Inside the bubble—the high castle in the sky—Mark Ruffalo or Jimmy Kimmel or any of the high-status aristocrats are protected. Any tiny bit of pushback they get, like accusing Ruffalo of antisemitism (which I disagreed with in my post):
I didn’t think his hysteria and idiocy meant he was antisemitic. But boy, the slightest bit of criticism brought out all the people who have been, for ten years, too cowardly to stand up for people like me or anyone else falsely accused of being a “racist.” Just imagine if they’d done that years ago. Just imagine how different things would be. As it is, the scolds and the puritans have Hollywood by the balls. And when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. I am embarrassed for all of them who only speak out when it’s convenient and only defend people who are acceptable inside utopia.
Here is their open letter (which is not brave, my friends, because they are preaching to the choir):
We are Jewish artists, writers, creative professionals, faith leaders and thinkers who have, in response to the outrageous smear campaign against our respected colleague Mark Ruffalo, a simple message to share with the world: Enough! Enough with the false and dangerous weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those who are brave enough to point out the obvious: that the assault on the Palestinian people and the assault on our liberties at home are deeply interconnected, and there is nothing antisemitic about recognizing that fact.
The proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery is no mere combination of two huge multinational companies. Yes, it will destroy thousands upon thousands of livelihoods. Yes, it will further consolidate the oligarchic control of our media (witness the gutting of CBS News). Yes, it will strangle competition and creativity in film and television production and distribution.
But it will do all this and more as part of a larger project of tech-driven domination, a project Larry Ellison and his partners have never been shy about trumpeting — and one they themselves have explicitly linked to their support for the ongoing depredations being visited on the people of Palestine and their silencing of critics of those horrors. We all saw this after their Trump-brokered takeover of TikTok — a takeover they openly proclaimed was in large part motivated by their desire to boost pro-Israel propaganda. Larry Ellison personally, with his astonishing $350 million in funding and pledges to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, has been Blair’s major backer as Blair assumes an influential role in the Trump-concocted “Board of Peace” takeover of Gaza, a territory which has become an open-air laboratory for AI-driven killing and control technologies like the ones celebrated by former Oracle CEO (and current Oracle and Paramount board member) Safra Catz.
The AI road to WarnerMount runs through Gaza, and Ellison has often let us know the Orwellian world he has in store for us as he consolidates control over what we watch and how we watch it, knowing that as we watch he and his corrupt cohort will always be watching us: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting.”
Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism. It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty. According to a recent Washington Post poll, 61% of American Jews now agree that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza; and four in ten even agree that these crimes amount to genocide. Do those attacking Mark Ruffalo as an antisemite seriously believe that all these American Jews are antisemites too? Or that we don’t see the connection between, on the one hand, the criminal impunities that have led the US and Israel into unending disaster and, on the other, the oligarchic powerplays of the Musks, Ellisons, Thiels and others who are working to dismantle our democracy?
But the virulence and falseness of the slanders they direct towards their critics is evidence of the increasing weakness of their position, based as it is on innuendos. Today, more and more people of conscience are joining together, to loudly and univocally proclaim: The time is over for spurious charges of antisemitism to be trotted out, this time in the defense of war, oligarchy, and AI domination. That tired playbook has run its course.
We stand proudly with Mark Ruffalo, and with all decent people who are bravely rising and speaking truth to power.
Signatories you can read the list at Deadline.
They throw around the word genocide, which is itself antisemitic, in my opinion. You can criticize the war but don’t get it twisted. Genocide was what happened to theJews and what will happen to them if the Arab world had its way. They’re fighting back now because Hamas started a war with them. That’s what happens when you start a war. You either win or lose. This is Berlin after World War II:
But regardless, this letter and everything we’ve seen in the last ten years show where the power lies. It shows how afraid they still are to tell any kind of truth and how easy it is for them to stand up for free speech when it’s safe to do so.
No, none of them are brave. None of them are holding the powerful to account. None of them are standing up for those who have been punished for thought crimes. That is Orwellian. Who they are is what 1984 is about. They are the enclosed bubble that keeps out the Proles. They are the side with the thought police who tittle-tattle on the thought criminals. They are now and have always been Big Brother.
With Trump, they have their Two Minutes Hate—their imaginary villain dragged out every so often (every second of every day) to keep the people in line. People like me, who have been severely punished for thought crimes, are shut out and used as an example: don’t speak out or this is what will happen to you.
If it’s one of theirs—Jimmy Kimmel, Mark Ruffalo—then you have the full protection of the side with all the cultural power, the side that chooses who gets to stay and who has to go. Being anti-Israel and anti-Jewish is all the fashion now. The other side are the people demonized as Zionists and ostracized.
That they’ve now married Trump and the war in Gaza with Paramount closes the loop at long last. There is no way out, because on their side you are told what to think, what to want, what to care about, what you should like, and what you can and cannot say. That’s not the right.
So no, I’m not impressed with any of them for doing what cowards do best: protecting themselves while pretending to be brave.Some of my favorite artists are on this list.
Not one of them would stand beside me, even though I have praised their work for years, now that I’ve become a marked person no longer welcome inside their castle in the sky.I just want them to know they get no pats on the back from me or from most Americans they’ve shit on and thrown away like human garbage, to their own detriment.
Mark Ruffalo will be fine. For once in his life he suffered the tiniest bit of criticism. And Hollywood has now shown everyone who really has the power and who doesn’t. If they kill this merger, there will be no saving the ship. It is made of iron and it will sink.
They’re the side standing up for blacklists. They’re the people who have gone along with a culture of silence and a climate of fear. They’re the people who have shut out half the country and somehow still think they are our moral betters. America is sick and tired of all of them.
Antisemitism in America is at an all-time high—on the Left and on the Right. It is unpopular and dangerous to support Israel, or even to say they have a right to exist, or to support the war in Iran. That is the simple fact. Why? Because the people with all the power are on the other side, and now we can see it laid bare. Fingers crossed the merger goes through, because these folks have all but ruined culture by making it one-sided and totalitarian, and someone has to do something.
