That’s why you have Hollywood attacking American values with their movies. Out of one side of their hypocritical mouths, they’re antigun. Out of the other, they make movies rife with gunfights, knifing, butchering, murdering, and mayhem.
Harvey Weinstein is one of the worst. Last year, he said he was going to make a movie with Meryl Streep that would make the NRA “wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them.”3 He promised in the same interview to stop making movies glamorizing guns.
Over a year later, he still hasn’t made his antigun movie, but he has obviously decided to break his vow against making violent movies. He currently has Kill Bill Vol. 3, a remake of The Crow, and another Quentin Tarantino movie, The Hateful Eight, in production.4 So much for no more violent movies.
Even Weinstein’s claim that he’s never owned a gun and doesn’t want one is disingenuous. He may not own a gun personally, but he has a large cadre of armed bodyguards who provide him protection the average American can’t afford. I’m not sure if that makes him more or less hypocritical than Dianne Feinstein, who actually has a concealed-carry permit herself.
Sean Penn is another Hollywood elitist peddling hypocritical antigun nonsense. Penn used to be an unrepentant gun owner until a few years ago. In 2013, he sold his gun collection to an artist to be melted down for sculpture, apparently because his new girlfriend at the time didn’t like them.5
Of course, once Penn decided he didn’t want guns, he immediately concluded no one else should have them, either, even though most people can’t afford the armed bodyguards he and Weinstein can rely on when they’re unarmed personally.
Penn’s newest movie is called The Gunman. I couldn’t make this up. He actually starred in a typical Hollywood shoot-them-up action film immediately after attacking the Second Amendment and calling guns “cowardly killing machines.” Meanwhile, I haven’t heard anything about him disarming his bodyguards.
Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen are also living a life of luxury from their for-profit film and music ventures, but raise millions for leftist politicians who attack everyone else trying to make an honest living.
We’ll have to see if Geffen can beat out Weinstein and Penn for Hypocrite of the Year. After raising money for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, he had a falling out with him when Clinton refused to pardon Leonard Peltier. Geffen indirectly called the Clintons liars in a 2007 interview, when he was backing Obama. He called Hillary Clinton an “incredibly polarizing figure.”6
Let’s see if he still thinks she’s polarizing now that it’s her or a Republican for president. One of his spokesmouths already confirmed he’ll vote for her, even if he believes she’s polarizing and a liar.7
Hollywood is awash with the usual liberal hypocrisy: capitalism and profits for me and socialism and misery for everyone else. They make billions on movies glorifying guns and have concealed-carry permits or armed bodyguards themselves, but want to ban guns and free enterprise for you and me.
Any film affirming patriotism, love of God and country, entrepreneurship, self-reliance, independent thinking, or any of the other heroic qualities inherent in the American ethos must be vilified out of existence.
The supposed evil of capitalism is another recurrent theme in almost every movie. Entrepreneurs are villains. Corporations become large and successful not by producing products that millions of people choose to buy, but by murdering people.
If a businessman is the hero in a movie, he is heroic only if by the end of the movie he rejects capitalism and the profit motive and “learns” how wrong he was to believe in free enterprise. If he is a white male, he also has to learn how inherently evil he is because of that.
You’ve probably been exposed to this without even realizing it. Do you like science fiction movies? The Alien franchise was popular enough to spawn several sequels. They were pretty good movies, if you like science fiction, especially the original. But they all peddled the usual socialist propaganda.
The real villain of the films was an evil corporation willing to sacrifice the lives of its employees to bring back the alien life-form for some unknown purpose. We learn during the sequel that the company was interested in selling the organism to the military. So the Hollywood Marxists manage to smear free enterprise and the military at the same time. What a bargain.
That corporations have to murder people to succeed is a fairly common theme coming out of Leninist Hollywood. The Fugitive and Total Recall are two other popular examples. These are just fictional stories, but they constantly reinforce the leftist idea that for-profit businesses can make money only by harming people in some way.
It’s the tired “zero-sum game” fallacy. One economic actor can profit only if another realizes a loss. The idea of two parties trading to their mutual benefit is just beyond the comprehension of these freedom-hating subversives.
If your tastes run more to romantic comedy, rather than action or science fiction, you don’t have to worry about missing out on leftist propaganda. In Two Weeks Notice [sic] with Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant, Grant’s character must learn not to act in the best interests of the company’s shareholders, among other things.
In the especially awful Sweet November, Keanu Reeves must learn how evil he is for being hardworking and devoted to his career, in addition to learning how bad he is just for being a man. He is taught all of this by Charlize Theron’s character, whom we learn over the course of the film is apparently sleeping with a different man every month, in order to save them from their evil selves, before dying of cancer at the end of the film.
Believe it or not, Hollywood wasn’t always like this. Yes, liberals have always infested the arts, from filmmakers, to actors, to musicians, to painters. But just as in American politics, there was once a strong opposition party in Hollywood.
Conservative icons like John Ford, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Spencer Tracy once made films that affirmed American values. They celebrated capitalism, patriotism, heroism in battle, and resistance to tyranny.
Back in those days, the left wasn’t so bold in coming out against movies celebrating America’s heroes on the battlefield. Even the liberal New York Times said that 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima had “so much that reflects the true glory of the Marine Corps’ contribution to victory in the Pacific that the film has undeniable moments of greatness.”8 The reviewer regrets that the movie didn’t portray the Marines more realistically off the battlefield, as that didn’t do enough justice to the U.S. Marines.
Hollywood movies actually celebrated capitalism, too. One of my favorites was a film called Boom Town, with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. The film begins with the two legendary actors playing partners in a wildcat oil company. They eventually split and become fierce competitors, the fortunes of each rising and falling throughout the movie.
Near the end of the film, Gable’s character has worked a deal to slow down production, which threatens to put Tracy’s character out of business. The federal regulators try to prosecute Gable’s character for restraint of trade and call Tracy’s character as a witness. Rather than seek protection from competition from the government, here is what Tracy’s character says on the stand:
He wanted these guys to produce less oil, so that their wells would flow years longer and not ruin the field. That way, they’d get all the oil there was to get out of the wells. Don’t you get the idea? He was for conservation. Now, how could a guy be breaking the law when he’s trying to save the natural resources of the country? Now, he didn’t know he was doing anything that you might call noble, but being one of the best oil men there is, he’s got the right hunch about oil.
Wow. When was the last time you heard an argument for the free market like that in a Hollywood picture? With just a few sentences, he blows up the entire liberal complaint against free markets.
Liberals constantly talk about markets as if there is an inherent conflict between individuals pursuing profits and the “greater good of society.” There isn’t. Just like Spencer Tracy said, en
trepreneurs pursuing profits benefit society at the same time. In fact, they benefit society because they are pursuing profits.
Entrepreneurs also protect the environment more than will a million government employees with a trillion of your tax dollars. By trying to maximize revenues and minimize costs, they naturally conserve resources. Raw materials cost money. An entrepreneur seeks to get every bit of value possible out of every yard, pound, or fluid ounce of raw materials, because the more value they provide for any given cost, the more profits they make. There is no conflict between profits and the environment.
Let me share one more jewel from this diamond mine of real American culture. After Tracy teaches the judge and the movie audience that capitalism is good for the environment, he asks a question we all should be asking ourselves now:
So, now I’m wondering. Is it getting to be out of line for a man like him to make a million dollars with his brains and with his hands? Because if that’s true, we’d better rewrite this “land of opportunity stuff.”
That’s what Obama and the progressive left want to do: rewrite this land of opportunity stuff. Instead of people feeling inspired by entrepreneurs who made a million bucks with their brains and their hands, they want people to feel aggrieved and envious. They want them to resent businessmen who offer them jobs and opportunity and revere the government that offers them handouts.
Men weren’t the only heroes during Hollywood’s golden age. Another of my favorites from this period was Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford. The main plot is about Mildred Pierce’s devotion to a daughter who is wholly unworthy of it and eventually betrays her mother and commits a murder. But what I love most about this film is the way heroism is portrayed.
When Mildred Pierce’s unfaithful husband leaves her, she doesn’t complain about a war on women or look for a government handout. She starts by baking cakes in her kitchen, which grows into a baking business, which she then grows into a successful chain of restaurants. She wins her own independence through hard work and making the most of the opportunities a free market offers her. She is heroic because she is a successful entrepreneur.
She is self-reliant and successful, but there is no implication that she becomes so at the price of her ethics or morality. On the contrary, her sound, moral character is one of the reasons for her success, as it is for most entrepreneurs in the real world.
The film is prescient in one way. The contrast between the faithful, hardworking Mildred Pierce and her snotty, entitled, greedy daughter is a perfect metaphor for the contrast between the greatest generation and the baby boomers. The former defeated two tyrannical empires and built the most prosperous economy in world history. The latter set out to destroy everything their parents built and create an amoral, godless, socialist sewer.
You might be wondering how things could have changed so much in Hollywood. How could the same town that produced Sands of Iwo Jima, Boom Town, and Mildred Pierce become so uniformly leftist? What happened to the opposition party in Hollywood?
You may as well ask why there are so few climate scientists who challenge the global warming hoax in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The answer is the same for both questions. Anyone who dissented was purged, through propaganda and character assassination.
The False History of the McCarthy Era
Unless you were born yesterday or have been living under a rock, you probably have some knowledge of what is now called McCarthyism. While most people don’t know all the details, most are aware that for a period during the late 1940s and 1950s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin headed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
As head of the committee, McCarthy accused many members of the U.S. State Department and other departments within the government of being communist spies or communist sympathizers. He and the HUAC also blacklisted a number of Hollywood movie producers, directors, scriptwriters, and actors because of their alleged communist affiliations.
If you know all of the above, I have news for you. You’ve fallen prey to yet another progressive mind trick. You’ve swallowed another liberal fairy tale hook, line and sinker.
This particular lie isn’t even internally consistent. First, Senator Joseph McCarthy couldn’t have had anything to do with a House Un-American Activities Committee. McCarthy was never elected to the House of Representatives. He was a U.S. senator. He chaired the Senate Committee on Government Operations, but the House Un-American Activities Committee had existed for over a decade before McCarthy’s campaign against communism.
More importantly, the HUAC did not blacklist anyone from working in Hollywood. That wasn’t a power any congressional committee had, then or now. The committee had the power to investigate subversive activities that threatened the form of government proscribed in the U.S. Constitution and to bring charges of real crimes, like espionage, when probable cause was established.
The committee subpoenaed various Hollywood figures to appear for questioning. When some of them refused to answer, they were charged with contempt of Congress, a misdemeanor. In response to the charges, the Motion Picture Association of America, a voluntary association of private individuals, issued a statement indicating they would no longer employ those people charged with contempt by Congress.
The infamous blacklist was not effected by Senator McCarthy and was only indirectly related to the HUAC. It was really just private individuals within Hollywood exercising what used to be recognized as an inherent, inalienable right: the right to associate or not associate with anyone you pleased. These Hollywood employers did not want the powerful influence of their studios used to promote communism and subvert the U.S. Constitution.
In the years that followed, many more people were blacklisted. I’m sure that some were wrongly accused. Senator McCarthy became a symbol of the supposed witch hunt nature of the investigations, even after Alger Hiss was found guilty of perjury for denying his involvement in Soviet espionage. McCarthy had some personal foibles, alcoholism possibly being one of them. He was eventually censured by Congress after the same kind of multimedia, total war-style character assassination that liberals have used on so many others who have opposed their agenda.
What the progressive jackals have been successful in erasing from America’s collective memory is the one, most important fact: McCarthy was right. For the most part, his allegations were justified, as were the suspicions of those on the HUAC who subpoenaed the actors and screenwriters.
We know this because of another bit of conveniently forgotten history called the Venona Project. Venona was a counterintelligence program run from 1943 through 1980 that decrypted Soviet intelligence communications.9 From the decrypted messages, U.S. intelligence was able to identify the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, and many others as Soviet spies in regular communication with the KGB. Hollywood producer Stephen Laird, who was also a reporter for Time magazine and CBS, was also identified. Hundreds of other people are mentioned in the decrypted messages, many of whom are also justifiably suspected of having been working with the Soviets during this period.
Despite this hard evidence that his allegations of communist infiltration into government, media, and entertainment were generally true, McCarthy remains a poster child for right wing paranoia. Just like a suspect in a crime whose indictment is reported on page one of the newspaper, but whose acquittal is reported on page fifty-seven, or not at all, no one remembers McCarthy’s vindication due to these decoded messages.
So effective was the vilification of McCarthy, the HUAC, and the private individuals who decided not to employ communists that a complete reversal in Hollywood occurred. It became politically incorrect to voice any opposition to communism at all, just as it is political suicide to express any concern over radical Islam today. “McCarthyism” and “reds under the bed” became in-vogue witticisms to imply paranoia in anyone who expressed a concern about communism, even though many of those concerns were justified.
Today, “Islamophobia” is used in
the same way to vilify anyone who might express some concern about a well-equipped army of ninth-century throwbacks who are rapidly conquering territory in the Middle East and establishing a brutal, murderous theocracy. Suggest that this has something to do with Islam itself and you are set upon by the liberal jackals in much the same way McCarthy was all those years ago. But all of their propaganda doesn’t change the truth.
Rotten Role Models
Athletes, musicians, and other entertainers have even more influence on young people than movie stars. Unfortunately, that influence is almost universally bad. When kids aren’t being bombarded with song lyrics and commentary by musicians pushing the leftist worldview, they’re watching their idols in professional sports committing crimes and generally acting like thugs.
In April, Time magazine released its list of the “100 Most Influential People.”10 Topping the list was a talentless hack married to an exhibitionist wife whose chief claim to fame is an overly large behind. He will be largely remembered himself for rude, inexcusable behavior during two Grammy Awards ceremonies where he interrupted acceptance speeches to voice his opinion that the winner didn’t deserve the award.
Every boxer, regardless of skin color, goes on and on like Muhammad Ali, apparently unaware Ali did it tongue in cheek to promote his fights. What does it tell nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old boys who idolize these athletes when they exhibit no humility in victory or grace in defeat?
The bad examples set for our children by athletes and entertainers don’t stop at rudeness or poor sportsmanship. Violent crimes, including murder, sexual assault, and other offenses continue to plague professional sports and entertainment. One NFL player was convicted of murder in April of this year,11 while another made headlines for viciously assaulting his girlfriend in an elevator.12
Government Zero : No Borders, No Language, No Culture (9781455563517) Page 13