Cultural Kommisar Attacks Filmmaker Reitman
One indicator of how far statism has progressed in American society and culture is the tendency to view everything through a political lens. Feminists used to argue that “the personal is the political,” and this attitude has become commonplace on both sides of the political spectrum.
A recent essay by Slate columnist Dennis Lim slagging Jason Reitman, director of the Academy Award-nominated film Up in the Air, exemplifies this baleful phenomenon. Lim criticizes Reitman for a failure to convey a progressive political vision, expressing open astonishment that the screenwriter-director has not been blacklisted by Hollywood’s allegedly liberal-minded industry self-censors:
[I]t is hard to fathom his success in the supposedly liberal bastion of Hollywood: His politics lean right when they are at all legible, and yet he’s embraced as an insightful social satirist, the second coming of Billy Wilder.
Lim goes on to provide what he sees as the answer to this riddle: Reitman is a fiendishly brilliant manipulator on the order of Fu Manchu or, well, President Obama:
On a deeper level, though, this disconnect makes perfect sense: It speaks to the brazen hucksterism that is so much a part of Reitman’s method. He’s a mediocre filmmaker but a world-class panderer. His movies, which instinctively play to both sides of a charged issue, are the height of smoke-and-mirrors artistry, wholly dependent on the concealment and the semblance of meaning.
Reitman, son of Ghostbusters and Stripes director Ivan Reitman, is the director of three very thoughtful and intelligent films with satirical elements: Thank You for Smoking (2005), Juno (2007), and Up in the Air (2009). His films do feature political themes prominently. Thank You for Smoking tells the story of a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, and the protagonist of Juno is a pregnant teenager who decides not to have an abortion but instead to give up her child for adoption. Up in the Air tells the story of a corporate consultant who makes a living going around the country firing people, but whose real character problem is his failure to establish close relationships in his personal life.
One can see why progressive politicos would find such films difficult to enjoy: they consistently place the personal above the political.
As Lim makes clear with the left-handed compliment of saying Juno “at least triggered some debate about its politics,” the only possible happy ending of a film about abortion, in his view, is evidently for the unborn child to be killed and the young lady to have her decision endorsed by everyone except the obligatory Catholic and born-again Christian villains. Or, of course, to have her killed by said villains, culminating in a lovely closing crane shot moving somberly away from her tragic, bleeding body signifying her martyrdom for the great and good cause of killing children in the womb for money. That would surely be a big hit in downtown Boston and San Francisco.
Critics are the aspiring gauleiters of the entertainment world; they contribute nothing, but they’re dedicated to the proposition that they’re just as important as the actual producers of entertainment. There’s just one problem with all that: if all the critics in the world were to vanish in a puff of sarcasm, the rest of us wouldn’t mourn longer than it takes to read the news flash.
The critics know that. They strive ceaselessly to find ways to promote themselves and their position in the entertainment world. Some even try a little creative action of their own, though seldom with any success. Mostly, the real entertainers, who know that the most important thing is to please the audience, ignore them, which makes the pain even sharper. Being naturally censorious and vindictive, critics who are ignored and dismissed often enough will vow revenge — and in our milieu, revenge often takes a political form, as we see from Lim’s comments.
No sensible person decides what books to read, music to buy, or movies to attend on the basis of what a critic has said about them. He goes by more reliable indicators: a friend’s recommendation, the creator’s track record, or an attractive preview. The critics know that, too, and there’s not one single thing they can do about it, which makes them even more bilious. And thus be it ever, where free men shall stand.
Mr. Porretto
Let’s try to distiguish between a criticism and a critique of a work of art. I have no problem with someone whose job it is to establish what the art work is about, what kind of flavors were used (i.e. satirical, political, etc.) and who tries to honestly detail all the good and bad things about the artwork. For instance if someone painted a painting I would love it if the crtic explained what the artist was doing, especially if let’s say it was in the vein of a certain period of the artwork. If the critic explained when, who and what the artists were doing etc. (impressionists for example).
That kind of critque is useful. Just going out and saying “This is Crap”. Well I could do that.
This is precisely why I have stopped discussing anything deeper than “where are we going for lunch” with liberals/progressives. Nothing else can be brought up with anything approaching calm, rational common sense; you can’t even agree to disagree any more.
I wonder what this Slate lib thinks about MTV’s surprisingly excellent series “16 and Pregnant”? Probably not enough abortion in it for him.
In other words, Lim thinks film’s shouldn’t invite the viewer to think, but rather tell him what to think.
And they call *us* anti-intellectual!
You’re quite right in saying “anti-intellectual” instead of “anti-Intellectual.” Conservatives are not anti-intellectual when intellectual is used in the same way as stoic or epicurean. When it is used as the title for its namesake philosophy, conservatives are definitely anti-Intellectual. We are the antithesis of Intellectualism, which has for an essential postulate the idea that each Intellectual is the smartest, wisest and best human being who ever lived. Seems that somebody forgot they can’t ALL be the smartest, but don’t tell them! They can’t possibly care that all their ideas originated centuries or millennia past.
This is why leftists are always worrying about whether or not the art “Makes a Statement”. I think that propaganda makes a statement. That does not have to be a bad thing by the way if you are honest about what you are doing. Art asks questions.
I watched, or should say, attempted to watch “Brothers”, last night. I couldn’t do it. What a load of crap! I have a hunch that Lim would have applauded it for telling me what I should think about the military and those who would join it. Utterly unbelievable, heavy handed trash. Toby McGuire should stick to Spiderman.
Lim also claims that the film “sidesteps the economic plight of the unemployed to wallow in the existential crisis of the lonely corporate executioner.”
Can Mr. Lim fathom the fact that the film’s production staff wanted to tell the story about the “existential crisis..” and didn’t need to “wallow” in the economic plight of the enemployed?
Lim should produce his own movie about the plight of the unemployed, or any other “progresive” cause he wishes. I’ll wish him luck and maybe even go see it.
Some weeks ago, the WGA sponsored a debate in Los Angeles about the under-representation of black homosexual and transgendered characters in TV shows – an issue that sure consumes 90% of the American TV audience -
So, no wonder that Reitmann ran afoul of this type of cultural enforcers -
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t do anything of merit become critics of those who can.
“Those who can, do. Those who can’t teach.” What a dumb idiom to continue spewing.
A very small list of some teachers who did:
Einstein
Aristotle
Ayn Rand
Confucius
Galileo
Newton
Pythagoras
Steven Hawking
Scott – That’s the problem. The list IS small.
It is a silly idiom, but seriously–he went over 3,000 years and he still couldn’t come up with 10 names.
It seems as if Mr Lim is determined to live up to the first bit of Anton Ego’s description of a critic in “Ratatouille”:
“We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”
Too bad he can’t live up to the second part of that monologue, where he states that sometimes a critic can bring attention to things that challenge the status quo. Apparently Mr Lim would rather take the easy route and defend the official party line.
Mr. Porretto, if the real entertainers know that the most important thing is to please the audience, why do they produce so many box office bombs? Kevin Costner didn’t deliberately try to drive people out of movie houses with “Waterworld” and “The Postman”, but that’s what he did. If there is value in star power, then “Lions for Lambs”, which co-starred Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise, should have done a good business instead of its actual mediocre showing. On the other hand, Mel Gibson had to finance his “Passion of the Christ” mostly on his own but it turned out to be one of the most popular movies of its year. Do the Hollywoodites turn out bombs like “Gigli”, “Ishtar”, and “Heaven’s Gate” because they don’t know what the public really wants to see, and if not, why not?
Mr. Olsen, the answer to the question in your opening sentence is obvious: it is possible to aim at a target and nevertheless miss. In the case of “real entertainers,” the target is the pleasure and satisfaction of one’s audience. A good entertainer is an entertainer who succeeds at this, and a poor one is one who repeatedly fails. However, in the case of what I call “preachers,” the target being aimed at is not the pleasure, but the enlightenment of one’s audience. One might seek to accomplish that by pleasing them, but in a message movie–a preacher movie–the pleasure is not an end in itself.
It’s interesting that you mention The Passion of the Christ, because that movie is every inch a preacher movie (literally!). It exists not to entertain, but to enlighten and to teach. Its massive success, as well as the historical popularity of passion and morality plays generally, puts the lie to any notion that audiences only want to be entertained. Clearly, sometimes they want to be taught. But they are also picky about what they want to be taught. The failure of movies like Lions to Lambs or whatever the hell it was called is not that it’s a preacher movie; it’s that few people actually share or are interested in the preacher’s faith. It simply has no audience. Moreover, stars or no, it fails to entertain. The successful leftist preacher movies of the past were successful in spite of their audience’s distaste for the message because they at least succeeded in being entertaining.
Good Lord! – If any film critic has problems with “the second coming of Billy Wilder” then he or she should rethink their career choice. What’s next? Will some future director get slammed as “the second coming of Howard Hawks?” What the hell goes through the mind of these people when they write this stuff?
Great column. Now I know what films to put on my Netflix cue. Directors courageous enough to defy the progressive narrative should be rewarded with commercial patronage. Conversely, I have been getting along just fine in my years long boycott of anything featuring Sean Penn, Matt Damon, Tim Robbins or his wife. Filmmakers, like writers with their readers, need foremost to develop a sense of trust with their viewers. A propagandaless presentation that simply lays it out there for the viewer to decide is as trustworthy as it gets.
Good Lord! – Does Mr. Lim actually think that “the second coming of Billy Wilder” is a bad thing? What’s next? A sneering reference to some heretofore unknown film maker as “the second coming of Howard Hawks?” Do these people actually believe the stuff they write? I’m sure Mr. Lim was tickled pink (no pun intended) with “Green Zone” despite its floperoo status.
The renown film critic Roger Ebert wrote that devastatingly poignant, existentially enlightening, carefully rendered, acutely observed film classic Beyond The Valley of the Dolls.
Anyone who lived in the USSR would recognize Lim’s style. Let me paraphraze him using original style….
Reitman failed to produce a truly proletarian art, and instead involved himself in analysing the feelings of morally deviant class enemies. In short, Reitman engaged in a Bourgeois pseudo-art, and ignored the burning issues, which are interesting to the builders of Obama-America. The verdict of the proletariat on this so-called “art” is clear – the author should spend some time working in a factory (preferrably in Siberia) so he could understand real life and real issues, and only then he would be allowed to even think of having a privilege to make movies in Obama-America.
A movie critic is like an english lit instructor who can’t make tenure…they don’t know how to use weapons, and they’re aren’t clever enough to be successful con artists. So they fall back on a skill that everybody learns in seventh grade–fifth grade, if you went to parochial school. They write for a living…except that most of them aren’t very good at that, either. Otherwise they’d be novelists.
Francis W. Porretto – right exactly; The movie critic today is somewhere between the funnies and the horoscope as foar as a vital read; a quick superfical pick me up – yes – advice on when to hit the movieplex – rarely.
What is interesting is how this critic, who I’ve NEVER read or heard of before, decided to go after a very successful young director who from what I can tell has remained rather apolitical at best when not making an increasing rarity comming out of hollywood – excellent movies.
Did I miss something prior in the news? Has Reitman ever taken a bold conservative viewpoint – even in regards to possible criticisms of his films?
The other curiosity is how this guy Lim could square that as openly a devoted progressive such as Clooney would ever sign on to a project if he believed Reitman was pining for conservative causes?
It’s a testiment to the guys talent that I’ve read and heard compelling arguments from both sides of the political spectrum claiming both JUNO & UP IN THE AIR – these stories are too good to let politics interrupt; & the acting as well.
In Juno, the main character finds herself in a situation of her own creation. She accepts responsibility for it, chooses a difficult course of action, and in the end, gives something amazing and life-changing to another person. She’s not a saintly figure. She just decides to make something positive out of her situation. So of course the “liberals” hate it. In their world, she should’ve blamed someone else, taken the shortest and easiest route out, not given it a second thought, and continued on into adulthood as a self-absorbed, asinine idiot.
Dennis who? heh heh
Who the heck is Dennis Lim? Jason Reitman can tell a story that resonates, and tell it like no one else. Dennis Lim can tear other artists down as much as he wants to — like Roger Ebert (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), he will never be an artist himself unless he loses his political rose-colored glasses and gets an honest worldview.
Finding quality entertainment, especially movies, is a formidable task, difficult for the discerning viewer. Like Frank, I too avoid like the plague, anything with Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins(Shawshank Redemption the exception),and now, Matt Damon. George Clooney is a difficult sell and his recent movies have been nothing but an exercise in political grandstanding and a convenient vehicle to bash anything American, especially the military. Matt Damon must have taken his cue from George and decided to associate himself with theatrical bombs to prove his devotion to far left liberalism.
Wonder which Hollywood liberal will undertake the task of making a movie about Obama? It will probably be difficult to cast the character since the only one who was ever without sin on this earth is no longer here and He would probably refuse the role anyway. Why should He play understudy to Obama since Obama is the only one who can play the role with authenticity and considers himself the newly appointed chosen one?
Outside the movies, television has devolved into the wasteland our parents told us it is. Another offering from television land has been relegated to the trash pile, NCIS, once a great entertaining hour has become a crashing, silly bore. 24 was cancelled and we will no longer sleep well at night, knowing Jack won’t be around to protect us actual Muslim terrorists. No one will be out there to do what is necessary to obtain information that will save lives.
No wonder porn is on the rise and increasing viewship. Who wants to be preached at, to, and indoctrinated with liberal and progressive ideology at every turn of the entertainment screw? But you can bet your bottom dollar that soon, even porn will have actors spouting lines about global warming and progressive politics every time they work up a sweat while shooting a scene or having a discussion about how size actually does matter. Now, that will really be quadruple X, hard core to the max, deviant porn.
For seriously good television where you will NOT expect it? May I recommend this weeks ‘Supernatural’? Some things are subtle – and you have to watch it twice – but… it is WORTH watching twice.
Wait a minute, I thought the right-wing was abortion sentiment was opposed to choice and the left was in favor of choice? But Juno was all about choice, making a choice and the effects of that choice. Should the Reitman be on the left (as far as discernible) for presenting the decision as a choice? It is not as if abortion was not part of the film. Does pro-choice mean having a choice between either having an abortion or having an abortion? I’m confused (once again) by political logic, right wingers are the pones who are supposed to be telling people what to do, they must have abortions or not have abortions; they must go to public schools run by unions; they must buy health insurance and so on.
Is Reitman even a “conservative?” Isn’t it more likely that he’s just not a raving, doctrinaire lefty and has found time to reflect on things that really matter?
Thanks to this last election, the ideological meter has been skewed so far left that the ranks of “conservatives” have been swelled by millions just by default.
Where is it written that modern film makers have to have an agenda and show it in thier films?
Some directors might just want to make movies that they think people wil like. Are they still allowed to do that?
For a Marxist, EVERYTHING is political. And destruction of any competing loyalties (such as “importance of friends and family”) to the State is a high priority.
To max, it’s easy: Pro-choice (or for freedom) only as long as the correct choice is made. Any other choice should be prohibited in the name of freedom.
I guess I should never be surprised by the idiocy of so-called “progressive intellectuals.” Up in the Air had a basic, simple message: Life is better when you are not alone. How is that controversial? How is that political? How is that anything but true? I understand Lim’s problems with Juno. Lim wants abortion and its glorification because he wants the “freedom” to have sex without any consequences. So, if abortion is even questioned or presented in a light that does not glorify it, Lim starts to sweat with the worry that he may actually have to grow up someday and be a responsible adult.
To a certain extent, Lim is right that Juno portrayed teen pregnancy as, if not “cute,” also not exactly heinously traumatic.
BUT…
The movie was at pains to make it clear that Juno was (however one feels about it) surrounded by supportive and loving people, like the step-mom who (melodramatically) berated the ultrasound technician for insensitive remarks about unplanned pregnancies.
It was this support that mitigated the trauma.
So, we have a movie about how loved ones can help a teen deal positively with an unwanted pregnancy, rather than either stigmatizing her or encouraging an abortion, and this particular liberal is … disgusted.
Lim’s article made me VERY interested in this particular director. Time to update the Netflix list…
A film critic has one function, but the vast majority have no interest whatever in fulfilling it: to help me determine if I will consider my time well spent at that movie as I am leaving it. They wish instead to tell me what I should enjoy.
Hollywoods IDIOTIC ILLOGICAL BLACK BIAS. When was the last time you saw a TV show where the BOSS or the MAYOR or the PRSIDENT or the Chief of POLICE or DETECTIVES or the brilliant SCIENTIST or Computer EXPERT and the hero’s bestest longest most true friend EVER was not BLACK?????
Throughout history elites have used narratives, usually based on actual events, to shape and control the picture of the world they impose on the societies they rule. Sometimes those narratives depict the heroism of ancestors in the hopes that a dramatic retelling of past exploits will motivate young listeners to emulate them in behalf of the elites. In societies ruled by more ideologically inclined elites, those tales often take the form of morality plays that shape and mold the outlook, values, and judgments of the ruled.
Here in the U.S., elites use the corporate entertainment industry and its vast television audiences to shape the outlook of their constituent populations. But instead of using truthful narratives, American elites resort to lies and distortions so that actual events can be twisted and bent to conform to the propaganda needs of their left-wing ideology.
Consider the case of NBC’s Law & Order, an extremely popular television show. L&O’s left-wing producer, Dick Wolf, controls a stable of five crime-oriented shows (also Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, L.A. Dragnet and Crime & Punishment), making him one of the most powerful men in television. For years, Law & Order, which is filmed in Manhattan, advertised its episodes as being “ripped from the headlines,” a claim Wolf and star Jerry Ohrbach still make in interviews. But instead of depicting reality, Wolf’s scriptwriters take high-profile crimes committed by blacks, and replace the bad guys with whites, even inventing white racist criminals that bear no relation to anything seen in New York during the past 100 years.
And so, even though more than 89 percent of suspects in violent crimes are black or Hispanic according to NYPD crime reports, L&O presents a looking-glass world in the grip of a white crime wave. In “Teenage Wasteland,” an episode that originally aired on February 7, 2001, the true case of a group of black teenagers who ordered Chinese food, and murdered the delivery man, is turned into a group of middle-class, white kids. “Myth of Fingerprints” (November 14, 2001) tells of a white, female forensics chief whose years of false testimony has sent many innocent men to jail.
One of those innocents was murdered in prison, resulting in the official’s conviction for manslaughter. “Fingerprints” was loosely based on the real case of former Oklahoma City supervising forensic chemist Joyce Gilchrist, nicknamed “black magic,” for her seeming forensic wizardry. Gilchrist’s lab techniques and court testimony had come under scrutiny by federal and state authorities. Critics charged she gave false testimony causing 23 men to be sentenced to death, eleven of whom were executed. Joyce Gilchrist is black, but unlike the fictional white official, was never prosecuted, though she was fired for alleged “flawed casework” and mismanagement.
Seven months after the October, 2002 Washington, D.C. sniper case was closed with the arrest of suspects John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, L&O dramatized the case, but with the shooter as a white man! (“Sheltered”; May 14, 2003.) “Smoke” (May 21, 2003) opens with the death of a child, whose adoptive father, a famous entertainer, had dropped him, while dangling him from a hotel room window. The detectives eventually discover that the entertainer would also arrange for underage boys to accompany him to his mansion, where he would sexually violate them. When I told a not particularly media-savvy neighbor who is the mother of four small children that story line, she immediately said, “Michael Jackson!” But on L&O, the character was depicted as a white comedian. Remember the Danny Almonte case? Almonte was the 14-year-old Dominican fraud who — through the connivance of his father, Felipe de Jesus Almonte, and Bronx-based, Dominican Little League coach Rolando Paulino — passed himself off as a 12-year-old, in order to play in the 2001 Little League championships. But in “Foul Play” (May 1, 2002), the coach magically becomes a blond-haired, white man, who is somehow convicted of a murder committed by the player’s father.
L&O’s creative team must read some interesting publications, since many of their “ripped from the headlines” stories never happened, but suit any left-winger’s paranoid fantasies quite well. Consider their obsession with non-existent, murderous white supremacists, whom they depict as besieging Manhattan. In “Open Season” (November 20, 2002), a William Kunstler-like defense attorney is murdered while celebrating the acquittal of a guilty-as-hell black defendant for shooting a white policeman. The killer, a member of a white supremacist group, then uses his defense attorney to unwittingly pass along information to his co-conspirators, who murder a prosecutor in another state. The defense attorney is charged with aiding and abetting the supremacists, before she is shot by a female supremacist. The real basis of the episode was the indictment of radical attorney, Lynne Stewart, of consciously aiding and abetting Moslem terrorist Sheik Abdul Rahman, the convicted ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In “Prejudice” (December 12, 2001), a racist, white real estate agent progresses from writing a letter to his co-op board in an effort to keep an interracial couple out of his building, to flashing a gun at a black colleague, to murdering a black man who beat him to a taxi. Such a case would have been fantastic in 1951, let alone in 2001. In “Genius” (April 2, 2003), a white, violence-embracing ex-con-writer stabs a white cabby to death. Viewers are then given mixed messages, as the cab driver turns out to be a fugitive, white supremacist racial murderer.
In another surreal L&O touch, ordinary black New Yorkers are repeatedly shown to be victims powerful white overseers. In “Kid Pro Quo” (April 30, 2003), the dedicated director of admissions at a tony private school is murdered by her corrupt racist boss. The victim sought to get a deserving but poor black girl admitted, but was overridden by the boss, who’d taken a bribe to accept the inferior child of a Jewish pornographer. And then there’s the homophobia angle. In the real world, Manhattan is, like San Francisco, one of the most gay-friendly areas in America. But not in L&O’s alternate universe. In “Girl Most Likely” (March 27, 2002), a private school student murders her lesbian lover, in order to hide the fact that she is gay. Last, but not least, comes xenophobia. In “Patriot” (May 22, 2002), a pale, blonde-haired former special forces officer kills a Moslem immigrant he had surveilled, and whom he suspected of being a terrorist. The prosecutor presents the imaginary patriot as a fire-breathing, chest-thumping, jingoist monster, even as the story suggests that the dead man really was a terrorist.
Now beginning its fourteenth season, Law & Order, a top-rated show and perennial Emmy nominee for Outstanding Drama Series, serves as a willing tool for the elites’ culture war against Middle American whites. No wonder it receives awards and recognition from its corporate masters.
Pragmatist;
Law and Order is tilted to the left, no doubt about that. But you seem to be laboring under a an illusion, not to mention being somewhat selective in your viewing. Perhaps filtering Law and Order through the prism of your biases, can be seen as a possible cause. Partly this may be due to your inability to see blacks as anything other then welfare queens (females) or criminals(males). That probably the basis of your objection, to seeing them in any other role. Anyone who’s viewed Law and Order on more then a random basis, would know that they present more then a few black suspects and criminals – WHERE THE SITUATION CALLS FOR IT. However, a crime that has it’s basis in something that happened during the Holocaust, for example, or in the events in the Balkans, or something having to do with Egyptian culture; calls for almost no black perps. And complaining about blacks being visible in upscale roles, normally is not accompanied by complaints about the number of white doctors and lawyers on TV, numbers also out of whack with their numbers in the general population. As to portraying blacks as criminals in a ratio somewhere near to their actual numbers, they would then have to portray their VICTIMS – also usually blacks – in a like ratio. Poor black thugs robbing other poor blacks, doesn’t make for good television (see note above about the numbers of doctors, lawyers – oh yeah – and cops on TV). Having lived in New York most of my life (except for those years when the Marine Corps was shipping me all over the place. Those years I lived out of my sea bag), I can attest to the fact that white folks do manage to make it to the headlines (which makes them eligible to be ripped from)in NYC. The occasional substitution, of white for black, is not some nefarious left wing plot on the part of Dick Wolfe, but mainly due to the fact that the audience is mostly white; and are far more interested in seeing someone who looks like themselves on the TV screen then they are in seeing any of those “other folks”. Let’s get real for a moment, TV land isn’t exactly a hotbed of multiculturalism – or even “multi-classism”. How often do you see an everyday working stiff on TV?
to mike giles there are lots of blacks on law and order. they are the suspects in the beginning of the show. they are always the innocent victims of the racist cops before the cops find the white person who is the real criminal. if this happened once in awhile it wound be okay. but when it happens constantly its done deliberately. it is a racist liberal smear tactic. we use to joke when watching the show, oops this can’t be the bad guy he’s black. if you go back and check how many times this is done you should see that its not an accident. it seems that you watch the show thru your own racially biased prism.
During the reigns of both Stalin and Hitler, those who dissented from the current political system were shunned without remorse – a similar course of behaviour has been breeding in US media for the last few years.
Mr. Lim tended to throw about the terms, “liberal” and “progressive” very often – Mr. Lim’s words are anything but liberal or progressive.
Apparently there just isn’t enough propaganda for Lim. Goebels would be so proud of his protege. But then, Goebels learned his propaganda skills from Woodrow Wilson, another Lim type. Hollywood is such a joke, but don’t tell em i said that because they may have plans for gas chambers for those that don’t conform to their indoctrination. Screw it, tell em, to paraphrase a quote, “as for me, I’d rather die a free man than live as a slave.” Especially as a slave to these hollywood idiots. Or another quote, “i’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” Unlike most of the people in hollywood, from what i hear.
What’s so frightening about Lim and his ilk, is I’ll bet good money you can’t explain to him what’s wrong with what he wrote.
When I hear the word “progressive” I immediately think Communist. I wander if people
like Lim, and the other “useful idiots” veer off the reservation, will they be sent to “reeducation camps” at Harvard or Berkley.