Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

September 2, 2024

THE ORIGINAL TDS RETURNS: Why is Starmer ‘unsettled’ by a painting of Thatcher?

Speaking at Glasgow’s Aye Write book festival this week, Baldwin said that he and Starmer were recently having a chat in Thatcher’s former study in No10 – presumably about what Starmer’s parents did for a living – when Baldwin’s eyes alighted on the big 2009 portrait of the former Tory leader hanging on the wall:

‘We sat there, and I go: “It’s a bit unsettling with her staring down at you like that, isn’t it?” Starmer replied yes and, when asked whether he would “get rid of it”, the prime minister nodded… And he has.’

So Britain’s new leader found himself so freaked out by a painting of a former, long-since deceased prime minister that he has ordered his minions to take it down.

This is more than a little weird, no? Granted, Robert Stone’s rendering of Maggie does look a little smug. But that hardly explains Starmer’s almost childish, hysterical reaction against it – albeit a reaction that was apparently prompted by Baldwin.

What’s going on? Why is Starmer, a man otherwise totally devoid of political passion and principle, seemingly so unnerved by a mere painting of an ex-PM?

The answer lies in the central role anti-Toryism plays on today’s establishment left. It is certainly the closest thing Starmer’s Labour has to an ideological core. After all, today’s Labour Party may not be for very much beyond technocratic authoritarianism, but it clings obsessively to what it believes itself to be against – namely, the ‘hateful’, ‘evil’ Tories. And there is no Tory more hated than the supposedly demonic figure of Margaret Thatcher herself.

Some 30-odd years after she left office, the former Tory PM is still viewed by many in Labour as the dark architect of Britain’s current moral and economic malaise. This is why Labour’s Deputy PM, Angela Rayner, feels licensed to call Tory ministers ‘scum’. Why middle-class lefties boast that they’ve ‘never kissed a Tory‘. Because in their eyes, the Tories are no mere political party, and Thatcher no mere politician. To Labour, they are forces of evil.

Every BBC historical retrospective, on any topic, invariably devolves into rote Thatcher-bashing once the ‘80s is brought up. Or as Peter Hitchens wrote in The Abolition of Britain:

Since the 1960s, when the Left began its conquest of the cultural battlements, it has always been surprised and annoyed by Tory election victories. The 1970 Tory triumph, though entirely predictable, took the cultural establishment by surprise. The 1979 Tory win, though even more predictable, infuriated them. They had won control of broadcasting, of the schools, of the universities, the church, the artistic, musical and architectural establishment? How was it possible that they could not also be the government? Their rage was enormous, and increased with each successive Labour defeat. It was an injustice. How could the people be so foolish? Now, instead of aristocratic snobs misgoverning the country, the establishment was portrayed as a sort of fascistic semi-dictatorship, hacking at the NHS and the welfare state, waging aggressive wars abroad and enriching itself while the poor lived in misery.

See also: American left’s reaction whenever a president with an (R) after his name takes office.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2024

WENN ES NICHT NAH DRAN IST, KÖNNEN SIE NICHT SCHUMMELN: AfD loses seat in Saxony — this has major consequences.

The electoral officer has corrected the provisional results of the Saxon state election. Due to a software error, an incorrect distribution of seats had been published, the state electoral administration announced.

As a result of the recalculation, the AfD has lost the blocking minority in the state that it would have had in the coming legislature according to the first published election results.

“Software errors” – they’re not just for American socialists anymore!

(Classical reference in der headline.)

 

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2024

NATIONAL SOCIALISM, YOU’RE REALLY DOING IT WRONG: Newsweek: AfD Makes German Election History 85 Years After Nazis Started World War II.

Alice Weidel, AfD’s national co-leader, hailed the result as a “historic success” and a “requiem” for Scholz’s coalition.

Despite AfD’s gains, mainstream parties continue to reject any coalition with the far-Right group. CDU’s national general secretary, Carsten Linnemann, reaffirmed that the party would not form alliances with AfD, a stance that could complicate the formation of future state governments.

The AfD’s success is largely rooted in the former communist East, where the party has capitalized on anti-immigration sentiment and skepticism toward Germany’s military support for Ukraine. Thuringia’s AfD leader, Björn Höcke, who is under surveillance by the domestic intelligence agency for right-wing extremism, expressed pride in the election results, dismissing concerns about his party’s extremist label.

As Germany braces for another state election later this month in Brandenburg, the rise of AfD and the emergence of the Wagenknecht Alliance are set to challenge the traditional power dynamics, particularly in the eastern regions. With the national election just over a year away, these developments could have profound implications for the country’s political future.

As in America, Germany’s leftists are doing what they always when things don’t go their way – looting and burning:

As British historian Fredrick Taylor wrote in his excellent 2004 book, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13th, 1945, at the start of that month, the Soviet Union requested that their western allies bomb Dresden to put further pressure on the Nazis retreat from the Soviet Union. In 2024, international socialists seem eager to see the city burn to the ground once again.

Posted at 12:42 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2024

September 1, 2024

MARK JUDGE: Exploding the Left’s ‘Language Virus’ with William S. Burroughs.

In 1986, the unclassifiable countercultural writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) laid out his thoughts about language:

My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus … has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.

In his book William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll, author Casey Rae sums it up this way:

In the Burroughs worldview, language is a mechanism of what the author called Control with a capital C: an insidious force that limits human freedom and potential. Words produce mental triggers that we can sometimes intuit but never entirely comprehend, making us highly susceptible to influence.

The modern left is unabashed about wielding language as a virus—or, really, as a form of control. “Supercut” videos by critics of corporate leftist media, like Tom Eliot, reveal the media figures and politicians repeating the same words and slogans over and over again: President Joe Biden, despite drooling on himself, is “sharp.” Kamala Harris has brought the “Joy, joy, joy” back into politics. Conservatives are “weird.” Abortion is “healthcare.” These word storms rip through the country via television, radio, and social media, infecting hosts from D.C. to California. Millions of people mindlessly repeat them as if they have been infected with some kind of mentally impairing disease. It’s a virus worse than COVID.

As Tom Bethell of the American Spectator, a very non-Burroughs-esque writer, wrote in 1981,“Bees in a hive don’t ‘talk’ to one another, but they do have an effective system of communication, and they all work toward a common goal, different bees performing different functions. ‘There is no need to posit an overarching conspiracy,’ [Joe Sobran of National Review] wrote recently. ‘The world collectivist movement goes forward. None of its constituent parts — Communist, socialist, liberal — runs the whole thing; they don’t even consciously cooperate, for the most part.’ But they manage never to sting one another.”

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS: Kamala Closes an Already Disastrous Week by Trashing Gold Star Families.

On three different occasions, the open border/outlaw private insurance/defund the police/free healthcare for illegal aliens/ban fracking/San Francisco radical stupidly told the world, “My values haven’t changed.” Within hours, the now firing-on-all-cylinders Trump campaign used that statement to launch one devastating meme after another.

Those stupid words will haunt her straight through to November.

Above all, Kamala stepped right into the Trump campaign’s narrative that she cannot handle the pressure of going off-script.

And then, on Saturday afternoon, came the big finale…

Kamala Trashes 13 Gold Star Families

Kamala’s insanely stupid and cruel Saturday afternoon tweet accusing 13 Gold Star families of agreeing to act as props so Trump could politicize the death of their loved one was unquestionably the act of a desperate campaign panicking over internal poll numbers and hoping to change the narrative on the Sunday shows away from her disastrous CNN interview.

In the history of unforced presidential campaign errors, this one’s a doozy…

That tweet is the act of a drowning campaign looking for any kind of life preserver.

Kamala has bragged about being the “last one in the room” when the calamitous decision was made to surrender Afghanistan to terrorists before all of our people and billions of dollars in weaponry had been removed. That’s why these 13 men and women died.

Worse still, according to these 13 families, neither Biden nor Kamala has ever reached out in any way to them, not even to offer their condolences. We all know why. These 13 heroes died needlessly due to Biden’s and Kamala’s dreadful judgment and now Kamala wants their inconvenient memory forgotten, memory-holed, and discarded.

As John Hinderaker writes, “If the Democrats were smart, they would avoid like the plague any reference to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was universally, and correctly, seen as a debacle, and the Afghanistan fiasco precipitated a drop in Biden’s approval ratings from which he never recovered. Normal observers see that the current controversy was stirred up by the Democrats in hopes of political gain. The controversy, kept alive by Democrats, mostly serves to remind voters of one of the Biden/Harris administration’s worst failures, and to tie that failure more securely to Kamala Harris. So in my opinion the Democrats’ attacks on Trump for his Arlington visit constitute political malpractice. We can only hope that they keep it up.”

Related:

UPDATE: Woman Who Got Soldiers Killed Condemns Man Who Comforted Their Families.

Once again, the Babylon Bee is doing straight-up reportage today.

Posted at 8:50 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

TRUMP: Hamas killed hostages because of ‘complete lack of US strength, leadership.’

Some 12 hours after Israel announced that it retrieved and identified the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel under Rafah in Gaza on Saturday night, former U.S. President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, commented three times on his Truth Social platform, mixing political attacks on his opponents with mourning for the victims.

“The hostage crisis in Israel is only taking place because Comrade Kamala Harris is weak and ineffective and has no idea what she’s doing,” Trump wrote, of the U.S. vice president and Democratic nominee, on Sunday afternoon.

“I look forward to seeing her at the debate! Biden failed, and now he spends his day on the beach, plotting and scheming how to take out his once political opponent, me, who took him out both at the debate, and otherwise,” Trump wrote. He added in all capitalized letters that “the Oct. 7 Israeli crisis would never have happened if I were president.”

Worst. Hitler. Ever.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

POUNCING DOWN THE ROAD TO DETROIT: “San Francisco 49ers rookie Ricky Pearsall released from hospital after being shot in attempted robbery,” the L.A. Times reports, adding:

[San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott] said the investigation is ongoing but that the suspect appears to have acted alone. He did not identify the suspect, nor would he confirm that Pearsall’s Rolex was the target of the attempted robbery.

Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins said her office expects to make a charging decision by the middle of next week. Because the suspect is a juvenile, she said, the case, at least initially, will be filed in juvenile court.

The shooting is expected to fuel a narrative that conservative pundits and politicians have hammered in recent years, painting San Francisco as a city overrun with crime and homelessness that they blame on the failure of Democratic leadership.

Evergreen:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

WELL, THAT’S ONE WAY TO WIN MICHIGAN: Watch Tim Walz’s shocking reaction when asked about Israeli hostages murdered in Gaza.

‘What’s your reaction to the six hostages found in Gaza,’ the unseen journalist asks in the clip, which shows Walz clutching a milkshake as he made rounds during his brief drop-in at the 12-day event.

At that point, a staffer for the politician appears to motion to him that it’s time to leave, leading Walz to announce his departure.

‘All right, thanks everybody!’ he tells the crowd, before walking off to a round of applause.

Joined by his wife, Gwen, and their daughter Hope, the politician was swiftly surrounded by a security detail before being whisked away.

Here’s the video of Walz’s milkshake duck. Why are Harris and Walz so bad at retail politics and speaking extemporaneously?

Posted at 6:47 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Dusk or Dawn?

American presidential activities have become increasingly important since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ushering in a period of U.S. dominance occasionally referred to as The End of History. The Reagan victory marked a moment when the key battlefield in the struggle to determine the future of humanity shifted from the superpower competition between East and West to the simple control of the institutions of the West, following the collapse of the USSR.

Gone was Che Guevara and Mao’s strategy of surrounding the global cities from the Third World countryside. Back was Gramsci’s plan to infiltrate Western institutions and culture from within. If the enemy walls were impregnable from without, they were vulnerable from within. The left accepted the West would be conquered by coup. To this task they set forth with might and main.

But something happened that Gramsci did not expect. As the march through the institutions progressed, the “progressives” — so confident of their intellectual superiority — did not sweep all before them. Rather they found the resistance stiffening unexpectedly. Unlikely coalitions rooted in the “Working Class” and even among formerly left-wing sympathizers began to multiply. The surprise setbacks of 2016, Trump and Brexit, grew rather than declined, as one might expect of the last-gasp resistance in the inevitable tide of history.

Today the Reagan castle the progressives captured by coup is in shambles. They are in possession of a ruin. The Global World has not only shattered but is breaking out in war. The only answer to inflation is price control. Worse, the political opposition to progressive ideas has become assertive and even respectable. Things have come to a head; that is what makes November 2024 so special.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

BRADLEY THOMPSON: Two Views of Justice in the American Founding.

The Declaration of Independence holds as one of its four self-evident truths that the sole purpose of government is the protection of man’s unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The idea of rights is connected to the broader concept of justice. Likewise, the Preamble to the Constitution says that one of the principal ends of the new federal government is to “establish justice.” To a person, the Founding generation held the protection of private property and the sanctity of contracts as direct derivatives of the rights to life and liberty and therefore as constituent principles of justice. The American Revolution (1764-1783) and the American Founding (1787-1800) were, if nothing else, concerned about justice.

How did the Founding generation understand the nature of justice? More particularly, how did they understand the protection of private property and the sanctity of contracts as manifestations of justice? How did the Founders institutionalize and bring to life the protection of private property and the sanctity of contracts into their founding moment?

These are complex questions, which, despite their obvious importance, have gone largely neglected by scholars of the American Founding period. This essay examines one concrete but important instance of how the Founders built their understanding of justice into the core legal-political institutions of the new nation. What is most interesting about this particular founding moment is that two deepest theoreticians of the American Founding—i.e., Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—disagreed over how to apply their shared understanding of justice to a concrete instance. Hamilton and Madison were the two leading architects and proponents of the new Constitution both in and out of the constitutional convention, and they joined forces to co-author (along with John Jay) the 85 essays of The Federalist, which was the most comprehensive defense of the newly drafted Constitution ever written. But to be in government and to apply the Constitution’s principles to legislation and the governance of the new nation was something altogether different. The task of legislation is complex and fraught with complications and challenges that tore these former intellectual and political comrades-in-arms apart. The consequences of their competing views of justice and contracts (or at least the application of a shared view of justice) would shape the future of the new nation.

Exit quote: “This mostly forgotten episode in American history represented a critical moment in the Founding of the United States. The representatives sitting in the second session of the first Congress were tasked with setting the foundation and determining the standard of justice that would guide the new nation into the nineteenth century and beyond. Put differently, the First Congress was assigned the task of determining the kind of society America would be in the present and future. To that end, the two titans of the American Founding—Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—presented the American people with two different standards of justice, or, at least, two different ways of applying a common concept of justice. The people’s representatives would have to choose which standard or application of justice would define America’s future.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

JOHN KASS: Leftist Media Hyenas Hamstring Amy Jacobson; Quarters Boyle is dead and Chicago Tribune Becomes a Combine Laughingstock.

“Time to move past rueful chuckles about Chicago and Illinois’ corrupt and damaging ways”

What? No rueful chuckles?

This is pathetic and beneath contempt. Why? Because the Tribune has studiously ignored its own institutional support of political corruption. The pretentious and imperious editorial ignored the important stuff like the corruption of President Barack Obama, who connived to unleash the Deep State Intelligence Agencies against conservatives like Donald Trump. And mysterious toilets of Gov. Fat Boy of Illinois. They go after old Irish guys who can’t hurt them, old men in their 80s, while the city of Chicago falls apart. The paper allows the architects of failure—Toni Preckwinkle, Kim Foxx, the CTU’s Stacy Davis Gates and Brandon Johnson—to skate away as the city burns.

As former conservative Illinois gubernatorial candidate Jeanne Ives noted on “X” the Tribune’s corruption series was a joke.

What the editorial ignored was corruption of the newspaper. It ran interference for the legions of Tribune-endorsed Democrat and Republican legislators who supported generations of corruption in Springfield mostly, and Chicago. The newspaper kept Boss Madigan in power through its endorsement of spineless legislators. And it avoided the key fact:

Tribune political editor Rick Pearson has been cheerleader and mascot of the infamous bi-partisan  Illinois Combine for decades. And the Tribune knows it.

To not acknowledge Pearson as the Combine’s prized pet is to slap the readers of the Tribune again and again and again. He’s repeatedly been arrested for DUI in Springfield. He was on George Ryan’s infamous favored favorites list. Ryan dipped down and gave Pearson’s wife a job. I objected loudly to him directly. And to the bosses. Still the Tribune kept him on the payroll, damaging the paper’s credibility.  If the soon-to-be indicted Combine boss Big Bill Cellini was mentioned, the Combine boys would snicker at the newspaper.  Tribune bosses protected him. That’s how they roll. The Tribune knows about Pearson. The editors know. The politicians know. Even left-wing carrion eaters like Erik Zorn and Marxist Tribune union boss Greg Pratt know.

The left was let into the Tribune Tower, metastasized and helped kill a great institution. The editors allowed it to fester. And it became poisonous, toxic.

Evergreen:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Robert Reich, writing in the Grauniad, is against free speech: Elon Musk is out of control. Here is how to rein him in.

3. Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.

Global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov, who founded the online communications tool Telegram, which French authorities have found complicit in hate crimes and disinformation. Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist.

Also Robert Reich: “I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: “The 18 Minute Gap.”

The New Hotness? The gaps in the 18 minutes!

As Kate Hyde tweeted after Harris’ interview, “Forget whether Kamala is for or against banning fracking… I just want to hear [her] explain what fracking is.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

ISRAELI-AMERICAN HOSTAGE MURDERED BY HAMAS AS IDF RESCUE TEAM CLOSED IN:

The body of Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin has been found in the tunnels under Rafah. Hamas had abducted the 23-year-old dual citizen on October 7 from the Nova music festival and an IDF rescue operation was closing in on his position when Hamas murdered him along with 5 other hostages.

There are no words to describe the inhumanity of the act. For the six hostages to have survived almost a year in the most unspeakably brutal conditions only to have their captors cruelly murder them when they were on the brink of being rescued demonstrates the heartlessness and cruelty of human beings without conscience, without a spark of human decency.

Goldberg-Polin’s parents had traveled the world, looking to put pressure on Netanyahu to come to an agreement with Hamas and bring the hostages home. The couple gave an emotionally wrenching speech at the Democratic National Convention last week.

“This is a political convention. But needing our only son — and all of the cherished hostages — home is not a political issue. It is a humanitarian issue,” said his father, Jon Polin. His mother, Rachel added very quietly, “Hersh, if you can hear us, we love you, stay strong, survive.”

Joe Biden took a moment away from working on his suntan to make a statement.

“I am devastated and outraged. Hersh was among the innocents brutally attacked while attending a music festival for peace in Israel,” Mr. Biden said. “He lost his arm helping friends and strangers during Hamas’s savage massacre. He had just turned 23.”

“Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes,” said the president.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, “He who murders abductees – does not want a deal. We are in a difficult day. The heart of the entire nation was torn.”

John Podhoretz writes, “And I cannot help but ask. I cannot. Had the Biden administration’s will not been bent and twisted in the months following the attack by the fiendish propaganda campaign causing them to worry about the war’s effect on Joe’s chances in Michigan—due to a population that effectively supported the terrorist monsters and cared not a whit for the eight Americans, let alone the 240 other innocents dragged into Hell—would Hersh and these others have survived? Imagine an Israel that had not found itself restrained and under assault, not told to pause, not scolded in pissy little phone calls with petulant American establishmentarians, without arms and aid held up, without being lectured about the geostrategic value of going slow or not going at all.”

UPDATE: This Is CNN.

Posted at 10:53 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2024

August 31, 2024

A LONG TIME AGO, FROM AN NFL FAR, FAR AWAY:

I’d love to know the reasoning behind this opening; I assume it was signed off on by a CBS Sports exec for his family-friendly Sunday afternoon show, despite seeming like a cross between Rollerball and A Clockwork Orange in its level of violence.

Curiously, the only play that wouldn’t get a player permanently ejected from the league in 2024 comes at the end via the Oakland Raiders — Willie Brown’s classic interception from Super Bowl XI. I’m sure you can hear the announcer as well as I can saying, “Old man Willie, he could go all the way!”, after ESPN’s highlight reel of the game was endlessly rerun by ESPN in the January runup to each year’s Super Bowl in the ’80s and ’90s.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 31st, 2024

HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Amandla Stenberg: The Acolyte Got Canceled Because of ‘Hyper-Conservative Bigotry.’

As I argued in my 2nd take on this show, it’s obvious that the whole concept here was a post-2020, BLM-inspired take on Star Wars. If the Jedi are space cops then the Jedi must in fact be bad guys who indiscriminately murder entire communities of black and gay people and then cover it up. Why? Because all cops are bastards, you fascist! Someone might have suggested to the show’s creator that a show in which the Jedi are suddenly the bad guys maybe was a twist too far for the Star Wars universe, but I guess Disney though BLM-Star Wars would be edgy and therefore good. So they dumped a reported $180 million on this turd.

There’s also an interaction between the two problems. Someone could have made a very dark show about Jedi’s who abuse their authority but it wasn’t these writers. While it’s clear that was their intent, what you actually get is a show that doesn’t make sense. For instance, one of the Jedi is so ashamed of his secret past that he agrees to kill himself. Later we learn that aside from acting like an impulsive idiot (bad writing), he actually didn’t do anything to anyone. Another character (a Wookie Jedi) gets murdered for his role in this massacre, but what was his role exactly? His mind was taken over by the space witches to attack his Jedi friends. Other than that, he never harms anyone I don’t think. They started with a terrible premise about bad cops and made a complete hash of it, so much so that there is literally no one to root for in this show.

The show got canceled because the ratings were poor, the lowest of any Star Wars show released by Disney so far. And this week lead actress Amandla Stenberg, who previously put out a diss track calling her critics racist, once again released a video in which she said the show was canceled because of “hyper-conservative bigotry.” Here’s a bit of what she said.

Our show, our Star Wars show has been canceled. I’m going to be transparent and say It’s not a huge shock for me. Of course, I live in the bubble of my own reality but for those who aren’t aware there has been a rampage of vitriol that we have faced since the show was even announced, when it was still just a concept and no one had even seen it. That’s when we started experiencing a rampage of I would say hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred, and hateful language towards us. You know, this really affected me when I first got the job because it’s just not something, even though I anticipated it happening, it’s not something you can fully understand what it feels like until it’s happening to you.

Later on she added: “It’s not lost on me how the way that these events have unfolded is also due to the hyper-divisiveness of the time that we live in, that is driven I would say at this point by echo-chambers of thought and algorithms that reinforce our biases. And I think that applies to everybody.” Had she stopped there it might have been a somewhat neutral take on things, but of course she immediately went back to blaming the right. “But I think that in a particular sect of people it manifests as a lot of fear for what is changing, a lot of hatred for anything that is other,” she said. She closed the clip by saying, “Let’s vote, y’all.” No need to specify who she wants you to vote for. That’s a given.

I won’t add much to this except to repeat that while I’m sure there are some obnoxious racists out there sending hate mail to Amandla Stenberg, that’s not why her show was canceled. The show was canceled because it was a woke concept at odds with the universe it was in and because of the terrible execution of the concept. It succeeded neither as light entertainment nor incisive social commentary. Those who tuned it out did so not because everyone watching was an alt-right racist, but because it was bad art which seemed morally confused.

So once again, Kathleen Kennedy was given an enormous pile of money by Disney, which she then set alight by trying to make a leftist message front and center in a TV series whose primary goal should be to entertain Star Wars’ fan base. That would result in getting positive word of mouth, which would then get many more Star Wars fans to give the house of the mouse their credit card numbers.

There’s only so many times you can fail to do that, before audiences realize they don’t need to fund this: Hollywood Bust: Technicians, Craftsmen, and Below-the-Line Workers Being Laid Off in Droves. “Unfortunately, it’s the more blue collar workers — who are not nearly as left-looney as the higher-paid actors and soulless producers — who are bearing the brunt of the recession,” Ace of Spades writes.

As Rob Long wrote last year at Commentary in “The Content Mandate Murders:”

The world, I don’t need to tell you, is falling apart. That’s bad. On the other hand, bad years for the world often mean terrific years for us in Hollywood. The rule is: When times are lousy, people go to the movies. That’s what they did during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Those were banner years for the business. Audiences were desperate for a few hours of relief from the relentlessly terrible economic news, and after 1941 they were aching for something to distract them from war in Europe and the Pacific, telegrams from the War Department, from a world that was falling apart.

* * * * * * * *

Some of the biggest movies of the 1930s were sunny and upbeat fare—musicals, romantic comedies, the merry lives of the super-rich. Maybe when you’re surrounded by poverty and depression, it’s nice to lose yourself for a few hours in glamorous Manhattan skyscrapers and elaborately costumed dance numbers.

And if you look at a list of the top movies from 1941 to 1945, you’ll still find lots of musicals, Westerns, romantic dramas. You could spend the whole day at the movies and never know there was a war on. That is, as long as you didn’t pay attention to the newsreel.

Decades later, when the world was falling apart (again) in the late ’60s and early ’70s, among the biggest movies were Doctor Zhivago, The Sound of Music, Love Story, Airport—you get the idea. When young American servicemen are dying in Southeast Asia and crazed death-cult hippies are murdering everyone in the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, who can blame audiences for thinking, Let’s go see “Paint Your Wagon” because Clint Eastwood sings! Or A VW Bug that’s sentient? I’ll grab the car keys!

Show business, in other words, is at its most successful when it counter-programs against a world that’s falling to pieces. But “counter-program” is probably not the right phrase to use, because it’s highly unlikely that any movie-studio mogul, way back in 1939 (or, for that matter, 1969) commissioned a focus group and hired a marketing research team to figure out just what the national mood was.

People were selling apples on the street. The national mood was pretty easy to discern then. And then later, when the children of the Greatest Generation were old enough to read and adopt revolutionary left-wing claptrap, nobody in show business needed to conduct a national survey to know that the nation was having a slow-motion nervous breakdown. Just look at Hank Fonda’s daughter! She’s over there yukking it up with the commies! Quick! Somebody green-light Tora! Tora! Tora!

Studios and television networks operated mostly on instinct back then, which was easier to do because the men—and they were 99 percent men—who ran those companies were deeply connected to the great, chaotic American Experiment. They weren’t producing movies and TV shows for a distant, unfathomable crowd of nobodies somewhere out there in the dark. When you include yourself in the term “American viewing public,” it’s a lot easier to know what projects to invest in. They’re the ones you’d watch yourself.

Kathleen Kennedy cut her teeth as producer for Steven Spielberg on such films as the Back to the Future trilogy, the Jurassic Park movies, and Schindler’s List. Despite her far left worldview, does anybody think she’s actually watching shows like The Acolyte and Ahsoka for pleasure?

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 31st, 2024
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