The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Let's Kill Hollywood
We all know how debased Hollywood has become, churning out content that not only isn’t family friendly, but it’s full of left-wing indoctrination, to boot. Daniel Greenfield has had enough.
Over the summer, Barry Diller warned that the double strike by Hollywood actors and writers could “potentially produce an absolute collapse of an entire industry.”
Diller, who once headed Paramount and 20th Century FOX, may know what he’s talking about.
Hollywood, trying to compete with the vast resources of dot coms like Netflix and Amazon, has been spending untold billions of dollars to convince everyone to buy subscriptions to their streaming services. …
The entertainment industry’s big companies have blown through over $100 billion to secure streaming subscribers. The longer the strike lasts, industry figures like Diller fear that the pipeline of new shows and movies will fade and the subscribers will go away. After spending a fortune they don’t have to lock in subscribers, Hollywood may be left with nothing.
But if Hollywood were to die, would anyone really miss it very much?
It’s true, Greenfield admits, that for decades Hollywood was “vital part of the American mythos.” Now, however, it’s little more than “a new woke identity that disdains the country.”
New Hollywood is no more integral to the American story than the video game industry or Silicon Valley. It’s an addiction mechanism that no longer adds the faintest iota of anything to the culture. It can no longer pretend to be a dream factory, it’s where the dream goes to die to be reborn as intellectual properties with scripts written by woke AI that will soon star AI actors.
Hollywood is still big business and the strikes are estimated to cost the economy $5 billion, but there are industries that add far more, with less negative side effects, that are under siege.
Unfortunately, he notes, outside of Florida where Governor Ron DeSantis is battling Disney, few Republican governors or politicians have the stomach to fight Hollywood. In fact, it’s worse than that: “Rather than fighting Hollywood, conservative states are actually backing it with tax dollars.”
Georgia has allocated a whopping $1.3 billion in Hollywood tax credits. That’s more than New York and California combined. A proposal to cap the credit at under $1 billion, and save $1.7 billion, was shot down by House Speaker David Ralston (now retired), who argued, “I’m not prepared to run that industry out of Georgia.” Capping Hollywood tax credits at a gargantuan $900 million somehow amounted to running the entire film industry out of Georgia.
Hollywood was more than ready to run Republicans out of Georgia by backing Stacey Abrams.
Hollywood is why Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020. Great return on those tax credits, Mr. Ralston. And Greenfield points to other Republican-run states playing the same game of footsie with Hollywood. These Republicans have “ignored the cultural damage that Hollywood is doing to us.”
Imagine if more conservatives were willing to take on Hollywood instead of pandering to it?
Conservatives complain about a culture war and too many would rather fight it with lame memes than with sharp legal elbows. Hollywood has never been this vulnerable and yet most conservatives do little more than complain about ‘wokeness, rather than expecting their elected officials to do to Hollywood what leftist politicians are trying to do to the oil and gas industry. Not to mention the automobile industry, gun manufacturers and countless others.
The Left has spent generations fighting corporations, sometimes to take them over, other times to outright wipe out an industry, while conservatives are still too timid to think big in this way. …
If the governor of a state that is heavily dependent on tourism can take on Disney and the DA of Tyler County can take on the most powerful entertainment industry corporation, there’s no excuse for House and Senate Republicans to keep doing favors for Hollywood, or for most red states to shove millions of dollars at productions wanting to show their people as inbred hicks.
He concludes:
Hollywood can be killed and something better, more American, can rise from the ashes. The industry has never been this fragile and vulnerable. All it will take is the willpower to do it.