by Ben Shapiro
Hollywood is the land of liberal renormalization, the chief outlet for a political minority making emotional appeals to a broader country. As television’s top creator Shonda Rhimes stated in her book, Year of Yes:
I am NORMALIZING television. You should get to turn on the TV and see your tribe. . . . If you never see openly bisexual Callie Torres stare her father down and holler (my favorite line ever), “You can’t pray away the gay!!!” at him . . . If you never see a transgender character on TV have family, understand, a Dr. Bailey to love and support her . . . If you never see any of those people on TV . . . What do you learn about your importance in the fabric of society. What do straight people learn?10
In 2017, she added, “I get really offended at the concept that what came out of the [2016] election was that—how do I say this?—impoverished people who are not of color needed more attention. . . . I don’t think any [of the audience that watches my shows] are [Trump supporters], because I’m a black, Planned Parenthood–loving, liberal feminist.”11 So perhaps Rhimes should have explained that you should be able to turn on the TV and see your tribe . . . unless your tribe disagrees with Rhimes. In that case, your tribe will be represented by stand-ins for John Lithgow in Footloose, glowering at the joy and wonder of liberal moral culture.
That attitude toward conservatives in both movie and television content is nothing new. Conservatives exist in dramas as foils for more open-minded and tolerant liberals; in comedies, they generally take the form of wrong-thinking incompetents. Occasionally, a stray libertarian may be portrayed as a cynical life guide (see, for example, Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation or Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock), but it is an absolute certainty that no mainstream television show or movie will ever portray an advocate for traditional marriage as anything but a bigot, or a thoroughly pro-life woman as anything but a sellout.
Why does this matter? It matters because, as my old mentor Andrew Breitbart used to say, culture is upstream of politics. Americans engage with the culture far more than with politics: political feeling is just the manifestation of underlying feelings people have about compassion and justice, about right and wrong. And those feelings are shaped by the cultural sea in which we all swim.
Netflix has 195 million global subscribers; Disney+ has over 70 million; Hulu has another 32 million. HBO Max has in excess of 30 million subscribers. Apple TV has over 42 million subscribers. Amazon Prime has over 140 million.12 According to Nielsen, Americans over the age of eighteen spend at least four hours per day watching TV; they spend more than twelve hours a day on average engaged with TV.13
And that cultural sea is dominated by the Left, from top to bottom. There is a reason Netflix has green-lit a multiyear slate of projects from Barack and Michelle Obama;14 that Obama administration alum and now Biden staffer Susan Rice was on the Netflix board;15 that 98 percent of all donations from Netflix employees went to Democrats in 2016, and 99.6 percent in 2018;16 that Netflix announced it would not invest in making film or television in Georgia if the state’s pro-life law stood17 (Netflix has no problem doing business with China, of course).18 There is a reason Disney said it would have a tough time doing business in Georgia, too19 (and yes, Mulan was filmed in Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has been stuffing Muslim Uighurs in concentration camps).20 There is a reason that during the Black Lives Matters riots of summer 2020, Amazon Prime recommended left-leaning films and television to those who chose to log on. Hollywood is thoroughly leftist, and that is reflected from top to bottom. Its bias is inescapable.
The product is obvious: more people thinking along leftist lines. A study from the Norman Lear Center found that conservatives watch far less television than either “blues” or “purples,” and are also “least likely to say they have learned about politics and social issues from fictional movies or TV”; both “blues” and “purples” are more likely to discuss politics based on entertainment and to take action based on entertainment; 72 percent of all political shift measured since 2008, not coincidentally, was toward liberal perspectives. Naturally, the Lear Center concluded that television creators should place “more emphasis on raising awareness of discrimination and its profound social impact.”21
But Hollywood’s progressivism isn’t enough. Not anymore. Not for the authoritarian Left. The Hollywood Left used to decry McCarthyism. Now they are its chief practitioners.
THE CANCEL CULTURE COMES FOR EVERYONE
Cancel culture is the order of the day in Hollywood. And you need not be a conservative to be canceled. The mere passage of time may subject you to the predations of the authoritarian leftist mob. It’s become a truism to state that classics of the past simply wouldn’t be made today—movies like Airplane! and shows like All in the Family would never make the cut. And that’s obviously true. Hollywood studios regularly prescreen their shows for activist groups like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation; GLAAD brags that its media team “work closely with TV networks, film studios, production companies, showrunners, scriptwriters, casting directors, ad agencies, and public relations firms” to ensure “fair and accurate representation” of LGBT people. By “fair and accurate,” GLAAD presumably means reflective of GLAAD’s agenda.22 It’s unlikely that GLAAD would let slide any joke about sexual orientation.
In fact, most jokes are now off-limits. The Office retconned its own content, removing a scene in Season 9 in which a character wore blackface (never mind that the scene was about how insane and inappropriate it was to wear blackface). Executive producer Greg Daniels intoned, “Today we cut a shot of an actor wearing blackface that was used to criticize a specific racist European practice. Blackface is unacceptable, and making the point so graphically is hurtful and wrong. I am sorry for the pain that caused.” Meanwhile, Community cut an entire episode from the Netflix library because an Asian character dressed in blackface, prompting a black character to fire back, “So, we’re just gonna ignore that hate crime, uh?” Even condemning blackface is offensive now. Episodes of Scrubs and 30 Rock were also disappeared.23
Movies of the past have been taken down to provide “context,” most famously when HBO Max removed Gone with the Wind from its library, explaining that the film was “a product of its time” that contained “ethnic and racial prejudices” that were “wrong then and are wrong today.”24 Never mind that Hattie McDaniel, who was accused of embodying that prejudice in playing Mammy, became the first black actress to win an Oscar for her role. Disney+ has now updated old movies with a warning: “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe.” Movies tagged with this pathetic mewling include Aladdin, Fantasia, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, The Jungle Book, and Swiss Family Robinson.25
And if content is perceived as un-woke—no matter how apolitical—it may be targeted for cancellation as well. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests and riots of 2020, the reality series Cops was canceled from Paramount Network after a thirty-one-year run—all because of fears that the show might show police officers in a positive context. The leftist activist group Color of Change cheered the decision, stating, “Crime television encourages the public to accept the norms of over-policing and excessive force and reject reform, while supporting the exact behavior that destroys the lives of Black people. Cops led the way. . . . We call on A&E to cancel Live PD next.”26 Days later, it was.27
It’s not a matter of merely canceling shows or movies, either. Artists who cross the woke mob find themselves targeted for destruction. In July 2018, Scarlett Johansson dropped out of production on a movie titled Rub and Tug, about a transgender man. The radical Left suggested that only a transgender man could play a transgender man�
��a biological woman who did not identify as a man could not. Now, this is one of the most absurd contentions in human history: actors literally act like other people. And verisimilitude shouldn’t have been an issue here: a biological human female was playing a biological human female who believes she is male. Yet the woke community decided it was better that the film, starring one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, be canceled outright rather than starring a non-transgender person. Johansson duly performed her penance: “I am thankful that this casting debate . . . has sparked a larger conversation about diversity and representation in film.”28 This illogical proposition creates some awkward moments: when Ellen Page announced she was a transgender man, the series in which she stars, Umbrella Academy, announced it would be fine for “Elliot Page,” a transgender man, to continue to play a non-transgender woman.
This puritanism regarding woke standards represents a serious career threat to comedians, who make their money off willingness to mock hard-and-fast rules. Hilariously, this has led to the specter of top comics tearing into the woke. After Sarah Silverman, a radical leftist, revealed that she had lost a film role thanks to a blackface sketch from 2007 (again, the sketch was about racism faced by black Americans), she tore into cancel culture: “Without a path to redemption, when you take someone, you found a tweet they wrote seven years ago or a thing that they said, and you expose it and you say, ‘this person should be no more, banish them forever.’ . . . Do we want people to be changed? Or do we want them to stay the same to freeze in a moment we found on the internet from 12 years ago.”29 Dave Chappelle has slammed cancel culture, calling it “celebrity-hunting season.”30 Bill Burr ranted on Saturday Night Live, “You know, how stupid is that ‘canceled’ thing? They’re literally running out of people to cancel. They’re going after dead people now.”31 Rowan Atkinson recently and correctly compared the cancel culture to the “digital equivalent of the medieval mob, roaming the streets, looking for someone to burn.” He added, “It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be ‘canceled.’”32
HOW HOLLYWOOD GOT RENORMALIZED
All of this raises a serious question: if woke culture quashes compelling entertainment, wrecks comedy, and generally makes entertainment worse, why cave to it? Why not simply make entertainment for the broadest possible swath of Americans?
The answer lies, once again, in renormalization. All it takes to renormalize an institution is a solid minority of intransigent, inflexible people: catering to that base, while preying on the innate compliance of the majority, can lead to a complete reorientation. That’s precisely what’s happened in Hollywood. Where Hollywood used to broadcast—emphasis on broad—searching for the biggest possible audience, they now narrowcast in order to appease the inflexible leftist coalition. Practically, this means catering to critics, who are near universal in their reflection of woke priorities; it also means superserving intransigent subsets of the audience, then counting on the rest of the audience to go along.
Hollywood critics are monolithically adherents to authoritarian leftism. This authoritarian leftism has infused film criticism to an extraordinary extent: films, if perceived as political, are no longer judged broadly on their merits. Instead, they’re judged on checking woke boxes. RottenTomatoes—the one-stop-shop for movie criticism—demonstrates a clear bias in favor of leftist films.33 For critics, RottenTomatoes’ aggregation of opinion also exacerbates confirmation bias: critics don’t want to stand out from the crowd. As Owen Gleiberman of Variety writes, “The sting of the pressure to conform is omnipresent.”34 When one Variety critic recently had the temerity to suggest that Carey Mulligan was miscast in the left-wing-oriented Promising Young Woman, Variety went so far as to tar its own critic as a crypto-misogynist and offer an apology for his review.35 The top-down censorship of the authoritarian Left is in full swing among the critics. The goal isn’t just silencing dissent, but forcing public confession and repentance.
There’s a reason critics are, all too often, wildly out of touch with movie audiences. It’s not rare for audiences to reject a film based on its lack of quality, but for critics to praise it to the skies for political reasons. For example, Ghostbusters (2016), the female-cast reboot of the original Bill Murray classic, met with tepid audience response—a 50 percent positive score among audiences on RottenTomatoes, and a brutal box-office run that cost the studio $70 million. That’s because the film happens to be a mediocre piece of annoying crap. But according to critics, the movie was important—and it was important because it supplanted male leads with female leads. Megan Garber of The Atlantic wrote, “For a moment, it seemed, the future of women in Hollywood—and the future of feminism itself—would be riding on the shoulders of Paul Feig, Ivan Reitman, Melissa McCarthy, and some CGI-ed ghosts.” And—surprise!—Garber found the movie to be “pretty great,” balancing “ghosts and guns and gags and girl power.”36
When critics come into conflict with audiences, there can be only one explanation: Americans are a bunch of bigots. So naturally, Ghostbusters’ failure became evidence that Americans simply couldn’t handle powerful females. And the film’s failure was laid at the feet of these fans, who were merely frustrated manbabies incapable of expressing a thought about a mediocre film.
This phenomenon has been invoked over and over again to explain just why critics like movies the public often doesn’t. If fans think that Star Wars: The Last Jedi was an incoherent mishmash of bad plotting, destruction of beloved and iconic characters, addition of new and boring characters, with a side plot of animal rights silliness, that’s not because maybe they’re right—it’s because they are “toxic fans.” If, in particular, Star Wars fans found Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) to be an absolutely superfluous and soporific character (she was), that was because they were racist and sexist. The critics spoke, and loved The Last Jedi (90 percent fresh); the audience spoke and hated it (42 percent fresh). Obviously, the audience was wrong. As Matt Miller of Esquire put it, Star Wars fans “have tragically become synonymous with hate, bigotry, and pervasive assholeness in 2018. . . . The Last Jedi inspired the worst impulses of a far-right movement that’s taking hold of the internet and extending its influence into the real world.”37 Toxic fans can be used as a constant excuse for the fact that critics are out of touch with the unwashed masses.
Meanwhile, critics can be as toxic as they like with reference to work they perceive as insufficiently woke. Dave Chappelle’s Sticks and Stones comedy special took on cancel culture and wokescolding—so critics excoriated it, giving it a 35 percent fresh score, complaining that Chappelle had become “a man who wants it all—money, fame, influence—without much having to answer to anyone.”38 When Chappelle reverted to rants about the nature of systemic American racism, the critics reverted to type: “Can a comedy set win a Pulitzer? . . . theater at its most powerful,”39 “not funny . . . but the comedian was in top form.”40 (Chappelle, it should be noted, survived in large measure because his entire shtick had been built around opposition to cancel culture.) When Hillbilly Elegy premiered, the critics savaged it (27 percent fresh)—not primarily because of its moviemaking, but because between 2016 and 2020, it became un-woke to take seriously impoverished white protagonists, or to champion the power of individual decision making. The movie review for The Atlantic, which deemed the film “one of the worst movies of the year,” found it worthy of note that the original book, which sold several million copies, “often appears uninterested in interrogating deeper systemic issues.”41 Audiences, by the way, loved the film—the audience rating was 86 percent fresh on RottenTomatoes.
Critics help kill entertainment projects they oppose politically. But most Americans don’t sit around waiting for takes from the critics. The biggest factor cutting in favor of the woking of Hollywood, ironically enough, is the fragmentation of the market itself. For decades, the rule in Hollywood was to try to cater to the largest available audience—to broad-cast. The biggest tent-pole movies—think
of the Marvel Universe—still do. But as the distribution mechanisms for entertainment fracture, it becomes more plausible to narrowcast toward particular audiences, or to cater to the most intransigent audiences. Narrowcasting automatically breeds renormalization.
Hollywood relies on conservative or apolitical Americans to ignore being offended, and superserves those most likely to raise a stink—or to consume products enthusiastically based on ideology. That’s why Netflix has categories like “Black Lives Matter Collection” alongside “Drama,” and announced just before launching the “Black Lives Matter” genre, “To be silent is to be complicit.”42 The industry is no longer about producing blockbuster films geared toward drawing massive audiences. It’s about pleasing the loudest, cudgeling everyone else, and hoping nobody will tune out. Most of the time, that hope is justified. After all, it’s not as though there are tons of conservative-friendly alternatives out there. Even if you’re offended by Netflix mirroring the woke dictates of BLM, you can’t exactly switch over to Hulu or Amazon: those companies put up their own propagandistic film categories designed to respond to America’s racial “reckoning,” and announced their own solidarity with Black Lives Matter.43 Renormalization of Hollywood, combined with closing the door to dissent, has created an entertainment monolith.
