NO good comes from going on X as I learned a few days ago when I logged on to see what was new. In short: a new level of hate and mockery. But I did come across a tweet gaining a lot of traction and my first reaction was to laugh. Then I saw who was sharing it, and it wasn’t funny anymore. In the clip, you hear a journalist asking Danish filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel why his new film, The Promised Land, is “entirely Nordic” and lacks diversity. Mads Mik­kelsen, the lead actor, looks confused: “What? Right from the get-go?” The director responds: “Well, first of all, the film takes place in Denmark in the 1750s.”

The question is absurd. Demanding racial diversity in a period drama set in 18th-century rural Denmark isn’t progressive filmmaking critique — it’s simply bad history dressed up as a moral stance. Of course, people laughed. But then I looked at who was celebrating this moment. White supremacists. People whose online presence is dedicated to opposing immigration, crying about ‘cultural replacement’, and treating any conversation about representation as an existential threat to Western civilisation. For them, this clip is ammunition.

One journalist’s absurd question has become proof that all conversations about diversity in the media or........

© Dawn