We have seen the enemy and the enemy is our ruling class.
Everything else is a distraction.
Hollywood, like the rest of our so-called “elite” formerly American institutions, pretty much now exclusively operates as just another bulldozer that our corrupt American Globalist Empire uses in order to further flatten freethinkers as they wield absolute power (which, of course, corrupts absolutely), refusing to hit the pause button on their nonstop offensive for a millisecond. Even before COVID-19, a nationwide trustworthiness survey conducted by Morning Consult found that American citizens firmly place Hollywood as the least trustworthy institution in the country, behind the government, the news media, and, yes, even Wall Street.
As Vivek Ramaswamy, Founder of Roivant and Author of the forthcoming Woke, Inc puts it, “ Wokeness has infiltrated every mainstream U.S. institution, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley… [It] IS the system.”
How did this happen?
For starters, the supposedly new front in the culture war, “critical race theory,” has actually been the status quo in Hollywood for at least a decade. Consider the following microcosm, an exchange between based legend Vince Vaughn (displaying a scrotal fortitude virtually extinct in Tinsletown) and David Hochman in the following 2015 Playboy interview regarding Vaughn’s thoughts on affirmative action in the industry:
DH: So you’re not a fan of affirmative action?
VV: I’ll answer that with a question. Do you believe that using race as a factor in evaluating a person is a good way to operate?
DH: The idea is that those who have been at a disadvantage because of race deserve a leg up when it comes to landing opportunities.
VV: But then you’re evaluating someone based on race, which is racism. Rights don’t come to you because you’re a man or a woman or African American or European or Jewish. And I certainly don’t think the federal government should be in the business of deciding things or handing out money based on factors like these.
This type of bold, courageous truthtelling is what we at ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP like to call “Affirmative Reaction.” It occurs when a freethinking individual makes a compelling, innocuous point rooted in fact, in turn inducing unpatriotic subversives to drop their masks and reveal themselves as tools of the regime.
Suffice to say, Vaughn’s violation of woke orthodoxy sent shock waves across Hollywood, a bought-and-paid-for cesspool so out of touch with the vast majority of Americans that at some point you have to start wondering about those who continue to buy into its approved narrative (the same one shared by the rest of our elite institutions i.e. that it is deeply interested in and concerned with helping to unite the country and push its culture forward). By simply invoking Martin Luther King Jr. and stating that history has proven to be better accommodating to merit-based nation-states (the kind in which children are “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”) and cultures, Vaughn was quickly labeled a “rich white man,” a “jerk,” and a “doofus” by the usual suspects.
And that’s nothing.
Take Hollywood’s endless love affair with ‘diversity,’ a totalitarian catchall that believes only nonheterosexual white males should be granted that almighty secular blessing known as “inclusion”:
Diversity is nowadays defined broadly by…underrepresented demographics—chiefly minorities, women and LGBT individuals.
The woke whiz kids of Hollywood have developed their own not-at-all-clever but most definitely divisive method of categorizing these ‘minorities, women and LGBT
Individuals’ in television writing rooms by referring to them as ‘diversity hires’ (or, as the wolf executives in sheep’s clothing call them behind closed doors, “two-for-ones”):
[A] diversity hire is a minority scribe who occupies a staff writer position that is fully network-subsidized. Showrunners are thus incentivized to take on an unfamiliar face since his or her salary isn’t coming out of the show’s budget. There’s no limit to the number of times a writer can be the diversity hire, provided he or she is fine with staying at entry-level pay.
Having constructed their very own “Diversity Wall” (for real, though, these people have no sense of humor or irony), the PC Stasi convince themselves that they’re killing two birds with one stone. Not only are they able to virtue signal to their peers by preventing pesky white “hetero” men from crossing the industry border, but they can ensure that their diversity hire(s), the same ones they’re supposedly so deeply concerned about, never step out of line with insane ideas like advancing beyond ‘entry-level pay’:
Like college scholarships for minorities, [this wall is] all about removing as many barriers to entry as possible, including financial ones. But with every good intention can come inadvertent side effects, from writers of color who are perceived as less qualified to the subsidization of first-season salaries that can lead to a “freebie” mentality among showrunners toward those scribes.
‘Every good intention?’ Please. It’s just another virtue-signaling front for just another exploitation racket. In the end, everyone inside and outside the border wall, save for the few old PC authoritarians with an agenda, loses.
On a 2016 episode of their Scriptnotes podcast (the aptly titled “They Won’t Even Read You”), establishment screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin read the following letter from “Anonymous”:
I’m an aspiring writer in Los Angeles and I’ve been trying to land a TV writing assistant job. These are actual quotes I’ve been getting. ‘We love your resume and you’d be a great fit for this job, but the higher ups told us we have to hire a girl.’ Or, ‘It’s going to be extremely hard for you as a white male to get into a writer’s room.’ Additionally, there are competitions or fellowships that are not advertised as diversity programs, but every year the winners will be along the lines of female, African American, ex-Marine. Let’s say there were 20 winners, there might be one or two white people. I’m sure all the writers are greatly talented, however it is statistically impossible for so few white people to win in competitions where race supposedly doesn’t matter.
August earnestly responds by telling the ‘aspiring writer’ to take a hike:
Look for the next thing…that may be the next industry, the next wave, the next thing that is just looking for great writers and hasn’t even really kind of thought about sort of how to diversify it.
This intersectional “ideology trumping aesthetics” drivel helped seal Hillary Clinton’s 2016’s presidential-election loss. It’s why 70% of Americans would now rather watch movies at home instead of dropping half their weekly paycheck (that is, if they a) still have a job and b) are allowed to work) at the local movie theater, even if and when they’re fully reopened. It’s why domestic moviegoing had already hit a quarter-century low in 2017 (keep this in mind as the inept suits who’ve been responsible for cranking out nothing but trash for years continue to blame COVID for a poor box-office receipts).
Yeah. There just isn’t a whole lot of irony left, ironically, on the Hollywood “Left” (whatever that means). Then again, these anti-art Neo-McCarthyites (“The New Philistines,” as Sohrab Ahmari so aptly refers to them), locked into the same Scientology-esque prison of belief as their American Globalist Empire fellow travelers, aren’t exactly known for their prowess in the self-awareness arena.
In White, his first non-fiction polemic, American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis comments on the absurdity of the mirrorless house of bullshit that our ruling class wants us all to live in, increasingly against our will:
This is an age that … proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions, [in which case] you’re fucked. Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist. This is what happens to a culture when it no longer cares about art.
Are you seeing a pattern emerge? Hollywood, like every other major institution, is managed by an elite that hates it, the country itself, and all those who reside in it (even the ones who serve their interests, mind you). In other words, as with every aspect of our society, the rapid decline of American entertainment over the past decade is just another piece of a much larger “managed-decline” puzzle.
As Bill Maher recently explained on his “New Rules” segment of Real Time:
The Oscars need to change their name to the Debbies — as in Debbie Downer. Because judging by this year’s Best Picture nominees, you couldn’t have a worse time at the movies if there was an active shooter in the theater … Academy nominations used to say, ‘Look what great movies we make.’ Now they say, ‘Look what good people we are.’ It’s not about entertainment. It’s about suffering. Specifically yours. It’s not two hours to forget your troubles. It’s Traffic School at the Holocaust Museum. In 2021, if you’re at the movies, and you’re wondering ‘Huh? Which one is the bad guy?’ It’s you.
That’s right. Hollywood hates ‘you’.
Even former chairman and CEO of Paramount and then 20th Century Fox Barry Diller let the cat out the bag when recently speaking to NPR at Sun Valley:
The movie business is over … I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it. [Now,] the system is not necessarily [there] to please anybody. It is to buy more Amazon stuff … These streaming services have been making something that they call ‘movies.’ They ain’t movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so.
We were originally told that the advent of streaming, with its unbelievable convenience, would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. However, if it hasn’t become crystal clear to you by now, this communist advent is largely responsible for our crap culture. And, despite what the talking heads will tell you, when it comes to this particular branch of American Globalist Empire, it actually really isn’t entirely about the money! As Maher correctly pointed out, it’s about punishing ‘you.’ After all, as the World Economic Forum tells us, by 2030, we’ll all “own nothing … and be happy.” Got it?
Where previous generations would have required that a market correction take place in the face of such a garbage product, streaming allows our woke Big Hollywood/Tech oligarchs to circumvent all that. No longer must these tyrants be forced to ‘make money to stay alive’ like they did in the old days known as Hollywood’s first hundred years.
Freed from the shackles of the past, American Globalist Empire: Hollywood now exists for the sole purpose of gaining monopoly power in order to reduce the quality of what you watch while evaporating bargaining leverage for everyone but the big donors. The net effect of this neoliberal nightmare is higher prices and, of course, what Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and author of Goliath: The Huncred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, calls the “The Slow Death of Hollywood”:
Netflix is doing something beyond just centralizing distribution and production. It is also deliberately losing money. This is a very dangerous practice. In the old system, studios sold content, often over-priced, often shoddy, but they sold it to people who bought it. The end network, either theaters or TV stations, had to choose from distributors what content to offer to customers. They had to make money to stay alive. Netflix violates this rule. Despite its claims of accounting profits, Netflix is a massive money-loser, projecting it will burn through $3.5 billion in cash just this year. Netflix is taking inputs and combining them into something that is of less value than those original inputs. But the company doesn’t really care if people watch its content, because it doesn’t sell content. The company is selling a story to Wall Street, that, like Amazon, it will achieve dominant market power. The story is that users will buy Netflix streaming services and it will be too much trouble to switch to a different service, which is a variant of a phenomenon called “lock-in.” So no one will be able to compete, the company will be able to raise prices and lower costs, and voila, another Amazon-style monopoly.
‘Voila,’ indeed. It’s not just that our culture ‘no longer cares about art.’ Again, it’s ipso facto that our elites just no longer care about the country (and haven’t for some time now).
Hollywood was built by immigrant Jews (legal immigrant Jews), competitive, fiercely patriotic men that were more than eager to assimilate and contribute to the greatest country ever. Today, these men are rolling in their graves amidst a cinematic landscape absent of a robust independent scene or a functioning studio system that doesn’t hate itself, one that truly abhors free expression and those who fail to conform to the hifalutin groupthink claptrap of the day.
Without some serious Advanced Citizenship, the future is being told that you shouldn’t criticize “private companies” as you’re encouraged to build own Netflix and Amazon, only to be put out for pasture by these very same monopolies if you decide to take a calculated risk. That’s “capitalism” in our “free market” (that crony global capitalists rigged for themselves by buying off the government) for you! Then, one day, after you’ve worked hard to get back on your feet and raise enough capital to make a killer feature, Netflix or Amazon will tell you how lucky you are as they offer you precisely one penny for your product. Since they’re the only shops in town and you have literally no other means of distribution, you will of course take it. If the elites keep getting their way, you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. Remember?
If you don’t want them to keep getting their way, however, check back with us next week for PART 2: POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS.