The wokeness that's eaten Hollywood — and the rest of America

Hollywood goes all-woke, blacklists white actors, writers, plots. (Brother Gideon points out that this couldn’t happen to more deserving crowd of anti-American freedom-haters and is long-overdue. Agreed, but it’s still troublesome, in a country-going-to-Hell sort of way.)

….Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers' rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. 

ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of 'inclusion standards.' ('I guarantee you every studio has something like that,' a longtime writer and director said.)

To help producers meet the new standards, the filmmaker Ava DuVernay—who was recently added to Forbes' list of 'The Most Powerful Women in Entertainment' along with Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift—last year created ARRAY Crew, a database of women, people of color, and others from underrepresented groups who work on day-to-day production: line producers, camera operators, art directors, sound mixers and so on. 

The Hollywood Reporter declared that ARRAY Crew has 'fundamentally changed how Hollywood productions will be staffed going forward.'

More than 900 productions, including 'Yellowstone' and 'Mare of Easttown,' have used ARRAY Crew, said Jeffrey Tobler, the chief marketing officer of ARRAY, DuVernay's production company. 

Privately, directors and writers voiced irritation with DuVernay, who, they said, had exploited the 'post-George Floyd moment.' But no one dared to criticize her openly. 'I'm not crazy,' one screenwriter said.

Of course, Hollywood, like many industries, does have a clubiness about it. And pretty much everyone on the inside insists it should open up to those who had, for decades, been kept out. 

But the heavy-handed mandates, the databases, the shifting culture—in which pretty much all white men were assumed to have gotten their jobs because they had the right tennis buddies or ZIP code or skin color—raised the possibility of a new kind of clubiness. 

When asked whether ARRAY Crew was just replacing one kind of exclusion with another, Tobler sidestepped the question, saying the organization had sought to 'amplify underrepresented professionals.'

But the result has not just been a demographic change. It has been an ideological and cultural transformation. 

We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. 

This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production.

How to survive the revolution? 

By becoming its most ardent supporter. 

'Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,' one writer said. 

The problems of Hollywood don’t particularly concern me: it’s been a cesspit forever, and hasn’t made more than a dozen films worth seeing in 40 years. And television? Ha. But the purge of all right-of-center thought has metastasized throughout our entire culture, and that does concern me. Publishing, and corporations have fallen in line, and academia is lost. Imagine trying to gain a teaching or administrative position at an institution where 98% of those in power are Democrats at best, socialists at worst. They aren’t going to hire you at any level.

The College Fix offers up daily examples of what’s going on at our campuses, stories like this one: U. Tennessee to launch CRT center, require professors commit to DEI for tenure. But the purge is practically complete through the arts, publishing, business, even, increasingly, medicine and science. That’s bad news.

(Addendum) I think that this entire movement: conformity of thought, censorship, suppression of dissent, has been working its way through our society since it got a foothold in academia decades ago, and has turned the nation into a group of cowed people who’d never be recognized by the rebels who founded America. The Soviet Union, China, East Germany and other dictatorships forced compliance and obedience on their populations with the power of the state, whereas we’ve been trained to comply voluntarily. The submission to the “authorities” who locked us in our houses, jabbed us with experimental drugs, damaged our children and who are soon to destroy our prosperity by deindustrializing the country would not have happened had we not been trained to do so in school and, increasingly, by our media.