Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
June 2, 2024
June 1, 2024
KNOWN-WOLF: “Covenant School shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale reportedly told her therapist that she was fantasizing about killing her family and committing a school shooting, according to a report by 99.7 WTN radio host Brian Wilson. The therapist reportedly did not report these findings to authorities.”
Flashback: Nashville Mayor Furious Over Leak of Transgender Shooter’s Manifesto, Demands Investigation. “If there was any question about whether the photos released by [Steven] Crowder were real, this answers them. You don’t start an investigation into the leak of something that doesn’t exist.”
JULIO ROSAS: Reflecting On The Minneapolis Riots Four Years Later.
The evening before my flight to Minneapolis, I covered a BLM protest in downtown Los Angeles. Tensions were high. An American flag was burned. LAPD donned on riot gear and pushed angry protesters away from city hall.
But that paled in comparison to what I had witnessed on May 28. The radical elements within the city and beyond seemed to be converging on Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue. Beyond a Minneapolis police convoy that quickly retreated just as quickly as they appeared, because of the mob attacking them, there was no authority to keep people safe. If you needed help, you were on your own.
It all culminated when the Third Precinct was attacked after the sun went down. Despite holding onto the building for days against the odds, officers were about to be overrun. Multiple times I heard rioters wanting to set the building on fire with the officers still inside. Mayor Jacob Frey ordered the officers to evacuate.
To highlight how much the rioters wanted to keep the officers trapped in the building’s perimeter, someone chained the back gate, forcing police to ram it to allow the evacuation to continue. After the officers were gone, the rioters’ dream became reality after the infamous fire was set. The crowd became ecstatic at the flames. They took selfies with the fire in the background. Fireworks were set off in the air.
While the riots had been going on in the Twin Cities for days, this was a turning point that sent a dangerous precedent: If BLM rioters were violent enough and had the numbers, they could get weak-kneed politicians to back down. It set a high bar for the rest of the rioters across the nation to reach, but Minneapolis showed them it was very possible to reach.
It was also a tactical error on the city’s part. Now that the rioters’ main target was gone, they did not go home. Instead, they spread out to create more victims in the name of social justice.
Thinking about that crazy night, I laughed how I naively believed that first wave of riots were going to be the only ones for that summer. By the end of that summer, I went from thinking, “Oh, this will end soon,” to “Will these ever stop?”
And they did (well, at least for a while), as the left finally gave up on their pipe dream fantasies of defunding the police, reducing the length of prison sentences and shrinking the size of jails:
Related: Four years ago, today:
DON’T GET COCKY:
Poll by HarrisX/@Forbes conducted online in aftermath of Trump guilty verdicts says he leads Biden, 51%-49%https://t.co/7rtrmi9uUl
— W. Joseph Campbell (@wjosephcampbell) June 1, 2024
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Hollywood’s Shocking Response to Trump Verdict, Explained.
Well, non-response:
What changed?
Hollywood is scared silly, and rightly so. The industry is contracting. Jobs are increasingly scarce in the post-strike world. The desperation is so profound all we see are more sequels, prequels, re-imaginings and reboots.
Chris Hemsworth is headlining a “Transformers”/”G.I. Joe” crossover film, fusing two tired franchises. The flop sweat beads are in plain sight.
Streamers are bleeding red ink. Legitimate fears of how A.I. will impact the industry are widespread.
The summer box office is off to an ignominious start. And that’s after blockbuster after blockbuster went bust last year. The Biden economy is making all of the above worse. Much, much worse.
Suddenly, alienating your remaining customers with a virtue signal endorsement isn’t smart[.]
And some sectors of the industry have actually figured that out: The Untouchable: Broadcasters Association Strips Robert De Niro of Award After Unhinged Trump Rant.
GREAT MOMENTS IN PAGANISM: Man who transformed into a dog says he wants to become another animal. The man known only as Toco spent around $14,000 on his hyperrealistic dog costume, which was completed last spring.
A Japanese man who went viral for transforming into a dog says he now wants to become another animal.
Speaking to Japanese news outlet WanQol, Toco said it is a dream of his to transform into something else that works for his size, even if it’s another type of dog.
“I would like to become another animal as well,” he told WanQol, according to a Yahoo translation. “I might realistically be able to become another dog, a panda or a bear. A fox or a cat would also be nice, but they are too small for humans to try. I’d like to fulfill my dream of becoming another animal someday.”
Last yeat at Commentary, Liel Leibovitz wrote “The Return of Paganism:”
To the pagans, change is the only real constant. Just consider the heathens of old: Believing, as they did, in the radical duality of body and spirit, they enjoyed watching their gods breathe the latter into a wide array of incarnations. To please himself or trick his followers, a god could become a swan or a stone, manifest himself as a river or adopt whatever shape suited his schemes. Ovid, the greatest of Pagan poets, captured this logic perfectly when he began his Metamorphoses with a simple declaration of his intentions: In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora, or, “I am about to speak of forms changing into new entities.” This was not understood as fickle behavior by the gods’ cheerful followers. To the contrary. With no dogma to uphold, the sole job of deities was simply to be themselves. And the more solipsistic a deity chose to be, the better. Nothing, after all, radiates inimitable individuality more than marching to the beat of your own drum and no other.
If that’s your understanding of the gods, or whatever you’d like to call the hidden forces that arrange the known universe, how should you behave? Again, lacking a prescribed credo passed down from generation to generation, pagans began answering this question by casting off the tyranny of fixity. The gods are precarious and ever-changing? Let us follow their example! We should sanctify each sharp transformation in our behaviors and beliefs not as collective madness but as a sign of the wisdom of growth.
Exit question: Why doesn’t Toco just transform himself into Jimmy Page, like normal Japanese men?
MARK JUDGE: Box office blues: Movies today are underwritten and have no emotional payoff.
Until recently, there was a level of literacy in comedies and action movies. Woody Allen’s films in the 1970s were funny, but also had long stretches of characters having philosophical conversations. Jaws, the 1970s smash that ushered in the blockbuster era, is based on a novel and has long, wonderful scenes that are nothing but dialogue. George Lucas famously mashed up literature, mythology, and psychology to create Star Wars. Whit Stillman’s great films from the 1990s, such as Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, feature young people trying to navigate their social worlds. The characters have read books. They are verbal and able to explore their interior lives with compelling perspicacity.
I still remember the comment my brother, an award-winning actor, made after seeing 1982’s action masterpiece Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: “That was Homeric.” Yes, The Road Warrior is about postapocalyptic car chases in the Australian desert. Yet there is a poetic voice-over throughout the entire film that holds it together and gives it depth. The film is well-written.
And more than 40 years later, Furiosa, a sequel to The Road Warrior, has been released. Like most movies these days, it is underwritten. Unsurprisingly, it has flamed out at the box office.
These days a film as literate and verbally rich as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is unthinkable. Yet I think audiences crave it. We want some intelligent payoff for our money.
As early as 1998, the late Todd Gitlin was telling the Washington Post:
“Insofar as American-based studios are making stuff for the global market, the stuff is dumbed down,” said Todd Gitlin, sociology professor at New York University and a cultural critic. “It’s not conscious, it’s just that the James Camerons [“Titanic’s” writer-director] who write the garbage dialogue are the successes. The relative crudity of the language is far from an impediment to exports. It’s a benefit.”
Said [then-Disney chairman Joe] Roth: “There’s no reason to think that the economics of movie business won’t turn out to be the same as Coca-Cola. It’s a product that’s uniformly imported. People will go see the ninth version of ‘The Bad News Bears.’ And I make them because people are going to see them.”
Until they don’t: Nelson Peltz Throws in the Towel On Basket-Case Groomer Corporation Disney, Sells Trian’s $Billion+ Stake In Disney.
Peltz’s proxy fight/hostile takeover bid had the perverse result of boosting Disney’s stock price even as Peltz was arguing the company should go back to producing family-friendly, uncontroversial, nonsexual material for children, instead of being a full-services groomer corporation. Because there was a fight for control of Disney, the stock was trading at an artificially high price — the stock had a control-of-the-company premium baked into the price.
Well, Peltz has now taken his own support away. He sold all of his (and his investment group Trian’s) stock for $120 per share, well above Disney’s current $100 per share value.
Like I said, there’s a control premium in the price of a big chunk of stock.
The rest of Disney shareholders won’t be enjoying that premium. They’ll see the stock lose value as Disney’s losing streak continues and no more White Knights will try to save it.
I hope all that Weimar-esque political activism was worth it for them.
Related: Fear not! A more intellectually rigorous script will finally soon be on its way: Chris Hemsworth in Talks to Star in ‘Transformers’ and ‘G.I. Joe’ Crossover Movie.
LOOK ON BIDEN’S FACE AFTER JOURNO ASKS ABOUT TRUMP BEING A ‘POLITICAL PRISONER’ IS CHILLING (WATCH):
Don’t let ANYONE on the Left tell you this entire Trump trial is not political … not one. And if they insist Biden has nothing to do with it? Yeah, show them this freakin’ video.
Is he confused?
Is he giving something away?
Is he evil?
Maybe all three but the smirk is very revealing.
Great moments in optics:
The Trump campaign quickly turned Biden’s Trunalimunumaprzure-cum-Kinsley Gaffe moment into a new ad:
Trump campaign already out with an ad on Biden’s Creepy Smirk
🔥🔥🔥
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 31, 2024
OLD AND BUSTED: Defund the Police.
The New Hotness? Lock ’em up libs run the Democratic Party.
There’s a lot of money and some activist passion on the Left behind prosecutors who value mercy over vengeance, but most of the energy on that side these days is behind locking up the “bad people.”
Alvin Bragg ran for district attorney on the promise of prosecuting former President Donald Trump — and won. Think about that for a moment. A Democratic politician campaigned on the promise of locking up the chief rival to the president of the United States. Then he brought an extremely thin case based on an unproven legal theory.
It’s banana republic stuff, but it’s also part of a broader trend: the prosecutorial fervor on the Left today.
Right up to the DNC-MSM’s favorite D-Day soldiers:
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record quipped in early October: FBI Stops By Antifa Riot To Ask If They’ve Seen Any Dangerous MAGA Around.
May 30, 2024
FORMER JEOPARDY! HOST MAYIM BIALIK SAYS IT’S A ‘REAL CHALLENGE’ TO BE A LIBERAL AND DEFEND ISRAEL:
Former “Jeopardy” host Mayim Bialik said it’s been a “real challenge” to be a liberal and be an outspoken supporter for Israel following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.
Appearing on Wednesday’s installment of “The Sage Steele Show,” Bialik was asked about the overall silence coming from Hollywood as the war between Israel and Hamas has unfolded.
“Like what we talked about with this, you know, the Trauma Olympics, right? There seems to only be room for one pain in this kind of conversation,” Bialik told Steele. “There’s room for everyone’s pain. You can hold all those things at once.”
“It’s a real challenge to be a liberal person who also believes that Israel has a right to exist. I’m a bleeding heart liberal, though. It’s very a very strange place to be. It’s a strange intersection,” Bialik said.
* * * * * * * *
“There has been an abhorrent and conspicuous absence of women’s organizations around the world unequivocally condemning the systematic rape and torture of women on October 7 by Hamas,” Bialik wrote on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “Brutal gang rapes, sexual torture, and murder of fetuses happened- period. Where are the ‘BELIEVE THEM’ voices?”
“These crimes against women were in many cases documented by the terrorists themselves and broadcast for the world to see,” she added. “Those of us who have fought for women’s rights and have sought to shout from the rooftops when women’s bodies are being used in war for the sadistic pleasure of perpetrators are astounded at how the world has been silent surrounding this.”
Related: Jon Lovitz: It seems the parties ‘switched completely’ on Israel.
On October 22nd, Konstantin Kisin wrote, “Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists…October 8 was a wake-up call for those who didn’t appreciate that the ideology of the campus has spread to our cities, supercharged by social media.”
Our first post mentioning “The Corbynization of the Democratic Party” ran in 2016 when Obama was still in office. The “Corbynization of the Democratic Party Continues Apace” headlines began in April of 2019. In other words, this wasn’t an overnight pivot; the handwriting was there for quite a while.
JIM GERAGHTY: Busted Gaza Pier Has All the Markings of a Joe Biden Op.
Our Phil Klein fumes, “The Gaza pier is every bit the disaster we all expected it would be when Biden made the ridiculous proposal in his State of the Union address back in March. . . . This debacle was not only predictable, it was predicted by many.”
Now, the Pentagon’s JLOTS [Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore] guys aren’t stupid. They knew the likelihood that weather conditions would require operations to halt at least temporarily, and the potential risk to equipment and personnel. This is why you’re seeing speculation that the Pentagon prioritized the president’s orders over a reasonable assessment of the risk.
We don’t know who, precisely, came up with the idea to build a pier. Perhaps on some future date, we’ll hear that it was the proposal of national-security adviser Jake Sullivan or Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin or someone else. The buck stops with the president, anyway; he’s the one who authorized the mission.
But . . . come on. The plan was to build a pier on the front door of a war zone, in the absolute minimally acceptable environmental conditions, and hope for the best? That has Joe Biden’s fingerprints all over it.
Biden’s foreign-policy ideas always have this, “Guys, it’s so easy” simplicity to them.
By the way, how’s Biden’s cancer-curing “moonshot” coming along?
UPDATE: Welcome Back Carter, Ace writes: “You Youngs may not remember Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated attempt to rescue his failing 1980 political campaign. At a late hour, he finally gave the greenlight for a special forces operation to rescue the hostages from Iranian Muslim fanatics. But the helicopters crashed in a dust-storm. It became emblematic of Carter’s ineffectual, feckless presidency. Now Biden’s got his own sandstorm. An American vessel used to unload humanitarian aid from ships into the Gaza Strip via a floating pier disconnected from a small boat tugging it this morning due to stormy seas, leading it to get stuck on the coast of Ashdod, eyewitnesses say. Another ship was then sent to try and extract the stuck vessel, but also got beached.”
Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:
To Save Time, Biden To Drop Next $320 Million Cash Directly Into Ocean https://t.co/wVD7tUyUk1 pic.twitter.com/fDwBrKBxGD
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 29, 2024
OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH THE APPEAL TO HEAVEN FLAG: San Francisco Flew ‘Appeal to Heaven’ Flag Until Saturday.
It’s no surprise that San Francisco is run by a bunch of insurrectionists.
How many of us secretly believed that the city was only barely American in the first place? There is even a Nelson DeMille book in which the ultra-conservative baddies plan on nuking San Francisco because it was full of anti-American zealots. It’s hard to argue with their reasoning about S.F., but I would never endorse nuking any city, no less one as beautiful as the City by the Bay.
Still, you wouldn’t expect the city fathers (mothers? Nonbinary caregivers? Degenerate lawmakers? What should I call them?) to be flying an ultra-MAGA January 6th insurrectionist flag. I would have expected a modified Cuban flag with rainbows and a keffiyeh or something.
But sure enough, until this weekend, the city was flying the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, showing their support for a violent insurrection to install Donald Trump as El Supremo Maximal Dictator Extraordinaire.
Thus causing this Orwellian headline from the San Francisco Chronicle:
I think the fact that it flew above San Francisco city hall until a few days ago sorta contradicts the description of it as “controversial”, @sfchronicle https://t.co/vbzCcFR3iS pic.twitter.com/sAywILb9MO
— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) May 29, 2024
“I WAS DONE:” The Day Nellie Bowles Left the New Progressive Movement.
Near the end of Morning After the Revolution, Bowles wrote:
To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends. It’s a positive thing, what you’re doing, and it doesn’t feel like battle so much as nurturing the love for one’s friends, tending the warm fire of a cause. You have real power when you’re doing it. And with enough people, you can oust someone very powerful.
The easy criticism of a cancellation is: You went after someone who agrees with you on almost everything but some minor tiny differences? Some small infraction? It seems bizarre. But that’s the point. The bad among us are more dangerous to the group*. Mormons don’t excommunicate a random drag performer. They excommunicate a bad Mormon. I’d watched all the presidential debates in 2016 with some family members, who are conservatives. After Hillary lost, I couldn’t stomach going over there for a few months. I was too upset, and I couldn’t handle seeing them happy. But that’s not a cancellation. I had no power over these family members or sway in their community. I couldn’t make them apologize for being happy that Trump won.
* * * * * * * *
Because around my thirtieth birthday, there came a day when I didn’t cancel someone, and it was the true end of my time in the movement. Reporting on the wrong topics had gotten me close. But it was resisting a cancellation that did me in.
I knew the thing I was meant to yell about that day. I knew the tweet I was meant to send, but I liked the target too much. He was sweet and younger than me. I was agonized over it, sweating in my apartment. I sometimes get this bizarre psychosomatic stress response where my arms go limp in a panic, and all that day my arms were going limp. I got a few notes pushing me to join in. It was important. We had to draw a line that day. We had to speak in unison. My voice needed to bolster the other voices.
I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t think the violation was so bad. I’d gotten old or soft or something, and there I was, too pathetic and limp-armed to even send a nasty tweet.
Eventually that close friend of mine from the book circled back to me. The one I had canceled in honor of. We’d lived together at one point when we were both coming up in the world, cooked together, talked about our families, plotted our careers together. Both our lives came to fruition as we’d planned them, and there was a thrill in that with each other. I loved this friend and still do. But I knew what was coming when I saw her name on my phone.
She said very nicely that it was suspicious how quiet I was that day. She said, Nellie, you say a lot of things, yet you haven’t said anything about this one, today. She very politely told me that I was a racist. Then she said goodbye.
Congrats leftists – you’ve finally become Ted Knight’s Judge Elihu Smails character from Caddyshack: “I’ve sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn’t want to do it. I felt I owed it to them.”
* Contrast this with President Reagan’s famous quote, “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20 percent traitor.”
JEFFREY LORD, FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: Journalists Forget Their Own Predictions: Millions of Americans to Die.
Let’s be plain: 100,000 dead Americans from the virus is horrific. Every human life is important.
But there is a curious something missing in all the many stories about the death toll of 100,000. Tim notes this question to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany from Politico and CNN’s Ryan Lizza:
“We’re about to cross the 100,000 dead American [sic] milestone… on Election Day, what does the White House view as the number of dead Americans where you can say that you successfully defeated this pandemic? Is there a number?”
Well now. Thanks for asking Ryan. As a matter of fact your question as to “is there a number?” has already been answered – by your media colleagues. And no, the pandemic has yet to be “defeated.” But there has been a vivid success on the battlefront, even if the media pretends not to notice. Here are some samples about how many Americans would die according to the media, bold print for emphasis supplied:
From The New York Times on March 13: “As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.”
From The New York Times on March 16: “Sweeping new federal recommendations announced on Monday for Americans to sharply limit their activities appeared to draw on a dire scientific report warning that, without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die.”
From The Washington Post, March 19: “In the worst-case scenario, America is on a trajectory toward 1.1 million deaths.”
From MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, March 24: If Americans go to Easter services: “If that happened on Easter Sunday, just 19 days from now, then in May, you’d have millions of dead people all over the country. Millions,” O’Donnell said on his MSNBC show. “If you have packed churches all over the country, including California, on Easter Sunday, by May there could be a million dead people in California.”
From Andrew Slavitt, Barack Obama’s former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): “Currently experts expect over one million deaths in the U.S. since the virus was not contained & we cannot even test for it.”
From infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm to podcaster Joe Rogan the week of March 12: “We conservatively estimate that this could require 48 million hospitalizations, 96 million cases actually occurring, over 480,000 deaths that can occur over the next three to seven months…”
From CNN: “On State of the Union, Dr. Anthony Fauci tells Brianna Keilar that in a worst-case scenario millions of people in the US could die from the coronavirus.”
From Yahoo: “At the low end of the projection this would mean about 700,000 deaths. At the high end it would mean 1.5 million deaths.”
In her recent book, Morning After the Revolution, Nellie Bowles wrote, “San Francisco saw ninety-two drug deaths in 2015. There were about seven hundred in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of Covid.”
Also by way of comparison, Covid was yet another chance for the media to dust off the Katrina playback from 2005. As Bryan Preston wrote at Hot Air in November of the following year, “What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses?… The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05? Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history:”
There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.
Years later, DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile would later confess, “Bush came through on Katrina,” but as a wise future mayor would advise in the fall of 2008, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” But with May of 2020 concluding, this gloomy phase of American history was about to come to end. Get ready, dancing TikTok nurses, it’s soon to be showtime!
May 29, 2024
DON’T GET COCKY: CNN Worried: Donald Trump’s Black Support has Doubled.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Manhunt Underway for Driver Who Left Tire Marks on a Pride Mural.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. I’ll admit I was bummed to see “Pride” crosswalks pop up in my city. I never voted for it, never asked for it, and don’t want my tax dollars paying for it. The crosswalks do seem to trigger some people, who lay rubber on them. A manhunt is underway for a driver who left tire marks on a Pride crosswalk in St. Petersburg, Florida.
They paint their sacred symbols on the road in the hope that this will happen
As we approach American Ramadan it is important that they manufacture the ritual of victimhood, even as they force the entire empire to worship at their feet https://t.co/UBz7ocbr3v
— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) May 28, 2024
Meanwhile, America’s Newspaper of Record goes twenty minutes into the future:
Airline Pilot Convicted Of Hate Crime For Leaving Contrail Marks On Rainbow https://t.co/N6RAx95mLY pic.twitter.com/OXEITPmA8D
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 28, 2024
HOW IT STARTED: Naomi Wolf: Sarah ‘Evita’ Palin to Usher in Rovian Police State.
Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.
You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand “Palin Power.” A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections — but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control.
—Wolf in the Huffington Post, as spotted by P.J. Gladnick of NewsBusters, September 22nd, 2008.
How it’s going:
And summer is just getting started: The Democrats Are a Cornered Animal. “Democrats are not the ‘lay down and accept their fate’ type. They don’t snap their fingers, brush themselves off, and say ‘We’ll just have to do better next year.’ They don’t lose, and if they lose there are consequences. Riots, destruction, and death have been a staple of leftists not getting their way.”
HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Hollywood crews in ‘crisis:’ ‘Everyone’s just in panic mode’ as jobs decline.
After more than two decades in the industry, Keith Dunkerley still loves nothing more than working on a set. The 47-year-old director of photography and camera operator, who’s had consistent work since he moved to Los Angeles 23 years ago, said his is “the best job in the world.”
Since the writers’ and actors’ strikes last year and the slow restart of production, though, Dunkerley said his work opportunities look quite different than in past years: He has worked only 18 days during the first five months of 2024.
“People outside the business don’t understand this is not a factory,” Dunkerley said. “It’s not like, ‘OK, the strike’s over, go back to the factory, turn the lights on and get the machines going.’ A lot of us knew it’s going to take some time to ramp things up.”
While Dunkerley supported his family through savings and odd jobs as a handyman on TaskRabbit during the strikes, the sluggish rebound has been difficult for him. He’s recently made more than 60 calls to friends and industry contacts to look for prospects.
What Dunkerley is experiencing is a part of the massive ripple effect of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that is still affecting tens of thousands of people working in entertainment and adjacent industries. Crew members, especially, have been hit hard.
“I am currently in the worst place I’ve ever been in my entire life financially,” said Heather Fink, a boom operator and director. “The industry is in a crisis. It is not back to normal. We are in debt.”
On the plus side, a Hollywood producing fewer product is a Hollywood with a smaller carbon footprint. Which is a good thing from the industry’s point of view, right? John Nolte: ‘Experts’ Demand Even More Global Warming Alarmism in Movies.
[F]ewer than 10% of the 250 films passed [a “climate reality check” test], and climate change was mentioned in two or more scenes of fewer than 4% of the films. That’s out of touch with a moviegoing public that wants “to see their reality reflected on screen,” said Colby College English professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, lead researcher on the study.
“The top line is just that the vast majority of films, popular films produced over the last 10 years in the United States, are not portraying the world as it is,” Schneider-Mayerson said. “They are portraying a world that is now history or fantasy — a world in which climate change is not happening.”
Don’t laugh. This is the exact same tactic GLAAD used, which is why absolutely everything is gay now. Remember who we are dealing with. Hollywood doesn’t resent left-wing propagandists butting in like this. Nope. Hollywood loves it when left-wing propagandists give them an excuse to inject this garbage in their films. They want to be able to say, We have no choice. It’s the right thing to do.
* * * * * * * *
People continue to believe Hollywood will eventually have no choice but to stop with this woke garbage and go back to creating art and entertainment. That’s naive. History proves that once the extreme left grabs hold of an institution, it never lets go. Given the choice between ending the propaganda and going bankrupt, they choose bankruptcy.
This sort of doomsday worldview has repercussions for those who otherwise have near-unlimited power in the film industry: Be Careful What You Wish for, James Cameron.
Even in liberal Hollywood, James Cameron stands out as one of the most “woke” directors. His Avatar movies deplore how a pristine ecosystem is despoiled by “settlers” and applaud the “indigenous resistance” fighting them.
So it’s deliciously ironic that Cameron is now facing fierce local resistance to his support for a giant film studio and training center in the pastoral British countryside. It would cost nearly $1 billion and feature half a million square feet of soundstages.
Cameron has suggested the project form the base for his production company, Lightstorm3D. “The 22.5 percent of total global box office the U.K. delivered in 2023 will grow as a result,” he reportedly wrote in a pitch for the project. “But embracing that opportunity necessitates support and boldness in thinking.”
But local NIMBY activists aren’t into “boldness in thinking.” They claim that Cameron’s project “would forever destroy” the local “Greenbelt” and be “detrimental to the people living in the area, destroying their quality of life by being surrounded and trapped by the industrial-scale development.” Although the proposed site for the project is a former quarry, it is zoned as greenbelt land, an area of open land around a city in which building is restricted.
This month, a local parish poll was held in Buckinghamshire on the project, and, in a low turnout, 85 percent of those who voted opposed the film studio. The local council, which has delayed a decision on the project, appears unlikely to move forward anytime soon.
Propaganda has consequences. If you make movies that decry development, don’t be surprised if impressionable filmgoers aren’t thrilled with your own building plans.
This isn’t the first time that Cameron’s “Progressives Against Progress” worldview has impacted Hollywood’s bottom line. In 2010, he decried the sale of DVDs due to their being very, very bad for the environment:
In 2010 that James Cameron told the Washington Post that DVDs were bad for the Gaia and other living things, and needed to be eliminated (while simultaneously having multiple versions of Avatar coming out that same year on DVD):
“It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability. …”
It turns out that a lack of DVD sales was very bad for those in the 90210 zip code. In 2013, veteran producer Lynda Obst wrote in Salon, “For consumers, the decline of the DVD market has meant switching over to both Blu-ray and, more recently, streaming options for their viewing pleasure. The end of the DVD format’s dominance meant something much more, and far worse, for Hollywood.”
“The DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” [20th Century Fox executive Peter Chernin] went on. “Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”
For those of you like me who are not good at math, let me make Peter’s statement even simpler. If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10 percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.
This was, literally, a Great Contraction. Something drastic had happened to our industry, and this was it. Surely there were other factors: Young males were disappearing into video games; there were hundreds of home entertainment choices available for nesting families; the Net. But slicing a huge chunk of reliable profits right out of the bottom line forever?
This was mind-boggling to me, and I’ve been in the business for thirty years. Peter continued as I absorbed the depths and roots of what I was starting to think of as the Great Contraction. “Which means if nothing else changed, they would all be losing money. That’s how serious the DVD downturn is. At best, it could cut their profit in half for new movies.”
* * * * *
“When did the collapse begin?”
“The bad news started in 2008,” he said. “Bad 2009. Bad 2010. Bad 2011.”
It was as if he were scolding those years. They were bad, very bad. I wouldn’t want to be those years.
“The international market will still grow,” he said, “but the DVD sell-through business is not coming back again. Consumers will buy their movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon et al. before they will purchase a DVD.” What had been our profit margin has gone the way of the old media.
A decade later, Matt Damon concurred:
In one of the most recent episodes Matt Damon took on the challenge and was asked to give his insight into what changed within the industry to result in the kind of movies we grew up watching not being made anymore. His answer makes total sense.
He basically said that DVDs used to be a huge part of the business, and that technology (streaming in particular) has unfortunately made them obsolete.
He said that when a movie that wasn’t guaranteed to be a box office hit was released, the studio would get a second chance to make its money back with DVD sales. As fewer people bought them however, it became more important for a film to do well at the box office because there was a greater risk of losing money.
Ironically a lot of the films Matt Damon built his career on are the kind that are now considered “too risky” which is why we’re not getting so many films like Good Will Hunting, Dogma and The Talented Mr. Ripley anymore.
In one of the most recent episodes Matt Damon took on the challenge and was asked to give his insight into what changed within the industry to result in the kind of movies we grew up watching not being made anymore. His answer makes total sense.
He basically said that DVDs used to be a huge part of the business, and that technology (streaming in particular) has unfortunately made them obsolete.
He said that when a movie that wasn’t guaranteed to be a box office hit was released, the studio would get a second chance to make its money back with DVD sales. As fewer people bought them however, it became more important for a film to do well at the box office because there was a greater risk of losing money.
Ironically a lot of the films Matt Damon built his career on are the kind that are now considered “too risky” which is why we’re not getting so many films like Good Will Hunting, Dogma and The Talented Mr. Ripley anymore.
Home video has always been hugely important to the movie industry and has given a lot of films that either flopped, or that just weren’t very well received at the box office a new lease of life on video and DVD.
Films like The Thing (1982), Blade Runner (1982), The Big Lebowski (1998), Donnie Darko (2001), Fight Club (1999) and even The Shawshank Redemption (1994) weren’t box office smashes, and in some cases were panned by critics. It was largely thanks to home video that these films became the fan (and cult) favourites they’ve since become.
In a lot of ways I guess we’re to blame.
I’ve always loved collecting films. First it was VHS tapes, then DVDs, and for a shorter period, Blu-Rays. I used to buy loads, but even I don’t really buy them anymore – just the odd movie that I like so much that I feel the need to own a physical copy.
With streaming becoming more and more popular, and with an increasing amount of original films being released directly to those streaming sites I worry about the future of cinemas. We’ve already lost video shops like Blockbuster, as well as countless independent rental shops.
Could cinemas soon become obsolete with the ever increasing popularity of streaming? I really hope not. Streaming has already become partly responsible for the decline of decent films. Let’s hope that’s where the damage ends.
Which is brings us back to the global warming message that Nolte spotted. Although ironically part of Hollywood’s unintentional degrowth strategy is that they followed the advice the media proffered to coal miners during the Obama era: they actually learned to code.
It was Ruddy and director Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to reach out to Marlon Brando to star as Don Vito Corleone, and the producer famously negotiated with the Italian-American Civil Rights League that led to the agreement that the words “mafia” and “cosa nostra” would not be uttered in The Godfather.
Al Pacino, who played Michael Corleone in the film for the first of his nine career Oscar nominations, said in a statement that Ruddy “was absolutely beautiful to me the whole time on The Godfather; even when they didn’t want me, he wanted me. He gave me the gift of encouragement when I needed it most, and I’ll never forget it.”
At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on March 27, 1973, Ruddy bounded up on the stage to accept the Academy Award for best picture. “The American dream and what we all want, for me at least, is represented by this [holding up the Oscar],” he said. “It’s there for everybody if we want to work, dream and try to get it.”
Clint Eastwood presented Ruddy with the statuette, and things came full circle when Ruddy offered Eastwood the opportunity to direct and star as the trainer in the boxing classic Million Dollar Baby (2004).
Paul Haggis had written the screenplay based on a pair of short stories from the collection Rope Burns by F.X. Toole. Anjelica Huston brought Toole’s work to Ruddy, who optioned it, but investors and talent didn’t see it as a movie — it seemed far too depressing.
“Who wants to do a movie about a girl boxer who dies with two old guys?” was the typical response Ruddy heard.
Well, Eastwood did; he came on as a producer, scored the film and then won the Oscar for directing. Meanwhile, Hilary Swank was named best actress and Morgan Freeman best supporting actor.
On the Paramount+ series The Offer, about the making of The Godfather, he was portrayed by Miles Teller. “It was an honor and a privilege to portray Al,” Teller said. “Al lived a life most could only dream of and all would envy.”
The Offer has some fun moments, and an enjoyable Mad Men-inspired production design. But it’s really a mini-series that was designed so that Ruddy could go out leaving the impression that everything that went right in The Godfather was as the result of his skill as a producer, and ends up leaving the actors playing Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo as little more than comic relief. For a much better look at who did what on the film, as I wrote in 2022: ‘The Godfather’ at 50: Skip ‘The Offer,’ Take ‘The Cannoli.’
May 28, 2024
JERRY SEINFELD: ‘I Miss a Dominant Masculinity.’
The film ostensibly pits Post v. Kellogg’s in a cereal slug match for the ages. It also captures what made the ’60s special, according to the squeaky-clean comic. The era featured manly men, Seinfeld argued, the kind rarely seen today.
“As a man…”
“Are you sure you are,” Weiss asked, teasingly. “I did not hear pronouns.”
“I always wanted to be a real man, but I never made it,” he said with a laugh in his voice. He got more serious soon enough.
“In that era, it was JFK, it was Muhammad Ali, it was Sean Connery, Howard Cosell … that’s a real man. I wanna be like that someday,” Seinfeld said. “No. Look at how I dress, like an eight-year-old.”
Weiss defended the comedian’s style, but Seinfeld shared why his childish mien matters in his line of work.
“I never really grew up. You don’t want to as a comedian. It’s a childish pursuit, but I miss a dominant masculinity. Yeah, I get the toxic [inaudible] but still I like a real man. That’s why I love [‘Unfrosted’ co-star] Hugh Grant. He felt like one of those guys I wanted to be. He knows how to dress. He knows how to talk. He’s charming. He has stories. He’s comfortable at dinner parties. Knows how to get a drink, that stuff.”
Masculinity has been in obvious decline in pop culture.
Perhaps “confident masculinity” is a better way to put this. That aspect of human culture has been undermined for decades, to the point where it has largely gone dormant, especially in progressive-elite areas. One has to wonder whether that impacts comedy, as the audience simply isn’t mature and/or balanced enough for it to work.
Not least the wannabe hippies manning the TRS-80s at Rolling Stone: Far-Right Influencers Celebrate Jerry Seinfeld Once Again Claiming ‘PC Crap’ Killed Comedy.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF WEIMAR AMERICA AND, “WELL, SO MUCH FOR #METOO:” Lawmakers’ horrific plan to turn NYC into ‘Sin City East’ by OK’ing prostitution.
Without any hint of public discussion or hearings, Albany lawmakers are racing to legalize prostitution before the legislative session ends June 6.
They’ve already legalized weed, greenlighted Big Apple casinos and rolled back consequences for most crimes via their disastrous criminal-justice “reforms.”
Now they want to degrade the city further by paving the way for legalized hookers. And without even giving critics a chance to complain in advance.
It’s beyond outrageous.
Politico reports that state Sens. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) and Julia Salazar (D-Queens) are backing dueling bills to “reform” the illicit trade.
Krueger would shield “sex workers” and go after only “johns,” while Salazar would legalize every aspect of the harmful industry.
Salazar, a radical Democratic Socialist, bizarrely believes sex workers are both independent entrepreneurs and victims of traffickers as well as prosecutors.
And just as with the botched cannabis legislation, neither has proposed a mechanism to oversee, license and regulate their sex-worker nirvana, compounding the horrors should their bills pass.
In 2021, Gov. Andrew Cuomo already set the leglislative-reform ball in motion, signing a bill to allow “loitering for the purpose of prostitution.”
Bill Blazejowski, your time has finally come!
DEAR MAINSTREAM MEDIA: YOU’RE SQUIRMING AND WE LOVE IT. From Steve, this morning:
Northeastern’s David Lazer, who heads up the Civic Health and Institutions Project, explained the shift this way: “In general there’s been a lot of negativity about Biden and younger voters may have been more responsive to that.” Not that Biden has done a bad job, mind you, or that Trump has somehow become acceptable. There’s just this vibe, you know, this negativity about Biden. The denial is strong with this one.
Then there’s the swing-for-the-fences panicmongering like this one from The New Republic: How the Hell Can People Be Nostalgic for Donald Trump? Yet—They Are.
I dunno — low inflation, rising wages, peace?
The New York Times chose Memorial Day to publish an op-ed by Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, comparing Biden to aged-but-lovable Boris Yeltsin in 1996 and Donald Trump to the resurgent Communist threat represented by election opponent Gennady Zyuganov.
Is Trump supposed to be Literally Hitler™ or a filthy Commie? It’s so hard to keep track these days.
Vox even devoted one of its trademark sleep-inducing “explainer” columns today to squirming over Biden’s loss of support among young and non-white voters. “High turnout may actually favor Republicans this year,” namely Trump, despite his “paranoid vision of American life and a populist contempt for the nation’s political system.”
Young and non-white voters don’t understand they’re voting for the end of voting!
The crème de la crème of squirming alarm is today’s Politico article that my colleague Rick Moran already gave a full writeup. But please let me break out this particularly tasty bit from it. Enjoy this classic bit of panicmongering boilerplate from an unnamed Dem operative: “This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.'”
These are the same people who said Romney would give people cancer.
Not to mention, this classic moment: Biden: Romney’s approach to financial regulation will ‘put y’all back in chains.’
Every GOP presidential candidate since Thomas Dewey has been compared to Hitler, but this is the first time the Democrats compared a candidate to Hitler who then went on to win who is running for a non-concurrent second term, and thus have to explain why even though he didn’t do much Hitlering* in his first term, he’d be sure to really have the Reich Stuff in his second.
* Of course, point taken. But all of that was entirely Fauci-approved, and the left were furious he didn’t go further, until riot season broke out, right around this time, four years ago.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Touré Asks What White American Culture Is.
I’m not sure what Touré [Neblett] does now. He had his own show on MSNBC before they gave the axe to a number of shows featuring blacks. Now he sits around and wonders what white culture is. Didn’t he rush to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture’s exhibit on “whiteness” and white culture? That pretty well spelled it out. According to the Smithsonian, white culture is characterized by individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, and more. One of the stated goals in Black Lives Matter’s manifesto was to “disrupt” the nuclear family.
What is white American culture?
— Touré (@Toure) May 26, 2024
Flashback for those who missed this classic moral panic from everybody’s favorite annus horribilis, the year 2020: After backlash, the Smithsonian removes that chart breaking down ‘whiteness and white culture’ in the US.
The chart may be gone, but, the message from the Smithsonian still stands, Byron York wrote in July of 2020: “Minus the chart, the ‘whiteness’ page on the museum’s website remains the same, including a video from another diversity consultant, Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestseller White Fragility. It includes a discussion of ‘white dominant culture’ without the specific references to individualism, hard work, objectivity, etc., that the chart included.”