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Whether One Battle After Another wins Best Picture or not will depend on how many in the industry believe in the Left’s increasingly paranoid version of reality. And by the looks of it, all of them do. The euphoric reviews for the film all say the same thing: this is our worldview finally put in a movie, and for that, it’s hard to have any faith that Hollywood will ever normalize out of its oppressor/oppressed mindset, which is why a counterculture will have to be built around them. That’s been true for a long time.
Jimmy Kimmel is now one of the martyrs of the Left. He’ll fail upwards as they all do. There will be Emmys, million-dollar deals, and standing ovations. He’ll never have to absorb the failure his show was, in reality. The ratings were a disaster, and there was no coming back from that. The country has moved on from the “resistance” everywhere except inside the bubble of the Left. They are like preppers by now, trapped inside a Doomsday Bunker and led by an unreliable narrator, the legacy media has become.
From Late Nighter:
According to Nielsen Live+7 data, all three network 11:35pm shows—CBS’s The Late Show, NBC’s The Tonight Show, and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!—have seen declines of 70–80% in the key 18–49 demographic since 2015. That year marked the beginning of a new era: Colbert took over from David Letterman, Fallon had just succeeded Jay Leno, and Kimmel had moved up to 11:35pm.
By 2018 the writing was on the wall that the time period that was once a cash cow was in free fall. According to one frequently cited report from the advertising data firm Guideline, brands spent $439 million advertising on network late-night television that year. By 2024, that number had been cut in half.
Unfortunately for Trump, as usual, he overplayed his hand. Power does strange things to people, no matter their politics. Most people can’t help but flip the switch. But in this case, he stepped on a rake because he saved Jimmy Kimmel and the network from the embarrassment of failure. Now they get to cosplay fascism yet again. The truth? They could have fought for Kimmel if he had been profitable for them.
The market never enters the chat. Profits are never discussed. Box office is excused away. Ratings? What are those? Jimmy Kimmel is a Good Soldier for the Democrats. That’s all that matters here. Yeah, I know.
Box office will once again become a factor when Paul Thomas Anderson’s Leftist dystopian fantasy One Battle After Another opens. Word has it that the budget is high — between $120 and $150 million. There’s always the chance that international will make up the difference, and that if it doesn’t make money here, it won’t matter. The other question is, since the film is pure propaganda for the Left’s worldview, will the box office even matter anyway?
My guess is that it won’t. Does that mean I think it can win Best Picture? The legacy media’s narrative that America is a fascist state reaches broadly across the globe. It includes all of those in the UK and elsewhere who are sympathetic to Palestine and mass migration. With the new voters, will they go along with the phantasmagoria that the film perpetuates? Maybe.
I heard someone compare it to Dr. Strangelove. If only. That movie, like Network, was satire. Even though Trump is in power now and they’ve cast him as their eternal oppressor, the Left still has all of the cultural power and is dictating the dogmatic, obedient films they churn out. It is a miracle if one can escape the DEI mandates, the sensitivity readers, and the intimacy coordinators.
Dr. Strangelove was a film made in the 1960s, when the government and the establishment went one way, and culture went the other. But over the last 15 years, the Democrats and the Left were the government and the establishment. The only great satire, therefore, would be satire that mocks them, and almost none of them do because none of them can. Who are the real totalitarians?
Somehow, BJ Novak was among the very few artists willing to tell the truth about these times in his brilliant (but ignored) film Vengeance. In this scene, he shows how the big city podcast bro was kind of a dick and how those who have been abandoned by culture have decided to believe in conspiracy theories because of it.
It’s great writing, but this was never an industry that would get anywhere near it. Why, because it has been and remains a climate of fear and a culture of silence.
Network is such a brilliant, timeless film because it had the courage to criticize the real power of its time. Like other films of the era, it targeted not the Republicans but the radical Left.
By then, rational and reasonable people were tired of it. Feminism had become toxic and stale, as depicted in films like Kramer vs. Kramer, Network, and Annie Hall, not to mention Manhattan. After the Manson murders, the hippies freaked out America enough that society began shifting rightward. That is what the death of Charlie Kirk has done.
It has caused many Americans to wake up and see who and what the Left has become. It isn’t just that they throw around the word “fascist,” and the shooter believed he was shooting a fascist. It is their reaction to his death. They celebrated it. They justified it. They ignored it. They excused it. If they ever did condemn it was always “I don’t condone violence but…”
The difference between Dr. Strangelove, Network, and One Battle After Another is profound. Universal stories are different from stories that push an ideology. One Battle reflects the Left’s view that the majority in this country that voted for Trump are “racists” and “fascists.” People with money and status often believe that about those who struggle to put food on the table and afford their mortgage.
I’ll dive into political movies more tomorrow, but I am wondering whether voters will opt out of political conflict and reach for a film like Hamnet that enriches their hearts. I guess we’ll see.
I agree with Mattias Desmet on his Substack when he condemns the Trump administration for punishing people for celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. I understand how hurt he is. Millions all over the globe are also in mourning. But just because he has the power does not mean he should use it. All it will do is perpetuate the mass delusion on the Left, the side that made this bed for the past ten years.
The current reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder confirms how hard it is to reverse a trend toward totalitarianism. The only thing that can get the job done is a group of leaders and part of the population that gives ethical principles radical priority over every personal narcissistic injury and the gratification of revenge.
I cut Trump some slack because of what the Democrats and the Left did to him and his supporters for ten years. It was not just totalitarian, but far worse. They lied about him and still do. They lied about his supporters and continue to do so. They have perpetuated a mental health crisis in this country that has destroyed Hollywood’s ability to make art or comedy or anything else. What we get instead is obedience.
So I get why Trump would want revenge and would use his power to punish people. But it’s wrong. Not only will they never give him credit if he backs off, but in behaving exactly like they do, he loses one of his most powerful cards he has to play: that he does value free speech and free expression, and they don’t. Why give that to them? They don’t deserve it because they don’t believe it. They just want to win their war against Trump by any means necessary.
Trump should back all the way off and let the empire collapse on its own. Who knows, maybe they will learn the lesson that free speech should be for everyone, not just them.
Oscar Bloggers Find Their Courage Only Now
None of them will face any consequences for this because it only moves in one direction, which is why Trump and others are fighting back. But in this case, it is not Trump’s job — just as it wasn’t Biden’s job when his administration was censoring speech on social media — to police speech. Leave them to succeed or fail on their own.
Clayton Davis saying MAGA stands for racism is funny, considering how diverse the Trump coalition is, not to mention those who are fans and advocates of Charlie Kirk. Here is just a sampling.
If you really believe that the half of this country that voted for Trump are “racists,” then you can’t ever write anything for them, make any movies for them, publish any books for them, or have anything to say to them — which is how the Left was lost. Will they recover is the only question.
It seems to me that there is a permanent hierarchy in place on the Left that demands people play their roles. The oppressed must always be oppressed, the oppressors must always be cast as the oppressors. Is there ever any way out of it? Seems to me that what resonated in so many people deemed “oppressed” by the Left was that Charlie Kirk attempted to find a different way. Agree or disagree, fine, but don’t lie.
Not all of them are pandering to groupthink, as usual, fiercely independent and not bought off Jeff Sneider sees it as it really is:
Thinking for yourself over the past ten years has meant being cast as a witch, exiled, marginalized, attacked, and shunned. But it is those who have the courage to speak up when it is not popular, even if it costs them greatly, that Hollywood, journalism, and art have been made on. They were not made on silence, fear, and cowardice.
What I learned in 2020 is that much of what I was told about Trump and MAGA was false. It was driven by a weaponized legacy press that created a media feedback loop, one in which these bloggers are very much a part. They believe what they are saying here, just as I once did. But it’s not the truth. Bill Maher proves that you can sit down and talk to anyone as long as you see them as fellow human beings and not monsters.
It’s easy to speak out now when you have the backing of the status quo. Having courage requires you to do it when you don’t, as Bill Maher has done above.
Hollywood movies taught me that. I grew up in movie theaters. I learned all of my lessons about speaking out, about journalism, about the truth from them. Whatever that thing was that once motivated them to stand up and speak the truth is gone.
What I’ve learned in the past ten years is that if you can’t tell the truth, if you can’t speak up for what you really think and believe, you will go insane. I think that’s what has happened to everyone on the Left, from the legacy media to the Democrats to Hollywood.
Their war on Trump destroyed them because they couldn’t see anything except the mass delusion of their own making. Trump is just a man. He’s not a supervillain. They could have beaten him, just as their movies could still be big hits and their shows still highly rated. All they had to do was come out of their bubble and join the rest of us in the real world.
