With “anti-racism” fast becoming the most popular religion of the American Left, it comes as little surprise that anything deemed racially offensive by these “wokescolds” must be eradicated, revised, or at least condemned. Case in point, the streaming service HBO Max announced that it is temporarily removing the Oscar-winning film “Gone With The Wind” from its library because of the film’s depiction of race. HBO explained, “‘Gone With the Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society. When we return the film to HBO Max, it will return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”

There’s great irony in this decision given the fact that “Gone With the Wind” featured the first black actress, Hattie McDaniel, to win an Oscar, and it was for her depiction of “Mammy.” McDaniel was the daughter of a former slave and she couldn’t sit with her white costars during the award ceremony because of Hollywood’s racism. While the award-winning film based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell is fictitious, its accurate depiction of the antebellum South has been widely praised. That the value of story exists not to either condone or condemn Southern slavery but rather to create a picture of what life was like for those living during that era of history seems entirely lost on the ministers of “wokeness.”

Indeed, it’s telling that HBO Max believes it must provide an overt denouncement of the slavery depicted within the film. As Hot Air’s Karen Townsend wryly mocks, it’s as if HBO thinks “viewers are too stupid to understand that the Civil War era is a different place in time and the history of our nation than modern-day America.” Leftists can’t let Americans think for themselves; that’s too dangerous.

This episode reminds us of how Hollywood production companies went after VidAngel for essentially allowing parents to censor offensive subject matter out of movies for their children. As our own Brian Mark Weber noted, “Ironically, some of the same leftists now crusading to ‘protect’ innocent Americans from ‘dangerous’ conservative and religious viewpoints on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are peddling the garbage produced by Hollywood these days — and making sure you and yours see every awful second of it.” This time, you can witness slavery, but not without a “woke” lecture on it. Who knew that taking your moral cues from Hollywood was a bad idea?