Hollywood’s Struggles with Wokeness

Michael Shellenberger's article at Public. "We Are Only Now Starting To Recover From The Madness

Its political power has broken, but Wokeism is still ruining the culture."  Excerpt:

“Complete intolerance became almost a religion,” wrote [actress Justine] Bateman, “and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others.”

Hollywood is not only one of the most status-obsessed neighborhoods in the world, it is also one of the most Woke. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Pictures mandated racial quotas. CBS required that 50% of its writers’ rooms be non-white. And a culture of fear of saying the wrong thing spread.

“This was the era of trying to exercise control over those who dd not want to follow the crowd,” wrote Bateman, “and has their own ideas about what they needed to do.”

At this point, Bateman circles back to the demands of the SAG actors union, which protested studios efforts to replace them with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“This dampened our culture and innovation, bringing people to even think that generative #AI, a regurgitation of the past, was actually our cultural future. When you starve a society of those called to be independent thinkers and cultural and intellectual innovators, you rob that society of any forward movement.”

What Bateman is saying is that Wokeism had so destroyed cultural innovation in Hollywood that many of its leaders, executives, and creative geniuses had become resigned to AI taking over the role of real humans.

Bateman isn’t alone in her assessment. “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” the writer and director of HBO’s “The White Lotus” told fellow Gen Xers Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik of The Free Press.  “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma.”

Bateman put her finger on the essential status-obsessed nature of Wokeism, which had been taken up most vigorously by Millennials but enabled by the “Me” generation of Baby Boomer liberals.

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Recommended Documentary Focused on the Flaws of DEI: “Am I a Racist?”

What's wrong with simply rewarding people based on merit? What's wrong with hiring and promoting those who excel? Many prominent DEI advocates are horrified by this idea. They divide all people into two (count'm, two) "colors" and urge us to treat people in special ways based on their "colors." In his the new documentary "Am I a Racist," Matt Walsh goes undercover to demonstrate many of the deep flaws of modern day DEI. This includes a surreal interview with today's best-known modern-day practitioner of racecraft, Robin DiAngelo.

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Political Power and the Need for Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff of FIRE:

In a democracy, the majority doesn’t need special protection for freedom of speech because their power is protected by the majority vote. The bully and the bigot easily get their way if they have the votes.

The fact is that only those with opinions that are unpopular with the majority or the ruling elite need the special protection of freedom of speech. It is not, in fact, a coincidence that the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement, and the gay rights movement (just to name a few) only really took off when the protections of the First Amendment became strongly interpreted beginning in the 1950s. Prior to that, without a strong First Amendment, those movements were easy to shut down.

But the powerful in higher education find this narrative inconvenient. This is because, frankly, they are unsatisfied with the amount of power they have over speech and thought (which is already immense, and regularly abused). They prefer a narrative in which they are still the underdog (which they've never really been) and still the hero (which they very rarely are). At the same time, they’d like to continue to censor “bad” speakers and “bad” speech — not just with new tools, but with a continued sense of self-righteousness about their authoritarian impulses.

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Mike Benz: It’s time to take apart the Death Star of government censorship.

I've followed Mike Benz for several years. He formerly worked in the US State Department. His analyses of the US censorship industrial complex are detailed and credible.

Question:

I want to ask you about the protections that we need for social media companies. How can we stop the government from being able to bully social media companies into censoring content that it dislikes.

Benz:

With control over the executive branch, it would be surprisingly easy not to take the whole thing out, but to devastate it in effectively a single blow. All you would need is an incoming day one executive order that prohibits government grants and contracts by any government agency to any outside group involved in regulating, flagging or downranking so-called "disinformation." It does what the Supreme Court should have done and said that the funding of censorship by the government is censorship by the government. So that Executive Order will allow you to go agency by agency and kill all of those grants and contracts that comprise the censorship industry. There are hundreds of 1000s of people now around the world, and 10s of 1000s of people here in the US whose full time--their paychecks, their livelihoods, their mortgages are effectively paid for by doing full-time 24/7 censorship work. This field did not exist eight years ago. It was created after the 2016 election as a response to Trump winning to stop a night like tonight where he might win again.

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RFK, Jr.’s Position on Vaccines

The corporate news, which is largely financed by Big Pharma and pressured nonstop by the U.S. security state, has lied to us for years regarding RFK, Jr.'s position on vaccines. That why so many people have sincerely looked me in the eyes and asserted that RFK, Jr. is "against vaccines" or is a "conspiracy theorist regarding vaccines."  People are free to agree or disagree with him, but responsible people should make sure they accurately understand RFK, Jr.'s position before hurling ad hominems at him out of ignorance and laziness.

Here is RFK, Jr.'s actual position regarding vaccines:

I just want to make this clear. I don't want to take vaccines away from people. I don't want to impose my choices on the American public. If vaccines are working for you, you ought to be able to get them. And I'll make sure that happens. But people should have informed choice. So they should have good science that tells them the cost and the benefits of these products, particularly since they're being ordered to use them.

76 million kids a year are required to use them. and they're healthy children. So it's the only medical product that's given to healthy people. You want a product like that to be extra solid, to make sure there's no risk, because you can take, you know, there's certain risks that you'll take if you're sick to get better. Of course. But if you're not sick, and you shouldn't be required to take a product unless it is iron-clad, unless you know what the... you know, what all the costs and benefits are.

And the problem with vaccines is that they were originally introduced by the Public Health Service, which is one of the five military services. That's why there's a surgeon general. And the Public Health Service introduced them and pushed them as a national security defense against biological attacks on our country. So they wanted to make sure that if the Russians attacked us with anthrax with some other biological agent They could quickly formulate a vaccine and then deploy it to 220 million American civilians without regulatory impediments.

A normal Medical product takes about eight years to get to market because it has to go through double-blind placebo controlled trials And you need to see long-term effects. There are many effects On every medical product that have long diagnostic horizons long incubation periods They didn't want to go through that because they said it's going to be a national emergency. So instead of calling it a medicine, we're going to call it a biologic and we're going to exempt biologics from pre-licensing safety studies.

So there's no vaccine on that schedule, that 72 vaccines, that has ever gone through a pre-licensing safety study placebo-controlled trial against a real placebo. And that's wrong because that means that nobody knows what the risk profiles are on these products. And nobody can tell you whether that product is averting more problems than it's causing.

And what I will do, you know, if I'm given this job in the White House, is I'll make sure that those studies get done, that there are people on the panels that approve these products that are not loaded with conflicts of interest. So it's real science. disinterested people and that doctors and patients and Americans know exactly what the costs and benefits of every vaccine are and can make a rational decision.

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