Disney heiress Abigail Disney has made a career out of trashing her family name. From documentaries about labor conditions to “tell-all” books about to salacious podcast interviews where she calls her great-uncle Walt a fascist she delights in making a mockery of her family name. To hear her tell it, it is all in the name of “activism.” That activism landed her in hot water today.
The heiress to the multi-billion company was arrested today for protesting…the rich. She and 12 other climate change activists were arrested after they illegally shut down an airport in the Hamptons. The protest was aimed at stopping private jets due to their carbon emissions. The small East Hampton Airport primarily services private jets and charter flights. Commercial flights do not go in or out of the airport. The airport is located in a glamorous neighborhood known to be vacation homes of various celebrities and wealthy business executives.
What does climate change have to do with the rich? According to Disney everything. Disney said, “As a person who has been privileged enough to use private jets, I know it’s hard to give up a luxury that is special, but I also know that the time has passed for spewing greenhouse gasses like this merely for our personal comfort.”
Teddy Ogborn, a spokesperson for Planet Over Profit explained that, “These same rich people farting into the Hamptons on private jets are often the ones who make their money in industries that hugely accelerate the climate crisis.”
I guess they forgot that third world countries where there is no “ultra-rich” class are the main proponents of climate-changing emissions. According to Brookings.edu, developing countries “are likely to emit more than half the annual global total of greenhouse gas by 2030.” It’s a lot less comfortable to protest there than the Hamptons though, I suppose.
For her part, Abigail Disney was proud of her arrest and bragged about it on Twitter this evening after posting bail (something only the privileged can afford to do but she probably doesn’t want to discuss that either). She proudly proclaimed she had “popped her mug-shot cherry.”
It’s interesting that she, a Disney heiress, would be protesting the rich when in 2019 she said this, “To most normal people, what I spend on a really good dinner at a really good restaurant, that would be horrifying.”
The protest at the airport today was just the first of many that the groups Abigail Disney associates with have planned. Tomorrow they plan to protest a golf course in the Hamptons and on Monday they intend to bring pitchforks and gather outside of a CitiBank executive’s home. They stated they are planning their protests strategically to “disrupt public areas in an effort to push leaders to take more aggressive actions to curb global warming.”
