Hollywood is starting to take notice: conservatives being targeted

Hollywood is starting to take notice: conservatives being targeted March 22, 2017

Hollywood is not a “safe space” for conservatives. If you don’t agree with the social issues pushed by actors and the studios, you will have big trouble maintaining a career in the business.

For a while, it has been the unspoken understanding among the celebrity elite. But now, the few conservatives in Hollywood, like Tim Allen and James Woods, are more outspoken about the hypocrisy of intolerance in Tinsel Town. Even the liberal Hollywood Reporter is catching on that conservatives are enemy number one in the movie biz.

One of its reporters, Stephen Galloway, wrote about what he sees as a “new McCarthyism in Hollywood” that is singling out conservative ideals and banishing them off the liberal plantation, just like what happened 70 years ago when the federal government, under the leadership of President Harry S. Truman, was weeding out communists in America and in Hollywood:

Months after Truman’s order, several dozen members of the film industry were summoned to appear as witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nineteen of them, known as the “Unfriendly Nineteen” — a term coined by the red-baiting Hollywood Reporter — were left-wingers, hostile to the committee. Billy Wilder mordantly quipped that “only two of them have talent. The rest are just unfriendly.” But their summons sent waves of fear coursing through the industry, enough to paralyze even liberal supporters such as Humphrey Bogart, and certainly more conservative ones such as Gary Cooper.

By the end of the hearings, 10 of the witnesses had been cited for contempt of court, and soon some of the top movie executives issued what became known as the Waldorf Statement, a two-page press release vowing that “We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ, and we will not re-employ any of the ten until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.”

Galloway added that those who were blacklisted couldn’t get work in Hollywood for at least 10 years. He argues that the same thing is happening now, only Hollywood has issued the loyalty tests against conservatives:

Back then it was fear of Communism; now it’s fear of an amorphous enemy that’s all the more potent to some for being unseen. Call it the fear of fear itself.

And here’s the surprising thing: that fear isn’t just felt by the usual groups liberals want to protect; it’s also felt by conservatives.

In an astonishing reversal of Hollywood history, just as liberals here once considered themselves an endangered species, so do conservatives today. They no longer are free to talk in the open, because they feel — rightly — we’re no longer prepared to listen, any more than they’re prepared to listen to liberals. There’s deafness on both sides.

Galloway mentioned Tim Allen’s recent criticisms of Hollywood when he said, “You gotta be real careful around here. You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody else believes. This is like ’30s Germany.”

Though Galloway recoiled at his exaggeration of it being compared to Nazi Germany, he does find “some truth to what he says:”

Think I’m wrong? Imagine what Mel Gibson or Vince Vaughn must have felt at the Golden Globes. I couldn’t help wondering how the crowd would have reacted if they had spoken out instead of Meryl Streep. While she was given an ovation, they’d have been booed off the stage.

And that worries me. Because nobody should be afraid to speak. Freedom of speech means freedom for all, for our opponents as well as ourselves.

It’s amazing when people wake up and realize that Hollywood preaches tolerance for all people except for those that don’t think like them.


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