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I have been running the Oscar website AwardsDaily.com since 1999. I was one of the leaders pushing for inclusion and diversity starting back in 2001 when Halle Berry became the first black actress (and since, only black actress) to win in the category. It is hard to overstate just how hard it it was for actors, writers and directors to penetrate the white wall. I felt it was my moral duty to change that. But then Trump was elected. Then the community and the left became locked in a kind of mass hysteria. For the mostly educated in this country it was a shock that people who would vote for Trump existed. To them, it had to be about race because everything on the left was about race. We watched the witch hunts start on Twitter, then go after people who had done things, then go after people who had said things, then go after people who thought things. Now we are - in total collapse. I have shifted my own coverage (inspired by Bari Weiss) to push back, to speak out, to teach others not to be afraid of the mob and to encourage Hollywood to do the same. This industry cannot survive this moment. Art cannot survive outrage culture. It is killing everything all in the name of social justice. The Golden Globes being canceled was one of the most chilling things I have ever lived through. None of my colleagues would even acknowledge the winners, which trickled out on social media without an audience, without a show.

I myself have been chased around Twitter, called a White Supremacist and had my business threatened. I have a little Netflix show right now that people have tried to get me fired from - all because I speak my mind. It is like the Red Scare which morphed into the Black List which morphed into the McCarthy trials. Eventually it took Eisenhower to stop the madness.

The fear is palpable everywhere you look, and visible in every single one of their films because the ones that push back on that fear don't even their foot in the door.

Those who control the Democratic Party have the same problem as Hollywood right now. They don't realize that they have become an insulated, isolated aristocracy that uses race and social justice as a way to absolve themselves of the crime of success and privilege (like the Catholics before the Reformation). And in so doing is forced to label more than half the country that doesn't support them, racists.

I keep telling people that this, like all episodes of mass hysteria will end. Make sure when that happens that you were on the right side when the worst of it came down. History will not be kind.

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founding

“Rochée Jeffrey, a black writer on “Grownish,” “Santa Inc.,” and “Woke,” said: “I don’t care if white people aren’t comfortable because black people are uncomfortable all the fucking time.”

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This is my favorite new phenomenon. It is a combination of pathological narcissism and racism. Maybe call it racissism?

😂😂😂

As a narcissist, this guy thinks that since he feels uncomfortable, everyone else who is black must feel uncomfortable……because he also believes that all black people are the same. Awesome. Good stuff.

👍👍👍

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The big ad agencies on both coasts are contributing to this wokism too. They’re creating ads featuring every couple as biracial or gay or minority as if the whole country is representative of that. But these ad agencies are run by leftist white guys who live in Tribeca and make millions of bucks to misrepresent America’s demographics to fulfill a quota. It’s funny actually.

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This hits home. I’m a 50 year old white male working in a senior level leadership role for a large tech company. I submitted my resignation this week.

I don’t want to put up appearances anymore. I don’t believe in DEI and it’s many insidious permutations infecting everything and everybody in its path. It’s pernicious and destructive, intended only to divide good people of all races and genders.

I don’t have the courage to be a vocal dissident. But I won’t be used as a mouth piece to advocate this garbage to my teams. The minimum I can do (and what all decent people should strive to do) is to not Live By Lies, as Solzhenitsyn once exhorted the world to do.

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Re “the audience stops trusting us. They begin to see us as a community twisting ourselves into a pretzel to make every movie as woke as possible, every relationship mixed racially, every character sexually fluid, and they decide that we are telling stories set in a fantasyland instead of a world they know and live in. If that happens, and they decide to throw themselves instead into video games 24/7, we will lose them.”

Sad but true. I avoid newer movies and television. I know that it is fiction, but it's exhausting. None of these people are like me or interact like me and all of my friends. And for some reason, proper English has disappeared (pity Sidney Poitier now).I find that even science fiction movies inhabit this universe of "woke". I can only buy so much fantasy at once.

On television I find it hard to believe that almost every couple is either bi-racial or gay or "fluid" or unhappy. The percentages don't work for me.

And the remakes where they pop a woman in to replace a male. Sheer pandering. Write your own story and I won't care if the person has zebra stripes.

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Jan 11, 2022·edited Jan 11, 2022

Very interesting and a lot shadenfreudey. Personally I could not care less about the hypocritical and whiny entertainment industry. Right now I’m watching Boston Legal and even 15 years ago Hollywood was woke. Ah well.

Hey, has anyone noticed white people aren’t in commercials anymore? Only black people climb mountains and go to the beach and do all the things white people used to do but don’t anymore. And all couples are either totally black or mixed race. And if a white person is in a commercial they’re stupid while the professionals are black. Yeah that’s believable. Sad what the woke are doing. Meanwhile the inner city schools are dreadful and POC are still being used and discarded by the left.

Oh and White Lotus was stupid and I didn’t even bother to finish the last couple of episodes.

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The entertainment industry hasn't been very entertaining for quite some time; it has finally accelerated to the point that it's not entertaining at all.

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hard to feel sympathy for the people who blacklisted conservatives for years in Hollywood. Let them meet the world they created.

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I used to love movies, but the last ten years or so, I've stopped paying attention to what's coming out. When you hire based on anything besides skill (writing skill, reading-the-room skill, skill at actually knowing how people live), and you hire people who only got there because of a set of grievances (grievances they have every motivation to keep going, even if they have been addressed and are being addressed), you end up with either (1) preachy propagandistic films or (2) regurgitated reboots (or they might as well be reboots, because you can play the "what classic movie did they steal that from" game while you're watching). No one seems to know how to tell a story anymore, because the story is not really the point.

Now I read. Books are not free of the above, but they're freer.

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That story could be about academia as well. The path out of embedded woke-ism is hard to see in industries where 90+ percent of the workers and management are from the left and far left. This reads like a science fiction description of some sort of soft Stalinism.

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"Archie Bunker—the main character—“is basically a Trump voter,” a producer explained."

Bullshit. I can say with a high level of certainty that the vast majority of Trump voters care more about your rights than you care about theirs, and probably more than you care about your own.

Just because you created the "Trump voter caricature" does not mean you got it right. So get over yourself. When you live in a fake world for so long, you begin to think it is real.

I am not the least bit disappointed to see Hollywood, the great land of pretend and pretension, in such a state. As Miles stated in the earlier response, we are past the point of hypotheticals. And your industry will likely die a slow death as a result.

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Last time I checked, anyone born in the US is "indigenous" to the North America. BIPOC is just a racist dog whistle of exclusion.

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1. You can drag a horse to water, but you can't make him watch your shitty product.

2. You can't teach talent, but you can delude almost everyone into believing they have it.

Sooner or later, the industry is going to realize that producing vast amounts of mediocre, derivative, pandering, forced exposition is unsustainable if nobody watches.

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There is no way out of this in the immediate future. Teachers are the big problem. Nobody’s more woke than teachers. What do you think your children are being taught. If you want an example of this thinking go downstairs and talk to your daughter: your children. We have raised a generation of McCarthite idiots, incapable of free thought, programed to be on the right side of history and conditioned to ignore the obvious illogic and hypocrisy. I don’t see any way out of this but at least it’s going to destroy Hollywood.

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I consider myself an old-school liberal and I loathe the woke. Therefore, I no longer watch current American films because I refuse to be preached at by snotty, PRIVILEGED millennials of any race or ethnicity. Both the far left and far right are fomenting division and making this country is a cesspool of racial animosity.

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My brother is an Emmy award winning TV a& film editor. Middle aged white guy who has been out of a job for a few years now. I remember when he lived in Hermosa Beach. We are from New Orleans so of course all of the white people in his industry assumed he came from a racist place down south. (Nothing further from the truth in the New Orleans I grew up in) Anyway they used to ask him, wasn’t he happy to be out of the racist south? He would respond with the fact that black & white people actually lived together in NOLA. We mixed in everywhere. We were friends co-workers, went to the same schools, bars, stood next to each other at parades, etc. He said The only black person he ever saw in Hermosa Beach was Shaquille O’Neal playing volleyball. Everywhere he worked in Hollywood was staffed by mostly white people for 25 years. I tend to doubt that was by design but they’ve always been so hypocritical. So now they are overreacting to their own perceived sins.

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