“Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important.”

– Lenin, 1920

Note: This is by no means a comprehensive list. This is about getting the ball rolling!

Like their fellow ruling class elites who run our major corrupt, decadent, rotten-to-the-core institutions, the elites of the Hollywood of arm of Globalist American Empire love their anti-art, anti-beauty, anti-merit cesspool of wokeness. They love attempting to distract Americans from real economic issues and protecting their globalist status quo with their newest nonsensical non-issue of the week. However, it’s important to bear in mind with these yahoos that there is an additional layer of psychotic disingenuous moral imperialism. These obedient little lemmings are supremely detached from the rest of the country. In other words, don’t expect noblesse oblige from this crowd anytime soon. From the ideologue studio heads that sold Hollywood out to China, to the many factions of insecure, dumb above-the-line talent, to the oligarchs like Bezos and Cook who took over Hollywood and turned it into an extension of Silicon Valley, this specific institution is going to need a lot of populism if it is ever be reformed. Nonetheless, as Lex Fridman says (referencing FDR “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”), “Fear can be used by politicians and institutions to control the masses, to control speech, to control thought. Forget fear. Let’s focus on solutions.”

POP CULTURE MATTERS

As Author and Professor Thaddeus Russell has wisely pointed out, “Modern-day left-wing politics has evolved into repressive, secular puritanism”. Pushing back against the argument that popular culture is purely nonsense and drivel (it certainly is today, yes, and it deserves to be mocked endlessly in its current state, though it doesn’t have to be this way forever), Russell declares that Americans need an escape, and that part of human nature is enjoying the cultural products that rise up, gain resonance, and provide a national cultural glue. Pop culture matters. While speaking to Dave Rubin on The Rubin Report, Russell went so for as to say:

[Pop culture] is better than escapism. A lot of my work is about Puritanism and its long history. People aren’t really aware of how it carries through to today. The heart of Puritanism is the Puritan work ethic. A lot of people are confused about this and think it is working hard to get a big house or a nice television, or a nice car, but it is not. It is the idea that work, in itself, no matter what you get for it, is virtuous. So you should work all the time. No matter what you get for it. Popular culture in this country, since it started in the early 19th Century has always been, not just an escape from that, it has been a repudiation of that. Because the Puritans, and their descendants the Victorians, in the 19th Century, said all these things were terrible.

Russell continues…

You see a lot of Puritanism in left wing politics, and that has been true for a long, long time. Left wing intellectuals over the last hundred years have been uniformly hostile to popular culture. To me it is totalitarian. Their idea is that your ideas are wrong. ‘False’ is the term they use. And they are leading you to do things that are counter to your own interests. So we know what your own interests are and we know how you should best arrive at them. So we’re going to tell you what music to listen to. What movies to see. Probably no movies! What you should do with your life. [That’s] why the people who followed the Frankfurt School in the 50s and 60s — the left wing movement they were attracted to was Maoism. Third world communism, because that is what Maoism looked like. This idea that we must rid ourselves of the bad ideas before the Revolution can happen.

Sound familiar? Modern Hollywood is what happens when an industry gets taken over by the faculty lounge at Oberlin. On a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher, increasingly fed up with his “side” of the aisle” and their obsession with self-righteous, self-congratulatory, virtue signaling, had enough with a panelist that proclaimed Americans need to get more “woken up!”:

[But] do we need to be woken up 24/7? That’s like the problem with the Oscars. It’s an industry about entertainment. And this show was always about entertainment. And they put on a show, it was like ‘We dare you to be entertained. We dare you.’ No jokes. No songs. Not even any clips of when we used to have fun. Fuck you. Eat your peas.

Maher’s not wrong, but this isn’t just an “Oscars” problem (quite frankly, could care less if there was ever another awards show). This is a Hollywood problem.

Hollywood needs to rediscover fun because Americans really could use the occasional escape to avoid going crazy amidst an avalanche of modernity.

A HOLLYWOOD FOR AMERICA (FIRST)

What Hollywood is definitely not (unlike, say, the 80’s) is American. Today’s groupthink-obsessed Hollywood doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Americans or America, a far cry from the days when it existed to bolster America’s standing in the world, which led to people wanting to come to it from all over. Yes, technically Los Angeles itself may physically still be in the United States, but most projects are filmed elsewhere for the tax incentives, and then distributed to Americans, the domestic audience, last. If Hollywood is to become an American institution again it would have to, you know, make movies for Americans again. That means making movies for masses ordinary Americans of all economic backgrounds and not just the weirdos who define themselves solely by their race, gender, or sexual preference.

Want to know why 64% of young adults are not proud to be American in 2021? Every institution tells them America sucks, and that includes Hollywood. Not that too many young people are going to the movies today, but Ray Charles could see a patriotism gap in the products coming down the conveyor belt. Thing is, America isn’t the problem. Its garbage so-called “leaders” are. If you want to get the youths to understand the difference (for what it’s worth, Reagan got the youth vote back in the 80’s – a lot has changed), an explainer or two might help.

You know what else might help? Bifurcating Big Tech from Hollywood in some capacity. Remember what movies were like before Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, two people who definitely couldn’t give less of a shit about them, came along? You were watching Leo shtoop Margot Robbie on a bed of cash in The Wolf of Wall Street, not a fish banging some broad wherever in The Shape of Water. The only reason these guys got into the business is because they want to be at fancy parties with people who don’t really like them but now desperately need them. Their trash streaming originals indicate as much.

You know who staffs these companies? Forget the best and the brightest and remember the worst and most conformist. Say whatever you want about a Barry Diller or even the recently cancelled Scott Rudin (Team America, anyone?), these guys cared about the gig.  

If Hollywood is to ever get its mojo back, it needs based leadership. That means people that actually like and know movies! Crazy concept, right? You don’t have to be smart to know that an organization run by someone who hates it probably doesn’t stand a good chance of making it in the long haul (unless you’re an oligarch, that is).

And people wonder why institutions are coming apart.

REPEAL & REPLACE THE DNC/HOLLYWOOD ELITE

You’re not even allowed to be entertained anymore. You [can only] see this corporatized, bland crap that they want you to see. It’s a cultural thing…Guys? The freedom of speech folk? Where are the artists? Where are the revolutionaries that are supposed to be for the first amendment and all of these things? They’re just silent. They’re like ‘Oh, but the Internet told me I’m not supposed to look at this channel, so I’m not going to. It’s so ridiculous.

– Amanda Milius, The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast

Unfortunately, the ‘artists’ aren’t coming because the artists are either dead, have given up, have left, are too scared to speak up, or are there by design to prop up the Globalist American Empire. The people at the top might be anarchists, but they’re not all stupid. They gleefully and intentionally hire some of the least-talented people on the planet by design because they know their useful idiots will remain loyal to the #resistance until its their turn at the guillotine. Where else would most these wokesters go? These are people who would wet their pants in excitement as you told them about how you planned to create a culture more ideologically rigid than China. If Hollywood is an actual meritocracy, you’re reading Ernest Hemingway.

The bottom line is that a lot of heads have to roll. This fish rots from the head down.

REPEAL & REPLACE THE GOP ELITE

Unlike so many articles that have been written over the years, this is not another call for a new “Conservative Hollywood”. That’s as silly as a call for “Liberal Hollywood”. American Movies were at their best when there was at least some semblance of free thought and ideological diversity allowed.

In any case, when people proclaim “Let’s build a conservative Hollywood!”, what they’re really saying is that they just want to see more high-quality movies that aren’t loaded to the brink with forced diversity and other politically correct “woke” dog shit made by people who not only hate the medium they’re working, but don’t know shit from shinola about it. This is a totally legit sentiment is shared by far more than just conservatives or Republicans. Most Americans go to the movies to be entertained, not be lectured by a snot-nosed, politically correct hall monitoring punks. So set aside the “conservative” part for a moment. Any honest American, regardless of their political affiliation, knows deep down that Hollywood just doesn’t make entertainment for them anymore.

How does this connect to the GOP donor class? Well, the so-called leaders on the “Right” in this country can never make up their mind. One second they hate Hollywood and say that it is irrelevant, then they cream themselves when Clint Eastwood speaks at the RNC, and go gaga for Reagan and Trump, the two most popular Republican Presidents of the last fifty years, both products of the entertainment industry. To a layman, it doesn’t exactly add up. But two things can be true at once. It is possible to dig certain artists, but despise an industry and its leadership as a whole (HI!). The problem isn’t the industry, it’s the ship of fools running the joint. Capisce?

Unfortunately for the masses, the GOP donor class, contrary to literally every single piece of evidence that points to the opposite being true, thinks we’re still in some mish-mash of the 1950’s and 1980’s and that Republicans are still the party of the professional class. However, as Thomas Frank writes in his book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?:

Between the Eisenhower era and today, professionals undertook a mass migration from the Republican to the Democratic Party [and] professionals went from being the most Republican social formation in the country in the 1950s to being the most Democratic by the mid-Nineties. Professionalism is ‘postindustrial ideology,’ and today the Democrats are the party of the professional class. The party has other constituencies to be sure – minorities, women, and the young, for example…but professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail. It is their tastes that are celebrated by liberal newspapers and it is their particular way of regarding the world that is taken for granted by liberals as being objectively true. Professionals dominate liberalism and the Democratic Party in the same way that Ivy Leaguers dominate the Obama cabinet. In fact, it is not going too far to say that the views of the modern-day Democratic Party reflect, in virtually every detail, the ideological idiosyncrasies of the professional-managerial class.

Because America is an oligarchy, and because the GOP donors don’t understand the ground they’re “fighting” on, they totally ignore the culture. It’s a mistake and with a government as big as ours, everyone pays for it.

Based elites, however, would understand the need for balance.

TELL THE WOKESTERS TO TAKE A HIKE

Today, young people in the big cities in New York and California are all part of a similar social ideological consensus and all think alike. They are highly motivated in their ideological reasoning and are intolerant. By the way, tolerance is tolerance is tolerance. Period, you assholes. Today’s intolerant, young, liberal California/New Yorkers are only comfortable within their own shared consensus. Friends must think alike and believe the same things now. They must vote the same and defend the same ideology like zombies. Anyone who disagrees can only be evil, stupid, and wrong.

– Vincent Gallo, Another Man (2018)

So who comprises this ‘professional-managerial class’? Who are these wokesters who literally run absolutely EVERYTHING? Well, for starters, they’re not just millennials (as the corporate media would have you believe). In fact, age isn’t even the best proxy.

As even Harvard University lecturer Yascha Mounk admitted in his overview of YouGov’s 2018 “Hidden Tribes” poll results at The Atlantic, what bonds this 8% of the country, a tribe that YouGov has identified as “Progressive activists…the only group [in the country] that strongly backs political correctness” is, well, something you won’t hear from the corporate media.

Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.

Cue the white guilt because the sanctimony dripping off the guiltmongering, handwringing set is a classic case of Freudian projection. Only with an elite as smug, arrogant, pompous, and boring as ours could McKinsey & Company consultants and Disney+ power brokers believe they’re actually revolutionaries capable of fringe, edgy, or cool thought. There’s nothing wrong with being boring if you know you’re boring, but these authoritarians and their ilk in the corporate press pontificate as if they are the true moral arbiters of speech, art, nobility, virtue, and ideological purity while marching in the streets with a sign they bought off Goop so they can pretend to be important, subversive, and groundbreaking. They believe their own hype and the whole country has to suffer as a result. It’s for this reason that Thomas Frank’s assessment of the political realignment in the country matters. Today’s wokesters not only live in LaLaLand literally, they live there figuratively.

In a sweeping sociological sense, professionals as a class do not get it. What are we to make of our modern-day technocracy, a meritocracy of failure in which ineffectual people rise to the top and entire professions? The answer is that the professional ideology brings with it certain predictable, recurring weaknesses. The first of these pitfalls of professionalism is that the people with the highest status aren’t necessarily creative or original thinkers. Although the professions are thought to represent the pinnacle of human brilliance, what they are actually brilliant at is defending and applying a given philosophy. Ideological discipline is the master key to the professions. Professionals do not question authority; their job is to apply it. This is the very nature of their work and the object of their training…’obedient thinkers’ who ‘implement their employers’ attitudes’ and carefully internalize the reigning doctrine of their discipline whatever it happens to be. The professions are structured to shield insiders from accountability. This is what defines the category: professionals do not have to listen. They are the only occupational group with the recognized right to declare ’outside’ evaluation illegitimate and intolerable.

If wokeness is the governing philosophy of American Globalist Empire’s footsoldier’s in the managerial class, the idea that Hollywood, an industry where free speech, freedom of expression, and free thought are necessary ingredients to creating work that endures, should be run entirely by ‘obedient’ lemmings who loathe real artists, not ‘creative or original [free]thinkers’, but rather people whose primary skill set is ‘ideological discipline’ and enforcing the status quo, well, it seems downright insane!

To be fair, the Hollywood “Left” wasn’t always like this. Hollywood “liberals” of yesteryear, like Warren Beatty, mastermind of Bonnie & Clyde (a movie that arguably kicked the doors of New Hollywood wide open until its 1981 demise), wouldn’t be caught dead with the creative executives currently cultivating the next streaming series on Apple TV+ in a petri dish sticking out of the head of Antifa’s Bushwick chapter’s asshole (you know, next to his artisan food truck).

It’s sad to see so many who can’t bear to see themselves as the establishment. A business filled with Justin Timberlake’s character from Bad Teacher is no fun for anyone and it makes for painfully boring art.

So, to this end…

VENERATE THE CONTRARIAN

Kanye West may not be a movie star, but he is most certainly an artist, and in the context of Woke Hollywood, his now infamous comment to David Letterman about liberals bullying Trump supporters (“Liberals bully people who are Trump supporters. It’s not just calm. You can’t just go and wear the hat. It’s like, ‘bro!’” ) was actually not so much a political statement as it was a commentary on groupthink in the arts. Defending Kanye as a real artist, Mark Steyn explained:

Kanye is making an important point here and it is about the groupthink. He doesn’t see why he should get told what the parameters within which he can think and that’s actually what’s so sad and pathetic about the current corporate celebrities. They think they’re edgy. They think they’re transgressive. They’re the least and least transgressive of celebrities that have ever existed because they’re terrified to move a sixteenth of an inch outside those parameters and that’s all he’s saying. He’s saying look ‘I’m one of the richest, most successful celebrities on the planet. Why can’t I think a little contrarian every once in a while?

Seriously. What’s the point in having f-you money if not to say f-you to the people telling you to go f yourself?

ART & AESTHETICS OVER IDEOLOGY

Don’t you think we need to bring back the taboo? Isn’t that what’s missing from moving the culture forward? I remember wanting to be offended. I remember wanting to have my mind blown by art. Whether it was Shakespeare, Scorsese, whatever. I wanted to get into kind of a dangerous realm and experience that. I think part of the reason why it’s important to do that is to step into other peoples shoes, is that it ultimately gives you empathy. And it rids you of narcissism. And I think this list of what’s being demanded – whether its movies, plays, books or whatever, is a real barrier to ridding yourself of narcissism and to encouraging empathy in yourself. This is a newish thing in the culture [and] I find it, as an artist, really bothersome.

– Bret Easton Ellis, 2015

Nothing makes art worse than art dictacted by ideology, no matter said ideology falls on the political spectrum. On his recent press tour for his novelization of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino has been sounding the alarm about how ideology has become more important than art and aesthetics in Hollywood, a sentiment Bret Easton Ellis has been expressing for nearly a decade. For coastal showbiz authoritarian elitists who lecture you about how Trump won because of racism while hurling racial slurs at their nanny that they refuse to pay a living wage, the message remains clear: tow the party line or else.

Sounds like a great recipe for art, doesn’t it? Pathetic.

HOLLYWOOD, NOT CHINAWOOD.

Certainly Hollywood had long been a destination for legal money laundering. But those who worked most closely with the Chinese knew that the biggest reason for these investments was a form of reverse-colonialism. After more than a decade as a place for Hollywood to make money, China wanted to turn the tables. The United States had already proved the power of pop culture to help establish a nation’s global dominance. Now China wanted to do the same. The Beijing government considered art and culture to be a form of ‘soft power,’ whereby it could extend influence around the world without the use of weapons.

– Ben Fritz, The Big Picture

The movers and shakers of Big Hollywood couldn’t wait to destroy the industry that they inherited by selling out to Communist China. Having learned absolutely nothing from how America used pop culture to get that Berlin Wall down in the 1980’s, these globalists got trained good and proper by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in how to self-censor. Thankfully, there are actually a few great populist ideas floating around Washington. They just need to catch traction.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has actually made this precise subject a priority of his, having outlined a plan to ban all Chinese investment in Hollywood in the “Entertainment” section of his “Beat China: Targeted Decoupling and the Economic Long War” proposal that details at length why Chinese influence in Hollywood is a problem and why it must be addressed.

For years, Hollywood justified its presence in China by arguing that it served a greater good by giving the Chinese people access to films made in the free world. Hollywood did not succeed in changing China. Instead, it became addicted to Chinese money and responsive to CCP control. The CCP, like other totalitarian movements, views entertainment, the arts, and sports as means to maintain social control at home and export propaganda abroad. Chinese leader Xi Jinping, [in] 2014, detailed that arts should serve politics, stat[ing] ‘Art and literature is the engineering that molds the human soul. Art and literary workers are the engineers of the human soul.’ The CCP’s censorship of U.S. productions, then, is not simply a reactionary measure to ensure regime security, but a part of China’s grander ambitions for global ideological competition. The CCP is intent on subverting the power of American movies and television in the short term. Its ultimate aim is to overthrow Hollywood as the world’s cinematic powerhouse, replacing it with a Chinese entertainment and media industry that can suppress all content critical of the CCP and engineer a world safe for autocracy. [Therefore,] the federal government should ban Chinese investment in U.S. studios and streaming services…[and] also prohibit Chinese investment in platforms that show movies and TV shows in the United States, such as movie theater companies and cable and broadcast television providers.

Knowing full well how American Globalist Empire is also compromised, Cotton shows his grasp of the gravitas of the situation by also recommending that the government “prohibit the DOD, CIA, and FBI from supporting any television and film studios that allow the content they release in the U.S. market to be censored by the CCP.” While Cotton doesn’t address Hollywood’s own ideological underpinnings head-on, it’s something in a swamp filled with nothing.

Cotton is not alone in understanding the scale of the situation. Back in May of 2020, Texas Senator Ted Cruz introduced a bill called the SCRIPT (Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, Protecting Talkies) ACT, understanding full well how the Department of Defense, a major artery of American Globalist Empire, works hand-in-glove with China in order to help China exert ‘soft power’ on America via popular culture. As Cruz states, the bill’s goal is to explicitly prohibit the use of DOD funds for the production of films by United States companies that alter content for screening in the People’s Republic of China and other purposes.

For too long, Hollywood has been complicit in China’s censorship and propaganda in the name of bigger profits. The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wake-up call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China.

But how do you deliver a ‘wake-up call’ to the perpetually asleep woke ruling class? After all, as Matt Stoller explains in “The Slow Death of Hollywood” on his BIG substack:

Such a dynamic isn’t just a problem in terms of a more arid artistic world, but is a political and national security problem. The free expression problem imports overt government censorship into America and the entire West. The centralization of power in a few studios and chains is global. In 2015, the U.S.-China Security Review Commission noted that Hollywood now obeys Chinese censors pretty much all films, even those made and distributed solely in the West. Unless this system is restructured, it is unlikely we will see any critical depictions of Chinese government actors again, which has parallels to the Studio System in the 1930s pandering to Nazi Germany.

Unfortunately, the ‘free expression problem’ is already here. The government is pushing for mass censorship (see The White House working with Facebook to ensure that the correct ‘narratives’ are promoted) at a faster clip than any time in history and freedom of speech no longer is a shared American value. It’s bewildering that this wouldn’t infuriate more people working within Hollywood, but once you understand how ideological they are, it actually makes perfect sense. As such, something has to give for things to move.

ANTITRUST

Responding to Barry Diller’s proclamation that Amazon and Netflix are too big and powerful to be bought and that “Those who chase Netflix…are fools,” Stoller righteously grinds his axe with the neoliberal worldview while dropping some white pills for good measure along the way:

This is a very billionaire-y perspective, and like all billionaires who made their money in the 1980s, Diller chooses to ignore the impact of public policy on industry structure, and how power was broadly shared. But there’s a grain of important truth in what he’s saying. The old system *is falling apart,* and a new far more concentrated one is emerging. But there’s no reason we have to build a highly concentrated storytelling industry on top of the Internet, which used to be the most decentralized communications technology ever imagined in human history.

As Steve Bannon would say, Diller is someone who “treats this [stuff] like the second fucking law of thermodynamics.” Stoller, however, is more optimistic.

The answer to the question of whether Hollywood can be saved is a resounding YES. Fundamentally, streaming is a commodity service; Netflix isn’t anything special, it’s just a good infrastructure service which has morphed into a monster attempting to control our access to content. Disney is just trying to become a monopoly studio of branded must-have content, and reproduce Netflix’s power. Movie chains are too big. And so on and so forth. These are all just political choices. In other words, we should aim to restore open markets for content again. This means separating out the industry into production, distribution, and retailing. We should probably ban predatory pricing so Netflix isn’t dumping into the market. And we should probably begin a radical decentralization of chains and studios. This is all possible. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

Can you dig it?

ACCEPT THAT EVERYTHING IS “POLITICAL”. ACT ACCORDINGLY.

You may not consider yourself “Conservative” or “Right-Wing”, but if you don’t go along with the woke stasi party line, you might as well be Rush Limbaugh to American Globalist Empire. Remember, Glenn Greenwald was accepting an Oscar next to Jennifer Aniston seven years ago for doing exactly the same kind of journalism he’s doing today.

In other words, ask yourself the following question: “Do you think he’ll get an Oscar for defending Tucker Carlson?”

NO BOOK BURNERS, PLEASE

Before the Sony hack, former Sony head Amy Pascal clearly felt the need to overcompensate for her own transgressions (let’s just say she doesn’t practice what she preaches in her private emails) when she asked Hollywood to eliminate gay slurs and stereotypes from movies:

How about next time, when any of us are reading a script and it says words like fag, or faggot – homo – dyke – take a pencil and just cross it out. Just don’t do it. We can do better and we will do better. We have to.

Since this is America, ‘we’ actually don’t have to do anything. Does she have a mouse in her pocket? What if the character is a bigot? What if they’re making a joke in a movie set before 2014? And wait, aren’t we talking about fictional movies with fictional characters? Who made Pascal God? This complex is very real in Tinsletown. And, as Michael Malice says, “For the Evangelical Left…” every woke virtue signal “is a personal march on Selma”.

Freedom of expression in the arts means freedom to say no-no words if the project calls for it. It’s all about context. The people have to hold the line when it comes to the weird, censorship people. The Tipper Gores of the world used to call lyrics they found offensive “blasphemy”. Today they call it “hate speech”. They’re both horseshit because censorship is antithetical to freethinking. Censorship is antithetical to open discourse. And, most of all, censorship is UNAMERICAN!

SLAVERY ENDED 150 YEARS AGO. JUST SAYING.

Even back in 2016, Snoop-A-Loop had enough of the victimhood porn. Fed up with the racial grievance industry in Hollywood, Snoop went off in a social media post:

I’m sick of this. How they going to put out Roots on Memorial Day? They just going to keep beating that (expletive) into our heads as to how they did us, huh? I don’t understand [Hollywood]. They just want to keep showing the abuse that we took hundreds and hundreds of years ago. But guess what? We’re taking the same abuse. Think about that part. When you all going to make a (expletive) series about the success that black folks is having. The only success we have is Roots and 12 Years A Slave? Let’s create our own (expletive) based on today. How we live and how we inspire people today.

Indeed.

ABOLISH IDENTITY POLITICS. RESTORE EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY.

Back in 2015, Lee Daniels, professional victim and co-creator of the Fox smash Empire, told The Hollywood Reporter that “Black people hate white people writing for black people. It’s so offensive!” In other words, he complained about the made-up grievance known as “cultural appropriation” (which of course gave us some of the best art of all-time – Elvis? Anyone?). In other words, if you’re a white writer, and you don’t write enough black characters into your script, you’re a racist. However, if you then decide to write a script with black people, that’s ‘offensive’. Got it?

Yeah. All this nonsense has to go. Good is good. Who cares about what the identity of a writer? Jerry Seinfeld said it best back in 2014 while giving an interview to BuzzFeed after Business Editor Peter Lauria asked Jerry about why he had “mostly white males” on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee:

This really pisses me off … People think it’s the census or something…This has got to represent the actual pie chart of America? Who cares? Funny is the world that I live in. You’re funny? I’m interested. You’re not funny? I’m not interested. I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone is else is kind of with their kind of calculating, ‘Is this the exact right mix?’ To me, it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC nonsense than ‘Are you making us laugh or not?

Get rid of the inclusion riders. Get rid of every contest that caters to only certain identities (i.e. every contest). Lose the stupid diversity guidelines for the Oscars. Fire every “Diversity, Inclusion & Equity Supervisor” and start trimming the damn fat off this disgusting bureaucracy!

Just because the humorless scolds see no irony in judging people solely by their orientation, skin color, and gender if they’re straight, white, or male, doesn’t mean you have to accept their reductionist, bigoted, sick view of human nature, one entirely fueled by bad faith.

No identity group – race, gender, age, skinny, fat, religion, and sexual preference – is above the human condition. The human condition does not discriminate. So do not bend a knee to the ideologues that say otherwise. Never negotiate with woke cultural terrorists.

“UNDERREPRESENTED” IS “MISREPRESENTED”.

Want to know why one-legged midgets are underrepresented in film & tv? There aren’t that many of them! If there were as many one-legged midgets onscreen as there were two-legged non-midgets, you’d be painfully aware that you were watching some serious social engineering gone awry. In other words, we’re probably a week away from seeing this play out. For real.

MAKE MOVIES FOR PEOPLE WHO AREN’T NERDS

It’s an open secret that, like social media, the Marvel/Superhero/Rick & Morty/Star Wars/Star Trek/Avatar trend of the past decade-plus has been part of a corporatization of culture globalist propaganda push. It’s a way to infantilize people, to make them mouthbreathers that see the world in solely black and white terms. Everything looks like a video game. Characters are not multi-dimensional. The CGI sucks. It all blows and it’s boring. No offense to nerds, but would it be cool if anything else besides movies for you ever got a seat at the table?

BRING BACK SOME ANALOG

No one can say technology (i.e. smart phones) and social media haven’t dumbed culture down, blanded it beyond oblivion, and unleashed some of the most psychotic groupthink enforcers ever seen with a straight face, unless, you know, said person is part of the problem. In this hellish reputation economy, political correctness stamps out passion and destroys creativity quicker than a wokescold can scream “That’s offensive!”

Meanwhile, for corporate celebrities and their fans, virtue signaling via hashtag activism has become fake philanthropy for real phonies. For the arts, extreme branding and the cult of personality has truly become an Orwellian nightmare, the result of so many people wanting to brand themselves as being overly virtuous when in fact none of us are perfect and all of us have flaws (and absurd, even). It’s all very boring, you see. Perhaps some dialing back on the technology could help bring some mystery back into the equation?

IN CONCLUSION (FOR NOW)

The reason movies (and all art by extension) used to be so great were because they let us wrestle with the complexities and nuances of the human condition at a distance, something no news program can give us. Without some less ideological and more human art, our culture will become nothing but a 24/7 reality show. Forever.

To truly be creative requires one to be truthful. Wokeness, however, kills truth. Until this contradiction is reconciled, it’s hard to see a way out. Nonetheless, this list is a good start.

In the meantime, ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP finds itself in the company of Matt Stoller when he writes “I love movies, and I think Hollywood is worth saving.”