Disney analysts are tabulating all angles on why Solo failed to hit light speed at the box office.  Was it because of "franchise fatigue" less than six months after the previous Star Wars film?  The movie's troubled production?  Did Alden Ehrenreich lack convincing resemblance to a young Harrison Ford?

The answer the suits in the Mouse House may refuse to acknowledge was provided by a store associate as I looked for a dog toy: "I didn't know what an ess-jay-dubya was until I heard about Lando being pansexual.  I don't want ess-jay-dubyas messing up Star Wars."

Neither did other longtime fans.  "Pansexual," stated by one of Solo's writers a week before the film's release, is not a term associated with two hours of escapism to that galaxy far, far away.  Or any sexual term, for that matter.  Little doubt that because of it, many faithful fans veered away from Solo.

Will acknowledging that mistake alter trajectory?  Probably not.  Kathleen Kennedy and others at Disney seem even more determined to turn Star Wars into something it has never been before: an ideological platform – beginning with injecting LGBT activism into the series.

To object to that agenda has been to invite derision and condemnation.  Star Wars author Chuck Wendig – whose Aftermath trilogy was more obsessed with gender politics than with decent plot and common sense – has unleashed torrents of profanity that in another era would have him dropped into the Sarlacc.  "Sorry, you squawking saurian," Wendig wrote in one particularly vulgar post.  "Meteor's coming.  And it's a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct.  You're not the Rebel Alliance.  You're not the good guys.  You're the f‑‑‑‑‑‑ Empire, man.  You're the s‑‑‑‑‑, oppressive, totalitarian Empire."

How tolerant.

A few days ago, I wrote in a forum that Kennedy is destroying Star Wars with a "social justice warrior" agenda.  I was quickly emblazoned a "bigot."  Told I was not "woke."

Perhaps.  Maybe I am asleep and dreaming that average life expectancy of gay men is twenty years less than that of heterosexuals.  For only that reason, I would never endorse the LGBT lifestyle – not out of "homophobic hatred," but out of sincere love.  It is unconscionable to applaud another's self-destruction.  There should be no more hatred toward our gay friends than an alcoholic could be despised for returning to the bottle.  Each of us has a temptation, and "there but for the grace of God..."

It was decreed that "intolerance" invalidated my fan credentials.  A novelist further told me over Twitter:

Tolerance can't be extended to people who are intolerant.  Intolerant people will take advantage and screw everyone else.  If a group of people are bad, it is fair to treat them badly.  Insisting on movies dominated by white male characters is bad behavior.  It is therefore fair to decry people who want movies to remain under white male dominance.  As for what to do with intolerant people, we need to find a way to reach out to them and teach them.

There it was: those refusing "enlightenment" are to be "re-educated."  To be shown the error of their beliefs.  Much as dissidents in Russia were deemed psychologically unbalanced and sent to Siberia for "treatment."  Declared evil and insane and enemies of society.

This, in due time, makes it easier to destroy them.

Consider Jack Phillips, whose Masterpiece Cakeshop prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Phillips was harassed with legal persecution because he would not create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, as happened to the owner of Arlene's Flowers after refusing to provide décor for a similar ceremony, and then again to Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Indiana.  It shuttered permanently in April, three years after reporter Alyssa Marino coerced out of owner Crystal O'Connor that she "would have to say no" to catering a hypothetical homosexual ceremony being called a wedding.  For that, O'Connor received numerous threats upon her life.

That is how many "peaceful progressives" reacted – as if they are "professional offendables" whose life purpose is being triggered and set upon a path to war.  Maybe that's an appropriate analogy.

During high school, I beheld many revolutions, from peaceful rejections of communism to the violent end of the Ceaușescu regime in Romania.  Then the Soviet Union went down, not with the fearfully prophesied bang, but with a whimper.

There was one element shared among those rebels: they knew when to stop.  Oppressive states were toppled by an overwhelming tide of desire for freedom.  Then the real work could begin.

That is political revolution.  It has a defined conclusion: closure of one epoch so that a better may begin and flourish.

Social revolution has no such finite end.  The civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties was not a "social" revolution.  There was no grand upheaval of the common order – only an assertion of what had long been codified in American heart if not law: that all men are created equal.  It began with acts of conscience, and it ended with acts of conscience.

There are many in our era who speak unceasingly of bringing about "social justice."  They never describe what a "socially justified culture" will look like.  Why should they want to?  Because for big-P Progressivism to be consistent, it must be progressing toward something.  To state conditions for victory?  That would be aborting Progressivism.  That is not part of the plan.

Radical Progressivism has spawned a social revolution whose adherents cannot provide a decisive objective.  It is not possible.  The inevitable mission of Progressivism is not to win a battle within society, but to wage continuous war upon it.  All that comes to matter is upheaval never-ending.  To find justification for the cause.  If none exists, one is created.

So it is that there must always be "enemies of the people" to correct or crush or crucify.  The words betray a dark intent: "obey us, or we will destroy you."

Demagogues exploit a need of all humans: the sense that their lives matter.  Striving to achieve something greater within ourselves and contributing its qualities to the larger world is a virtue requiring effort from the individual.

Progressivism offers abolishing that obligation.  It promises a fast and easy path to fulfillment.  "Join us!  Lay down the burden of your conscience!  Take up the cause and be something you could never be on your own!" 

Such is the case of the "LGBT rights" movement.  A Centers for Disease Control study in 2014 indicates that homosexuals and bisexuals constitute less than 2% of the population.  Yet the perception from the entertainment and news industries is that the LGBT lifestyle accounts for at least a third of the American people.

Are there really legions of support for the radical LGBT movement?  It's doubtful.  Neither did the radical environmentalist movement of the nineties enjoy committed support.  At best it was "the cool thing to do."

That style of "liberalism" now seems so quaint.  Liberalism in the noble sense is entwined with conservatism – the former being fair but firm, the latter firm but fair.  Both are enjoined toward a common goal: affording liberty and peace to all within the sensible bounds of law and nature.  True liberalism is at a dire impasse with what progressivism has become.

Now, at last, "Progressivism" is revealed as fascism in need of fashionable veneer.  For this moment, that is "LGBT pride."  Many succumb to its allure of power and pleasure.  To resist that is to stand as an enemy of the revolution.  Even among the homosexual community, those who condemn such fanaticism are not spared from wrath.  As one gay friend recently remarked, LGBT extremism is a threat to lasting peace for all of us.  It is "pride or die."  No exceptions tolerated.  It is a short distance from there to the abyss that spawned Robespierre, Roland Freisler, the Khmer Rouge, and the basement of the Lubyanka Building.  At least the LGBT movement is more multi-colored than Lenin's own "useful idiots"...and that is all that it is: a means to an end, a tool to be employed by "superiors" and then crushed in the name of the revolution.  It always happens.

The war for "social justice" will never be voluntarily ended.  Victory is not desired.  Identity politics will continue exploiting those too lazy to forge an identity for themselves.  Those who persist in their individuality must be wary of those willing to obliterate their own.

But be of good cheer: whether by resistance or running out of fuel, all social revolutions must end.  Always the result is the same: destruction of what could have been and should have been magnificent.

This returns us to a certain space opera.  Disney should tread with caution.  See that massive swath of crimson splayed across America on the 2016 election map?  That's where the vast majority of Star Wars tickets comes from, to say nothing of the colossal volume of merchandise bought by families there.  No doubt a few Disney shareholders prefer that profit trump ideology.

For the most part, those families will never purchase a "Rebel Husband and Husband" action figure set for their kids.

Christopher Knight is a writer, filmmaker, and geek currently journeying across America with a dachshund.  Visit his blog at theknightshift.com.