Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

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Truth, Justice and the American Way Jan 01, 2022

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What’s so funny about Peace, Love, and Understanding?We’ll leave 2021 with no stronger grasp on collective truth than we had in 2020. One kind of dystopian nightmare is exchanged with another. I wish Biden had tried to unite this country. But he didn’t. I wish the Left had not gone so utterly insane. But they did. I wish I hadn’t seen just how corrupt our media class in this country is. But I did. I wish I didn’t wake up from the comfort of the delusion that I was fighting on the right side, but I did.I have come out of 2021 as clear-eyed as I have ever been. There is nothing good about that. The more you see, the more you know, the worse it is. Indeed, ignorance is bliss. I would be lying if I said I didn’t go through many very dark nights this past year. For most of my friends that would translate as: fear of Trump supporters destroying “Democracy Itself.” But for me it was the feeling of being completely and utterly alone. Physically alone. Emotionally alone. I had four animals around me at all times, hovering nearby for comfort and warmth. But I had no one to share quarantine with in 2020 or 2021. I only had the the terrible, abusive internet which I kept returning to again and again for friendship, warmth and kindness. What I would get back, though, was either more abuse, indifference, and cruelty. That can distort how you see the world and how you see yourself in it. I have contemplated more than once if I was anywhere near close to ending it. I never would because I have a daughter, for one thing. Also, I would worry about my four animals. Who would take care of them? Then I would remind myself that this is what it feels like to live in an extremely polarized, algorithm-driven reality and that none of it was real. Then, I would take a walk outside, see the smiling faces of my neighbors, and feel my feet on the ground and I would remember what was real. A good friend of mine dropped dead of a heart attack at 57, reminding me just how suddenly it can all be over. And that time spent on Twitter is time wasted. As hard as it is to quit, my goal in 2022, among others, is to spend much less time there. I do want to say a big thank you to you readers of this Substack. Having you here, subscribing - whether or not you read my newsletter — has made me feel less alone. Less alienated. Some of you I know and some I don’t know. But just knowing you are here means the world to me. What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American WayThe one thing I wish for more than anything is to have a country back where we are allowed to express ourselves freely and openly without fear. As Sam Harris wrote two summers ago:“We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.This isn’t just politics and human suffering on display. It’s philosophy. It’s ideas about truth—about what it means to say that something is “true.” What we’re witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we’re attempting to have in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what’s going on in the world? What is real? If we can’t agree about what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we’re stuck with one other.” I had to think really hard about exactly what I wanted back in 2022. Then it finally hit me. We need Superman. More specifically, we need to be guided once again by his principles: Truth, Justice, and the American Way. TruthThe alternative narratives are messing with our perception of reality. We watch every day as the narrative is distorted on the Left and the Right. It’s hard to know what is true and what isn’t. While many will blame Trump for this, he’s been gone for a year off of social media and it’s as bad as it’s ever been. The news media is less trustworthy than they ever have been. Objectivity is very nearly gone. We just seem to be stuck in this place of endless Civil War.For me, it was when the New York Times and Twitter worked together in a struggle session over the Tom Cotton op-ed I saw for the first time how we on the Left distort the truth to serve the narrative. How long did the Kyle Rittenhouse narrative rage out of control? Did the media ever walk back their accusations that he was a “racist white supremacist who used an illegal weapon to cross state lines and kill Black Lives Matter protesters?” None of it turned out to be true, none of it. And yet, most on CNN or MSNBC or Twitter had the courage to even ask whether it was true or not. That is just one example of how twisted our perception of reality has been for at least a year, but probably longer. The good news is that there are still plenty of resources to set the record straight if you can pull yourself out of the media bubble and find it. My year would have been utterly lost without the genius that is Matt Taibbi. Notice how in this video he says he would never simply accuse someone of being a “white supremacist” without piles of documents to prove it? Where did that kind of ethics in journalism go? Well, we know where it went. It got fired from most of the publications in this country. The New York Times’ biggest blunder of 2020 was losing Bari Weiss, who is a pioneer now in leading the way for new media voices. Weiss’ podcast and her Substack have been absolutely essential. I always immediately listen and I always immediately read anything that sails through my inbox from her. It is Weiss who encourages her readers to be open-minded and brave. It is Weiss who understands that unless we all start speaking out we will continue to live in a country afraid of the truth. That is what is happening now. There are so many brave voices online and all of them have been attacked at one time or another and have built platforms outside the mainstream. While it’s a benefit to people like me, we still lose much by having people like Matt Taibbi’s work not make the mainstream. At least Real Clear Politics will often link out to both Weiss and Taibbi, which ensures more people will find their way there. Here are some other voices on Substack I have read and appreciated this past year — you should read all of them:Freddie DeBoerBlocked and Reported’s Katie Herzog and Jessie SingalWalter KirnWesley YangMichael SchellenbergerAndrew SullivanKatherine BrodskyJames StrockNancy RommelmanAntonio Garcia MartinezJeff EinsteinGlenn GreenwaldDarryl CooperJeff Maurer Abigail ShrierThe Liberal PatriotGlenn LouryPodcastsHonestly Pod (Bari Weiss) The Quillette PodcastMegyn KellyBen ShapiroWalk-ins Welcome with Bridget PhaetesyAll-In Podcast with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg The Fifth Column Podcast with Kmele Foster, Matt Welch & Michael MoynihanUnspeakable Podcast with Meghan DaumOne of my favorite new discoveries is Sharyl Attkisson whose motto is:She has gone through all of the media “mistakes” in the Trump era, and all of the media “mistakes” in the Biden era. She is an old-fashioned reporter who believes in objectivity and ethics. I know, right? What a shock. Her podcast has been a must-listen for me this past year as I know she will always get the story. JusticeWe have been subjected to trial by mob for at least five years now. When Trump was elected and the entire established order of this country, aka the ruling empire, believed itself to be the “resistance” everything went out the window. The press was blamed for putting Trump in power so they did nothing but subvert the truth to attack him on a daily basis. On Twitter, the presumption of innocence went out the window completely. Almost every case became partisan fodder, with justice being rendered by mob and no one really having the stones to stand up to any of it. While Superman’s definition of justice might have meant taking the law into your own hands when institutions of power fail, I mean it here as restoring faith in institutions. Everyone deserves not only a fair trial but a path to redemption when “canceled” by the mob, for starters. But worse than all of that is how Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other elected officials have inserted themselves into ongoing cases without any verdict being rendered. This was true when Biden falsely labeled Kyle Rittenhouse a radicalized Trump supporter who was opening fire on protesters because he was a “white supremacist,” true when Biden expressed anger at the Rittenhouse verdict after a fair trial, true any time Biden has commented on a partisan side. That is not the President’s job. Laying it out in painful detail is Jonathan Turley for The Hill, who warns Biden to change course heading into 2022 and he’s right. Says Turley:A president plays a critical role in reinforcing our system of justice. He not only represents our constitutional process of representative democracy, but he is given specific power to correct injustices through pardons and commutations. When passions turn to rage, a president can bring a needed voice for fairness and patience in allowing our system to function without prejudice or prejudgment. Conversely, if the president rushes to judgment, he becomes an enabler of mob justice.Every jury member in this country is potentially under threat from the mob and they know it. In our modern-day surveillance state where everyone is a “children spy” to make anyone famous for anything they do - where video clips are often taken out of context and misunderstood that is all the more reason to fortify our justice system and try to diminish the power of the mob. It is immoral the way people can be accused of something online based on a tweet or something from their past and have no due process or any way to defend themselves. It isn’t easy standing up to it, but stand up to it we must. The American WayIn the new economy of the internet and social media, no one is safe. You are expendable. It is considered a privilege to have access to a major platform like Twitter, Youtube, or Facebook, not to mention publishing houses, movie studios, even fast food joints, universities, libraries, the corporate offices of Coke or Nike. You have only one choice: SHUT UP AND COMPLY. If you can do that, you will thrive. If you dissent, your job is on the chopping block. Does that sound like the American Way to you? It doesn’t to me. Even saying it out loud, “The American Way” feels like it’s verboten, doesn’t it? Why? Because calling anything American carries with it a source of shame, at least on the Left now. I saw a couple with a baby on Youtube offering up a recipe for vegan pumpkin pie say, “We no longer celebrate Thanksgiving because it’s representative of genocide.” It should surprise no one that this year DC Comics decided to change Superman’s motto from “Truth, Justice and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow.” Though never part of the original series, The “American way” was added in the early 1940s as part of the WWII war effort, and changed to “freedom” in the 1960s. It sticks with me probably because it was revived in the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeve. But apparently, in the years since, The American Way just isn’t on-brand anymore. As CBS News points out:Still, DC's decision to have the head of the company officially announce Superman's motto appears to be a pointed statement that the Man of Steel is a hero for everyone, part of a wider effort across the company to broaden its representation. Most recently, on Oct. 11, DC announced that Jon Kent — Superman's son, who also wears the iconic "S" shield as a superhero — would come out as bisexual. Why wouldn’t people see America as the most inclusive country in the world because it is. No other country has so much inclusion, so much diversity and is such a cultural and religious melting pot as this one. We get to decide what this country is. It’s more than a little heartbreaking that in 2021 there is so much hatred towards America and the idea of America. She deserves so much better than that. While the modern Left wants to tear down America and build a new utopia they forget that it already is a utopia. It is built on the idea that everyone in this country has the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Just because these ideals weren’t upheld in America’s founding, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or that we shouldn’t remember them or fight for them. America is the only country in the world that has Freedom of Speech written into its Constitution. At its best, we hold to those values, even when we disagree with what is being said. America stands for the Land of Opportunity. People flee failing governments and oppressive regimes knowing that if they stake their claim somewhere in America they can build a business from the ground up. If their kids work hard they can become doctors, teachers, celebrities, tech moguls, and scientists, even millionaires here. No class system or caste system will hold them back, not if you stick to the founding principles of this country. There is nothing funny about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, just as there is nothing wrong with Peace, Love, and Understanding. We need more of both everywhere and in everything. I will close 2021 with this quote from a wonderful speech by Abigail Shrier - another Public Enemy Number One on the left - to the students at Princeton that she ends this way:You will, each of you, have the chance to matter. You will find yourselves at hospitals or in banks or in courtrooms and at newspapers where you will see things happen that you know to be wrong—where you find that the standard line is actually a lie. You may have found yourself there already. If you’re fortunate enough, you may even find yourself one day with children of your own, knowing you are their best defense in this world. And you’ll feel the nub of your will, pressing you to do something—say something. And when that happens, don’t sit there like a sock puppet.I’m 43, which I realize makes me very old to many of you. But not so long from now, you’ll wake up and be 43 yourselves. And when I look back on my life thus far, it occurs to me that the decisions of which I am most proud—the ones that strike like an unexpected kiss—are not the times when I obeyed the algorithm. They’re the times when I defied it and felt, for a moment, the magic and power of being alive. When I felt, even for an instant, the exquisite joy of not being anyone’s subject. When I had the unmistakable sense that I’ve existed for a purpose, that I stood the chance of leaving the world better than I found it. You don’t get any of that through lock-step career achievement and you certainly don’t get that by being the Left’s star pupil.You feel that frisson when you choose a person to commit yourself to knowing full well that any marriage may fail; when you bring children into a world where there are no guarantees of their safety or success. When you summon the courage to fashion a life, something that will remain after you are gone. When you speak the truth publicly—with care and lucidity. And when you say to the world: you cannot buy me with flattery. Purchase my colleagues or classmates at bulk rate. I am not for sale.Happy Happy Happy New Year dear readers. Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for being there. All the best for 2022. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

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Houses of the Holy: The New Religion of the Left Threatens the Democrats Dec 19, 2021

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The Democrats are out of touch and out of time.There have been so many opportunities for the Democrats to turn things around since the wake-up call in 2016. To understand why Trump not only won but got that close in the first place is to have the kind of self-awareness that leads to genuine reflection and change. But that isn’t how it went down. As Barton Swaim puts it in the WSJ:Which brings us back to Donald Trump. His nomination in 2016, and even more his election to the presidency, was an anguished outcry against decades of aggressions. It wasn’t wise or sensible, but it was understandable as a frantic attempt to stay the hand of an uncompromising cultural leftism.The leftward-inclining elites who dominate American institutions didn’t interpret it that way. They classified it, as they had classified the tea-party revolt of 2009–10, as an expression of racism and hatred, thus relieving themselves of any responsibility to take it seriously or to discern its meaning. They employed every conceivable tool in an effort to remove Mr. Trump from office. Intellectuals and commentators called him a fascist; top-drawer authors blamed him for coronavirus deaths; officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked with political operatives and for-hire spies to frame him as a Russian asset; the U.S. media accepted and publicized the hoax wholesale; former military and intelligence officials openly called him a traitor; federal security bureaucracies hatched plots to have him impeached; and the entertainment industry used every opportunity to cast him as a villainous madman and a snarling racist idiot.They went all the way to Hitler with Trump. They genuinely believed a fascist had taken power and was about to start shooting people randomly on the street, silencing dissent, banning journalism, forbidding freedom of thought, and putting undocumented immigrants (illegal immigrants - meaning, they came here illegally but we can’t say that because it sounds bigoted) in “concentration camps.”In the end, it would turn out that it was the Left, not the Right, that was exhibiting signs of authoritarianism. Not that you could ever convince them of that. It doesn’t really matter how often they’ve been warned, they are digging their heels in, holding onto what they used to have rather than loosening their grip and understanding that they can’t micromanage an entire country to follow their newfound religion. Now, every day there are more headlines aimed at the Democrats to try to solve the problem:Voters are saying ‘no’ but Biden isn’t listening: Could the message to politicians be any clearer? Any louder?Democrats’ only hope for 2024: jail TrumpA Pollster’s Warning to Democrats: ‘We Have a Problem’Democratic Party’s brand is brokenThe Democrats Need to Dump Harris FastThe Democrats Mayor Pete ProblemDemocrats lost in Virginia, but their win in New Jersey is more worrisomeWhy A ‘Sister Souljah Moment’ Won’t Save BidenAnd today’s latest offering from Benjamin Wallace-Wells:What is the matter with the Democrats? On one level, the answer is simple. Voters with college degrees are increasingly siding with the Party, while those without are moving toward the Republicans, and there are more people in the second category than the first: about two in five voters in the 2020 Presidential election were college graduates. The Party’s prospects in the midterms do not look bright, and everyone involved in Democratic politics is exhorting the Party’s elected officials to do something about it. This has created a slightly comic situation, in which a group of highly credentialled people urgently instruct one another in how to appeal to those who are not.But it’s worse than that. The small but loud minority that controls the Democrats is concentrated on Twitter, where the Blue Check army keeps all of the journalists in line, dolling out their daily “take” or talking points that actively distorts reality people can plainly see with their own eyes and spits it back out on the headlines of like-minded outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, where it eventually trickles upwards to CNN and MSNBC. How you respond to these headlines will tell you everything about where you sit in the paradigm.The problem for Democrats - they’re losing people. Daily. They aren’t bringing people to them. Who would want to exist in such a guilt-ridden, puritanical, judgmental community without humor or free thought? If you watch any pundit on CNN or MSNBC try to struggle through any news report where they have to give bad news to Democrats you can see their inner panic. They have to offer up a sign that they still believe Trump is an existential threat to Democracy before they can finish a sentence. That, my friends, is a climate of fear. What are they afraid of? Twitter. Believe it or not.The Best of TimesFor a while there, things were really great. A new Camelot. The height was Lin Manuel-Miranda’s glorious Hamilton. It was a celebratory version of America where everyone had a shot at the dream because the founding documents are just that strong.Hamilton represented the best of the Obama era where he rose to power and proved that yes, Black men in this country could be elected. Twice. In fact, Obama was instrumental in helping to inspire and promote Hamilton. This video was from 2009, when Obama had just been elected. It should have been a sign that when Hamilton finally did open on Broadway the tickets were so prohibitively expensive no one in the working class could afford to go. It was, just as so much of what the Left does now, aimed at the privileged class. By 2016, as Obama was leaving, Hamilton came back to the White House to perform again with its cast:Cut to 2021:Lin Manuel-Miranda’s In the Heights was deemed problematic because of “colorism.” They have just removed Thomas Jefferson out of City Hall in New York after 187 years.It writes its own campaign ad. Remarkably, shockingly, the Left is morphing into everything Trump said they’d be, up to and including removing the Jefferson statue.The white liberals of the upper crust still use Obama, or black culture, or “antiracism” or “people of color” to give them a sense of purpose. You see this every day on social media. They “virtue signal” nonstop, along with self-flagellating, to prove they are worthy of their one true god. As Darvio Morro puts it in Newsweek:We're living in a golden age of awareness about white supremacy. You can't turn on your TV without hearing the phrase applied to the news, whether it's the explanation for Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia or Kyle Rittenhouse's actions in Kenosha. But more often than not, white progressives' newfound obsession with opposing white supremacy isn't helping. It's coming at Black people's expense.Reverend Jerry McAfee of New Salem Church in Minneapolis has described white supremacy as a situation where white people are defining your reality and then forcing you to live under that definition. And sadly, that's what we're seeing now over and over: White folks on the Left defining a reality for us that doesn't comport with how we as Black people see things, then demanding we identify with it.The reason is that this cultural-religious movement on the Left is not about race. It’s actually about class. Ideological compliance is still necessary. If you give them that you get to stay. If you do not, you have to go, no matter your skin color.A New ReligionIf the new ideology of the Left was and remains a religion, with a leader like Obama at the head of it, then it makes sense that when Trump won it would have sent the Left into a state of existential and spiritual panic. If they thought Trump was a racist, and everyone who voted for him was a racist, then this country must be racist and we need to ferret out racism from everywhere and everyone and everything. Every white person is potentially guilty of racism just by the color of their skin. We must teach our white children to understand this but we’ll it as “white privilege.” There is no escape from it. If you are white, you are an oppressor destined to succeed. If you are not white, or Asian as we now find out from a recent column on Loudoun County by Matt Taibbi, you are oppressed and destined to fail.And it’s true that the Me Too movement was a reaction to Trump’s win, since Trump was accused by so many women and still won the presidency. They could not cancel Trump. They couldn’t shut him up. He stands as the most powerful person in the country, maybe the world, who spits in the face of the power elite on the Left, and his supporters not only love him for that, they excuse his faults and would follow him anywhere.Because many of Trump’s supporters will follow him anywhere, the folks on the Left decided that meant they were in a cult. But cults force ideological compliance and punish dissent. That sounds a lot more like the left to me. There is also this idea that they are the protected people, the chosen people. How else to explain how the media went totally dark on COVID for the months and months when protesters poured into the streets by the hundreds of thousands. They were wearing the sacred cloth masks, that’s true, and their cause was bigger than COVID. Okay, but then when the protests ended, COVID became so serious it has completely wrecked the American economy and is leading to the collapse of the Democratic Party. Surely saving the country and the economy would be important too.The truth is that somewhere between Trump, who was not cautious enough, and Biden who is too cautious is the right response to COVID. The one thing it never should have become is partisan. The red state/blue state divide is hurting this country. More people died in the red states but their economies are faring much better. Life seems almost normal in states like Florida and Texas, whereas in California, New York, Portland, and Seattle it feels closer to a dystopian nightmare of fear and rising crime and unemployment. What message does that send about Democrats in power?Moreover, this idea that only they are allowed to protest, as violently as they want, and the media will cover for them, the politicians will encourage them, and the government and major institutions will overhaul all of their power structures to address the claims of systemic racism. Unfortunately, for the Democratic Party at least, they’re about to find out just how many people they’ve now alienated and how bad it’s going to be in 2022 and 2024. I imagine the most religious among them, the mostly white women for whom “antiracism” is their newfound passion, will likely believe that the racists won. The Worst of TimesBiden’s numbers didn’t really start to drop until August, after the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, where it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse:Afghanistan Health Care on the Brink of Collapse [AP]UN: Afghanistan’s economy is collapsing `before our eyes’ [AP]More than 60,000 Interpreters, Visa Applicants Remain in Afghanistan [WSJ]On the front line as Afghan children battle malnutrition and measles [BBC]An Economic Catastrophe in Afghanistan [NYT]The Independents bailed. The Blue Checks and the loyal Democrats hung on. Then inflation spiked, gas prices soared, then Biden backtracked on his promise not to mandate vaccines on a Federal level. Then Delta, then homicide rates spiked in cities, then smash and grab robberies, then the sudden and inexplicable lurch leftward by the Democrats such that you had General Milley mewling about “white rage” in Congress, and the Democrats with a handful of Never Trumpers could not stop talking about January 6th. Bad as it was, it was not the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. It is ludicrous to any American who watched the riots and the wreckage over the Summer, many minority-owned businesses without insurance burned to the ground, to say that. The Democrats said nothing about the attacks on police officers, nor showed any concern whatsoever for them until January 6th, then acted like they gave a damn. Then came the disaster in Virginia where Democrats took their first big loss. The press said it was “dog whistles” and “White Supremacy.” Big mistake. It showed all of America yet again just how out of touch they actually are. No one with a platform could dare venture down the road of what might have really gone wrong in Virginia. If “wokeness” is the religion and racism the ultimate evil no one would touch that topic, even if some of it was driven by parents desperate to get their impressionable children out of the hands of the lunatics on the Left. The obsession with race and racism has led to purity tests where each person is expected to give their opinion that will show exactly where they stand on the issue. You have to completely support “critical race theory” or say it’s just teaching people about slavery or else you are a racist. This is deemed a “right-wing” issue but plenty of parents from all different backgrounds and skin colors on the Left are also opposed to the teaching of whatever it is that is going on in schools now. It isn’t CRT. It is a method of purging presumed racism from every white person in a way that resembles Scientology or Nxivm more than it does activism. But it isn’t only that. There is all of a sudden a rise in transgender children that teachers and administrators are demanding parents accept, never question, and just happily go along with. This is a recent change in the Left’s ideology but it leaves no room for debate, for questions, for objections. Biden’s numbers might climb back. Things might get better for the Democrats. The news coming out of San Francisco, that the Mayor was ready to finally confront the crime that has mostly destroyed the city is a good sign. But make no mistake, if you have shut down debate in a country that still allows for free speech, the dissenting voices are going to get more popular and louder, which explains why Tucker Carlson is the number one cable news host and Ben Shapiro is routinely at the top of the iTunes podcast chart.Freedom of Speech, Law and Order, PatriotismLast year, when the cities were exploding and we were heading into the 2020 election, I warned anyone who would listen that the Democrats were ceding three key American anchors to Trump:* Freedom of speech* Law and Order* Patriotism When I saw Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore it was the first time any politician anywhere in our country, or any prominent person anywhere, said out loud what the majority of Americans were feeling but could not say. Here is what Trump said in August of 2020:1776 represented the culmination of thousands of years of Western civilization and the triumph of not only spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy, and reason. And yet, as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this, but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them.One of their political weapons is cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America.This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty must be stopped and it wil…

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The Kings of Film Twitter Nov 21, 2021

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Barney was mostly invisible on Film Twitter. His 3,593 or so loyal followers hung around but he couldn’t break out much farther than that. He was a no-blue-check-nobody. You have to be somebody to get one. It’s a game of status. Who has it and who doesn’t. It was just outside of his reach. Was that fame? Maybe it was. He knew he should leave Twitter. Just walk away from it. The sick game of begging for likes, validation, attention. Wanting to matter but not knowing where to start. No one cared what he thought. NO ONE. At least not on Twitter. He had a modest following for his youtube videos. That had given birth to a modest Patreon where he collected around $700 per month. That wasn’t bad but even he couldn’t live on that. And if he couldn’t live on that he could not move out and find his own place, something he dreamed about in that middle space between sleep and waking when anything seems possible.He also wrote film reviews that were featured on Rotten Tomatoes, and the occasional Oscar predictions on his blog Where The Sun Don’t Shine. His readership averaged roughly 1,200 eyeballs a day. Zero cash there either. Mostly his readers agreed with him. He was just not someone anyone cared about. If they thought of him at all they just saw a rando normie writing things about movies that are probably not that interesting. He knew he needed to lay out the hot takes to get engagement. But the last shred of dignity he still had left kept him from doing that. He would play it straight. People would read or not. Barney knew he wasn’t a somebody. He also knew he probably couldn’t get a job now anyway. He was a white guy and nobody was hiring white guys. At least not straight white guys. Not cis straight white guys. “You were just born in the wrong era,” his mother told him. She wrote something on Instagram - about how she felt sorry for him but it was his turn to step aside, to let someone else eat at the table. She taught him how to be forgiving, she said, and he turned out great, she said. She was trying to get him to put his pronouns on his bio on Twitter: He/Him. But he couldn’t bring himself to state the obvious. He/Him turned out great. Did she really write that? She did. Barney flicked off tweets like lit matches. Some fizzled into a puff of smoke. Some had the power to set something ablaze. His followers liked him best when he was cruel. They liked the little fires and the big blazes. He routinely deleted the tweets that had no engagement. They fizzled out. Puffs of smoke. It wasn’t every day Barney felt powerful. In fact, most days, he struggled just to look at himself. He would deliberately look away when he approached reflected glass or mirrors. He could not stand what he’d become after a year of lockdown. He didn’t like himself before that, even after being raised in the system of the granola crunchers in Los Angeles where the only valued trait was high self-esteem. Leave no he/him chubby gifted kid behind. Windows and mirrors were everywhere, even in places where they shouldn’t be. On closet doors, on walls, in elevators. He practiced the art of not looking. His mother sent him a lot of old photos to remind him of their life together. Single mom and her perfect son. There he was ice skating. Totally alone. Not one friend. She caught him in an expression of surprise. His arms poked out like an upright snow angel, eyes too wide, mouth hanging open, hair that she’d tucked into a wool hat so that no strands were hanging down. He looked like a snowman caught in the headlights. Or was it snow person now. “You have a memory from 2008,” Facebook told him. “You have a memory from 2010” his phone told him. He never knew what horror would surface each time the artificial intelligence decided he should re-engage with his past. Where would all of it go when he died? Would the memory algorithm just keep churning away? Does anyone ever really die online? There was another photo of him taking riding lessons that he’d never wanted. But his classmates were all taking them, the girls were, so his mom wanted him to take them - you know, to look kind of like a normal kid. There he was sitting on a horse, not really smiling, his hair tucked tightly into a riding helmet. His expression was only slightly less miserable than the one on that poor horse. They made him ride that poor horse. No good could come out of that. He had to pretend again. Pretend the horse was into it too, pretend he was having fun, pretend he was normal. He had to look at that photo before quickly deleting it. So much of it was for her, his “woke” white mom. Happy mom, happy son. Her Instagram was a collage of happy and activism. Happy activism. Hapactivism. White wine glass in the sunset happy. Picking up trash on an “Environmental racism” meet-up happy. There was that flushed look white women get when they were high on “purpose.” His mother was all in with the pussy hats and the ongoing efforts to “dismantle the patriarchy” and destroy “systemic racism” and heal the planet before it explodes in a fiery ball of carbon. Goodbye planet. Poof. Puff of smoke. She was like your textbook “libs of TikTok” who fell to her knees and screamed at the sky when Hillary lost. She laid on the couch for a year and drank a bottle of wine every night. Then came the Women’s March, the Muslim March, Kavanaugh, the hashtag resistance. And before long, her face changed. She was flushed with glassy-eyed purpose. But she was also picking apart everything he did. Like she woke up and he was all wrong. Her perfect son is not so perfect anymore. She also worried he had a dark side. Like he was an “incel.” She thought if he put his pronouns in his bio people wouldn’t think that about him. Everything he did seemed to set her off. Most of the time they ignored each other. Barney had no escape, not since COVID locked them in together for a year. She did march in the Summer for BLM. But that didn’t count. When you have a higher purpose you can’t worry about pandemics. That was what she said. His mother seemed to be happy if you saw it from the outside. But if you knew her you would see how fearful she was all of the time, how she could not stop staring at her phone, how her fingers flew across the keyboard when she was getting in a fight with someone online. Hours she would spend tap tap tapping. Then they’d have dinner and she’d recount the fight. She had long since stopped talking to Trump supporters but there were still “problematic” people on Facebook who would say something offensive. Hours would disappear and she’d still be staring at her phone or computer, tap tap tapping away.But she would not show that. Instead, she would snap a picture of their plates then post it on Instagram to show just how healthy it was, what a good mom she was, how normal their lives were. NORMAL normal. Just like everyone else. Barney never allowed her to take pictures of him now. Enough of that. He couldn’t look at himself even in a photo. Even in a selfie. When he did accidentally see himself, like a memory eruption, it scared him. His hair was still too long. His eyes looked sad and droopy. They were blue, once upon a time. Now, against the dark half-moons that shadowed them, they looked colorless. He knew he was two people. Himself, the quiet loner whose mom loved him anyway. A supercomputer nerd who has been online his entire life. He resisted the cliche of being a porn addict and chose instead to buy vintage nudie mags off Ebay. The kind with pubic hair. Even if he did use Pornhub he would never describe himself that way online. He couldn’t be that guy, even if he was that guy. Online, he was someone else. A different voice came out, one that was in constant reactive mode to what he saw scroll down his feed. He was outspoken and brave, even angry. One tweet would set him off on a long, threaded rant that no one would read. A few hours later, with maybe one “heart” he would delete it. He was starting to like who he was on Twitter more than he liked his real life self, even if he knew it was an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, hijacking the amygdala and fight or flight that was keeping him engaged. He was smart enough to know that if you are getting content for free you ARE the content. He knew that but he could not stop. His 20 or so followers who engaged with him made him feel something. He knew he just needed the one day, the one viral tweet, to become a somebody. Then he could try for the blue check. It was an ordinary day when Barney became Twitter-famous. It all had to do with “that b***h.” Everyone knew who “that b***h” was. She was always piping up to defend bad people. She was fearless in the worst way. She couldn’t shut up. Just shut up. But instead, on a day after the shooting in some town at a massage parlor was being labeled a hate crime, he called her a racist. Not in so many words. He insinuated she had written anonymously about a Chinese film director’s movie doing better because now all of Hollywood would be sympathizing with Asians. All he wrote was, “I think I know who said that.” Everyone on Twitter knew that he was referring to “that b***h.” Because she was the only person with balls big enough to say something like that. She denied it, of course, but she was losing hundreds of followers. It was fun watching her flip out. It felt good somewhere Barney couldn’t even pinpoint. PING! She was like, “I can’t believe no one on Film Twitter, people I’ve known for years, wouldn’t stand up for me. I can’t believe everyone is so silent. You know I would never have said that.” They were all laughing at her desperation. Barney knew it. He also knew on Twitter it didn’t matter if something was true or not. The ritual had to play out anyway. Each person cast in their roles and everyone showcased their morality when they took a side. If they liked her tweet that revealed their own ideology. No one wanted to risk that. Liking his tweet was rewarded. CRUELTY is good on Twitter. It is the heat and the combustion that drives the engine, baby. Then his follower count started to balloon as more and more of the blue checks RT’d his revelation about who the baddie was today. She had so many haters and they were crawling out of the darker corners of Twitter to send him screenshots of things she’d said over the 14 years she’d been on there. Would that be Barney’s fate? Would he really give so much of his life over to a stupid website that took so much and gave so little back? Except today it was giving something back. He was gaining lots of followers.At some point during the day she went on offense. Because of course she did. She was never one to back down. She tweeted, “In the old days it used to be you’re fat, ugly and old. Come on, losers, you can do better than this.” She was putting on a strong front but it was obviously hurting her, being called a racist and a white supremacist. Barney didn’t exactly say that but others did. By the end of the day five people had contacted the movie studios that advertised on her site and told them what she said. “It wasn’t me,” she tweeted. “I think My American Life is a great movie and worthy of winning Best Picture so why would I say otherwise?” Then she became defiant, “go ahead and take away my advertisers. Go ahead and destroy my business. Do you think that will shut me up? Think again. Keep sending me those tweets. I’m going to make you famous for them.”She was such a dumb woman. Didn’t she know when it was time to shut up? There was no coming back from this. The tweets just kept coming and coming. By the end of the day Barney had 1,315 likes and 5,670 RTs. His follower count went from 3,593 to 5,400. Imagine thousands of people at once engaging with a little button shaped like a heart, formerly a symbol of love, now branded as part of a hive mind agreeing on something in a day. Pressing the symbol of love on the cruelest tweets was how Twitter was winning the game. You give love for hate. You love what you hate. You erase love for hate. And all the while you signal to other people that you agree with them. With their fake love-hate . Barney wanted to make movies. That was his dream. For now, though, he put these little montages he made on Youtube. They were sort of popular. He was trying hard to build his platform. “Your WHAT?” His father had said, with that twinge of judgment Barney hated. His father lived in Texas with his real wife and family. An affair with his mom produced Barney but he calls every once in a while out of duty. He knows nothing about the online world. He has no idea what Twitter is. “MY PLATFORM” Barney had to say back, weakly. How could he explain what a platform was to his boomer dad? His conservative boomer dad. His boomer dad who had voted for Trump - a fact he had to most definitely keep hidden. A stain on his otherwise mostly pristine invisibleness on Twitter. All someone had to tweet was “your father voted for Trump.” Maybe he could escape it. Maybe not. “My platform,” he would patiently explain, “is about how many people I am connected with, who know who I am, who will engage with my content.””Engage with my content,” his father said, not even hiding his disdain. ”Okay Boomer,” Barney snapped back. “Getting likes on youtube is not going to make you much money, Barney. I always told you to get a real job but you never listened. Your generation just wants a free ride. You complain about capitalism completely unaware that your entire life is ruled by things built by capitalism. Your phone, your laptop, your social media, you—-”He did spend one summer with his dad and that family. They all ate at the dinner table, no cell phones allowed. The kids - a pair of blondes, a boy, and a girl, had chores they had to complete before they could spend time with their friends. They were church-going folks whose idea of a wild time was scoring a six-pack of Budweiser and drinking it by the creek before stumbling home beer drunk, which wasn’t drunk at all. They were nice enough to him but every time he opened his mouth it was like they exchanged a glance of unspoken agreement where Barney was confirming their suspicions about him. He slept in the guest room and unfortunately heard his dad and his wife having sex in the middle of the night. Heavy breathing, grunting, and then it all went silent. Barney spent the whole time subtweeting about them to the amusement of his twenty or so followers back before Trump won and everything got too serious to do that. No matter what else he did in life, no matter how big he got on Twitter, he was always going to measure his success by what his MAGA DAD thought. Like it mattered. He could make one anonymous phone call and send the DOJ after his dad. He was at that Stop the Steal protest on January 6th. Maybe he should let his dad know that he holds that kind of power over him. Is that a bad thing to be, he wondered, or would that make him a good citizen, helping to protect the country from terrorists. Everything was tightening up and closing in. There was going to be a group that got to stay and a group that had to go. Barney couldn’t save his dad. They were living in two different countries now, more or less. Besides, Barney had enough to worry about.He had about 20 DMs. One from a Slate reporter who wanted to do a story on him and how he found out Alexandria Anderson had been the person who wrote the anonymous comment about My American Life. He also saw he had a DM from Alexandria herself. She had unblocked him to send it. “Why are you doing this to me,” it asked. “What did I ever do to you?”Barney stared at her words. He thought about any answer that would make sense to any person. He floated above himself then. He could see what he was. Staring into his phone, angry and frozen like his mother, a glow lit up his face. So this was it. This was all of it. The next DM came from Alexandria and it had a screenshot of someone else that said, “haha, Twitter thinks that b***h wrote this but I did.…

Full show notes at the publisher

The Horror Movies I Love are Frozen in Time Oct 31, 2021

Show notes

Stanley Kubrick’s sublime The Shining breaks all of the rules. It breaks the rules of adaptation by completely upending the plot and meaning of Stephen King’s original book. The plot of the movie doesn’t really even make sense from a story point of view. King’s book is very much about telekinesis inside people and inside the Overlook Hotel. The hotel wants the boy Danny because his powers are so great. In their way is the mother Wendy, strong and protective, who will keep them from getting the boy. They use recovering alcoholic Jack, a writer, to kill off the mother and bring the boy into the fold.

In the movie, Jack simply loses his mind inside the potentially haunted Hotel. Kubrick has simplified it greatly, to focus on the claustrophobia of the snowed-in hotel, and how that might break down a marriage.

If The Shining was released today it would be trashed by some 200 self-appointed critics who operate more or less as a hive mind that monitors issues of social justice, as every industry controlled by the left does, as much as it does anything else. But in 2021, there is no such thing as a purely great movie unless it crosses all of the t’s and dots all of the i’s. Amazon Studios has even written it into its DEI guidelines for filmmakers. The left has been consumed by its own righteousness and has become every bit the zealots of the Evangelical Right.

The Shining is allowed to mostly exist as a film made before the religion took hold (pre-2014). It would not be made now the same way. Not a chance. First of all, you could probably count on one hand those working today with Kubrick’s talent and ability. But secondly, there is no way it would be told the way Kubrick decided to tell it.

Kubrick’s The Shining would be described as misogynistic, no doubt, by many of those who cover film. The irritation with the actress Shelley Duvall by director Stanley Kubrick and star Jack Nicholson is clearly evident and, dare we say, hilariously funny.

But it’s funny in that way you might only get if you are a member of Generation-X, that is those of us who really were jaded throughout our young adult lives and preferred subversive art to almost every other kind. We think Taxi Driver is funny. We think Blue Velvet is funny and, yes, we think The Shining is funny.

But it’s also brilliant. The reason is, quite simply, that Stanley Kubrick was a great director. He took material that wasn’t his and made it his.

Kubrick’s The Shining spoke about the social issues of the time in a quiet whisper, like many of the films of the late 70s did. Feminism, in particular, was taking a hit. If you remember the 80s you’ll remember how no woman wanted to admit she was a feminist. It had a negative connotation, at least to any woman who wanted to attract a man. You heard “I’m not a feminist but…” a lot. It took a while for the word to come back into style. Of course, now it barely exists as a stand-alone movement because it’s been overtaken by trans rights, or non-binary or LGBTQIA+. Feminism? What’s that?

Stephen King wrote The Shining in 1977 and is (and was) most definitely married to and influenced by a feminist, his wife Tabitha. So his book isn’t the same kind of commentary that the film version of The Shining is. If you are familiar with King’s work you know what an important person Tabitha is to him. He has called her his “ideal reader” and there is no way she doesn’t get the first pass when he writes a draft. Because of that, even with the awkward sex scenes factored in, his books have always been feminist-friendly.

Kubrick, however, was having none of that. The film version exists inside the mind of a man who is driven so insane by his wife and son that he imagines a hotel driving him towards murder. If you had not read the book, that might have been your takeaway. I find the book actually scary and the movie kind of funny. Much of that is due to Nicholson’s hammy but hilarious and magnetic performance as Jack.

Nicholson appears to be trolling Shelley Duvall throughout, and though she famously had a traumatic or difficult experience on the set, the result is something weird and unexpected. The more distraught she becomes, the harder he is on her and somehow it becomes funny. This is one of the things about comedy that is hard to explain. If you dissect it and analyze it there is nothing funny about it. But it somehow it is.

Even though Shelley Duvall is mousy and bullied by Jack in the movie, she still manages to be the feminist hero in the film that she isn’t really as much in the book. That’s because she is “saved” by the character Scatman Crothers plays in the film (he’s killed in the film, leaving Wendy to be the hero).

The acting in The Shining is great, the story is pretty good but what makes it timeless is the directing. If you want to know what great directing is, watch this film. Shots like this one. Kubrick doesn’t have to make this scene funny. It’s supposed to be scary - it’s the scene where Hallorann realizes that Wendy and Danny are in danger. But he makes it funny anyway in the two zoom shots.

One of the bummers of living through 2021, if you love movies, is that the notion of what makes a great director comes secondary to their gender or skin color. A white man like Stanley Kubrick is expected to recede into the background to allow for marginalized groups to step up and be counted. And while there is certainly nothing wrong with inclusion, when it comes to great directing, enforcing “equity” can mean you are going to watch people praise movies that aren’t very good and ignore movies that really are great just to keep things equitable and fair.

The best horror movies ever made were directed by men, and those include Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Brian De Palma’s Carrie, John Carpenter’s Halloween and The Thing, and They Live, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, Ridley Scott’s Alien, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.

I also count Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and David Fincher’s Gone Girl as horror films, even if they don’t fit the traditional definition.

Jennifer Kent who directed The Babadook, and Mary Harron who directed American Psycho, are among the shortlist of women whose films are on par with the best of the genre.

I don’t know why men are better directors than women. Some would say a patriarchal society handed directing to men, or that men are mentored and guided where women aren’t. Some even say that men are more visually inclined than women since they were the hunters, where women were the gatherers. Most people I know don’t want to have this conversation. It is verboten. We have to all just pretend everything is normal and everything is going fine and the only thing holding women back was sexism. Maybe someday that will be true. Maybe more chances for women will mean they eventually make movies that are as great as the ones men have made. I don’t know. I just know that right now they do not. Not if we are counting the greatest films ever made.

From my perspective, I love great movies. I hope that the best directors will still be able to make them and be celebrated for them, regardless of whether they are male or female. I do sometimes worry that great movies will have to come second to the ideology going forward. Woke casting or storylines are easy to spot for someone like me, who grew up on movies from different eras. My daughter tells me she and her friends mock films and advertising that are too obviously “woke” because they know when they are being pandered to as any generation would.

Great movies have to tell a truth. They have to be true to what they are trying to do. To get there, it is sometimes necessary to, as is the case with The Shining, be willing to risk people saying it is “misogynist.” It might be, but there is no denying that it’s funny that a guy like Jack would be trapped in a hotel with a woman like Wendy. Backing off even a little bit from that essential premise and the whole movie falls apart.

A great horror film like Jordan Peele’s Get Out very much exists in the post-2014 universe of the “woke” because it is from the POV of a black filmmaker whose nightmare is racism. It tells that truth extraordinarily well. But going forward, it seems that the rules can sometimes hurt the story in various ways. Like the idea that only white people can be “bad” and people of color must always be “good.” Or like casting films in order to meet diversity requirements but in so doing throw the whole film off, as I have seen recently in a film that is not yet out. Here, they cast a black female in the role of what is written as a traditional WASP. It’s important that she is a WASP because the whole arc of the main character is about being shut out of that unattainable world.

The Great Awokening also demands that directors be pure and good from their childhood onward. They also are scolded for the harsh treatment of actors that drove them to their emotional brink, like Shelley Duvall in The Shining or Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks. The new requirements also forbid casual or gratuitous nudity or maybe even sex scenes. The nudity and sex in Halloween would be deep-sixed, and probably that way too graphic scene in Don’t Look Now with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie that so many for so long insisted was “real sex.”

For all of these reasons and many more, I kind of think the best horror films, maybe the best films overall, are going to have to live in the past, in a time when artists were free to tell stories and direct films in ways that didn’t necessarily comport to good behavior or keep humanity on the righteous path.

Happy Halloween, Dear Readers. Go watch a great movie.

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Operation: Save Joe Biden's Poll Numbers Oct 25, 2021

Show notes

Somewhere in Washington, in a parked car.

Ike: It’s a dumpster fire.

Mike: They’ll bound back.

Ike: Didn’t Elon Musk invent some kind of brain enhancement thing? Is it too soon to get that for Biden? Is it only chimps?

Mike: What?

Ike: Nutrisystem … Nutra grain …

Mike: Nuralink!

Ike: Is it too late to join human clinical trials?

Mike: Don’t be an ass. Everybody gets old.

Ike: Most people don’t get that old.

Mike: The boomers. They built it all. Now, they’re destroying it all. Everything is coming apart. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer - how did it all go so wrong?

Ike: Seriously, calm down. It’s not that bad. He can bounce back. If he passes those bills the press will be giving him slobbery blow—you know.

Mike: Please don’t say it.

Ike: He’s putting on the heat with Manchin, the press keeps bullying Sinema - how long can she possibly hold out? Although her fashion sense tells me she doesn’t exactly want to blend in. Got Obama out in Virginia to drag MacAuliffe over the finish line. They have Americans whipped up into unmanageable panic and fear with January 6th. They’ll do as they’re told. Polls will rise because that is the story we’re going to tell. Reality is less of an issue than what we say the reality is. Reality isn’t what you think it is. Reality is just a matter of opinion. If we say everything is going fine, then everything is going fine.

Mike: What?

Ike: They’ll bounce back. He’s too big to fail. They are too big to fail. The press, the blue checks - they will not let him fail. They put him in power and they don’t want to look like fools. We got this.

Mike: It’s more than the polls. There is a disconnect between reality and fantasy. The people who are dictating what the Democrats do are themselves completely out of touch with at least half of the American people. What the Right thinks about the Left is closer to reality than what the Left has decided the Right is. The Democrats only have one option to win elections: To scare voters. Rolling Stone comes out with a January 6 piece just before a big election. But what no one ever says is that there were two separate events that day. One was legal and one wasn’t. They’re treating the whole thing, all of the people who were there to protest lawfully and rightfully into insurrectionists. They weren’t. And yet. If they can keep the people scared they can maintain some power. Once that fear goes away, though, they are sunk. But they need fear and fear is destroying the country. Democrats really think that this is the way forward. It is a way forward. To war.

Ike: You’re overthinking it. I’m telling you, the kind of power backing the Democrats right now is insurmountable. We just need to spitball a few ideas to throw out into the public to let them know the Biden administration is on their side. Maybe stop testing baby puppy beagles. Just a thought.

Mike: Oh you mean like removing Thomas Jefferson from City Hall? Pronouns Day by the State Department? This was not supposed to be America’s second revolution. You start taking down the statues of confederates, that’s one thing. Teddy Roosevelt - now it’s getting weird. You take down Jefferson, that’s the end of the American experiment.

Ike: Okay, so those didn’t work as well. We have to think outside the box here. Ice cream, bike rides, that disastrous Town Hall with Anderson Cooper…not working. So what about, you know, maybe a kind of casual fun thing. Slow jam the news?

Mike: BIDEN IS NOT OBAMA! He doesn’t have that kind of charisma. No one wants to see him on TV. The country is falling apart.

Ike: Do you want me to give you a “yeah but” or are you past the point of no return.

Mike: We just dig around in our pockets and find that one shiny penny that gets us off the hook. Yes it was a global pandemic, yes we were so freaked out we were wearing face shields and lining up outside of Costco but when hundreds of thousands hit the streets it was yeah but they’re wearing masks. Yeah but they’re outside. In May. Of 2020. I know what your “yeah but” is going to be. You’ll say yeah but Thomas Jefferson isn’t being taken down, he’s just being moved. But yes moved after being called an offensive racist! THOMAS JEFFERSON!

Ike: Yeah … but …what do you me to say?

Mike: I want you to say Biden will start facing reality. He’ll start being the guy who would never go for removing Thomas Jefferson from City Hall. It’s not that hard. It’s the least you’d expect from a president. The very least.

Ike: Those who voted on it don’t represent the Democratic Party or Biden.

Mike: Yeah but. Yeah but. Yeah BUT!

Ike: Why are you generalizing? Okay, so we all know what Thomas Jefferson did with Sally Hemmings and all that, what this whole country did building itself up to be the greatest country in the world, wasn’t exactly pretty. Do you think the elite class who own million-dollar homes are really going to give them back to the indigenous people they claim to care about? Like Gwyneth Paltrow and Laura Dern? No. Are they going to give away all their money to families living in poverty? Not a chance. Taking away the Jefferson statue allows them to feel as though the right people, long since dead, aren’t around to defend themselves or make excuses or virtue signals on Instagram, are the ones paying the price for progress. That is enough. Take down the statue and they can keep their stuff.

Mike: What we need is someone with courage. Wisdom. Someone to stand up to Twitter. Teddy Roosevelt took a bullet to the chest and still went on to give a speech. He could handle Twitter.

Ike: Biden is just trying to get through the day. And I don’t know if TR could handle Twitter. Public humiliation is a crippling fear.

Mike: They voted for the guy in the middle. The moderate. If you could sum up what they voted for it would be: Not Bernie Sanders. Not Elizabeth Warren.

Ike: They didn’t vote FOR anything. They voted against something. Or someone. The American people don’t know what they want. We tell them what they want.

Mike: What if America is being sabotaged. What if there is an entire army of spies infiltrating all of our institutions and slowly weakening them.

Ike: I think those are just Berkeley graduates.

Mike: It’s all starting to make sense now. What if you were smart enough to destroy a country not with bombs but with ideas. Idea pathogens. What if you could weaken their education system, weaken their military, weaken their scientific research by figuring out how to knock out those who are genuinely the best at what they do but because they might not meet the DEI requirements they have to go work at Costco just to find employment.

Ike: I’m sorry, you lost me, man. Get a grip. It’s not that big of a deal.

Mike: Not that big of a deal? The whole plane has crashed into the whole mountain.

Mike: Think about it: you have no choice but to hop aboard the Woke Express, destination: Utopia. And if you have no choice that means your military has no choice, your teachers have no choice, your media has no choice, your entertainment has no choice. How can a country function when it is at war with its own foundational principles? Think of how easy it would be to get on Twitter and call everything racist. The Chinese totally have our number on that. They laugh at us because of it. They know they just have to press that button and our entire system goes into DEFCON 1. Think of how easy it is to throw us off our game, to scare us into distraction and panic.

Ike: You’ve been watching too much Tucker Carlson.

Mike: Me and everyone else in America. It used to be easier to pivot when no one did.

Ike: But now they do.

Mike: Now they do.

Ike: Even Jake Tapper.

Mike: Even Jake Tapper.

Ike: Even Rachel Maddow. Especially Rachel Maddow.

Mike: I think people are watching because they’re angry.

Ike: Trump is gone. They have nothing to be angry about.

Mike: Except Trump isn’t gone, is he. They booted him off social media just to prove the half the country that votes for him that they are elites who are above even the President. Now he’s got some social media thing that is worth twice what the New York Times is worth. He is headed towards running a business worth 20 billion.

Ike: He’ll screw it up.

Mike: Doesn’t matter. This is only moving in one direction. It means the left is collapsing. You get that, right? Once they start firing editors at the New York Times for words they said on a field trip, it’s over, man. Thomas Jefferson - it’s over.

Ike: Come on, we have a whole army on Twitter. The blue checks!

Mike: What, that’s like 3,000 people max.

Ike: We have Zuckabucks.

Mike: America is an idea. An idea that is crumbling and being replaced by ideas that have already proven themselves failures. Even Vladimir Putin knows this. Even Xi Jinping knows this. They see what America is becoming. They also seem almost sad to watch its decline. I always used to go to sleep at night thinking I lived in the best country in the world and that every other country envied our scrappy tale. But look at us now.

Ike: Look, man, it’s really not that bad.

Mike: It is that bad.

Ike: White men have ruled this country since its founding. So they’re taking a well-deserved hit. Let’s recenter the narrative for a change.

Mike: Oh, yeah, no big deal, like every person who built this country, drove scientific achievements, made the best movies, wrote the best books. We’re just gonna pretend they’re expendable?

Ike: By stomping on and exploiting marginalized people.

Mike: Oh b******t. Right, like Einstein?

Ike: Pretending is not so bad. This whole country was founded on pretending. Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden are the perfect patriarchs America wants. What you can see is fully compliant, what you can’t see still holds all of the power. Take away a Jefferson statue here, implement DEI mandates there, vote for Kamala Harris. We are all playing a game that all of a sudden we’ve solved the problem of inequity. But it’s all a game, man. It always has been. So let’s just pretend a little longer. That is what we’re paid to do so shut up and dance.

Mike: So what’s next?

Ike: We’re primates. We probably need an alpha male to take us out of chaos in the final analysis. Round and round and round in the circle game. No one on the left has that kind of courage right now so you do the math.

Mike: So after that all that, we’re primates, that’s it?

Ike: Well if I had to guess, yes. Of course if I said that out loud I’d be fired.

Mike: So in other words, Trump 2024.

Ike: Your words, not mine.

Mike: We are seriously going to run a candidate who couldn’t even beat competitors on her own side against Trump?

Ike: Do we have a choice?

Mike: Why don’t we have a choice?

Ike: Because if you critcize her or seek a replacement you will be called a racist, just as you would have in 2020 if you suggested she wasn’t the best choice for Veep. How else are we going to get an overeducated group of social justice Zoomers to turn out?

Mike: Let’s go, Brandon.

Ike: Yeah but.

Mike: Yeah.

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Getting Tired of the Puritans Oct 18, 2021

Show notes

In 2021, there are only two paths for the left generally and the Democrats specifically to take: totalitarianism or collapse.Some days, like today, when the New York Times’ Kara Swisher parrots the talking points of the progressive left (what does that even mean anymore) while pretending to write about Big Tech, it feels hopeless. The massive wave of support to cancel Dave Chappelle, or have Netflix pull his show The Closer, is overwhelming. And yes, this too shall pass. As long as no one is being thrown into gulags or meth-addicted Nazis aren’t marching into France we’re on the better side of history. But still. This is America. And these are supposedly liberals. Suddenly it’s okay for a mob of mostly white people to condemn, chase and attempt to destroy the life of a black man for jokes. Jokes are harm, they scream. Words are violence, they insist. COMPLY OR ELSE they demand. So few people have the stones to stand up and say ENOUGH. There aren’t adults in the room there are helicopter parents who pander and soothe and over-protect. Or they’re baby boomers who still think pushing back against mass hysteria is selling out. Don’t forget that those who marched against the Black List and McCarthyism were loathe to push back against actual Stalin. Don’t forget what led to the fear of communism. Don’t forget the gulags and the censorship and the propaganda and the forced conformity of thought. The struggle sessions are back but at least they don’t go hand in hand with starvation and torture. Why are we here? Because of three simple words: intent doesn’t matter. Intent doesn’t matter because inside of each person is a corrupt evil that must be exposed. Once exposed, that person is to be hauled out in the court of public opinion. Confess your sins and apologize, even if you did nothing wrong. Deny your sins and be banished from Salem Village, I mean Twitter, I mean your platform. You will be blacklisted in polite society, aka the revenue stream.Of course, there is a market for those expelled from Salem Village, I mean Twitter, I mean the ruling class, I mean polite society. Outsider content can be found on Youtube, podcasts, right here on Substack - desperate sane people looking for voices of courage, looking for people who will say what they can’t spend a lot of money for some relief, for someone to remind them that they are not crazy, that none of this is normal. Dave Chappelle was “transphobic” because he defended “transphobic” JK Rowling in The Closer. But Swisher, and everyone else, can’t humanize Chappelle so they can’t measure nuance in what he’s saying in his show because intent doesn’t matter. He doesn’t pull punches but he also calls his transgender friend Daphne a “she” and speaks of their great friendship. He tells the audience that Daphne took her own life, jumping off of a building after defending Chapelle on Twitter. He makes one final joke that “she couldn’t be a woman because only a man would do some gangsta s**t like that.” The crowd goes completely silent, and then he adds that he told that joke because Daphne would have loved that joke, and, he says, “that’s why she was my friend.”He also said he set up a scholarship fund for Daphne’s daughter. Most people I know in real life don’t understand the sudden lurch in the direction of “there is no biological difference between men and women.” Most people I know don’t believe that and can’t believe the militancy around forcing people to accept that. Chappelle’s show, like it or not, reflects what the majority in this country thinks. You can’t change their minds by forcing policy, as the left is now doing. Trying to destroy Dave Chappelle and Netflix over it only makes that acceptance harder. It is shocking that Ted Sarandos has held the line in standing up for Chappelle, who no doubt brings millions of subscribers to the platform. Shocking to see someone in the plain light of day in the moneyed class say something as truthful yet controversial as “I don’t believe jokes cause real-world harm.”If you talk to anyone on the left they will brush it off. Either they deny “cancel culture” exists at all, or they say you are painting the entire left and the Democratic Party with the same brush as a small but vocal group of activists. Or they say the punishment is not that severe, after all, Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle, even Louis C.K. can still make money outside of Salem Village, I mean Twitter, mean the ruling class, I mean polite society. Whatever it is that people call “Cancel Culture” exists. It always has. It is also called mass panic or mass hysteria. It afflicts a community of people who are connected to each other enough to feel the same fear at roughly the same time. This study concluded that fear spreads on social media like a game of telephone, growing every time it spreads from one to the next. It also concluded that “unbiased factual news of a story does not seem to halt growing panic.”The study followed 154 participants on social media. The total group was divided into 14 chains of 8 people. The first person in the chain reading multiple neutral and factual news articles and then writing a message to the second person regarding the story. The second person then wrote a message to the next person until all eight members of the chain had been involved in the news thread.When the sixth person received a message from the fifth person, it was sent with the original news story.In all 14 chains, news stories that dealt with “dreaded” topics became more and more negative and tended towards fear and panic as it progressed through the message chain. Importantly, the effect of this distorted dread was not changed when the unbiased facts were presented to the sixth person. The neutral/original article had relatively zero impact on changing people’s negative outlook.The study’s author concludes:“Society is an amplifier for risk. This research explains why our world looks increasingly threatening despite consistent reductions in real-world threats. It also shows that the more people share information, the further that information gets from the facts and the more resilient it becomes to correction.”So far, Ted Sarandos is among the very few in the corporate class to take a stand against the ridiculous notion that words, essays, jokes cause “harm.” Most of them have not only caved but are using this “woke capitalism” to keep themselves in power by selling to those who care about their own virtue. In other words, you shop at Whole Foods because you can afford to shop there but you’ll feel good about spending your money if virtue is attached to it. Just look at how quickly the elite class abandoned their “antiracism” when coming across people of color who don’t comply with the doctrine. Larry Elder is a “white supremacist in black face,” Candace Owens is a “Nazi sympathizer” and now Dave Chappelle, whose politics are on the left, is a “transphobe.” I won’t say these are modern-day lynchings - that isn’t my place to say. But I most certainly can say they are modern-day witch hunts because that is exactly what they are.It was supposed to get better when Trump left office. It has only gotten worse. Those who continue to obsess on Trump without helping to crash the house of cards on the left are simply kicking the can down the road by treating the symptom and not the disease.Biden was meant to be a bulwark against the “radical left” but he has not been. He acts as though he has just won the second Civil War and genuinely sees himself as a kind of savior to the black community under siege by half the country. There is a reality to this that can’t get through to Biden because he is managed by people who pay too much attention to Twitter and mainstream media and not enough attention to the outsider voices who are shouting from the rooftops about the crises at hand. Don’t expect the mainstream Democrats like Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi to push back even a little bit. They will not. No one can or will. Not in the New York Times, not in the Senate, not on Twitter. But Ted Sarandos did. Whether he can hold the line or not is a different story. As Leonard Cohen would say, there is a crack - a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. That’s how the light gets in.Ted Sarandos is Like Thomas MauleThomas Maule was a quaker in Salem in 1692. Being a Quaker in Salem was almost as bad as being a witch. They were routinely beaten and banished, tormented because they did not accept the One True Religion of Salem Village. The Puritans didn’t leave the Church of England to erect their “shining city on the hill” only to have it then polluted by outsiders of a different faith. Building their utopia meant they had to police their utopia constantly, handing out scarlet letters, and brutal punishments. They punished “fornicating” and blasphemy more than actual crimes. Salem was a miserable place. I imagine the only two outlets for their misery were fornicating and blasphemy. I imagine if they were then punished for these they might become a bit, shall we say, pent up.It was a brutally cold winter in 1692. There was a small pox pandemic. They were under constant attack by the Native Americans. In fact, in the book The Witches by Stacy Schiff she wrote that children who were kidnapped by the Native Americans often wanted to stay with them rather than return to the oppressive nightmare back in Salem Village. The only education, offered just to men, was the Bible. They all believed in witchcraft to explain almost everything that could not be explained by God. They lived huddled in fear. Fear of mysterious noises from the woods at night, of unpredictable attacks by the warring tribes that surrounded them, and eventually they began to fear each other as an imaginary wave of witchcraft began afflicting every kind person, and even some animals. In their own primitive way, they believed their trials were fair due process. But when your only evidence is spectral, fairness is not really the point. When a handful of adolescent girls began throwing fits and pretending to be possessed by witchcraft their lives were transformed for a time. They were allowed more freedom from the daily grind of chores and prayer. They were suddenly powerful. More powerful than any man in town, that’s for sure. They were closer to God because they could see who was a witch and who wasn’t. All they had to do was point their finger and play-act to end someone’s life. The hysteria spread rapidly because the fear was unmanageable. It wasn’t just fear of the Devil. It was fear of real things that were killing them, threatening them in unpredictable ways. Those accused were given a choice. Confess and live as a witch, or deny and be hanged. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see who were the liars and who was telling the truth. Lying was what they wanted them to do. Lie about being a witch, confess and beg for redemption. That kept things harmonious in the town because then they knew who their enemies were. But if you denied it, it sent them into a frenzy of fear. The most famous of these is Giles Corey who was an angry, belligerent man who beat his own wife continually, but who, when accused, not only denied it but denied it defiantly. They put heavy bricks on his chest until he couldn’t breathe. Still, he denied it. He died with his tongue hanging out of his mouth rather than lie to God. This conundrum caught the attention of Maule. He and his wife went along with the witch trials at first and testified against one of the first accused. But at some point, he saw what others couldn’t, maybe because they were already outsiders. Think of him like someone who writes on Substack. He saw what a scam it all was. 20 people were executed in four months with many more waiting in jail. Eventually, the accusations became too ridiculous for even the church leaders to go along with and the trials came to a halt.The Puritans in Salem were so ashamed of their social contagion that had paralyzed their village in fear that they really tried to make it all go away. The story would never have been told but for Thomas Maule who wrote in 1695, “Truth Held Forth and Maintained.” In it, he stated, “[F]or it were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a Witch, which is not a Witch.” From the Maule Family’s website:Official reaction to Maule's publication was swift and severe. By order of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Council and by warrant issued by the Lietenant Governor of Massachusetts, Maule was arrested, his properties searched, and 31 seized copies of Truth Held Forth were burned. He was charged with seditious libel, and imprisoned for at least a year. Brought before the Council and the Governor in Boston, he refused to answer any questions, and demanded to be tried in his own county by a jury of his peers. Finally, he was released on bail, and the grand jury brought a charge of slanderous publication and blasphemy. The trial took place at Salem, in 1696, before his Majesty's Superior Court of Judicature, Court of Assize and General Gaol Delivery, the justices present being Thomas Danforth, Elisha Cooke, and Samuel Sewall. Maule argued cleverly and causticly, Maule addressed the court and argued that with respect to religious matters the court had no power. He then addressed the jury, pointing out to it that it was bound by the King's law, no part of which Thomas had broken. He also told the jury that the presence of his name on the pamphlet as author meant nothing since it was the printer who put it there; this point had no basis in the law. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty, explaining to the court that the pamphlet was insuffcient evidence of the charges against Thomas Maule because his name had been placed on it by the printer. Though the court pressed the jury for a guilty verdict it rendered an acquittal whose impact was visible not only in the words and faces of the enraged judges but also in the events that unfolded thereafter.The impact of Thomas Maule's acquittal cannot be understated. For the first time in a reported trial, the jury ignored the directions of the court to find a defendant guilty. The growing public impatience with secular interference with religious matters undoubtedly affected the jury, which made clear that it disclaimed any authority by the court over religious matters. The break between governmental control of secular matters and religious matters that surfaced in Thomas Maule's trial set a precedent that contributed at least in part to the First Amendment right to freedom of religious expression.This past year we have all witnessed mass hysteria run amok on social media, with the mainstream media also unable to withstand getting caught up in it. Fear spreads like wildfire, gaining momentum as it moves through people. It isn’t just one person triggered. It’s potentially thousands. It is certainly not millions. The millions are the ones watching in horror as our culture collapses. There is room in this country for different points of view. The idea that jokes could cause harm is simply not backed up by the statistics. While it’s true that jokes can lead to justified bullying which could definitely lead to harm, banning the jokes themselves is a road to ruin if, for no other reason, it makes them more powerful. This is a good moment to look around. Who is standing up for freedom of expression and who is calling for censorship and who is staying silent? Remember their names. These stories will be told, just as the story of Salem Village was. History has never been on the side of those who crumble under waves of panic, fear, or hysteria. It has always been on the side that humanizes, empathizes, and stands up for the rights of the individual and the outsider in the face of forced conformity. And that is why Thomas Maule is remembered as a hero. What Ted Sarandos does next will decide whether or not he will be re…

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Reimagined History: Monica Lewinsky, The Academy Museum, and Kim Kardashian Oct 10, 2021

Show notes

Probably every society goes through revisionist history. Usually this happens gradually, over time, as stories become myths which become legends. Truth or fiction, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Even now, stories are being retold to serve various agendas. The story of the election in 2020 has become a dark and witchy fairy tale on the left and a religious persecution story on the right. Each side clings to the myth that helps them sleep better at night. Yes, there are monsters roaming the countryside but it’s okay because we have MSNBC to protect us. Trump didn’t really lose the election because superhumans do not lose. Trump is an omnipotent force two ways it seems. Devil or Diety. Take your pick. The truth is much less complicated but it is risky to abandon the myths because the myths define us. There probably isn’t a single event that can’t be told a different way, or from a different perspective. I often think about that one Quaker back in Salem who spent a year in jail to make sure the story of mass hysteria and hangings was told. The horrors of Salem are so much bigger and so much more terrifying that the kitschy way Salem is remembered as witch hats and broomsticks is misleading. These are stories of children being forced to condemn their parents as witches. Poor women and their babies dying in prison. A man being crushed to death because he would not confess. Hangings that were applauded by the townspeople in the town square. Fear does strange things to us humans. Collective fear is unmanageable. The Monica Lewinsky myth is being retold because in the post Me Too era even the die-hard Democrats have turned on the withering charmer. He isn’t now an echo of JFK whose romps with women were part of his legend at a time when men were applauded for their James Bond-like sexual allure. I remember being at a party in the 90s and making the joke about the Lewinsky scandal, “when they were handing out b*******s in the Oval Office where was I?” It wasn’t much of a joke. But people did laugh. I suspect every single person at that dinner party now believes Clinton Me Too’d Monica. Or Monica Me Too’d Clinton.We women who lived through these eras remember full well what things were like, and even as far back as the 1970s when it was not uncommon for 12 and 13 year-olds to lose their virginity and brag about it. Molestation was everywhere, hidden from view or barely noticed or addressed. Adulthood was cool, childhood wasn’t. Not until the 1990s. Then those of us who grew up in the careless 70s began to notice that it was all bad, hardly any of it good. No seatbelts, smoking at 10, smoking pot, watching porno, rated-R movies. The parents who protected their kids tended to be Conservatives who still went to Church on Sundays. But kids of the Left? We were raised like weeds. Some of us made it, some didn’t. Then in the 90s we all watched Oprah and went to therapy. Then we figured out that everything was bad. We vowed to raise our kids better. Monica was a kid of the 70s too who grew up in the 90s to think it was cool to chase a married guy with seismic charisma. She famously flashed him her thong to show interest. And back then, wearing a thong was kind of risque. Not like now when everyone wears them. Poor Monica thought he was in love with her and that he would treat her well. She didn’t realize that when she became a problem she’d be tossed in the garbage. And trust me, as someone who knows all too well what it’s like to get in the way of a man who is using you as a side piece, that doesn’t feel good. To her credit, Monica doesn’t entirely blame “Predator Bill” for the affair. But she does tell a big lie in the casting. Beanie Feldstein is no Monica Lewinsky. They want it to look like Bill Clinton cornered a wallflower who isn’t used to male attention, and while that might have been how Monica saw herself, that isn’t how the world saw her then or now. She was vivacious and pinup-like in her beauty. Beanie Feldstein is pretty in a different way. There is no polite way to talk about the differences between the two women - it is a matter of taste and the fact is, Monica was his taste and Beanie Feldstein would have been easier to resist. Although I suspect that if she flashed her thong at Bill he would have still gone for it. It isn’t so much an insult to Beanie Feldstein as it is a distortion by Monica to edge ever so slightly to the person she wants the public to think she was, rather than the bubble-headed girl she actually was.You see, the Me Too movement depends on one simple fact - women are never to be held accountable ever for anything they do regarding sex. It is always the man’s fault because men are predators and women are innocent. Always. To tell this story from the vantage point of now requires Monica be rewritten as Beanie Feldstein because that is the only way to see the power imbalance between the two. If they had cast someone more Monica-like, the show would have been accused of trying to blame the victim. They would say the show sexualized a child, even though Monica was in her early 20s. It’s gross what Bill Clinton did, what Hillary Clinton did, and how all of us defended them for so long. To me, the worst thing he did was move her out of the White House when she became a problem. That is sexual harassment because he’s punishing her for their affair when in fact, he was an equal participant. Why should she have to suffer? No, he should not have been impeached for it, and yes it was yet another in an ongoing string of attacks to bring down the Clintons. And the public back then did not care because being “good” was not the ultimate goal of the left like it is now. Goodness rules everything. Monica wants to be seen as good and so this story helps her do that. Bill Clinton also wants to be seen as good but there isn’t much he can do about it now except keep apologizing and hiding from the press. But still, Monica was punished more or less and Bill Clinton wasn’t. I guess punished might be too strong of a word - after all, Monica has relied on this story her entire life for both her work and her image. What bothered me most was the attention and time it took to chase the Clintons and the attention Bill Clinton had to pay to his impeachment instead of focusing on the job of the American people. After all, 9/11 would happen not too long after this. We need our elected officials with their eyes on the ball. That is their job. But the opposition party wanted the Clintons out because they had held onto power for so long because his charisma put him in power for two terms. I feel that way now about the four years Trump was in office and how badly we all handled COVID in his last year. We could have and should have worked together rather than continue to rip the country apart to make sure Trump left office. The truth is that the Democrats wasted time and energy chasing Trump, energy that could have been spent a different way. The Democrats are now in the same place the Republicans were back then - doing everything they can to destroy the other side to remain in power.The Lewinsky story will always be told only one way from now on. Those of us who lived through it will soon die off, and all that will be remembered is that Bill Clinton was not JFK but something closer to Harvey Weinstein. The Academy Museum is a Beautiful LieIt is indeed beautiful, what the Academy wants to be. They, like all of Hollywood, all of science, all of the medical-industrial complex, heck even Nike and the NFL have decided that their very existence is exemplary of “White Supremacy” and that their history, their achievements, their glory and everything the public loves about them is not a source of pride but a source of shame. White shame. Or, as we used to say in the 80s, white guilt. I didn’t used to know what a “self-hating Jew” was back when I first heard the term. I was in my 20s and a Woody Allen fan. I would hear that phrase a lot back then, along with “white guilt.” Now I know what a “self-hating Jew” is. I know why they would be self-hating. I guess it’s similar to being called an “Uncle Tom.” It’s about moving beyond your own station, which is defined by your ethnicity, to join the ranks of the WASPs. Woody Allen was called a “self-hating Jew” because his movies were, for a time, about escaping his own history and his own heritage and remaking himself as someone of that privileged, white elite on the Upper East Side. Being Jewish in Hollywood was never all that popular when it came to whom they’d cast in movies, even if it was popular in who made those movies. The reason there were so few Jews in movies was probably baked-in anti-semitism throughout the country, but it was also because the country was mostly white and mostly Christian. The market decided what got made and justified its “white wall” when it came to the Oscars. We woke up from 2020 without the free market to remind us of what actually sells and what doesn’t. 2020 was like a massive ship wreck that sends all of the debris floating to the surface, with everything seen in one big picture to be judged. Just as the Titanic had lower and upper classes, how the rich survived and the poor didn’t, the ship wreck tells the tale. There was no market so there was no justification and suddenly the ruling class scattered in a panic, caught in the bright light, their entire past suddenly upended and floating on the surface.It did not go well. By the end of it, the Academy implemented an inclusion mandate to “instruct” production companies and creatives to make sure they hired BIPOC and women - at a time when there is some debate over what the word “woman” even means. My friends who crow at me about being a conservative apologist on abortion always say, “wait, you're defending the side that is robbing women of rights they’ve fought for over decades.” I always think, but don’t say, “you mean birthing people?”The Golden Globes were cancelled when Tom Cruise, Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo were SHOCKED, shocked that racism was going on here, even though the HFPA nominated a black female director before the Academy ever did. Oh, wait, the Academy never has. The British Film Academy (BAFTA) took the voting rights away from its members entirely, opting instead for a select committee to hand-pick nominees to meet the diversity and inclusion standards 2020 demanded. In the end, they picked two white actors for the leads anyway who they went on to win Oscars. And we have the Academy museum, a beautiful building with some film memorabilia that is worth seeing, and a drop dead gorgeous Hayou Miyazaki exhibit, but it is most definitely a somber reflection to ease the pain of so many good people in the Academy who do not want to be seen as dirty rotten racists. That isn’t really something any good liberal in this town would want to admit, but take it from someone who knows Oscar history inside and out and has been covering it for 20 years — this is the Oscar museum that would very much catch 2020 Hollywood in a time capsule but it is not Oscar history. Every part of it is like trying to head off any potential criticism that would become clickbait for the major newspapers and Twitter. The lesson of 2020: don’t become someone’s sanctimonious, self-righteous think piece that goes viral. They definitely subverted 90% of their actual history and cherry-picked what diversity they could find here and there to portray a reimagined version of the last 94 years. I know about the Academy’s White Wall. I have been writing about it since 2001. I wrote about it so emphatically that I lost half my readership in 2011. For a long time I was known as the only person covering the Oscars who wrote from the POV of “diversity and inclusion.” I remember when no one used the word “inclusion” at all and then suddenly just using “diversity” was wrong. I pushed for movies by black directors to be recognized, and for black actors to be recognized. I did this every year because I thought it mattered. Walking through the museum you’d never know what their history was or why activists fought so hard for inclusion in the first place. Sacheen Littlefeather is now a point of pride for the Academy when it was a point of embarrassment way back when. To date, only one black female has won in Lead, Halle Berry in 2001, but she is featured at the Academy Museum. They have devoted an entire room to Spike Lee and walking through you might think Do the Right Thing was nominated for Best Picture. It was not. He has won a single Oscar for writing BlackKklansman. You also might think that Citizen Kane, featured prominently at the museum, won Best Picture. It did not. How Green Was My Valley did but it is nowhere to be seen. They have the gorgeous backdrop for North by Northwest hung on a wall. You might think Hitchcock won an Oscar for directing. He did not. Or that he was nominated for North by Northwest. He was not. They could not even show Mount Rushmore, however, without affixing a mea culpa:Then why use it at all? Why hang the backdrop to begin with if you are ashamed of it? And if you are ashamed of it, why not put up all of the things you are ashamed of? I guess because this way they can have their cake and eat it too. They can display the cool art as long as they slap down the whites for their bad bad dirty rotten behavior of the past. Gee, sounds fun, doesn’t it?What you won’t see are the icons the Oscars were actually made on, maybe because their histories are too problematic? The big studios aren’t even represented a little bit. The major icons who won Oscars aren’t there - no Marlon Brando, or Dustin Hoffman or Meryl Streep? Where was Meryl? Did I see her there, icon that she is? I cannot recall. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was nominated for Best Picture, but not Director. He is a big donor and has quite a presence in the museum. There are bits and pieces of the empire that Hollywood once was but they have been sidelined in order to amplify the marginalized faces and voices who fought so long and hard to be seen in an industry that was driven by the market and a market that was driven by the white majority. That’s the truth. But Hollywood does not want that to be the truth.That’s why you’re seeing so much awkward colorblind casting now. I just watched a movie that took place in the late 70s that was based on a memoir of a working-class white male who got into Yale and pined for the Westport girl who was simply out of his league. She slept with him but never really considered having a relationship with him and ends up marrying the right kind of man. This is based on a true story but they thought casting a black female in that role was “inclusive” — in fact, it throws the whole thing off because you’re thinking about Yale and Westport and WASPS and the Great Gatsby and actual white supremacy and the white wall - and working-class New York who aren’t exactly woke and weren’t then. You can’t just erase that history. That is what led to the activism now. Otherwise, there is no need for diversity and inclusion. But the point is to look good. That is what everyone in Hollywood and on the left wants more than anything. I felt a little funny walking around the museum, knowing everything I know about the Oscars. But it’s very much in keeping with how I feel now, as a person from the left trying to make sense of what has become the left in 2021. I barely recognize it and they barely recognize me. The good people of the Left will love this museum. It is a monument to their new religion, after all, their utopia’s screed writ large. This is who they will be going forward, and all they ever wanted to be looking backward. They are happy to have the heat of accountability taken off, even if it means sweeping everything under the carpet for a time. Maybe someday it will all be told, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But that day is not today. And that museum is not this one. Kim Kardashian is Finally Accepted It w…

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Listen to: My Unfinished Near Future Sci-Fi Novel on Standby Oct 04, 2021

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