Netflix Is the Greatest Enemy of Western Culture

"Behind its feel-good branding, Netflix promotes a single worldview—one that mocks tradition, rewrites history, and erodes the values that built the West."

From The European Conservative

By Itxu Díaz

Behind its feel-good branding, Netflix promotes a single worldview—one that mocks tradition, rewrites history, and erodes the values that built the West.

If Netflix subscribers worldwide were a nation, they would rival the United States in population—and far surpass it in ideological reach.

And Netflix subscribers are, in fact, a nation. They are also an army. And they are also a religion. Not even Hollywood in its Golden Age matched the ideological influence Netflix has today.

But there’s a notable difference with the famous streaming platform: Netflix offers no real ideological diversity, despite constantly preaching ‘diversity’.

Instead, the streaming platform displays an exhausting ideological uniformity, however subtle it may be at times, which makes its impact far more precise in shaping public opinion.

Over the past year, I’ve had the chance to review Netflix’s content to analyze, recommend, or discourage productions for a group of teenagers who asked me to do so. While I’m not easily shocked at this point, I admit I haven’t come across major series or films that are terrifying in the explicitness of their imagery—at least not much wilder than what was already around in the ‘80s during my childhood. But what has irritated me is realizing how insidiously Netflix is quietly redefining the culture and morality of our nations and actively participating in the demolition of Western civilization’s values.

Exaggeration? Consider some recent examples, picked at random: Gay parents and a boy in a tutu in the animated series CoComelon Lane. The non-binary bison in Ridley Jones. The repulsive violence of Squid Game. The sexualization of minors in Cuties. The mockery of Jesus, Christmas, and Christians in the family-friendly Christmas special That Christmas. The 190 sexual references and pre-teens having sex in Big Mouth. The absurd woke-ification of Cleopatra.

The list could go on endlessly, shows that demonise men, ridicule families, obsess over sex, and mock tradition—packaged for teenagers as harmless fun.

In the new culture wars, victory doesn’t belong so much to those who hold actual power, like political power, but to those who manage to write the narrative of the moment. And the one scripting the battle, though not exclusively, is the aforementioned streaming platform. We form opinions more through what we feel on screen than what we think on paper. 

Thus, young people learn to relate by imitating the models in series, not by reading dense essays about love. Even if they read thoughtful books, young people still absorb the emotional templates from the shows they watch—the hero, the girl, the sidekick, the betrayer.

We’re losing the ability to step back and think clearly. Thought organizes the flow of life’s information, grounding it, calibrating it, and, in fact, putting emotions in their proper place. That’s why we say we are free, because we can act freely only when we bring our actions and experiences to a deeper place than the surface. And we’re becoming less free. Contemporary paradoxes haunt us as if we were Chesterton himself: Netflix markets itself as the pinnacle of freedom because, technically, you can choose what to watch with the flick of a finger, yet it’s the exact opposite.

Without reflective thought, there’s no freedom—only spontaneous reactions, mechanical movements, currents that sweep us along to avoid standing out from the crowd, and irrational universes full of deceptive emotions. We’re only truly free when we reflect on our actions—not just react to them.

The most dangerous consequence of this dehumanizing process is that audiences are increasingly uncritical. It’s not that they aren’t critical—they are, in the frivolous and immediate sense, thanks to the constant participation enabled by social media—but in the absence of reflection and reason, audiences have become far more malleable, and the narrative that screenwriters wish to serve becomes infinitely more persuasive. Messages resonate more effectively today than yesterday because we’re more permeable and have fewer intellectual defenses to tackle the key issues of the postmodern cultural battle.

When I refer to the effect Netflix is having on young people, I’m not being entirely fair. The truth is, it’s also affecting adults. But young people remain more vulnerable today, reaching greater levels of identification with the characters they like in their favorite series—characters they aspire to emulate—and, most importantly, they access streaming content today with a widespread lack of parental oversight. This is not only due to today’s TV consumption trends, via devices and anywhere one wants, but also because many teen shows pose as harmless entertainment but are carefully designed to shape opinions on today’s moral and political issues..

Cultural shaping happens day and night in series and films that travel the world through a vast network that allows access to the platform in 190 countries. If, in the golden years of American cinema last century, Hollywood offered a glimpse of the American way of life through films, promoting the American hero with their values, love of freedom, and deep respect for tradition, today Netflix has taken its place to spread a deranged, sectarian, and profoundly self-destructive image of the United States—and of the West in general.

In recent times, partly due to the “go woke, go broke” phenomenon, many major entertainment corporations have backtracked on their DEI agendas and their frenzied attempts to rewrite classics to fit today’s woke fever. Disney’s backtracking shows how unsustainable woke storytelling has become—yet it has still flooded the market with repulsive stories, woke-ified classic characters, and progressive sentimentalism.

And while many major corporations are breaking away from that trend, realizing that audiences are now moving in a different direction, Netflix’s insistence on not budging an inch from that stance is paradigmatic. Partly because its leadership position allows it, and partly because, in the case of its co-founder, former CEO, and chairman until 2023, Reed Hastings, wokism is so pervasive that he only finds meaning in his work by embracing it as one would the precepts and missions of a sect.

Some analysts downplay the role of streaming platforms in shaping public opinion, arguing that social media like Twitter and TikTok hold more power today than any series. They’re not entirely wrong if we consider their sheer reach, but they are mistaken regarding prescriptive power. A viral clip may get views—but a series shapes how people think and feel over time.

We know P.J. O’Rourke’s words ring true, even before the web became what it is today: “The web is just a device by which bad ideas travel around the globe at the speed of light.” However, even though social media or certain AI platforms provide a springboard for harmful ideas, both spaces maintain a certain ideological diversity: in fact, on platforms like Twitter, ideological confrontation is practically part of their DNA. This isn’t the case with Netflix, where what’s served is overwhelmingly uniform, and if concessions are ever made to viewpoints opposing the dominant ones, it’s only to distort or ridicule them.

Around the time of his inauguration, Donald Trump proclaimed it was time to make Hollywood for everyone again, a beacon of American culture to the world, not merely a monotonous progressive megaphone. It’s unclear how Trump’s promise will materialize or if it can be fulfilled, but it would undoubtedly be a great conservative mission. The goal isn’t for the productions of the coming years to be the opposite of what Netflix’s are now, but simply for another way of telling the story to emerge, for silver-screen leaders proud of Western civilization’s cultural legacy to rise, and for critics of wokism to be allowed to exercise that cultural criticism through entertainment. This would at least give viewers the ability to choose and ensure the cultural image exported to the world is a little less manipulated, sectarian, and decadent.

Ultimately, the question is no small one for the millions worldwide who entrust their TV entertainment exclusively to Netflix: What image do they have of the United States? More than that: What image does the United States have of itself? And furthermore: What image does the West have of itself and its historic cultural legacy? For better or worse, Netflix is today the United States’ most significant diplomatic agent. It’s best not to look the other way and simply mutter, “Bah, it’s just kids’ stuff.”

Pictured: publicity poster for "Cuties", a child-porn movie shown on Netflix