The most infamous example thus far was the race swapping of Queen Anne Boleyn by the BBC, who decided to put black actress Jodie Turner-Smith in the role as King Henry VIII’s second wife. When the showrunners were asked why they did this, their only reasoning was that the actress and Anne Boleyn were a lot alike personality-wise, side-stepping the elephant in the room.

Now, Netflix has decided to take its turn in generating a wildly out-of-place race-swap in its new show “Vikings: Vallhalla.”

The character in question is the Viking king or “Jaarl” Haakon Sigurdsson. The actor they got to play him? Well, for starters it’s a she, and the “she” in question is black Danish singer Caroline Henderson. In short, the Viking king is a Black queen.

Again, just pointing this out would be enough to send leftists into a tantrum with accusations of racism being flung all over the place. They would say it shouldn’t matter that this blatant of a ridiculous race swap happened and that only racists would care. These same people would foam at the mouth in absolute rage if a retelling of the Madam C.J. Walker story was made with Walker being played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

What makes it so bad is that this wasn’t just careless casting, it’s blatant politics. As God of War: Ragnorok Narrative Director Matt Sophos noted when the trailer revealed that Norse jötunn Angrboda would be portrayed by a black girl, he confessed that the move was absolutely political.

“As a writer, your job is to tell stories that are compelling & relatable,” he said. “You bring pieces of yourself to stories and your opinions shine through. So writing is *always* political—it’s just usually only called that if the politics aren’t agreed with.”

But the injection of politics is unnecessary in the first place, and again, if the race-swapping were reversed with a white actor portraying a popularly black character, there would be endless outrage. The race-swapping only goes one way. It’s political pandering at its worst, but as black culture critic Eric July once noted, this pandering is insulting to the black community, calling these race-swaps of established white characters “hand-me-downs.”

“White folks saying ‘we already developed this character for decades, merchandise is out there, generations of people have grown up understanding who this character was…now we can pass this character to you even though everybody knows the original ain’t you,’” said July.

Woke politics has no business injecting itself into art but it does so at the behest of those who believe we need to be saved from some moral failing we all share. According to social justice advocates, we’re all racist, sexist, and bigoted, and we need to have their politics normalized within our culture in order to break the curse. Their thought is that if white characters are erased and replaced in popular media that this will somehow cure our society of racism.

Yet the racism seems to be flowing from the woke in great wafts and they’re not practicing much self-awareness in noticing it. They attack white people as solely responsible for this racism and as a result, erasing white people from popular media or adding black characters in roles where they’d be clearly out of place becomes the rule.

That is racism. Full stop.