ARMOND WHITE: The Karla or Carlos Controversy Confounds Hollywood.
Instead, the trade press has attacked Gascón for social media posts uncovered by a renegade freelancer, Sarah Hagi, who identifies as a black Muslim and who is Canadian but writes hit-pieces for U.S. media. The trade press has heroized Hagi for exposing dated “racist tweets” by Gascón. Gascón’s posts ranged from criticizing Black Lives Matter and questioning the credibility of the George Floyd scandal to what Hagi claims were endorsements of Adolf Hitler.
So a Muslim in a hijab attacks a trans performer who identifies as a woman yet doesn’t kowtow to all the liberal pieties. It’s an almost humorous fulfillment of the prediction that the Left will eat itself. This is an aberration of progressivism — the flip side of beleaguered social media gadfly Andy Ngo, the independent muckraker who exposes mainstream media’s protection of Antifa. Ngo recently tracked the January 20 killing of a border-patrol agent in Vermont to an alleged violent trans cult.
But the unserious Hollywood trade press remains trivial. Variety went for standard left-Hollywood accusations. Daniel D’Addario wrote a piece on the Gascón affair, with a headline calling Gascón “the Donald Trump of Oscar Season.” D’Addario mentions President Trump nearly as often as he mentions Gascón. A former television critic for Time, D’Addario uses prejudiced phrases — “the politics of prejudice emanating from President Trump,” “our current, entertainment-obsessed president” — even digging-up the Obama birth certificate controversy and the tired comparisons of Trump to Hitler. D’Addario practices code phrases the same way that Gascón’s old tweets, according to Hagi, issued “dog whistles.”
Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and The Wrap betray their own integrity by waging industry vendettas against Gascón and Trump as if both were infidels to the DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) cause.
What makes this fracas serious is the underlying media mania for cancellation and censorship — of a performer and a president. It’s an extension of the angry zeal that has overtaken the media in general, from legacy publications to the internet upstarts that all mistake partisan activism for journalism. The idea is to effect the revolution in gender and identity that is part of the social transformation progressives demand be installed in our language and thinking. The Academy’s endorsement of Karla or Carlos Gascón has exposed the trade media, transforming it into a medium of spite.
Earlier signs that the entertainment industry trade papers were going far off the rails were in 2022 when they insisted on using The Flash actor Ezra Miller’s “preferred pronouns” to the point where publications such as Variety appeared “More Concerned Over Misgendering Ezra Miller Than His Assaulting Victims,” Brad Slager wrote at Red State:
The ridiculousness begins early, as Variety works hard to address Miller in the proper fashion, and the fractured language that follows delivers this ridiculous diction.
Miller…became a regular at bars in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, where locals came to know and even befriend them. Many recognized Miller from their earliest breakout movies, 2012’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and 2011’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” where they played a troubled teen.
Resorting to the they/them pronoun while describing encounters with a crowd of people leads to obtuse reporting. When it becomes unclear if you are describing the group or the preferred pronoun reference you have veered from your charged duty of providing clear reporting on a matter. It would be more concise to simply use ‘’Miller’’ to designate the actor. But then, there is a possible conflict in using the gendered term actor, so Variety has painted itself into a rainbow corner.
From here, Variety takes the position that this correct pronoun usage is the important way to cover this story. When it comes to interviewing one of the women from Iceland, who had violent encounters with Miller, the corrections to her testimony are glaring and rather offensive. Even as the entertainment outlet affirms the likelihood the woman had no idea about Miller’s pronoun preference, Variety changes her quotes to avoid offending Miller and any potential activist positioning.
“I think it’s just fun and games — but then it wasn’t,” she said. “All of a sudden, [they’re] on top of me, choking me, still screaming in my face if I want to fight. My friend who’s filming sees [they’re] obviously not joking and it’s actually serious, so he stops filming, and pushes [them] off me as [they’re] still trying to fight me. Two guy friends of mine are actually holding [Miller] back as [they’re] screaming, ‘This is what you wanted! This is what you wanted!’” (At the time of the interview, it was unclear whether the woman was aware Miller uses they/them pronouns.)
This decision by Variety echoes a recent piece I covered concerning the BBC and a report that the British outlet delivered about a sexual assault. When a lesbian woman detailed an encounter with a trans woman who was still physically male and ultimately raped her, the BBC took the steps to correct her quotes where she referred to her attacker as him, and “improperly” used the term “his penis.”
These are the inane levels the media is sinking towards where they are fearful of angering a group if they manage to use the wrong pronouns of a violent individual. The willingness to alter the quoted testimony of a victim is journalistically inept, to say nothing of violating the recent narratives we have been spoonfed from this very same journalism complex. Believe all women has now given way to Correct any women who misgender their attacker.
Will next month’s Oscars be a full-on anti-Trump leftist freakout, or does the industry’s attempt to tamp down Gascon’s activism represent an attempt to find the off-ramp? In any case, Ricky Gervais was and is spot-on:
