Tyler Durden
Hollywood is dying, their various partners are dying, and they brought it on themselves. The entertainment and corporate news industry has long had a cringe inducing leftist bias, but for many years their propaganda and their motivations remained comparatively subtle.
Then, something happened.
Maybe it was the election of Donald Trump, maybe it was a unified decision within corporate culture to take the mask completely off and reveal the true ugliness underneath, or, maybe it was just pure arrogance. Whatever the cause, Hollywood and all the related appendages of the tinsel town religion suddenly turned openly militant and the zealotry was palpable.
This is a dynamic that had been developing for some time, but truly became an international phenomena around 2016 onward. It’s important to note that also around this same time there was a burgeoning revelation among conservatives and many moderates that our popular culture had been overrun by people with an agenda, and they did not have our best intentions at heart.
We had been lax in our vigilance. Many thought that pop culture was “stuff for children” and that the real fight was in politics. They were wrong.
The first group that really took notice and spoke up was video game consumers. This led to open opposition to leftists hijacking the industry and spreading like a cancer into video games journalism.
And, of course, as soon as people expressed distrust the leftists attacked them as “racists, homophobes, bigots, sexists and misogynists.” A typical gaslighting response that is all too familiar today. Known as “Gamergate,” leftists to this day still rabidly froth at the mouth over the mere mention of “integrity in video games journalism.” Leftists really hate it when you expose them.
There have been many other moments of exposure since 2016, from the negative reactions to Comicsgate, feminist Ghostbusters, feminist Star Wars, woke Star Trek, woke Dr. Who, woke Batwoman, woke He-Man, woke Lord of the Rings, critical race theory in television, trans, LGBT and CRT propaganda in children’s programming, etc. It’s becoming endless.
Around 95% of all popular entertainment contains multiple layers of leftist messaging. The market is utterly saturated with it.
This kind of overwhelming propaganda is familiar. It is a methodology used in communist regimes and authoritarian governments throughout the 20th century including the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, and it almost slipped right under the noses of the majority of Americans and western nations.
The goal is simple: Make EVERYTHING political.
Want to escape the real world for a couple of hours into a fantasy land? Want to see daring tales of classical heroes and villains? Want to experience history as it actually happened, or at least very close to the historical record? Are you looking for an archetypal experience, a mythological exploration of the human mind or the human heart – something that almost anyone could relate to?
Sorry, you’re not allowed to escape. You’re not allowed to examine universal ideas and ideals. Every single story must be told within the narcissistic framework (or prison) of modern political ideology. Even in stories set a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
The extreme political left wants you to think about their beliefs and viewpoints all day everyday. They want you to assume that their ideology is the ONLY ideology. They want you to assume that the “majority” of the population thinks as they think. It’s called manufacturing consensus.
The problem is, the public is aware of the agenda and they are looking for the subliminal and not-so-subliminal messages. They see the narratives and they are getting sick and tired of it.
Thus, the mantra of “Get Woke, Go Broke” was born.
The more the leftists in media double down on inserting their politics into every single product, the more broke they get. Case in point, the continuing decline of the largest media entities in the world.
The streaming giant Netflix is now imploding, with a multitude of failed woke projects, the company is dealing with a recent subscriber loss of 200,000 and a projected subscriber loss of over 2 million by next month. The company actually began to falter last year, despite covid lockdowns in many states that should have encouraged people to buy into streaming services as a means to deal with boredom. Beyond that, the Netflix stock price collapsed from almost $700 a share to $190 a share in less than six months.
The company will never openly admit it, but woke programming is mostly to blame. Netflix released an internal memo to employees last month indicating that they would be producing more content for consumers of differing political views and even suggested that any employee that has a problem with that should quit.
A major problem within woke companies is the attitude of low level, low value and low intelligence employees thinking that they should be in charge. Now it appears that Netflix is trying to clean house, with hundreds of people fired in the past couple of weeks. But, it’s too little too late.
Disney is another huge example that Get Woke, Go Broke is becoming a social rule. The company is rife with leftist cultism to the point that it avidly defended the sexualization of children in public schools.
Disney’s attacks on Florida and its stated goal of disrupting the legally ratified and widely supported Anti-Grooming Bill has revealed the disgusting underbelly of the conglomerate for all to see. Disney wants your kids to be exposed to sexual discussions and mentally ill teachers looking for psychological validation.
When you target people’s kids, even the normies start to take notice.
Disney has now suffered multiple box office flops and streaming network failures, from Ms. Marvel, to Obi-Wan Kenobi to Lightyear, the media giant is crumbling. You can only put so many CRT and LGBT messages into your movies before it starts to add up to box office poison.
And, you can’t declare fealty to the leftist agenda as a company and then expect the majority of Americans, who are not extreme leftists, to give you their hard earned money.
Disney’s stock price has collapsed this past year from $200 down to $90. The company is currently relying on continued traffic through its theme parks to sustain it, but with gas prices inflating to record highs it is unlikely that park revenues and tourist dollars will continue to levitate.
One movie that did do extremely well this year from every angle including from a budget standpoint was Top Gun: Maverick. Tom Cruise’s love letter to fans of the original film had a budget of $170 million and has grossed over $1 billion globally so far, crushing every other competing film including Disney’s woke film ‘Lightyear.’
With zero leftist propaganda injected into the Maverick story and a perfect balance of fan appreciation and nostalgia, proponents of the war against the woke cult have been proven correct. Audiences want nothing to do with progressive politics in their entertainment. It is a fact.
What leftists seem to have forgotten is they don’t own the consumer. They can pump out an endless array of woke media, but they can’t force the public to buy their products. We own them. They are the consumer’s bitch.
Activism in entertainment might be viable at times, but the market has spoken when it comes to “woke,” and the market says no.
Originally published at zerohedge.com and Richardson Post.