In order for lectures to be effective, they must be backed up with some kind of moral authority; they have much less impact when the lecturer is standing up to his waist in a cesspool — and that’s what Hollywood is

Wendy … Davis may have gotten trounced in the 2014 Texas governor’s race,

writes Benny Huang at the Liberty Unyielding blog,

but at least [“Abortion Barbie”] will be cinematically memorialized as a heroine. The word on the street is that Sandra Bullock has been cast in a film called “Let Her Speak” about Davis’s 2013 filibuster.

Even before the first scene has been shot I can tell you exactly what the movie will be about — Wendy Davis’s supposed bravery. This is a woman who stood on the floor of the Texas Senate — in cute pink tennis shoes! — for eleven straight hours advocating for the “right” to have very late-term abortions in unsafe and unsanitary clinics.

If that’s not bravery I don’t know what is. You go, girl!

Hollywood is fond of such moralizing films. “Erin Brockovich,” a film about pollution and corporate greed, won Julia Roberts an Academy Award. Since then Hollywood has treated us to “Stop Loss” (anti-Iraq War), “Trumbo” (McCarthyism), “Detroit “(racism, police brutality) and “Miss Sloane” (gun control). With the exception of “Erin Brockovich,” audiences have largely passed on these films, probably because of their insufferable preachiness.

Like most people, I don’t like this kind of politicized entertainment. I don’t have a problem with movies that push a message per se. I have a problem with the messages themselves because they are usually garbage.

Today’s big screen parables are a constant reminder that the entertainment industry’s values and my own are diametrically opposed. Hollywood’s virtue is my vice and the other way around. That’s why I chafe against their incessant lecturing.

In order for lectures to be effective, you see, they must be backed up with some kind of moral authority. They have much less impact when the lecturer is standing up to his waist in a cesspool — and that’s what Hollywood is.

The cesspool’s stench has gotten so bad over the last month that now even its die-hard defenders must acknowledge it. Almost no one denies that Tinseltown is full of gropers, child molesters, rapists, and least a few guys who enjoy masturbating in front of women.

To name a few:

• Kevin Spacey has been forcing himself upon young men and boys for years — even before his starring role in the ironically titled “Consenting Adults.” He allegedly turned the set of “House of Cards” into a sexual abuse playground.
• A grand jury is being impaneled that will likely result in Harvey Weinstein being charged with rape. It’s too late for Weinstein’s sleazy attorney to pay another bribe to the Manhattan DA to make the charges disappear the way he did in 2015.
• Charlie Sheen stands accused of sodomizing Corey Haim when Haim was 13 years old. According to court documents, Sheen also lost his wife and kids because of threats of violence and his love of kiddie porn.
• George Takei, who is still milking a minor role he hasn’t played regularly since Richard Nixon’s first term, is now being accused of attempting to rape a male model. From the story it sounds as if Takei dropped something — rohypnol or a similar drug — into the man’s drink.

And that’s not counting the philanderers, the cokeheads, and the celebrity parents who think it’s cool to have gender-confused kids.

Despite all of this, Hollywood is our nation’s guiding moral light — or at least it thinks it is. Just ask Harvey Weinstein. As he once told the Los Angeles Times:

Hollywood has the best moral compass because it has compassion. We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.

As if this quote weren’t bad enough coming from a pig like Weinstein, the context is even worse. He was defending previous remarks he made in support of his friend Roman Polanski, a confessed child molester who’s been hiding out in France since 1978.

At least one person has worked very hard to shed some light on Hollywood’s problem with kiddy diddling — Amy Berg. This independent filmmaker’s 2014 documentary “An Open Secret” held a mirror up to the film and television industry.

Berg, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her previous work, a documentary about a Catholic priest child molester, decided to tackle the issue of sexual abuse in Hollywood …

 … Unfortunately, getting the film [“An Open Secret”] seen was far more difficult than producing it. It was rejected by several film festivals though, to its credit, not Cannes. The youth division of the Screen Actors Guild threatened to sue Berg if she didn’t remove references to their organization. No distributor could be found for the film, not even Lionsgate, which distributed her previous documentary about the child molesting priest. Obviously, “An Open Secret” was being locked out in the cold.

But why?

It’s not that Hollywood is uncomfortable with the subject of pedophilia. It can be downright preachy about it when it can be found somewhere else, particularly in an institution it hates such as the Catholic Church. The year after the industry shunned “An Open Secret,” it gladly produced, distributed, and lauded “Spotlight,” the true story of a team of Boston Globe reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards and won two including the coveted Best Picture award. The film industry can bestow no greater accolade.

It’s hard to imagine “Spotlight” playing out the same way if it had exposed another institution such as the public schools, the BBC, or the United Nations, all of which have had their molestation scandals. It’s absolutely inconceivable that anything remotely similar would have happened to a film that took on Hollywood.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that a journalist might cover the story. The Los Angeles Times’s Dawn Chmielewski has done some excellent reporting on Hollywood’s pedo problem, but she’s never won a Pulitzer for it and she never will. If she did, Hollywood certainly wouldn’t make a movie out of her story, and any movie it did make would never, ever be nominated for an Oscar, much less win Best Picture.

That’s because Hollywood doesn’t like the “spotlight” to be turned back on itself. No one does, I suppose, though Hollywood is unique in that it has the world’s biggest spotlight that it can shine on anyone and anything it wants. With the possible exception of Amy Berg, no one has yet succeeded in shining one back on Hollywood, and hers was a puny, low-budget spotlight. This enormous power that Hollywood has to illuminate injustices both real and imagined has given the industry an inflated view of its own importance, and most of all of its own moral rectitude. It scolds the rest of us for our failures without realizing that its own moral credibility is in tatters.

Until the film industry cleans up its act and takes out its own garbage, it will have a hard time convincing the public to sit still for its moral instruction.

Hollywood alters film content to satisfy the communist gatekeepers in Beijing

Disney is hardly alone in groveling before the gates of the Middle Kingdom

writes Martha Bayles in the American Interest.

On June 16, 2016 in Pudong, Shanghai, the Walt Disney Company opened its largest theme park ever. In his dedication speech, CEO Bob Iger described the $5.5 billion, 943-acre Shanghai Disneyland Park and Resort as a “happy place . . . created for everyone,” a world “of fantasy, romance and adventure,” a land of “magical dreams,” and “a source of joy, inspiration, and memories for generations to come.”

Related:
• Hollywood's Offerings Promise Only to Get More Anti-American

• In an effort to placate China's cultural sensitivities, Hollywood is willing to make all manner of changes to their films

• Is Kung Fu Panda 2 "a Metaphor for the China-US Struggle"?

•  Further Inroads into Hollywood for China's Communist Party and Its Censors

• Chinese Film Studios Are the Planet's Largest, Mass-Producing Films Designed to Build a Positive Image of the Country

 … In the same speech, Iger characterized Shanghai Disneyland Park and Resort as “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese.” This was, of course, a reference to the park’s cuisine (90 percent Asian) and décor (faux European jumbled with faux Chinese in a way bound to give spiritual dyspepsia to any visitor cursed with artistic taste or historical memory). But it was also a confession that the iconic Walt Disney Company, which for almost a century has symbolized the United States and its ideals, is kowtowing to the world’s most powerful autocrat.

The Magic Kingdom is hardly alone in groveling before the gates of the Middle Kingdom. Just this past week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donned a jacket and tie to appear before Xi—and applauded a speech in which Xi stated that the purpose of education was to “train the builders and successors of socialism with Chinese characteristics, not bystanders and opponents.” Clapping along was Apple CEO Tim Cook, apparently in the same state of shock as other Silicon Valley wizards who, having been warmly welcomed to the PRC just a few years ago, are now being shown the exit.

Why are these tech wizards no longer welcome? Because by paying close attention (a.k.a. intellectual property rights theft), the Chinese have developed their own sophisticated digital technology, which the security services are now deploying to censor, propagandize, and surveil all those bystanders and opponents not in lockstep with what Xi calls “the glorious tradition of listening to the party’s words and following the party’s path.”

Because movies are not as easily replicated as software, a somewhat different story is playing out between China and the magicians of Hollywood. Dazzled by visions of vast new audiences flocking to shiny new theaters across China, the six major media conglomerates—National Amusements, Disney, Time Warner, Comcast, News Corp, Sony—have all gone through the same five-step process.

First, they lobbied to increase quotas on the import of foreign films to China. Second, they altered film content to satisfy the gatekeepers in Beijing. Third, they invited Chinese investment in Hollywood. Fourth, they partnered with Chinese firms to co-produce big-budget films aimed at the global market. And fifth, they agreed to make movies in China, where in exchange for allowing the party to tailor content, they get a bigger slice of the profits.

Apart from concerns expressed in Congress last year, this process has gone all but unremarked in the United States. When it is mentioned, most Americans shrug and say, hasn’t Hollywood been cutting deals with foreign governments since Day One, and always to its own advantage? It has indeed. But take a look at where these recent deals are leading: to the mighty American entertainment industry lending its resources and talents to the manufacture of propaganda aimed at strengthening the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power. Walt Disney would roll over in his grave, if he had one.

Speaking of Walt, here’s another reason why Americans shrug at this particular company’s kowtowing to China. Ask a professor of film studies to use Disney and autocrat in a sentence, and you will not get a sentence about Xi Jinping. Instead, you will likely get a whole paragraph about Walt Disney being the autocrat—because when his underpaid employees organized a strike back in 1941, he accused them of being Communists. He also appeared as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, and later made anti-Soviet propaganda for the U.S. government.

The gist of this narrative is captured in the Guardian newspaper’s 2006 assertion that “kind Uncle Walt” was really “an uncaring husband, bullying boss and rabid anti-communist witch-hunter.” Not just in academia and Hollywood but throughout blue-state America, the same people who would pass this judgment on Disney would also have us believe that there were no Communists in America during the 1930s, and that the Soviet Union posed no real threat in the years following World War II. From this surprisingly tenacious perspective, it was Walt, not the Left, who was living in Fantasyland.

 … Under Xi, the Communist Party is pushing for a return to “the core values of socialism,” and a rooting out of such “false ideological trends” as constitutional democracy, civil society, unregulated markets, a free press, critical historiography, and political dissent.¹ What this means, according to Duncan Hewitt of Newsweek, is that the writing is now on the wall for the compliant magicians of Hollywood:

In April an article in China’s official army newspaper denounced Disney’s Zootopia, a big hit at China’s box office, as U.S. propaganda, saying it reflected twisted values and distorted the natural order of the animal world, by presenting wolves as victims and a sheep as a villain. Such irreverence for the natural order was a dangerous trend, the paper said, and it encouraged soldiers not to watch such movies. One well-known actor even made a public appeal to young people not to attend Disneyland since it represented “pure American values.”

That may be too great a compliment, given that Jiminy Cricket is now in Shanghai, singing, “When you wish upon a (red) star…”

Following Leftist Sex Accusations Against Conservative Politicians, Conservatives Join In the Onslaught: When on Earth Are We Going to Learn?!

When, folks?!

When are we going to learn?!

That is the question that I ask myself as Republicans and conservatives lash out against Judge Roy Moore, with accusations and venom that I have rarely seen wielded against the Obamas, the Reids, and the Pelosis.

For (at least) the past decade, the Democratic playbook has been to win elections by bringing up personal sins to destroy their opponents with, whether real, perhaps exaggerated (Obama adversary Jack Ryan), or imaginary — i.e., fake (Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, etc etc etc…)

I'm sorry, I have no earthly idea where Roy Moore fits in and, more to the point, I don't know how on earth Moore's foes (Democrat or — especially — Republican) know that he is indisputably guilty, and that of being nothing less, it seems, than one of the most disgusting and despicable people alive.

All I can say is that I remember similar accusations against Herman Cain in 2012, by one Sharon Bialek, who by an amazing coincidence, happened to live in the exact same apartment building of one of America's largest cities as one of Obama's closest associates (David Axelrod)…

Meanwhile, the Democrats' own transgressions are passed over (where possible, Bob Menendez, Bill Clinton, and members of the Kennedy clan have been mostly ignored). In the leftists' case, they are, at best, romanticized (Jack, Bobby, and Ted), and at worst, dismissed with a shrug and the words, "it's only sex".

If Republicans like Mitch McConnell cannot restrain themselves from making comments about Roy Moore not being fit to serve in the Senate and deserving to be expelled, couldn't they at least have paused to wonder why the sex scandal, by an amazing coincidence, happened to erupt after the Alabama judge was chosen to run for the state's Senate seat and not during any of Moore's past 20 years of often controversial public service? And while he was at it, couldn't the Senate majority leader at least have mentioned Bob Menendez in the same breath?!

Here’s the clincher:

Are you willing to believe the double standards of democrat drama queens and allow a party to return to power which wants to raise ever more taxes, relax border controls to allow illegal immigrants to pour across the Rio Grande, bringing everybody's salaries down in the process, order judges to inject politics in the public restroom area, and fine citizens $135,000 for refusing to bake a cake?

Socialism at Work: Victims of the Red Revolution, the prisoners worked to death or shot in the Soviet Union's slave camps

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the Daily Mail's Kelly McLaughlin presents a portfolio of photographs of the Victims of the Red Revolution, showing the "haunting faces of prisoners worked to death in Stalin's slave camps." Socialism at work, dear friends… In addition, one picture (the bottom one) shows

The bodies of hundreds of Polish people [who] lie dead in a mass grave in Katyn, Poland.