Many in the dinosaur “news” media and the old guard of Hollywood evidently don’t grasp that we’ve turned away from them, thanks to the decentralization of audio-visual tech, our ability to deliver and receive insightful and entertaining messages, and their insistence to keep pummeling us with their egotistical political messages.
Case in point, as the liberty-minded indie entertainment reviewer, journalist, and video creator Gary Buechler, of Nerdrotic on YouTube and Nerdrotic.com recently revealed: a bunch of mostly leftist Hollywood millionaires (and at least one billionaire) recently sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asking him and his D.C. friends to deliver a Happy Meal to American movie theatres.
In recognition of his excellent video on the news, let’s allow Gary to open things in his inimitable style:
Hollywood’s apocalypse, NOW. As celebrities continue to tell us how to vote, and complain about the President… Stuck in these six-million-dollar mansions they feel imprisoned in, yet they’re willing to sell at a steep loss as they flee Hollywood in droves… As politicians that they helped -- in some cases -- get into office, refuse to allow movie theatres, arenas, and theme parks to reopen. As NFL and NBA ratings continue to sink -- and they have a symbiotic relationship with Hollywood… All of this combined is costing the entertainment industry billions in revenue, and now we are losing thousands – tens of thousands – of jobs, and this all could have been avoided… Now, they want you and I to bail them out.
Buechler refers to a recent piece in Variety that opens with this misleading paragraph:
Leaders of the nation’s movie theater business, which has been hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic, are urging Congress to provide bailout funds so the industry can survive.
How is this misleading?
The only provable, verifiable fact in that Variety statement concerning the “theater business” is that it has been hammered by state and municipal lockdowns – literal forced closures under threat of state and city fines, armed police, and prosecution. Since the deadliness of the Wuhan Coronavirus and its resultant COVID19 illness not only statistically cannot be determined but has been inflated thanks to federal subsidies to medical centers that list deaths as “COVID19 deaths” when that literally might not be the case, the only concrete fact one can determine is whether a movie theatre was forcibly shut due to a local or state edict such as those imposed in California, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, and other states.
And Buechler is spot-on mentioning that many of the entertainment industry figures who signed that letter supported the very politicians who imposed these commerce-crushing, anti-constitutional, anti-free-will attacks on voluntary association and free markets.
As much as one might want to apply a term related to entertainment here, the word “irony” isn’t really right.
The word “hypocrisy” is much more appropriate.
Variety continues:
The letter urges Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy to redirect unallocated funds from the CARES Act to proposals that help businesses that have suffered the steepest revenue drops due to the pandemic. The National Association of Theatre Owners, the Directors Guild of America, the Motion Picture Association and more than 70 directors, producers, and writers signed the letter.
And who are among its well-known signatories?
Signers include Wes Anderson, Judd Apatow, James Cameron, Alfonso Cuarón, Clint Eastwood, Paul Feig, Greta Gerwig, Evan Goldberg, Barry Jenkins, Patty Jenkins, Ang Lee, Sam Mendes, Steve McQueen, Christopher Nolan, David O. Russell, Martin Scorsese, M. Night Shyamalan, Zack Snyder, Steven Soderbergh, Denis Villeneuve, Taika Waititi, James Wan and Lulu Wang.
And if you noticed a lot of big-government boosters on the list, you’re not alone.
Millionaire Judd Apatow on September 29 threw himself into the COVID19 mud-pit by implying that Trump’s tax returns and the President’s handling of the pandemic show moral malignancy, tweeting:
Trump will take your money and let you die. He’s a casino owner who wants you to lose and doesn’t lose a second of sleep when you kill yourself because you have nothing.
Which is curious on a few levels.
First, when it comes to taking money nowadays, even if one disagrees with many of his policies, one must admit that Trump as President has pushed for and gotten LOWER taxes virtually across the board, a policy that, combined with dramatic decreases in federal regulations (i.e. decreases in threats and commands hurled at peaceful participants in a voluntary market) had allowed many more Americans to open businesses and expand employment…until collectivist politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (called Charlie Parker by Joe Biden).
Second, as I have noted, and as is obvious to anyone who bothers reading the Constitution, the so-called “rules” for the U.S. government do not grant it any “power” to “bail-out” anyone or any business. In fact, on a moral level, no “constitution” can grant some people – in the “government -- "just powers" over anyone.
The lockdowns that leftist Democrat and leftist GOP government officials on state and local levels have imposed are not only patently unconstitutional, even if the U.S. Constitution did claim that politicians could shut down businesses and churches, force people to wear masks, and threaten people with arrest and physical violence if they didn’t comply, no human being could ethically claim a right to do that to another person.
Likewise, this “bailout” that these Hollywood figures seek not only comes on the heels of unconstitutional and immoral lockdowns, any such “bailout," even IF it were allowed by the Constitution, would be immoral and unethical, because its funds would be forcibly expropriated from others.
Theft, regardless of how many politicians vote for it, or how many Hollywood celebs promote it and claim it’s for a “good cause,” is wrong.
Donald Trump did not impose these lockdowns. He is not at fault.
Like Apatow, many of these glitterati have long been tied to leftist causes and politicians.
Director Paul Feig blamed Trump’s rise and “anti-Hillary” sentiment for the failure of his 2016 feminist-SJW takeover of “Ghostbusters”. Super-wealthy writer-producer-director James Cameron has been a big backer of Dem figures and government-imposed “climate change” burdens on businesses for years. Director-writer-actor Jordan Peele, who is another signatory to the letter, has made sure he saw $1 million donated to Black Lives Matter and leftist Stacey Abrams’ voter-promotion group Fair Fight.
But now, despite many of these folks backing ideologies or actual politicians whose policies have wrought this economic destruction, they want taxpayers to shell out cash for the theaters.
And Variety promotes the fiction that it’s COVID19 that is to blame.
Well, we know different. We know who imposed the lockdowns, despite the low death rate and lack of any moral or constitutional authority to do so.
And we also know that, thanks to the years of leftist ideology being spewed by many “artists” in television and film – unfunny, unenlightening nonsense like what Feig served-up in “Ghostbusters 2016” – Americans had already turned away from television and film years before COVID19 appeared.
We’ve found other creators, and ways to support them, and a new paradigm is rising. It’s a paradigm that will see principled Americans trying to steer their entertainment spending and other forms of commerce towards people with whom they share deeply rooted principles, not towards those who would use their money to undermine their beliefs in freedom.
That’s not included in his letter for more tax cash, and we don’t need our money taken from us to make our own decisions about what we value.
Thanks, but no thanks, Hollywood.