by Greg Gutfeld
MORE IMPORTANT: If you combine the full effects of Southeast Asian communism—from the Viet Cong to the utter madness of Pol Pot in Cambodia—Jane Fonda’s support was the historical equivalent of supporting malaria. I can’t even joke about this woman. She was Typhoid Jane in aerobics tights.
August 23, 2013
Ben Affleck is playing Batman.
Batman, as you know, is a rich man who fights evil, which sounds kind of Republican to me. I mean, imagine if Batman were the hero our media wanted him to be—he’d be a grad student, a leader of drum circles who pickets fracking sites while vandalizing Monsanto labs. His Robin would be his tapeworm, his daddy’s trust fund acting as Batmobile.
Or perhaps he’d be a sexually confused whistle-blower leaking key info to our enemies. The evil he fights would be the U.S. because it always is, for those who mock the war on terror. Instead, we get a rich white guy, Mr. Affleck, playing a rich white guy who stops bad guys, because it sells.
Hollywood may deny the existence of real evil in the world—other than other rich white guys—but it knows that on-screen morality makes financial sense, even if they laugh at it privately. No one wants a superhero who frets over gray areas. We want exceptional men who kill. But the problem with Batman isn’t Batman at all. Each film depends on a new evil, a villain beyond shocking who justifies our repulsion.
The problem is, real evil now outstrips movie evil. When boys kill an Australian ballplayer for fun, when boys kill a war hero for fun, when scum rape and mutilate a young couple, or when a young girl is shot dead for fun, when a young man is rewarded with a Rolling Stone cover for blowing up children, you get pretty jaded.
I am referencing some of the more grisly real-life crimes that occurred around the time the film came out.
I mean, who does Batman fight now when what we are fighting right now seems so much worse?
So basically, in my head, if you read the synopsis above, Affleck is playing Donald Trump. HA! I mean, when you think about it, isn’t Donald Trump basically a crude version of Bruce Wayne? Bruce Wayne, a rich guy in a time of trouble, became Batman to save the city. Trump, a rich guy, in a time of trouble, became president to save the country. So who does that make the villains?
The Joker = Hillary [the laugh is identical].
The Riddler = Chuck Schumer [the resemblance is uncanny].
The Penguin = Harvey Weinstein.
Catwoman = Nancy Pelosi.
I dare you to refute this amazing analogy! Simply write your argument on a large sheet of paper and mail it to Greg Gutfeld c/o Go Screw Yourself. Eat Me, Colorado, 10021.
This is one of my favorite monologues. It’s something I think about a lot—that what Hollywood deems heroic in real life is far different from what they promote in movies. How we see heroism—a fearless, freedom-loving badass Navy SEAL—is exactly how Hollywood portrays heroism . . . when it wants to make money. But in real life—in their rich, secluded, existences behind armed security and iron gates—their version of heroism is something different. It could be a traitor who leaks defense secrets. It could be a cop killer on the run in Cuba. It could be a radical bomb maker who’s now a professor in your local college. The average Hollywood industry hack can live in two worlds—the one they sell you, which they hate, and the one they believe, which is a lie. And you just know that when they’re selling you the brand of heroism you believe to be true, they’re laughing at you all the way to their therapist [isn’t it weird that the psychiatry industry is concentrated on the coasts?]. They only do THOSE movies to fund the other smaller movies that make fun of you.
Note: I realize these are sweeping generalizations, but that’s what Hollywood does to us every day. And it’s not hard to find the evidence that backs up such generalizations. They churn it out daily in films and television. It’s not a generalization: It’s just overwhelmingly true. And while there are genuinely honest diamonds in the rough—real, rebellious television and brave moviemaking—they are overshadowed by the dreck that ticks every cynical assumption about American life.
Last but not least, I realize that since 9/11, I have stopped watching zombie films, and horror films in general. They do nothing for me, or to me. They don’t raise my pulse, they don’t make me sweat. The only reason I can think for this change: Such villainy just doesn’t match what we’re facing in real life. Is the postmodern Joker really as bad as the everyday ISIS decapitator? Not even close.
October 30, 2013
Sean Penn was on a local cable access program recently, interviewed by a mangy kitten, where he said that the Tea Party were rubes and Ted Cruz should be institutionalized. Behold the vile.
SEAN PENN, ACTOR: Let’s go to the Tea Party influence on Congress. I think they have—there’s a mental health problem in Congress. This would be solved by committing them by executive order, I think, because these are American brothers and sisters. We shouldn’t be criticizing them, attacking them. This is a cry for help.
PIERS MORGAN, CNN: Literally commit people like Ted Cruz?
PENN: He’s my American brother. We should take care of him. He’s in trouble.
MORGAN: Actually have him committed?
PENN: I think it’s a good idea.
Note: he had a chance to walk it back—Piers followed up on the comment. But this commie progeny [look it up] advocates the forced incarceration of people who disagree with him politically. I would dismiss it as a joke, until this . . .
But moments later, this furious self-tanner admonishes Americans for saying nasty things about each other.
PENN: Between an uneducated people and the solipsism of people like Ted Cruz and their party, it’s a poisonous thing. Here’s this country where we have it all. We have it all to make it great and we find ways of self-destructing. And by saying nasty things about each other and being crazy.
You see? We’re crazy—not the guy who just completely forgot what he said moments earlier. Anyway, talk about complete blindness. Saying nasty things about each other! AFTER he says nasty things about each other! The “solipsism” is profound!
Wow, that’s either amnesia or great cocaine. I put money on the coke.
But he’s kidding. And this is humor among the left. The Tea Party, they’re so stupid. The takeaway is how desperate Penn has become to maintain his cool cred in Hollywood.
Remember, Penn has always fashioned himself a rebel, yet his pronouncements are mundane, so lockstep that he shares DNA with sheep. Ribbing on the Tea Party is just lame dialogue, cut from a bad Woody Allen flick. It’s so hopelessly boring.
How hilarious is it that the Tea Party is edgier than Sean Penn? They’re fighting the man. He’s just spooning him.
Boy, that creates an ugly image. It’s kind of sad that Penn’s peak was pretty much his first movie, when he played Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. After that, it was all downhill for this self-serious, pretentious twaddlemuffin.
And it reeks of distress from an aging bad boy who’s just gone bad in a spoiled-lettuce sort of way. No wonder he ODed on bronzer.
Ugh, another tanning joke. Damn—even I get tired of my own insults.
What do you expect? Hollywood is home to fake rebels who bash Americans to preserve their status with a dollop of phony concern to mask their lack of depth.
The urge to limit intrusive government is considered insane—and amassing crippling debt isn’t. That’s more a sign of insanity than anything. But I’d never suggest Penn be committed, for he already lives in Hollywood.
The thing about Penn: He’s likely a talented person, I think—or at least once was a talented person. So his obvious lameness in this interview reflects not simply intellect or personality, but what happens when one’s assumptions are never challenged. He’s gone from a vibrant young actor to a monumental, catastrophic bore. When he talks, nothing shocks you. What he finds funny is on par with a comment left on the Huffington Post by a gender studies TA. He reminds me of the guy who used to be in a band, and now just works tu
ning guitars. He’s got all the same mannerisms, but nothing else. Go home, Sean, you could use a good sleep. Because that’s what you’re inducing in us.
So, I have a theory about celebrities who get deep into liberal politics—the latest example being Jimmy Kimmel. Here’s how it works.
Individuals who come to politics later in life possess a false confidence that’s inversely proportional to their knowledge of issues. This happens on both the left and right. A person like, say, Kimmel, is only sure of his stance because he hasn’t yet graduated from that adolescent emotional platform of belief onto a mature, fact-based position of thought. I’ve been there—the only difference was that I was twenty-two at the time. Pick any celebrity—from Penn to Kimmel to that angry lady from Will and Grace—the tribalism they express is born from being new to their political tribe.
Celebrities also cultivate liberal agendas because they’re often safe-spaced in comfortable settings for such endeavors—and met with accolades by people with lower status who don’t want to upset them at film shoots and press conferences. In Hollywood, everyone who isn’t a star is that star’s fearful fanboy.
And another note: Last week (March something, 2018) Sean Penn released a novel of such immense badness that even his lefty sympathizers in the media disowned it. This supports my earlier point: Come to something later in life, be it politics or writing, and your confidence is inversely proportional to skill. The book was so bad precisely because you could tell that as Sean wrote it, he thought it was soooooo good. . . . He used a thesaurus the way a terrible cook uses salt—to cover up the lousy meat. Without that crutch, you realize that Sean Penn is as dumb as a post (not the wooden kind, the Huffington kind).
November 12, 2013
According to a new study, gun violence in PG-13 movies has tripled over the last twenty years, going from under one gunfight per hour to three per hour. Modern PG films now blast more guns than R-rated films from way back then—which goes to show you how much Hollywood loves their guns.
Unless . . . they belong to you, and you use them for protection and not pictures.
I bet if Matt Damon had to fire a real gun, he’d shoot himself in the butt, where his head currently resides.
Still, gun crime is way down, as movie crime increases. So, I’m not sure you can blame Hollywood for gun violence.
So, how about all violence? To me, one fact rears its ghoulish heads in most heinous crimes: resentment . . . which brews in the world of unrealistic luxury and unquenchable desire for infamy. Violence is now a performance for a worldwide audience, from shooting up a school to savagely punching innocent pedestrians, to hacking a harmless family to death. The weapons are all different, but the need is ever-present: “Look at me. Look at what I have done.”
We call the perps insane, but it is way worse than that. Beneath it all is a pattern of entitled recognition, the desire to be known forever. Where does that come from?
As families and communities decline, recognition finds another route.
If you can’t be famous for giving, you can live forever by taking away.
I basically touch too lightly on the following points:
First: Hollywood loves its guns as long as those guns do two things—make them money at the box office, and protect them at the premiere. You—the average obscure schmuck—can’t have guns, but they can have them in every room. The typical Hollywood male loves a good firearm. It gives him even more power than the drugs make him think he has. It’s the worst combination you can think of: an entitled celebrity, a gun, and a medicine cabinet. The only thing a Hollywood celebrity likes more than a gun is a bodyguard with a gun.
A lot of the violence perpetrated by mass shooters and terrorists alike isn’t done by madmen. It is done by sane, bitter boys who see the fame around them and feel insignificant. Why is that movie star famous, and I am not? He shoots fake guns. I will shoot real ones. Violence—especially the kind that culminates in a horrifying spectacle [the recent Vegas or Florida attack]—can take someone from obscurity and exponentially make him infamous. You want to blame the NRA for that? No. Blame Hollywood, and us [cable news]—which has made fame the only currency that matters, and violence the magical way forward to immortality. Hollywood is a religion predicated on the idea that anything you do to get to Mount Olympus will be forgiven—and forgotten. But whatever you do—don’t shoot inside the tent [see Weinstein, Harvey].
And finally, this concept of insignificance is new. It didn’t exist before television. Before fame of a worldwide magnitude existed, you could live a life of importance in your hometown or village. If a hundred people knew you, that was enough, and your behavior mattered to THOSE people. Because they were the people you saw every day. You had meaning—you had family.
But TV- and film-based fame changed that. Now, you can afford to alienate yourself from local society if you believe you deserve greater notoriety. This is driven by an underlying cause: the emptiness of your own obscurity. The more you see of the world—on TV, Twitter, or Instagram, with instantly famous and vacuous models—the more you believe you’re owed something greater than simply your neighbors’ knowing your name. And when you don’t get that expected fame, and feel that insignificance, you settle for infamy. You shoot up a school, or a concert. Until we learn to reconnect with the people around us, reject superficial desires for greater recognition, and stop reporting breathlessly on every garish crime [which elevates dead ghouls to a seemingly immortal status], such horrible crimes will continue to occur.
The opinions above coincide, I believe, with a lot of what noted professor Jordan Peterson has been saying about mass shooters. Peterson doesn’t believe the Columbine killers were insane at all—they knew exactly what they wanted to do. They wanted to bring the world down. And that impulse is born from a nihilism that permeates current society. If we don’t have a purpose in life, then what is life for? Hanging around until we die. We are now replacing the idea of purpose with the notion of exposure. More “likes,” more retweets, more followers—desire for attention has replaced the need for belonging to a community, or living for a greater goal. It’s not about guns, but the minds that see them as tools toward achievement in a world where nothing seems to matter. In sum, a totally connected world of social networks reveals the status inequalities that drive the worst kind of envy: the envy that doesn’t seek but also destroys. And it reveals a path to infamy that the media breathlessly covers: violence.
February 19, 2014
As the debate over income equality blossoms like a flower of failure, how come no one ever targets Hollywood? A left-wing actor might make $20 million a flick as the on-set caterer makes only a hundred bucks a day.
Shouldn’t Obama and his envoy of envy focus their punitive pupils on that? Of course not, because those are O’s buds and they’re famous, cool, and rich.
As Gregory Mankiw in the New York Times reports, in 2012, Robert Downey Jr. raked in $50 million, ten times what the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent make.
Yet, no outrage from class warriors in the White House. Why is that? Afraid to lose the votes? Or the famous friends?
Mankiw says actors like Downey do more than act. They pay millions in taxes, which fund schools, police, and military, and they employ a lot of people. Even if their motivation is money, the by-product helps everyone. It’s the opposite of socialism—where the motivation is to help but the by-product is misery.
I agree completely on this point. What bugs me is that this defense is never applied to other rich folks who aren’t liberals, Democrats, or Hollywood stars.
It’s something the left, rarely, if ever understands. There’s nothing more helpful than making, and nothing less altruistic than taking. One should never attack Downey or anyone for their success. If the market can bear it, only the losers will whine.
Which is why I ask the White House to respect others who aren’t as glamorous but just as hardworking. After all, Downey plays a maverick CEO. Why pamper the famous who preten
d to be achievers, while punishing the real achievers themselves? Maybe that’s what President Obama really wants, to play the president instead of being one.
I wish the New York Times would write articles like this about me—I do pretty much the same thing as Downey [on a smaller scale], employing a lot of people in various occupations. I spend almost all my money in my community—mostly in bars and restaurants and on handymen who fix all the crap I can’t fix after I break things when I miss Final Jeopardy. I have supported more struggling actors and actresses with my drinking habit than all the fine arts scholarships you can name. After all, in New York, whoever waits on you is playing Fortinbras somewhere . . . even if it’s in their own head.
The bottom line: Superrich people are really awesome only if they’re movie stars. But if you make your money any other way, you’re a greedy monster. Downey makes a shitload more money than most CEOs—but he makes it “the fun way”! He entertains us! Which is way more important than figuring out how to pay for experimental vaccines. Yes, pharmaceutical companies are awful beasts, but film companies are heroic! How does that work? Who does more good for society? I’ll wait while you make me a drink.
February 23, 2015
Last night were the Oscars, or as I call it, the Super Bowl for short men. It was typical Hollywood, many black presenters, few black nominees. The Oscars were as white as the cocaine snorted in the bathroom. But Patricia Arquette deservedly won for her role in Boyhood. And she said this.
PATRICIA ARQUETTE: To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.
Now, one could point out that single childless women in their twenties actually earn more than their male counterparts. And that it’s not really about equal rights.