“The country is in the throes of a major epidemic, with no known cure and some pretty scary symptoms,” wrote Justin Raimondo, a contributing editor at The American Conservative. “It’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome.
“In the first stage of the disease,” Raimondo went on, “victims lose all sense of proportion. . . . In the advanced stages of the disease, the afflicted lose touch with reality. Opinion is unmoored from fact.”
Nowhere was the disease more virulent than in the worlds of popular music and movies. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton raised ten times more money than Donald Trump in Hollywood. She was fêted by the town’s royalty, and was elevated to the status of near-sainthood.
The movie and music industries haven’t always been a bastion of liberalism. In the Golden Era of Hollywood, many movie moguls and stars were conservative Republicans, including Cecil B. DeMille, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Mickey Rooney, Shirley Temple, Robert Mitchum, William Holden, Steve McQueen, Rock Hudson, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Charlton Heston, and Clint Eastwood, among many others. But by the 1970s, liberals were dominating the industry and driving conservatives out. Today, progressive politics has become a virtual religion in La-la Land.
“This isn’t a night-life city anymore,” a longtime Hollywood denizen told a writer for National Review. “You’re expected to attend breakfast meetings [of progressive activists]. You’re not up late partying. And politics fills that role. You go to fundraisers and dinners. It has become central to how you live here now.”
After Trump won the election, a howl went up from Beverly Hills to Malibu. Movie stars and musicians vied with each other to prove their political piousness. It was hard to tell who was the most demented.
Robert DeNiro, the star of Raging Bull, ranted about Trump in a Vice Exclusives video. “I mean he is so blatantly stupid,” said DeNiro. “He’s a punk, a dog, he’s a pig. Colin Powell said it best: he’s a national disaster. He’s an embarrassment to this country. It makes me so angry this country has gotten to this point that this fool, this bozo, has wound up where he has. He talks how he’d like to punch people in the face?. . . Well, I’d like to punch him in the face.”
There was, of course, the obligatory comparison of Trump to Hitler. Russell Simmons, the music producer who had known and worked with Trump for many years, wrote the president-elect an open letter. “My friends, both Muslims and Jews, are saying there are so many comparisons between your rap and Hitler’s,” wrote Simmons, “and I cannot disagree with them, Donald.”
Shock rocker Marilyn Manson, an emblem of modern decadence, released a music video in which he stood over the decapitated body of a man who resembled Trump.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Jennifer Lawrence, who often seemed to have trouble finishing a sentence without several four-letter words, said, “If Donald Trump is president of the United States, it will be the end of the world.”
Lea DeLaria, an actress on the TV series Orange Is the New Black, used social media to tell her followers how she’d like to deal with Trump. “Pick up a baseball bat and take out every fucking Republican and independent I see.” She added the hashtags “#fucktrump,” “#fuckthe GOP,” “fuckstraightwhiteamerica,” and “#fuckyourprivilege.”
In an interview with the Guardian, George Clooney—who once chided a discourteous reporter for calling the president “Obama” instead of “Mr. Obama”—called Trump “a xenophobic fascist.” When Clooney received an award in France in February 2017, he slammed America’s new president, associating him with “fear” and “hate.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had fathered a son with his housekeeper, and been accused of sexual harassment in the past, said with a straight face that he wouldn’t vote for Trump because of Trump’s mistreatment of women.
Rihanna, who released a video with the warning “Language. Nudity. Violence,” tweeted: “Disgusted!”
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), who was arrested in 2001 when guards at a security checkpoint at the Burbank Airport found hallucinogenic mushrooms, marijuana, and crack cocaine in his carry-on bag, wrote a letter to his fifteen-year-old daughter Roxy and her mother Julia Sorkin, which was published in Vanity Fair.
“Well the world changed last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from,” Sorkin began. “That’s a terrible feeling for a father. I won’t sugarcoat it—this is truly horrible. It’s hardly the first time my candidate didn’t win (in fact it’s the sixth time) but it is the first time that a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and curiosity to learn has.
“So what do we do?” Sorkin continued. “Here’s what we’ll do . . . we’ll fucking fight. (Roxy, there’s a time for this kind of language and it’s now.) We’re not powerless and we’re not voiceless.
“Roxy, I know my predictions have let you down in the past, but personally, I don’t think this guy can make it a year without committing an impeachable crime.”
Kathy Griffin urged her fellow comedians to go all out on “President Piece of Shit.” And she vowed to “deliver a beat down to Donald Trump and also to Barron,” his eleven-year-old son.
Months after threatening the president’s son (without a peep of disapproval from anyone in Hollywood), Griffin finally went too far even for the deranged Left. She posted a gruesome video on Instagram showing her holding a bloody severed head of President Trump. The stunt got her fired from her gig on CNN’s New Year’s Eve program, which she had hosted with Anderson Cooper since 2007.
An unrepentant Griffin then held a teary press conference in which she made a half-hearted apology—“I went way too far”—and then complained, “A sitting president of the United States and his grown children and the first lady are personally trying to ruin my life forever. You guys know [Trump], he’s not going to stop. I don’t think I’ll have a career after this. I’m going to be honest, he broke me.”
“Imagine,” wrote the New York Post’s John Podhoretz, “living in a bubble so impermeable it didn’t occur to you that retailing a photograph of a decapitated president’s head would be a horrendous career move—a bubble in which you don’t know anyone who doesn’t think the world would be a better place once Donald Trump had had his head cut off. That is the world Kathy Griffin lives in.”
And that is the world of Hollywood liberals.