If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I’m no stranger to controversy. For years, I’ve found that social media is a great way to jump into conversations and engage in healthy debates with people who disagree with me (or, with some regularity, people who hate my guts).
I’m sure that the itch to get on Twitter and piss people off must come from the same part of my brain that made me want to join my high school debate team. I’ve always liked using words to solve disagreements and to fight in the battlefield of ideas. Some of my fondest memories were created in the heat of disagreement with good friends over a beer or two in my college dorm room.
But social media, as it turns out, is a much different place from a dorm room. When you send a message, you have no idea who’s going to see it—and just how angry some of those people may get when they do.
As a result, I’ve found over the years that it’s rarely the things you think are going to cause controversy that bring the mob to your door. I’ve sent tweets about hot-button cultural issues, for instance, that get nothing more than a few hundred retweets and messages of support from my followers. And, on the other hand, I’ve sent out what I thought were innocent holiday messages that ended up bringing me a torrent of online hate like nothing I’d ever seen.
But in all my time in public life, I have rarely managed to make the woke mob quite as angry as I have on the rare occasions when I have dared to talk about my favorite films, musical artists, and television shows.
Late in 2022, for instance, I recorded an episode of my podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz in which my co-host and I got to talking about some of the stranger claims that the environmentalist Left had been making in recent years. We spoke about how, in the eyes of your average climate change activist, human beings are a disease that has been inflicted upon the planet. They believe that the fewer human beings we make in the future, the better things will be for Mother Earth.
In this way, I said, they resembled Thanos, the CGI-created ultra-villain who wiped out half of humanity with a snap of his fingers in Avengers: Infinity War.
“Have you noticed,” I asked, “in how many movies how often rabid environmentalists are the bad guys? Whether it’s Thanos or go to Watchmen… the view of the Left is people are a disease. They buy into the Malthusian line that there are too many people in the world, that people are bad, and everything would be better if we had fewer people. I mean, Thanos wanted to eliminate 50 percent of the lifeforms of the universe with one finger snapping.”
The outcry from the Left—and not just the rabid comic book fans who typically comment on this sort of thing—was immense. During my career, I’ve introduced many pieces of legislation that didn’t get half the attention that my throwaway comments about The Avengers and Watchmen did.
Looking back, I think I know why. It’s not simply because the Left hates conservatives and doesn’t like the fact that I’m a hard-core movie buff who grew up watching movies with my parents and who loves to watch good (or even lousy) movies. It’s not even that they really believed my interpretation of these films was wrong.
Rather, they got angry because my comments made them realize that their beloved stories could, in fact, be viewed seriously as critiques of the environmental Left. It made them consider the possibility that perhaps films—and all art, for that matter—are open to interpretation, and that my interpretation might be just as valid as their own. Maybe a few of them even considered the possibility that I was right, and that the creators of these films had made points that they hadn’t intended to make when they created their art.
This, apparently, drove them insane.
To the woke, the notion that they might not have total control of the messages they stuff into their art, or how those messages will be interpreted, is incredibly dangerous. Wokeness, like the many forms of Cultural Marxism that came before it, relies on complete control. Artists who want the approval of the woke mob must ensure that their art contains exactly the right political messages, and that it does not contain anything that might be misconstrued by the public to say anything other than those messages.
As a result, there is something in the mind of dedicated leftists that makes them believe—and not, I should add, without reason—that all entertainment, whatever the quality of that entertainment or the politics of its creator may be, belongs to them, and only to them.
In the minds of the woke Left, all entertainment should be created to reinforce their political opinions. Any piece of entertainment that deviates even slightly from those politics is deemed unworthy of anyone’s time. This means that when you go to the movies or watch television these days, you’re likely to see all the tenets of neo-Marxism staring right back at you.
It’s not quite clear when this tendency became so pronounced. Hollywood, after all, has always been known as a bastion of wacky left-wing ideas. According to Andrew Klavan, the political commentator and novelist who spent many years in Hollywood writing screenplays for hit films, the change really kicked into high gear sometime in the early 2000s.
In a wonderful foreword to the book Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul, written by the film critic Christian Toto, Klavan describes a meeting that he had some time in 2004 to pitch a horror film. He had written several at the time, which had all been big hits. This next one, he was sure, was the greatest idea he’d ever had.
But after Klavan gave what he calls “the best pitch [he] ever did,” the producer he’d been pitching to looked at him blankly and asked a simple question.
“Do you think we could make the villains the American military?”
Because he was a person with integrity, and because he was especially mindful that thousands of soldiers were about to go overseas to fight a war on terror, Klavan left the room after giving a noncommittal response on whether he would be willing to change his film—a ghost story—into an anti-American screed to please the left-wing overlords who were then in the process of taking over Hollywood.
Shortly thereafter, he writes, his phone stopped ringing and “the jobs dried up.” What had once been a promising career in screenwriting was now effectively over, all because Klavan was not willing to write the kinds of proto-woke scripts that were suddenly required of all people working in Hollywood. In a town that had been rocked to its core in the 1950s when many screenwriters who were suspected of being communists were placed on Senator Joe McCarthy’s “blacklist,” a new kind of blacklist had taken shape. Only this time, the list contained the names of screenwriters, actors, and producers who refused to churn out anti-American nonsense for big film studios simply because it was fashionable.
This left a vacuum. For every person who got his or her name put on a blacklist for having the wrong politics, there were ten more willing to step up and do the woke dirty work that studios were now demanding. Today, as Klavan puts it, “the blacklisters, encouraged, have come to run the town.”
“In Hollywood right now,” he writes, “it’s not enough to disrespect your mother country onscreen. You have to despise it. You have to depict it as a cesspit of racism and cruelty. Your hero has to be a victim. Your victim has to be a minority. Preferably female. Preferably with a penis.”1
Turn on a television and fire up almost any streaming show that has gotten acclaim over the past few years, and you’ll find that Andrew Klavan (who now hosts a successful podcast with The Daily Wire and still writes excellent thriller novels) was exactly right. The top shows in the country all seem to have been created in the same sick, woke laboratory. The characters speak endlessly about oppression, microaggressions, and the racism that all “people of color” in the United States must live with. The plots of these films and shows depict life in the United States as an eternal struggle of good versus evil, in which minorities of all kinds are always fighting against the oppressive structures of the places they live.
And anyone who dares to point out that this does not quite reflect reality is immediately shamed.
Consider the case of Rainn Wilson, who played the offbeat character Dwight Schrute on NBC’s The Office for nearly a decade. Not a right-wing guy by any means, Wilson took to Twitter to speak about a recent episode of the HBO series The Last of Us, based on a video game of the same name. The message was simple, and relatively surprising coming from someone who had spent so long in Hollywood—and who, by all outward appearances, was a dyed-in-the-wool leftie.
“I do think there is an anti-Christian bias in Hollywood,” Wilson wrote. “As soon as the David character in ‘The Last of Us’ started reading from the Bible I knew that he was going to be a horrific villain. Could there be a Bible-reading preacher on a show who is actually loving and kind?”2
To me, this is the kind of message that Twitter was made for. It’s a poignant piece of cultural criticism in miniature; on its face, it shouldn’t offend anyone. It even includes a question, rhetorical or not, that seems intended to start a polite conversation.
For a while, that’s what happened. Even left-wing accounts in the replies discussed the issue politely and insightfully, offering examples of films and shows in which Christian characters have been portrayed in a positive light.
Then, just a few hours later, Wilson issued a follow-up tweet lamenting the fact that Fox News had used his first message on the front page of its website. He noted that he did not agree with the positions of Evangelical Christians, who were, in his opinion, “Banning books – banning freedoms – denying inconvenient science, taking a grotesque anti-LGBTQ+ platform.”3
Clearly, Rainn Wilson had stepped out of line. After vicious replies from left-wing accounts—and their quote tweets—to his original observation of Hollywood bias against Christians,4 he had obviously felt the need to stand up and immediately signal once again that he was on the right team.
Scrolling through Twitter one day, I happened to see an article about this small controversy. This, as I recall, is when I first learned that the show The Last of Us existed. Given that the show seemed to be getting quite a bit of praise in the mainstream press, I wasn’t surprised to find out that it featured a strong anti-Christian bias. Then, almost by accident, I scrolled down in the story and saw the series had been created and written by Craig Mazin, my old college roommate.
Now, I thought, it all made sense. Given his inveterate leftism, his prurient and juvenile sense of humor, and his dripping contempt for most Americans who didn’t share his radical views, it came as no surprise that Craig was more than happy to write screenplays depicting Christians as arch-villains to be feared.
Over the past two decades, something happened. As Hollywood continued to blacklist principled writers who were unwilling to write woke nonsense—the trend Andrew Klavan outlined in his foreword to Virtue Bombs—the producers began looking for anyone who would write that kind of nonsense for a paycheck. Suddenly angry leftists are everywhere in Hollywood, slipping woke messages into their scripts and sending them out into the world, where they’re praised by the critics and awards voters who also believe in those woke messages.
To visualize the scope of the problem, think back on your own life. Picture the whiniest, most entitled liberal brat you’ve ever come across. Maybe that person was your college roommate, your lab partner in high school, or someone who sat next to you on the school bus blasting Rage Against the Machine from his headphones.
There is a good chance that today that person (or somebody just like him) is a screenwriter working for a major Hollywood studio, churning out absolute crap to keep the powers that be happy (when he’s not busy striking for higher wages, of course).
For a while now, the people who make the decisions in the American entertainment industry have been leftists. A lot of them are people who were educated at our top universities, taught to believe that this country is an evil place. I can only speculate about their motives; if the rest of them are anything like my old roommate, I know I will never truly understand how they think, or why they see the world the way they do. But from outside it sure looks like they believe that the purpose of art—even blockbuster films—is to let everyone know just how evil America is. They seem to believe, in typical Cultural Marxist style, that films and television are some of the best vehicles for radical ideas—possibly because the people who consume the films and television shows will not know that they are being slowly indoctrinated.
This idea isn’t new. In China under Chairman Mao Zedong, one of the primary ways that the government got its message out was by making smarmy, propagandistic films about the glories of communism. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union, where citizens were subjected to films in which communist heroes fought valiantly against the capitalists for control of the world. In these films, Americans were usually depicted as stupid, fat, and rich, while the Soviet Marxists were cunning and noble. The idea was to inundate people with Marxist messaging in ways that were not immediately obvious. Eventually they would be exported to other countries to further the revolution.
Now it’s Hollywood regularly churning out films that push the tenets of Marxism, albeit the strange American variant that is obsessed with race and gender rather than class. Recently, it was announced that in order to be eligible for the Academy Awards, a film must meet certain rigid “diversity” standards imposed from above.
According to these new standards, films must pass muster in several categories before they can be considered for an Oscar. “The categories,” according to the New York Post, “would require new diversity measures to be met through ‘On-screen Representation,’ ‘Creative Leadership and Project Team,’ ‘Industry Access and Opportunities,’ and ‘Audience Advancement.’ ‘On-screen Representation’ is classified as at least one lead character from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, having at least 30 percent of secondary roles be from two underrepresented groups or the main storyline has to focus on an under-represented group.”5
If you’ve ever spoken to anyone who works in Hollywood, you know just how important the Oscars can be. Studios and producers will do just about anything to increase their chances of winning one. Now, it is no longer just implicit that these studios must consider “audience advancement”—read: reeducation—when writing the scripts of their films. They must consider it from the very beginning, measuring how well a given film aligns with the predetermined opinions of those on the Left.
In May of 2023, the actor Richard Dreyfuss—famous for his fabulous portrayal of the shark expert Matt Hooper in Jaws and of the devoted music teacher in Mr. Holland’s Opus—said that, as an artist, he found the new guidelines made him want to “vomit.”
Asked why, he said, “Because this is an art form, it’s also a form of commerce, and it makes money, but it’s an art. And no one should be telling me, as an artist, that I have to give in to the latest most current idea of what morality is. And what are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that.”6
As expected, Richard Dreyfuss—an outspoken liberal—has been widely condemned for sharing his opinion on this highly sensitive matter.7
But he’s exactly right. Once art and politics begin to mix, we are left not with art, but with propaganda. As the Left imposes more rules on the people who make art, the art will get worse, and the people who watch it will become more indoctrinated than ever.
However bad things are now, they stand to get much worse in the years to come.
And things, in case you haven’t noticed, are very bad now.
For a long time, the woke messaging in film, television, sports, popular literature, and music was subtle. The woke, even before they were called that, knew that if they wanted to keep people buying movie tickets and watching television, they couldn’t insult the intelligence or the values of their audience in ways that were too obvious.
Then, around the same time that the rest of society began to grow more radical, an even greater shift happened in Hollywood. This has proven to be especially true in the era of so-called “prestige television,” when screenwriters and showrunners have been given more power than ever before. Now, it’s difficult to find anything to watch on a major network that does not include at least some left-wing, neo-Marxist talking points as part of the plot or dialogue.
Take Watchmen, for example, a show whose writer-producer attacked me on Twitter.8 In the original 1986 comic, as well as the fantastic 2009 film that was made from that comic, one of the central plotlines concerns a villain named Ozymandias who believes the world can avert nuclear war if he simply kills half of the people in Manhattan (an idea that AOC and the Democrats might bring to a vote in Congress soon, if we’re not careful). It was for this reason that I analogized him to Thanos in Avengers, as yet another radical environmentalist whose solution is eliminating people.
When HBO decided to reboot the series during the Trump years, however, the plotline was completely rewritten, so that the show contained very little of the original source material. Instead of a crazed anti-nuke activist who wanted to eliminate half of New York’s population for leftist utopian reasons, the new plot revolved around police violence and White supremacy—secret Klansmen hidden in plain sight in Oklahoma.9 Apparently these are the greatest dangers we face as a nation.
This sort of thing has become incredibly common in recent years. Take something everyone loves, stuff it full of woke neo-Marxist ideas, and then put it on the air. If people point out that the ideas (and the show) are bad, you can always claim that they’re racists, fascists, or both. By now, it has happened too many times to count.
Disney’s reboot of the beloved Little Mermaid was a case in point. Fans complained that the 2023 live-action film starring Halle Bailey was a poorer version of the original animated tale of the mermaid Ariel and her handsome human prince—even NPR called this “latest of Disney’s poor unfortunate remakes” a “cynical exercise,” complained about its “dull, forgettable” new music, and judged it “creatively uninspired.”10 But instead of admitting that Disney had managed to ruin a classic, defenders of the subpar remake—including its star—accused the public of racism. When the trailer to the film was universally panned, CNN published an “Analysis” purporting to offer a “Definitive Rebuttal to Every Racist ‘Little Mermaid’ Argument.”11 And after the film itself met with scathing criticism, Halle Bailey “opened up” in an Entertainment Weekly interview “about all the racists who are butt hurt about her casting as Ariel in Disney’s Live action/CG-animated The Little Mermaid”: “As a Black person, you just expect it and it’s not really a shock anymore.”12
Meanwhile, what parents have come to “just expect” from Disney is relentless propagandizing for the woke agenda. Pixar’s 2022 Lightyear hijacked the beloved “Buzz Lightyear” franchise to acclimate small children to the sight of lesbians kissing. That same year, Disney also released the aptly named Strange World: “a focal point” of that film is “a scene in which 16-year-old Ethan tells his grandfather, Jaeger, about his crush on another boy.”13 (It’s all part of the “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” that one Disney employee—who bragged about “adding queerness” to programs for children—was seen boasting about on video leaked to Christopher Rufo.)14
When it comes to children’s television, the messages are, if possible, even less subtle. Maybe this is because the producers and screenwriters responsible don’t think that parents spend much time watching television over their children’s shoulders. Maybe they believe that even if the parents do notice all the woke nonsense being force-fed to their kids, they won’t do anything about it.
That would certainly explain how strange and outwardly woke most programming for children has become. Consider, for instance, the scene in Muppet Babies, a popular television show for children, in which one of the (supposedly male) characters announces that he wants to wear dresses and become a pretty princess. Rather than treating this as some kind of silly joke—which is certainly what would have happened in any of the cartoons we watched when we were kids—the other characters in the show deliver long impassioned speeches about how people who believe they’re the opposite gender should be fully supported.
“Oh, Gonzo,” says Miss Piggy, apologizing for questioning the Muppet baby Gonzo for wanting to change genders and go to the ball as “Gonzo-rella.” “We’re sorry. It wasn’t very nice of us to tell you what to wear to our ball.”
The message of this show, and too many others like it, is clear. Dressing up in clothing meant for the opposite gender is no longer a silly game for children. It is a profound proclamation of transgender identity, which must be treated with profound respect.
The same stilted, deadly serious dialogue is often deployed on children’s TV shows with regard to race—a topic that has become inescapable even on the silliest of children’s cartoons.
Consider the recent reboot of Disney’s cartoon series The Proud Family, which ran quite successfully in the early 2000s as the story of an African-American family living in California. The original version was an ordinary children’s cartoon that featured jokes, gags, and occasional lessons about the values that mattered to all human beings. It taught children about things like sharing, bullying, and looking out for one another.
The new version, however, is a far cry from the nice, easy children’s programming that defined the original series. This time around, it is left-wing politics, not story, that takes the lead. Rather than emphasizing our common humanity by telling stories that might appeal to all children, the writers of The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder seem to have opened a textbook on Critical Race Theory, copied down the most ludicrous phrases and assertions, and then written some light scene direction to turn the textbook into a television show.
Below is an excerpt of the dialogue, with absolutely no edits or additions.
This country was built on slavery, which means SLAVES built this country. Tilled this land from sea to sea to sea. First there was rice, tobacco, sugar cane…. Built this country! The descendants of slaves continued to build it. Slaves built this country! And we, the descendants of slaves in America, have earned reparations for their suffering, and continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy! That America was founded with and still has not atoned for. Slaves built this country! Not only field hands but carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, musicians, inventors built cities from Jamestown to New Orleans to Banneker’s Washington. Forty acres and a mule? We’ll take the forty acres! Keep the mule! We made your families rich! From the southern plantation heirs to the northern bankers to the New England ship owners. The founding fathers. Current senators. The Illuminati, the New World Order. Slaves built this country! We had Tubman, Turner, Frederick D. Then they say Lincoln freed the slaves! But slaves were men. And women. And only we can free ourselves. Emancipation is not freedom!
Amazingly, it goes on from there.
Images of chains, whips, and a crumbling Mount Rushmore flash on the screen as the characters perform their monologue in a kind of strange, semi-religious chant, apparently written to stir the kids watching from home into revolutionary anger.
This, in the neo-Marxist Left’s ideal world, is what our children would watch all day. This is the nonsense that would air in the time slots once occupied by Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry. Rather than raising a generation of kids who have fun, play outside, and care about one another, they hope to raise a revolutionary class of young Marxists eager to tear down the United States and everything it stands for.
I can’t imagine the damage that has already been done to children who sit down in front of radical, revisionist entertainment like this, filled as it is with such hate and division. When I was young, parents worried that allowing their kids to watch Tom whack Jerry with a hammer might lead to too much violence on the playground. Later, parents worried that too many episodes of Rugrats might make their children use coarse language such as “Shut up” too early in life.
Now the parents of young children need to worry that their kids are going to run up to people of other races and scream, “Slaves built this country!”
Even parents who would like to shield their children from this nonsense by showing them old films and cartoons aren’t safe. Given that the entire library of Disney, to take just one example, now lives on streaming services accessed through smart televisions, the company can now alter these films in any way that it sees fit. A few years ago, Disney began adding “trigger warnings” and “racial sensitivity notes” to some of its most beloved cartoons, implying that there was something somehow wrong and offensive with classic films such as The Aristocats and Peter Pan, which, Disney now tells children, “portray Native people in a stereotypical manner that reflects neither the diversity of Native peoples nor their authentic cultural traditions.” And that’s not all. “Peter and the Lost Boys engage in dancing, wearing headdresses and other exaggerated tropes….”15 The horror! According to Disney this “appropriation of Native peoples’ culture and imagery” is “a form of mockery.”16 Silly me. I always thought kids like to wear those headdresses because they think Native Americans are cool.
Apparently, in the view of the folks at Disney, the headdress scene in Peter Pan is far more harmful than the insane ranting in The Proud Family, which teaches children to be obsessed with racial division and class conflict rather than showing them how we can all get along. And more worrisome than the “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” that Disney is busy inserting into its new programming for children. Latoya Raveneau, the director of The Proud Family reboot and a self-identified “biromantic asexual,” is the Disney official who was caught on tape bragging about that.17
Given how extreme and political children’s television has become, you might wonder what the Left expects our children to watch as grown-ups. How, after all, can you go up from a show that includes lines directly lifted from some of the most unhinged left-wing literature on the planet?
Apparently, you simply take the most insane left-wing literature and film it, which is exactly what Hulu did when it turned the 1619 Project into a documentary series. For the Left, it’s not enough simply to allow this project to exist in its initial magazine format, or as a book; it’s not even enough to turn it into lessons for schoolchildren to learn at their desks, as we covered in Chapter Two of this book. In their eyes, the messaging must come from everywhere, even the smart televisions that are now in almost every living room in the country.
Although I have not seen the entirety of Hulu’s The 1619 Project, I have seen enough to know that it goes even further—and contains more outright falsehoods—than the original magazine story, which was debunked by numerous major historians at the time of its release.18 In the show, which offers the same dim view of the history of the United States as its source material, Nikole Hannah-Jones (who narrates most of the series) doubles down on her demonstrably false assertion that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”19
This time, however, there are even stranger claims. Near the end of the series, for instance, Hannah-Jones speaks over video clips showing workers in a modern-day Amazon factory about how the institution of slavery, in which every living American is complicit, never really ended.20 The implication is that the people who work in Amazon factories today—who, in fact, make decent wages and live in nice apartments in major cities such as New York City and Seattle—are somehow comparable to the slaves who were denied all human rights and were forced to work the fields of this country and suffer horrific abuse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The comparison is absurd. And it is also unadulterated Marxism.
The “project” of this show is clear. It is meant to rewrite not only American history, but the American present as well. It is meant to demoralize and confuse young people into believing that their country is racist, uncaring, and cruel. It does this, amazingly, by attempting to convince viewers that working for wages is somehow analogous to slavery, and that there is no way out other than a complete embrace of left-wing revolutionary ideas—reparations, for one.
Other shows have made similar points. For instance, a couple years ago Netflix released a television show hosted by Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers who found himself unable to get rehired as a free agent after staging several racial justice protests from the side of the football field. In that show, titled Colin in Black & White, Kaepernick speaks about the horrible racism he faced while playing in the NFL.
During one memorable episode, he narrates a scene in which NFL players are shown being weighed and evaluated before being recruited by teams—which, as I understand it, is common practice in all sports leagues—and intersperses that footage with animations of slaves being measured before being sold to their White slave masters.21 The implication, I suppose, is that making millions of dollars to play football is the modern-day version of slavery. (Only today’s oppressed slaves drive Lamborghinis.)
This kind of playacting is necessary to sustain the myth that the United States is a White supremacist country. If this is the worst example of the terrible racism that Colin Kaepernick has suffered in his life, it would appear that he hasn’t experienced much real mistreatment or prejudice on account of his race. In order to maintain the fiction that “people of color” are victimized even when they are paid millions of dollars and widely adored by every media institution in the United States, the woke must overanalyze every aspect of their lives looking for racism.
This, as it happens, is something that Colin Kaepernick is quite good at. He’s certainly better at it than he ever was at playing football. Early in 2023, just as his children’s book about racism was going to print, Kaepernick spoke about all the ways that his White parents—two people who’d adopted him and shown him nothing but love—were secretly racist against him when he was a child.
“I know my parents loved me,” he said, “But there were still very problematic things that I went through. I think it was important to show that, no, this can happen in your home, and how you move forward collectively while addressing the racism that’s being perpetuated.”
The “racism that was being perpetuated,” according to Kaepernick, was his mother’s aversion to cornrows, which she said made her son look like “a little thug.”22 To most sane people, this sounds like a mother trying to ensure that her son looks good when he goes out into the world. As a matter of fact, according to Kaepernick’s story, his mother told him cornrows weren’t “professional.”23 That’s not much different from memories a lot of us have of our own parents telling us not to wear a wrinkled shirt, shave our heads, get a mohawk, or acquire a tattoo in a place where potential employers might be able to see it. In my case, I remember leaving the house more than once in high school demonstrating truly horrific teenage fashion sense—dressed in parachute pants and billowy shirts reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s Thriller—and my father asking me, “Why do you want to look like a bum?”
To Kaepernick, however, his mother’s question was evidence of latent racism—which, when your career depends on finding racism wherever you go, everything is.
The damage that Colin Kaepernick and others like him have done to our culture is immense. They stoke the fires of racial hatred, knowing that as long as people are looking for reasons to hate one another, they will keep selling books and finding audiences for their terrible streaming shows.
Consider the trail of destruction that Kaepernick has left behind him in the world of professional sports.
As the woke neo-Marxists have infiltrated the institutions of the United States, it’s become increasingly difficult to find apolitical pastimes. In recent years, it seems that everything people used to do to unwind, whether it be going to the movies on a Friday night, watching a television show on the couch, or even cracking open a Bud Light at the end of a hard day, has become a political statement.
This is by design.
In the neo-Marxists’ worldview, everything is political. They believe that we are so close to fascism in the United States (by which they mean that a Republican might be elected) that all art, commerce, and personal interactions must be used to further antifascist and antiracist goals. Anyone who doesn’t go along with this is contributing to the problem.
As they often put it, “Silence is violence.”
Still, not long ago there used to be some places where you could reliably waste a few hours without having to hear a political speech. One of them was a concert. Growing up, I went to lots of concerts, from The Police, to Genesis, to Billy Idol to Pink Floyd. I saw a bunch of fans getting stoned, but I don’t recall any of the musicians giving long political speeches.
Now I’m not saying I was under the impression that many (or even any) of these artists shared my political views. I’m well aware of the tendency of musical artists to lean left. Nobody expects Willie Nelson to be a conservative.
But slowly, as the pressure campaigns grew during the Trump years, it seemed that there were no musical artists left who did not regularly weigh in on political issues. When President Trump was inaugurated in 2017, news organizations took delight in publishing articles about how he could not get A-list musical artists to perform at the ceremony.24
In the aftermath of the “summer of love,” things got even more serious. Citing a “racial reckoning,” many groups issued statements filled with the nonsensical language of neo-Marxism. The Dixie Chicks, who had once taken heat for criticizing President George W. Bush over the Iraq War, now found themselves under fire because their name vaguely referenced the Confederacy. On June 25, 2020, they announced that their band name would be changed to “The Chicks.”25 (I’m shocked that they’re still willing to acknowledge that they’re female.)
Of all the areas that have fallen to Cultural Marxism in recent years, however, the most surprising may be sports. Since I was a little kid, I’ve loved going to basketball and football and baseball games. I was there when the Rockets won game 7 of the NBA Finals in 1994 to win Houston’s first championship in any sport. I was at the Rose Bowl in 2006 when the University of Texas beat USC for the national championship. I was at Kyle Field when Texas A&M beat #1 ranked Alabama in 2021. And I was at Minute Maid Park just last year (with my twelve-year-old daughter, Catherine) when the Astros won the World Series (for the second time in six years).
For as long as I can remember, football games, especially, have been largely patriotic events. Anyone who has stood in the stands at a stadium while the national anthem is sung or witnessed the touching displays to our military that often occur at these games will likely agree. I’m sure that if you went back about twenty years in a time machine and told anyone standing in an NFL stadium that these games would soon become bastions of anti-American nonsense, they’d have been quite surprised.
But that’s exactly what happened.
By most accounts, the woke movement in sports began with the aforementioned Colin Kaepernick, who decided (like many mediocre celebrities before him) that the best way to distract from his faltering career26 was to appeal to left-wing politics. In the beginning, this was all small gestures. Kaepernick began kneeling during the performances of the national anthem that always open football games. When journalists asked him why, he made vague references to the supposed epidemic of police violence against African-Americans in the United States27 and claimed the American flag “oppresses Black people.”28
Eventually he would sue the NFL and suggest that the only reason he hadn’t been recruited since the 2016 season was that the owners and coaches of various NFL teams who could have recruited him were secretly racist.29
In response, some critics claimed he was ignorant.30 I’m not sure that was necessarily true. I think there’s a high probability that Kaepernick knew exactly what he was doing, even if what he was doing was morally reprehensible. I’m guessing that sometime around the year 2016, when the nation was becoming more divided than ever and Cultural Marxism was well on its way to becoming ascendant in all of this nation’s major institutions, Colin Kaepernick must have realized that there was more currency in being a victim of oppression than there was in being a professional athlete. Since then, a number of other celebrities—Meghan Markle and Jussie Smollett, to name just two examples—seem to have come to the same realization.
But Kaepernick was early to this game of victimhood, and he played it better than most. And the heightened rhetoric and baseless accusations of racism worked for him. Even when his career in the NFL had ended, he was rewarded with book deals, television shows, and other opportunities to appear in the media and spread his message. The fact that this happened so quickly illustrates how streamlined and monolithic our cultural institutions have become.
Watching from the sidelines, I was annoyed at Kaepernick and the other athletes who followed him. I was disgusted by the tendency of other players and coaches to bow to his beliefs and the beliefs of those who agreed with him. I was dismayed to see that professional sports—one area of American culture that truly remained a meritocracy—had been consumed with this new woke ideology.
In 2019, I saw that Colin Kaepernick had posted a few lines on Twitter from a speech of great historical import. He was using it to further his usual thesis that the United States of America and everyone in it are hopelessly racist and irredeemable.
The speech he quoted was “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” by the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass. As a piece of rhetoric alone, this speech is almost unmatched. And it was written by a man who loved his country. Douglass says as much in the speech itself. But Kaepernick didn’t quote that part. Instead, he tweeted:
“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine…. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”31
Taken alone, this excerpt gives the impression that Douglass hated the country he lived in—that he shared the leftists’ view that America is irredeemable. Many of Kaepernick’s followers may have gotten the impression that the only acceptable position for someone looking to honor Douglass’s legacy was the rabid anti-Americanism that many modern leftists openly embrace.
I thought I would add some context.
In response to Kaepernick’s tweet, I shared a thread that went viral over the next few days. Taken together, the tweets said this:
You quote a mighty and historic speech by the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but, without context, many modern readers will misunderstand.
Two critical points:
This speech was given in 1852, before the Civil War, when the abomination of slavery still existed. Thanks to Douglass and so many other heroes, we ended that grotesque evil and have made enormous strides to protecting the civil rights of everybody.
Douglass was not anti-American; he was, rightly and passionately, anti-slavery. Indeed, he concluded the speech as follows:
“Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain.
“I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from ‘the Declaration of Independence,’ the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”32
I then sent another tweet with a link to the full speech33—encouraging everyone to read it in its entirety—believing that if people could read and decide for themselves what Douglass meant, they would get much closer to the truth of the matter.
Although my answer was broken up into 140-character tweets, it seemed to resonate with people. Multiple news outlets wrote or ran stories on it, and it was shared widely in political circles. There were, of course, leftists who seemed annoyed that I had shared a link to the entire speech—as if they were afraid that people might find out that the great Frederick Douglass did not share their reductive neo-Marxist view of the world. I replied to as many as I could.
This, I believe, is a critical weapon that we have against the woke. Whenever they say something wrong or easily disprovable—especially if it’s on social media—we can say so. Most of the time, the source material they’re using is easy to find. So are good, science-based studies that contradict whatever ridiculous claims they’re making. This may seem like a small thing, but you’d be amazed how far a simple correction can go. At the very least, it lets the woke know that they cannot simply spread lies to a credulous public with impunity.
Another similar exchange happened with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, who like Kaepernick routinely trumpets neo-Marxist dogma. It started with the NAACP issuing an absurd “travel advisory” in May of 2023 advising African-Americans not to travel to Florida because Governor Ron DeSantis’s policies constitute “an all-out attack on Black Americans.”34 I thought that was ridiculous, and said so:
This is bizarre. And utterly dishonest.
In the 1950s & 1960s, the NAACP did extraordinary good helping lead the civil rights movement.
Today, Dr. King would be ashamed of how profoundly they’ve lost their way.
At this point, Norm Ornstein, a left-wing “scholar” at AEI who has become more and more partisan in his old age, jumped in, tweeting:
Guess who would’ve been first in line to filibuster against the voting rights act, and the civil rights act. Yes, Ted Cruz!
To which I responded:
Nonsense. That shameful filibuster was led by Democrats—your party. My party—the Republicans—proudly voted for the Civil Rights Act in much higher percentages than the racist Dems.
At which point AOC chimed in, tweeting:
Why don’t you go ahead and tell people what happened to the parties after that, Ted.
I was more than happy to oblige. Here’s the tweet thread I put out:
Sure.
- First, the Dem party founded the KKK.
- Then the Dem party wrote Jim Crow laws.
- Then the Dem party filibustered the Civil Rights Act.
- Today, the Dem part[y] filibusters school choice—trapping millions of Black kids in failing schools.
- Today, the Dem party pushes abolishing the police, which results in many more Black lives murdered.
- Today, every Dem senator voted against my bill to stop DC from throwing 40% of Black kids out of schools bc of vax mandate.
- The Republican Party was founded to oppose slavery.
- Our first Republican President was Abraham Lincoln, who won the Civil War and ended slavery.
- It was Republicans who voted for the civil Rights Act in a much higher percentage than racist Dems.
- Today, we produced the lowest African-American unemployment EVER, under the Trump economic boom.
- Today, we produced the lowest African-American poverty levels EVER, under the Trump economic boom.
- Today, (in 2017) I passed the largest expansion of federal school choice EVER (making 529 plans cover K-12), over the objection of every single Senate Dem.
- Also, just two years ago, the Dem governor of Virginia had put the photo of A MAN DRESSED AS A KKK KLANSMAN on his personal yearbook page.
- And today, the sitting Dem President—Joe Biden—gave in 2011 a flowery eulogy for an “Exalted Cyclops” of the KKK.
- And to add to all that, the Dem party aggressively supports open borders—which has led to the deaths and brutal assaults of thousands of Hispanics, and @aoc somehow can’t seem to find her White pantsuit to cry over their suffering.35
AOC… never responded.
Why push back so vigorously? Well, her initial post had 19.3 million views.36 The only way to counter the propaganda of the neo-Marxists is to respond forcefully on the merits. They are wrong. But they hope that the people hearing their dishonest messages never hear the truth.
Moreover, engaging immediately, with facts and substance, is a small way of changing the calculus for institutions that are faced with the constant threat of boycotts and cancellations from the Left. Right now, these institutions believe that caving to the mob is the safest, most efficient way to keep the money rolling in. Sadly, they are not always wrong.
Some of them have even begun preempting the mob.
In August of 2022, an anchor on ESPN suggested that the term “Mount Rushmore,” often used to list the four greatest athletes in a given category, be retired because it is offensive.37 A few months later, the National Hockey League held a draft in Middleton, Wisconsin, meant only for trans players. When fans of the league reacted with bafflement, the league tweeted, “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Nonbinary identity is real.”38 Over the same period, the National Basketball Association—recently voted #1 on the “Worst of the Woke” list compiled by the New Tolerance Campaign39—has made countless statements about what a horrible place the United States is to live in for people who are members of “marginalized” groups.40
In 2020, for instance, countless players in the NBA replaced the names on the backs of their jerseys with slogans coined by the radical Left. Suddenly, “Anti-Racist” was passing the ball to “Justice,” then jumping over “Black Lives Matter” to score.41 (Notably, the NBA refused to allow “Free Hong Kong” because woke virtue cannot get in the way of the almighty dollar—and China drives much of this nonsense.42 More about that in Chapter Nine.)
That same year “Black Lives Matter,” which also happens to be the name of an explicitly Marxist organization, was emblazoned on the hardwood of NBA basketball courts.43 Players fell to their knees to protest systemic oppression as fans watched from home, confused and annoyed at the sudden infiltration of politics into one of the few areas of life that were supposed to stay apolitical.
During that season, according to Sports Media Watch, NBA viewership fell to 1.36 million, compared to 2.51 million just ten years earlier.44 Today, those numbers have rebounded, but only slightly, to around 1.59 million.45 As long as players keep shoving left-wing politics down the throats of their fans, many fans won’t return.
When players and coaches are asked about the new tendency to take left-wing political stands on television, they often talk about the right of all people to criticize their government. This is understandable. Given that nearly all of these people have lived in the United States for most of their lives, it’s only natural that they would hold the ability to speak out against the government in high esteem. But, alas, very few of them dare speak out against the Cultural Marxism that allows one and only one message to be conveyed in sports.
Entertainment will be the hardest commanding height to retake. But it is, in my judgment, the most important. It is the most ubiquitous, the most subtle, and the most effective. And its takeover by the Cultural Marxists has been thoroughly complete.
The only answer is either to create new avenues of entertainment or to retake the old ones. Both routes need to be pursued. When it comes to new avenues, The Daily Wire is investing heavily in creating a new movie studio. I recently returned from filming a cameo in its upcoming comedy about a group of guys who decide to dominate women’s sports by claiming to be transgender. (Spoiler alert: I do not wear a skirt in the scene.) The script is hysterical—think an anti-woke Dodgeball—and it will certainly offend all the right people. At the filming, I saw one of the cast members of the Babylon Bee’s side-splittingly funny series Californians Move to Texas (in which I also got to make a cameo).
The week before, I met with Jim Caviezel and Eduardo Verástegui about their new movie The Sound of Freedom, a true story about the heroic work of DHS officer Tim Ballard, who risked his life rescuing children from child-trafficking networks in Latin America. A few weeks earlier, I joined my friend Steve Deace for the premier of his new movie Nefarious, a horror film exploring demonic possession from a Christian perspective.
All of these efforts are good. We need more. Much more.
And the demand is there. Think back to 2004. When Mel Gibson wanted to produce The Passion of the Christ, no major studio was interested. Hollywood doesn’t do Christian films that are biblically faithful. So Gibson made the courageous decision to produce the film himself. He cast Jim Caviezel in the title role, he bore the financial risk… and the film ended up grossing over $612 million worldwide.46 Much of the country longs for positive films, for comedy that’s actually funny, for art that doesn’t attack their faith and their values and their very existence with contempt. Parents want shows that kids can watch… without being indoctrinated by woke ideology.
Late-night TV is virtually unwatchable. I love comedy, but watching angry leftists scream about how much they hate Donald Trump isn’t remotely funny. It’s pitiful.
The talent is there. I remember, back in 2013, I was invited to speak to the Friends of Abe, a right-of-center group in Hollywood that met surreptitiously. To my astonishment, I arrived to find over four hundred people (the largest group they’d ever had) gathered to hear me speak. There were a few big-name stars there. Jon Voight. Gary Sinise. Bruce Jenner. (And yes, he was Bruce then; it was long before Caitlyn.) But the bulk of the room was filled up with relatively unknown actors, writers, cinematographers, and others who worked in movies. Friends of Abe had a strict policy: ZERO pictures. This is markedly different from most other political events, where just about everybody wants a selfie. Here, virtually everyone was terrified for there to be any evidence that they were even in the room. If you’re already a star, maybe—maybe—you might survive, but if you’re a little guy, one whiff that you’re conservative and your career in Hollywood is over. I still remember the palpable fear in the room; I don’t think it would have been worse if we were at a midnight meeting murdering puppies under a full moon (indeed, in Hollywood, that might even be a plus!).
Friends of Abe no longer exists. But the talent is still there. It’s just underground. For example, actress Gina Carano was fired from the hit Disney show The Mandalorian after she posted on Instagram: “Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors… even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”47
This was not her first “offense.” Prior to that, she had been on social media criticizing mandatory masking (the horror!) and making fun of “preferred pronouns.” Here’s what happened on the pronouns:
Lucasfilm’s choice to remove Carano from The Mandalorian likely came as a relief to Star Wars fans who have been calling for her firing since September, when she put the words “boop/bob/beep” in her Twitter bio, in lieu of pronouns. Many saw this as Carano openly mocking trans people. After being accused of this, Carano removed the words from her bio, but fired back at fans, writing that “Beep/bop/boop has zero to do with mocking trans people” and everything “to do with exposing the bullying mentality of the mob that has taken over the voices of many genuine causes.” But she said she finally removed the words because her co-star on The Mandalorian, Pedro Pascal, helped her understand why people specify their pronouns in their social media bios. [Emphasis added.]48
So Lucasfilm fired her. Her talent agency, UTA, fired her as well.
Because deviating from the neo-Marxists in Hollywood is a firing offense.
Fortunately, Gina got hired by The Daily Wire to star in its films.
But there are hundreds of other Gina Caranos out there. Actors, writers, directors. Some are not even conservative. Take, for example, Richard Gere. Yes, seriously. Gere, of course, was an A-list actor. He starred repeatedly in major films, including Looking for Mr. Goodbar, American Gigolo, An Officer and a Gentleman, Pretty Woman, and Chicago. He’s also a liberal Democrat who donated to Hillary Clinton.
But Gere committed a cardinal offense: He criticized China. Gere is a vocal advocate for human rights in Tibet and regularly visits Dharamshala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile. In 1993, he was banned from being an Academy Awards presenter after he denounced China’s occupation of Tibet and China’s “horrendous, horrendous human rights situation.”49
As a result, Gere has been blacklisted. I met him when he came to the Senate to advocate for Tibet, and he told me he hadn’t done a major studio movie in two decades. Here’s how one Hollywood paper explains it:
But now that Hollywood is cozying up ever closer to the authoritarian superpower, and studios are careful not to offend the government that oversees what has become the world’s second-biggest box-office market, the star also is paying a price. “There are definitely movies that I can’t be in because the Chinese will say, ‘Not with him,’ ” he acknowledges matter-of-factly. “I recently had an episode where someone said they could not finance a film with me because it would upset the Chinese.”50
If we’re tired of the arrogant censorship and abuse of power of the neo-Marxists, our alternatives are simple: build “counterinstitutions”—ironically, as suggested by Marcuse so many decades ago—or buy back the existing institutions. Ideally, we would pursue both. So, for any conservatives with resources: BUY a damn movie studio. BUY a network. BUY CNN or Paramount Pictures or Universal or Warner Bros. or MGM or somebody. BUY a country music label. BUY a streaming service. Put together the financing, raise the equity, secure the debt, and invest in saving America. Or invest real capital in one of the multiple endeavors right now to create counterinstitutions.
There is no better investment. It is not about maximizing returns. Sure, make a profit, but the stakes are much, much higher than that. Ronald Reagan put it perfectly in 1964 in his speech “A Time for Choosing”: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”51
If we can create “safe spaces” for free speech, sanctuaries for those who dare criticize China, havens for those who think freely and refuse to succumb to the neo-Marxists… many more will come. America will reemerge. As they said in Field of Dreams, “If you build it… they will come.”