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For the past five years, Hollywood has been held hostage, and free speech has been under threat. Not by Trump but by the Left – the activists, the scolds, the journalists, and bloggers have contributed to creating a climate of fear and a culture of silence. That has led to some of the dullest, most unwatchable films and television the industry has ever produced.
The entire Penske Empire otherwise known as the trades – Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Gold Derby, Rolling Stone, Deadline – all are under a strict code of silence to never talk about anything that will upset anyone and they must always show they are on the “correct” side at all times. They know they might lose their jobs if they break this rule.
The critic Sean O’Connell very nearly lost his job because he posted an honest review of the Pixar film Turning Red. He had to offer a horrifying apology (for doing nothing wrong) to keep his job. This kind of thing happened so often that at some point, everyone inside the bubble of the Left just gave up. Speech and thought suppression became the new normal.
No one said anything out of fear. They cowered in silence. Only a few of us had the courage to speak up and push back against it, which I have been doing since the hive mind called the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri “racist.” That was in 2017. And still, there was a culture of silence and a climate of fear where the only people who had the courage to stand up to it, like me, were severely punished, shunned, alienated, attacked online, threatened and eventually, exiled from utopia entirely, as I was last year.
If you see any movie studios advertising on my site, well, then you know they are people who are not afraid of what the scolds, the Puritans, and the conformist totalitarians will think. They are few and far between. But let’s get one thing straight. This has never been a culture, at least not in the last almost ten years, where free speech has ever been encouraged or even allowed.
Things were so bad in 2020 that a bunch of people had to get together to sign a letter speaking out against the intolerance that had already taken hold and choked the life out of all creativity in all industries across all cultures.
Reading the Harper’s Letter now, I can see how they went out of their way to genuflect to the Left by going after Trump and trying to say, “he’s the tyrant on speech, we aren’t.” But the opposite is true. Trump and MAGA never controlled culture – not Hollywood, not book publishing, not journalism, not science. Not then and not now.
But I remember how shocking that letter was at the time, how brave they all were to sign it.
I remember feeling fear for sharing it. I remember the reaction of intolerance to it. That was part of what began to push me away from the Left and to find my out of the bubble and towards something that felt more free.
There was a massive machine — an empire — falsely termed the “resistance” that went to war on Trump every day, not exactly something that would be allowed in a dictatorship or a fascist regime, but who cares about the truth, right?
There is a whole website called canceled people with hundreds of names. This went on for years, and the end result of it was, well, nothing less than the demise of a once-thriving industry.
What “cancel culture” tells us about the Left is that they are the totalitarians. They don’t really even have a plan that includes the other half of the country beyond converting them to the ideology. They barely consider them human, let alone audiences worth telling stories for or allowing inside utopia.
Not only was speech under threat by the panopticon on social media — and still is, by the way, but the Biden Administration was violating the First Amendment too. Ever hear of the Twitter Files? Probably you haven’t.
In Congress, Matt Taibbi said:
“I think the most alarming thing that we saw was the regular stream, organized stream of communication between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the largest tech companies in the country. They had an organized system for flagging content, not occasionally, but in enormous numbers, involving spreadsheets of accounts that ran to the hundreds and 1000s. And this was shocking to us, and to the Congressman’s point, this isn’t crazy conspiracy theory. We’ve already had four federal judges rule that they believe this activity violates the First Amendment. This is quite serious. We didn’t know whether it was against the law, but we certainly thought it was shocking enough to be in the public interest, and that, for me, was the most serious.”
Michael Shellenberger said:
“For me, it was seeing the so called former FBI officials within Twitter, and working with a variety and other groups, including this Aspen Institute, participate in an effort to so called pre bunk the Hunter Biden laptop before it was ever published in the New York Post, and then to get it censored by Twitter in violation of Twitter’s Own Terms of Service, whose internal staff had concluded that the New York Post tweet had not violated their terms of service and they censored it anyway.”
People who risked their reputations and their incomes to speak out are the heroes of this story. Those who went along with it, who said nothing out of fear or survival, are not. Granted, I know most of the people who run Hollywood are true believers in the fundamentalism that has overtaken all culture, but even if they aren’t, they have allowed an army to bully, intimidate, and harass dissent.
So I had to laugh—and laugh hard — when I saw this letter with 2,000 signatures from members of the Writers Guild criticizing Trump for what they say is a dangerous threat to free speech. Give me a break. Now they want to speak up because to them it’s 2016 all over again and the resistance is out in force, as though Trump’s second win wasn’t an event of their own making.
They turned America off — the Democrats, the Left, and Hollywood. They did it. And yet now, they’re acting as though Trump and his “brown shirt army” rolled in and invaded our country again when, in fact, he won in an election, even the popular vote. It’s not a threat to democracy. Democracy kicked your ass.
From The Guardian:
More than 2,300 members of the Writers Guild of America, including Spike Lee and Adam McKay, have signed an open letter decrying the actions of Donald Trump’s administration that represent “an unprecedented, authoritarian assault” on free speech.
The letter, a combined effort from the WGA East and West branches, cites the US president’s “baseless lawsuits” against news organizations that have “published stories he does not like and leveraged them into payoffs”. It specifically references Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16m to settle a “meritless lawsuit” about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The letter notes that Trump “retaliated against publications reporting factually on the White House and threatened broadcasters’ licenses”, and has repeatedly called for the cancellation of programs that criticize him.
Additionally, the letter blasts Republicans in Congress who “collaborated” with the Trump administration to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “in order to silence PBS and NPR”. And it says the FCC, led by Trump-appointed chair Brendan Carr, “openly conditioned its approval of the Skydance-Paramount merger on assurances that CBS would make ‘significant changes’ to the purported ideological viewpoint of its journalism and entertainment programming.
“These are un-American attempts to restrict the kinds of stories and jokes that may be told, to silence criticism and dissent,” the letter reads. “We don’t have a king, we have a president. And the president doesn’t get to pick what’s on television, in movie theaters, on stage, on our bookshelves, or in the news.”
Signees include Tony Gilroy, David Simon, Mike Schur, Ilana Glazer, Lilly Wachowski, Celine Song, Justin Kuritzkes, Desus Nice, Gillian Flynn, John Waters, Liz Meriwether, Kenneth Lonergan, Alfonso Cuarón, Shawn Ryan and many other prominent names in film and television.
What a self-righteous load of garbage. And these are supposed to be writers? The only thing that is remotely true is that Trump punishes outlets by not allowing them in the daily pool — and so? Like that can in any way compare to what we’ve just lived through with a one-sided media EMPIRE backing and supporting the Democrats and attacking Trump. Even in this letter, we can see the narrative shaping fiction they have tried to sell for ten years.
Do you think audiences are falling all over themselves to hear anything you have to say anymore? Newsflash: they don’t. Why? Because of the climate of fear and the culture of silence.
Why do you think they watch the Trump show? Because it’s a thousand times more interesting than anything Hollywood puts out because at least it’s real. It’s not softened, pandering, one-sided crap that you’ve been dishing out for almost ten years. Yes, the audience should decide and guess what? They have. They voted for Trump.
PBS and NPR, like Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, and every other person who gets paid millions and millions and millions of dollars to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, should have to compete for eyeballs just like everyone else. Your ratings suck? That’s on you. Box office sucks? That’s on you. No one watching MSNBC or CNN? That’s on you.
Stop blaming Trump for your weakness and your lack of courage to stand up to your own side. And by the way, everyone who signed that letter knew what would happen to them if they didn’t sign it. Some stupid headline in Variety about some writer who didn’t sign it, and that’s it. There goes the career.
That is what is killing Hollywood, not this ten-year war on Trump – a war you LOST. Get over it. Turn the page. Find something else to say, another message to sell, or get out of the arts and go into politics.
What else do you got? The world is changing. Media is changing. Audiences are evolving. Generations are getting online, and guess what they are not doing? Listening to any of you.
Get over yourselves and stop treating the other half of this country like they don’t have a right to participate in our democracy and vote for whomever they damn well please — and movies and culture should made for them too. Your delusions that Trump is some omnipotent super villain you can’t take down is why you are in this mess. Stop blaming him.
This should be a lesson to Hollywood — get your shit together and offer people something they want instead of what you think they should want, and stop blaming them for your creative bottleneck. You did this to protect yourselves and you thought everyone would hang on your every word for all time. Guess what, they don’t. They’re bored. It’s boring. A monoculture is boring.
And by the way, suing isn’t some authoritarian act. I’ve been sued twice. Once, by the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences, to change the name of my website. I did it. I didn’t whine about authoritarianism. And a photographer sued me for unlawful use of a photo, and I had to pay out $10,000. Everyone gets sued, and everyone can sue. Adam McKay can sue anyone he wants any time he wants. That is not authoritarianism.
No one was silencing NPR and PBS. Taxpayers didn’t want to pay for pure propaganda for the Left, and by the way, everyone knew they wanted to do this. If you wanted to protect them, you should have figured out how to win elections.
Trump wasn’t trying to shut down Colbert – as if he even cares one way or the other. 60 Minutes did edit the Harris interview to make her look less incomprehensible. But that’s better than shelving it like Subway Takes did:
You really think Trump is obsessed with you as much as you are obsessed with him, as if getting rid of him would help make the industry better. Well guess what? It didn’t, as we saw from 2020 to 2024, maybe the worst years of Hollywood output in their entire history
Paramount and Skydance did not have agree to the merger. No one forced them, you fools. It’s called COLD HARD CASH. South Park now is on the verge of becoming yet another Stephen Colbert because, I think, they don’t want to be accused of selling out for what was it, $1.5 billion? They’ll cash that paycheck and then flip Trump the double bird, everyone wins.
No one holds a gun to your head for these payouts, fellas. NO ONE.
It’s funny that these COWARDS who have said nothing and done nothing for almost ten years to protect the flow of ideas, the writers, and the dissenters now want to pretend- to COSPLAY- that they are living in some kind of dictatorship – all because people wanted to get rich off of a merger.
People who took real risks to speak out, such as Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, experienced the chilling effects when they lost their high-status positions in the media and are still attacked every day and called MAGA and Far-Right. Look at Rolling Stone, now owned by Penske, without Taibbi. Or the New York Times without Weiss. Or the Atlantic without Walter Kirn. Or New York Magazine without Andrew Sullivan. There is nothing worth reading if everything sounds the same.
If you snuff out original thought, if you mandate ideology, if you punish dissent, what is left? You have extincted yourselves. That’s not on Trump. That’s on you.
I have witnessed this industry’s decline over the past 25 years. I have watched how movies became dogma delivery devices, how we had to sit there and tolerate all of the pandering lectures pumped out, all of the strident rules put on artists to make their films “correct,” and all I see is an industry driven by fear and a lack of support for writers and original ideas.
And I see people who have everything — all of the power, all of the status, all of the wealth dehumanizing the working class of this country because they are not ideologically compliant and they dared to vote for Donald Trump. My kingdom for a Rod Serling right now. He would be canceled too.
All of this has meant an outsider industry out of necessity for people who just want to hear someone say what they really think, damn the torpedoes. People who read my site now know they might not agree with me on politics, but they appreciate someone who has the courage to speak the truth, at least as far as I see it.
I hate what has become of the film industry, and I know that everyone is just pretending things are fine, keeping it all status quo, watching the whole thing sink deeper into a bubble that has almost no way of reflecting or even reaching life outside of it.
And that is depressing. There is no way to get great movies back unless we start facing the truth. And unless we are allowed to tell it.
