Last night (as of writing this and a bit over a week ago as of this being posted), A More Civilized Age announced that they would not be covering the second season of Disney’s Andor. According to the podcast episode (which appeared in their feed instead of the first episode of coverage that everyone was expecting) shared along by the social media posts, members of the podcast felt it would go against their moral and/or ethical beliefs to cover something on the BDS boycott list, which they’d just learned included Disney+ specifically. This recording specifices that this was a difficult decision for them to make given that the members of the podcast had differing views and that they had to make it in under a week since they only learned of the Disney+ boycott the week that the new season of Andor began streaming. It makes sense that they might struggle with this choice since their weekly coverage of the first season of Andor launched them into a position of relative fame that has contributed to their current success and included perks like being able to watch the final episode early in order to release their final episode of coverage at the same time that the season 1 finale aired. That said, it speaks to their strength of character and their overall morals that the eventual decision wasn’t to cover Andor season 2 without the members of the group who objected to breaking the boycott but to pivot to covering something that isn’t being boycotted.

If you’re not aware, BDS (or Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is a 20-year-old Palestinian-led movement working to draw attention to and create consequences for companies who are supporting Israel and (often but not always indirectly) its on-going genocide against the Palestinian people. Its targets include everything from fast food companies to Microsoft, but each of these companies is targeted in specific ways meant to produce the greatest possible results based on not only the movement’s own decades of experience but on the lessons learned from the South African anti-apartheid movement. Disney+ has been on their list for a while now, around a couple years I believe, as a result of not only casting decisions Disney made in the movies of years past, but because they’re going to be including characters who have strong historical ties to Israel’s intelligence services in upcoming Marvel projects. The call, specifically, is to cancel Disney+ subscriptions and to not engage with Disney’s digital-only media that it features on its streaming platform. This, of course, means you can still buy DVDs or Blu-Rays, go see movies in theaters, and go to Disney parks without breaking the boycott since it is targeting one6 service in particular, but that you shouldn’t be doing anything that could be construed as promoting their digital services. The BDS website explains that this level of specificity is meant to acknowledge the difficulty of existing within modern capitalistic systems while still applying noticeable pressure to the parts of these massive corporations that can be isolated and that the company is heavily relying on (which is why the Microsoft boycott is targeted specifically at Xbox’s Game Pass service, specific flagship game franchises, and xbox gaming hardware).

I’ve crossed the path of many of the more-recent BDS boycott calls over the last year or so, but I hadn’t actually seen a list of on-going boycotts until they started getting circulated across Bluesky in the days prior to the release of the first three episodes of Andor season 2. Typically, given my support of Palestine and its people, and my position AGAINST anyone comitting genocide just as a matter of course, I’ve aligned my shopping habits with each of these new boycott initiatives. It’s been pretty easy, to be honest, given how little money I spend most of the time, so the first time I actually had to stop and think about it was learning about the Disney+ boycott just two days before Andor season 2 started. It was an easy decision in the end, given that going without shows I want to watch is LITERALLY the least I can do and still sleep at night (at least as much as I ever sleep at night), but what turned out to be a real struggle for me was deciding what to do about one of my favorite podcasts as their silence stretched on and I began to worry that they might actually cover Andor season 2 despite the boycott. There was only ever going to be one outcome if AMCA covered the show, and it would have sucked because that would have meant no longer listening to my top four podcasts, but the announcement that AMCA would be pivoting to KotOR 2 instead meant I could set all of those thoughts aside.

Unfortunately, not everyone sees this decision as a principled, outstanding move by the podcast despite it being well-known and loved for being so left-leaning, pro-rebellion, and anti-facist. While most of the comments on their social media and patreon announcements were supportive, there was a decent amount of people decrying this decision as being perfomative, pointless, or downright idiotic. Lots of people even said they were going to withdraw their Patreon support, but I only ever saw those comments on social media so who knows if they were even truly supporters rather than entitled listeners trying to exert undue influence over the podcast. I hope this hasn’t caused too much of a wrinkle for the AMCA folks, but the whole point of these boycotts and standing in solidarity via boycotts and other pressure campaigns is that you might have to, at a minimum, do something that is uncomfortable or difficult, so I think they’ll be okay. I think that they also probably kept more listeners by taking a principled stand than by ignoring the boycott since I would absolutely have commented on their social media posts and withdrawn my patreon support if they didn’t change what seemed to be their course. After all, once you know, there’s no excuse for non-compliance. You can’t help not having known in the past, but once you know you have a responsibility to align yourself or admit that your morals were a sham given that you abandoned them at the first sign of hardship.