The Hollywoke Syndrome - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The Hollywoke Syndrome
by

RICHARD CARLSON: It’s worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes, walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.

BOB HOPE: You mean like Democrats?
From The Ghost Breakers (1940)

I don’t need a new poll to tell me progressive Democrats are among the most intolerant, vindictive, bitter people in the country, having worked in Hollywood for twelve years (1992-2004), before it was even Hollywoke. Their disdain for those outside the liberal faith has reached critical level. An Axios poll reveals that 71 percent of Democratic college students would not date a Republican voter, compared to 31 percent of the reverse. Similarly, 41 percent would eschew supporting a GOP business owner, versus seven percent the opposite way. And forget cross-party friendship for 37 percent of them, as opposed to five percent of Republicans. This is a fanatical cult of hatred born in academia, bolstered by media, and spread via its mules, radical feminists and — the saddest of the species — feminist men.

Intrepid journalist that I am, I sought to put a personal face on the poll — that of my apartment floor neighbor, “Jack” (not his real name). Jack is 22-years old, six-foot-three, handsome, and in NCAA shape. He spent his first college year at West Point but decided against joining a woke U.S. Army led by losers like General Mark Milley, who last August lost 13 soldiers fleeing Afghanistan while bemoaning “white rage.” As a third-year business major at the University of Miami, plus an investment firm intern, Jack has a promising financial future, making him what single women once called “a good catch.” But those women were older, wiser, and themselves better catches than too many of their brainwashed, misguided modern counterparts with whom regular guys must contend and snowflake boys comply. Jack told me of one recent encounter that gives weight to the poll.

“Last semester, I’m at a South (Miami) Beach nightclub bar. After a few drinks, this beautiful friend of a friend comes up to me and says, ‘You’re really cute, but you look like you voted for Trump.’ I thought that was a great pickup line by her, and got ready for a fun exchange. But when I said, ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘That’s a bummer,’ and just walked away.”

Jack said he’s had several similar experiences, as have friends of his. He finds the attitude socially counterproductive. “I would never use politics to not get to know someone,” he said. “It defeats the purpose. Politics in general shouldn’t hinder your ability to be in a relationship. Just the opposite. It gives you the opportunity to have a friendly discourse with someone you respect.”

Jack’s bigger worry is that the anti-Republican cultism no longer ends with college culture. The financial world he soon intends to enter now embraces it, even the once conservative bedrock of banking. “The same way girls turn me away, corporate America will,” Jack said. “They’re all about diversity and inclusion.” Except for white male conservatives, thus his condition of anonymity for this piece. I said, “So I guess a picture is out of the question.”

It didn’t used to be this insane, except in Hollywood. I literally wrote the book on politically crossed young love, my 2018 novel, Paper Tigers (inspired by my time as a Washington Post copy-aide, and romance with a feminist-fatale colleague). Before it was a novel it was a screenplay and, in the summer of 2008, it caught movie Industry fire. One of the three top agencies, ICM, took on the project, and set up meetings for me with a dozen major players like Ron Howard and J.J. Abrams. But a female studio executive gave away the game.

As a non-hack writer, I had done something in my script that Hollywoke never does. Made the co-lead that I politically disagree with into a dynamic, witty, attractive figure that gave as good as she got, and sometimes got the better of my protagonist (as her real-life version had of me). The Industry players liked the character so much, they assumed I was one of them. And that my conservative protagonist was my Archie Bunker. Because, they thought, no modern hero would use lines on a girl like, “If you used that needle to sow with, you’d be a happier woman.”

Hence, in the middle of my upbeat August ’08 meeting with her, the executive conspiratorially said to me, “You clearly have political insight. Tell me something. Is there any chance at all McCain might win?” At the time the polls were tight, thanks to new excitement over Sarah Palin as his running mate. I knew there and then that once Obama won, my script would lose. And I was right, because in the liberal euphoria that followed, a “funny” clever conservative could not exist.

But it was Donald Trump’s 2016 election that created the current uncivil state — and Hollywoke. Supporting Trump made you a pariah. Of the over twenty friends I had in the movie industry, only three are still my friends. I didn’t drop the others. They dropped me. I’ve never unfriended anyone, no matter how much nonsensical leftwing blather they threw at me. I always tried to be diplomatic in my debates with them, personal or virtual. But I learned early on that my every rebuttal was a nail in our friendship or romance.

Scott Adams called out the phenomenon in his December 15th podcast of Coffee with Scott Adams (4:40). “The number of times I get insulted, and then I check and I say, oh, it’s an artist.… Often they work in Hollywood. Hollywood writers are absolutely the worst.”

I still write scripts as well as books. But no one in Hollywoke will ever again confuse me with one of them.

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