Will the 2024 Election Change Hollywood?

Movies

The 2024 election is over, at least mostly – I think there are still some congressional contests on the West Coast still being tabulated. But generally, we know the results, certainly for President but also for the House and Senate makeups. I don’t want to get too far into the politics of it or what I wanted to happen (though you can probably make an educated guess as to how I felt last night; Scotch was involved). But I think there are implications for the entertainment industry and culture found in the election results, and those are interesting to think about. Some of it is speculation, some will come as a relief, and some is the righteous hand of reality smacking some smug people in the face.

Celebrity Endorsements

Let’s start with the last one. Everybody knows Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry is extremely left-wing and has been for some time. It wasn’t always this way, but the days of conservative Jimmy Stewart and liberal Henry Fonda being best friends are long gone. There are outliers, of course, like James Woods, Clint Eastwood, Tom Selleck, Kelsey Grammar, or the recently revealed Zachary Levi (and Levi isn’t even all that conservative; he’s more pragmatic than anything else – and very brave), and I’m sure plenty more that are afraid to speak. But the truth is that it’s as monolithic as pretty much any institution gets outside of patently political ones, like the NRA or PETA, for example. So, no one is surprised that most Hollywood celebrities support the Democratic Party; it’s been this way for as long as most of us have been alive, and nobody held it against them in the past.

But things have been changing recently, with actors and actresses becoming much more vocal about their politics on social media, which many (myself included) identify as perhaps the biggest contributing factor to the death of the movie star. To put it bluntly, nobody wants to be lectured by a bunch of snooty millionaires about what their values should be and how they should vote. (The values part is a whole can of worms in itself; it wasn’t plumbers and truck drivers who were implicated in the Me Too controversy.)  The people who crave the adoration of the masses have made themselves insufferable, and that’s translating to watching them in movies and on television. As I said a couple of years ago, it’s getting increasingly hard to separate the art from the artist because the artist never goes away; the artist now forces himself on his audience and demands they talk, think, and vote like he does.

The final form of that behavior is celebrities endorsing political figures. This has been a thing for a long time, of course, but it was usually done in a more reserved, friendly tone. “Hey, I played your favorite cowboy, and I think this guy would make a great President,” followed by a winning smile. Nobody much cared about that, and the exceptions (you Sean Penns, your Susan Sarandons, your George Clooneys) were few and far between. But the fervor has become increasingly ubiquitous and angry, and in 2024, it got completely out of control, to the point where Hollywood felt like a lobbying group targeted at the average American. Did you see that death-by-cringe video with the Marvel actors trying to give Kamala Harris a superhero catchphrase? That may have been the worst one because they were not just sharing their personal opinions; they were suggesting one candidate was the choice of the Avengers, effectively politicizing a beloved movie series with a massive cultural impact (at one point, anyway). That is disgusting, and I can’t imagine even someone as politically involved as Robert Redford insisting that anyone who liked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid must vote for Jimmy Carter in the 70s.

And look at the results. Not only did the candidate Hollywood was stumping for lose decidedly, but that entire party was crushed in congressional races. Now, I don’t believe celebrity endorsements ever worked, at least in politics. Getting Michael Jordan to endorse Nike sneakers or Gatorade is different because those products are connected to sports, and Michael Jordan is one of the greatest athletes of all time; the implication that part of why he’s so good is that he knows which products to use can be persuasive to potential customers. But who cares who a famous person thinks would be a good President? Nobody, and I think that’s true of the left as well; the Swifties who voted Democrat would have done so with or without Taylor Swift’s endorsement, although they were probably happy to see her give it. The deluge of celebrities in this year’s election was likely a desperate gambit from a failing campaign, but it didn’t move the needle at all, and if it did, it went in the opposite direction. It’s as clear a refutation of the power of the celebrity endorsement as one could wish for, and it will be interesting to see how that plays out in the future, if politicians will continue seeking out finger-wagging movie stars (a debatable term nowadays) to join them on the stage.

Woke Entertainment

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we’ve all noticed entertainment getting considerably more political in the last ten years or so. The injection of identity politics into movies, TV, and video games has been as obvious as an elephant hiding behind a ficus, and the increasingly diminished profits from these woke endeavors (if there are any returns at all)  suggest that people are sick and tired of it. There’s no escapism anymore, no wrestling with ideas, no illumination about human nature or the inner workings of the soul – in fact, no soul, period. And it feels like it happened so rapidly that audiences didn’t take long to remember the good old days fondly. To an extent, this has been an issue for most of the 21^st Century; John Nolte wrote a great article in his Daily Wire days about how Hollywood got overtly political while George W. Bush was President and likely would do the same under Donald Trump. And while I disagree with some of the movies Nolte listed (especially Charlie Wilson’s War, which I love), he was right on the money, and “woke” entered the lexicon.

These past couple of years have seen a massive pushback against woke entertainment from the audience, and now Hollywood and the video game industry are showing signs of backpedaling. Sweet Baby Inc., the DEI consulting firm that has pushed its ideology into video games (I understand they’re only one of many, but they’re the face of it), has become so toxic it’s continually looking for ways to hide its involvement in a game just to survive. Meanwhile, at least one of the games SBI has worked on has shown evidence of revamping the woke crap injected into it. In August, Chris Gore revealed that Marvel is trying to right their ship by moving away from woke movies and shows and bringing their franchise back to what their fans actually want. And there are studios making movies for other audiences, be it Angel Studios and their films that appeal to conservatives, like Sound of Freedom and Cabrini, or 87North and their ridiculously fun, well-filmed, and smarter-than-you’d-think (usually) action movies. Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry could be on the cusp of a real sea change and a shift back to entertainment.

Well, I should’ve said it could have been, because last night, Donald Trump won the Presidency, and that very well may have changed everything. Going back to John Nolte’s article, the current Hollywood regime loves to react like screaming toddlers when they don’t get their way. As the celebrity endorsements I just talked about demonstrate, they are convinced that their voices are influential and will lead to the change they want, regardless of the mountains of evidence to the contrary. And if there are no politicians to endorse, their only outlet is their art. That means we’ve got two mentalities at war in Hollywood, one that insists they speak out and the other that realizes they’re losing money by pushing their politics. Who wins, the true believer or the pragmatic businessman? We’ll see, but I’d put my money on the true believer because I’m not convinced the businessman exists in Hollywood anymore, and if he does, he’s been suppressed by the fanatic. Many in our online space have said that reality will inevitably set in, and they’ll realize that they have to make money to sustain their industry, and the recent indications of a potential sea change would suggest they were right. But Trump’s winning may have changed that. I mean, look at this Yellowflash video:

They don’t call it “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for nothing. I find it easy to believe people this crazy will gleefully sink their own ship just to raise their middle finger at someone they hate as much as the 47^th President of the United States. Sure, anything could happen, and maybe cooler heads will prevail, at least in the boardrooms. But I’d buckle up and get set for a whole lot more lectures from an angry entertainment industry whose only remaining punching bag is its audience.

Cancel Culture

This one is immensely gratifying and much more important than the other two, which are really just about celebrities being babies. A couple of weeks ago, Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and one of the early speakers was Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian who did a set to open the event. I’m sure you’ve heard his joke about Puerto Rico because it was ubiquitously repeated by the news media as if it were a natural disaster. The message was that this would kill Trump’s massive inroads into the Hispanic community and lose him the election, and Hinchcliffe was vilified almost as much as Trump was. (Many of these lying thugs tried to make it appear as though Trump said it himself; jiminy jillikers, I wonder why nobody trusts them anymore.) Since this happened so close to the election, the narrative went, there would have been no way to make up for the loss or sway Hispanic voters back to his side, and Trump was toast for sure.

Well, here we are. Trump won decisively, and Hispanic voters supported him at record-high levels. That means what normal people already knew was true: nobody cared about the joke, nobody was offended outside of preening celebrities and phony news correspondents, and maybe… just maybe… people thought it was funny. First of all, the notion that this would sway the election is a bigger insult to Hispanic people than anything Tony Hinchcliffe said. Believe it or not, people of all races can take a joke and separate a comedian trying to get a laugh from a politician running for office. More than that, the massive win for Trump, the clear lack of repercussions for something that required none, is evidence that cancel culture is not popular and that it comes not from the American people but from the vile fascists in the media and entertainment world. Tony Hinchcliffe doesn’t have to go away forever because he told a joke some uptight pearl-clutchers (or, more accurately, people trying to use him as a political weapon) found offensive, and Trump certainly wasn’t canceled for being associated with him. Perhaps this will be the end of this vile practice, destroying lives and careers over “offense” taken for whatever reason, the clear signal that most people don’t agree with the press or whiny actors or anyone else who would lay waste to a man over a joke. I hope it is, and it may be one of the most positive effects this election will have on American culture.

Most of this is speculation, of course; none of us has any idea what Hollywood will do, and they may not even know right now. (They’re not exactly in a good headspace at the moment.) It would be nice if good things come of this reckoning, but I doubt anyone has much faith in the famous anymore.

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