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We’re in a Fourth Turning now. If you know, you know. That can be boiled down to this: Out with the Boomers and in with the Millennials. Nothing showcases that theory better than Bari Weiss, Scott Pelley, and 60 Minutes. With just 9 million viewers per week (making it the number-one news program on network television, which tells you where network television is headed), 60 Minutes felt like the past. My mother never missed an episode, but my daughter? Well, let’s just say it would never occur to her to watch.
Scott Pelley is a pompous, self-important bloviator if there ever was one. His worldview is exactly what is wrong with the modern-day Left and the legacy media that props up the empire. I know you’re not used to hearing this, or reading it, because you get what you expect from the press: confirmation of your own worldview.
The assessment of Bari Weiss runs the gamut between erratic incompetence at best to being a Trump toady, silencing free speech at worst. That Hollywood and the ruling class have cast themselves as living through another “blacklist” era, where Trump is trying to censor them, is hilarious. If only they put this much imaginative thinking into writing better screenplays…
To the Left, to Hollywood, to the trades, they believe they are the brave people standing up to tyranny. They genuinely believe “free speech is under threat.” This Scott Pelley speech says it all — and it’s this false reality that I escaped. None of this is true or was ever true.
Scott Pelley fired.
This commencement address last year was peak Pelley:
The drama. The theatrics. The self-important preening and performative outrage. The sermonizing. The propaganda.
Scott can now bring this kind of energy to Substack and hits on the Jim Acosta podcast. pic.twitter.com/1VZZhxGkuz
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) June 3, 2026
Hollywood and the trades, of course, back up this mass delusion that this is somehow an affront to free speech. Yeah, the 3 million who watch Kimmel at night (at best) and the 9 million who watch 60 Minutes are meant to represent all of America.
Brother, you can shout your opinions from the rooftops anywhere in America, and nothing will happen to you. If Trump had the power to censor anyone, he would go after the people who get hundreds of millions of views that people actually watch on YouTube and TikTok. He never had the power to do that.
Trump isn’t threatening Hollywood. Trump isn’t killing Hollywood. Hollywood did that to itself by becoming an insulated, isolated bubble and then, at best, passing judgment on its audience and, at worst, demonizing them. They want all of America to worship the same gods they do — to elevate the marginalized based on identity, where you have no way up the ladder except to become more of a victim and find your place in one of the protected groups.
No one is being censored. It’s called being fired for being boring, predictable, and one-sided. Scott Pelley, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel are not being silenced. My god, you can’t shut them up. All we hear is their blather. Get back to me when they’re thrown in jail or simply shot, as Hitler would have done. They won’t be. The shooting, the silencing, and the censorship are going in the other direction and have been for ten years. Anyone who says otherwise is either stupid or lying or both.
I loved freedom of thought and speech back when it existed in our culture. It doesn’t anymore because the people who rule over it demand obedience or else. You are told what to think and forced to believe it, even if it isn’t true. What we all created on the Left, going back to the very beginning of 2008, was a 1984-like “Inside” and thus, we could also banish anything or anyone we didn’t like to the outside.
Social media made that possible, as we all formed a massive tribe ruled by an angry mob that swarmed the non-compliant whenever they stepped out of line. I’ve been writing about this for many years now, almost ten years, probably because cancel culture – the black lists, the silencing of speech, and the suppression of free thought has collapsed Hollywood’s empire, even if very few of them will admit it.
Why do you think Nepo Babies are so popular now? It’s this idea that they’ve closed themselves off like an aristocracy would have, you know, like the Romanovs before the Russian Revolution, or the Court of King Louis XVI. It’s easier to keep recycling the same bloodlines rather than open it up to new people. There is a pipeline now, and no one says anything about it. If you are a member of this class, you are invited to participate.
America was not built to be a class system, though that runs counter to our nature, doesn’t it? We are status-oriented, and we always want to position ourselves against everyone else. I’ve just never seen the Left do it in my lifetime. I’ve never seen them sneer at the working class the way they do or decide it’s perfectly fine to shut out or disregard millions of Americans just because they voted for Trump. It remains hard for me to fathom that this is what became of American culture at the hands of the ruling class.
I know why it happened. I lived it. But I couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t like living that way. I don’t like demanding that other people follow the rules or else. I don’t like accusing people of things they aren’t guilty of just because you imagined soemthing they said or did was racist or homophobic. And so here I am, an exile in my own country and the Hollywood I used to know.
None of this means that either side is better than the other. People are people. They will essentially do the same things in varying circumstances. I am listening to a brilliant Noiser podcast about Adolf Hitler.
What is remarkable is how many people went along with Hitler’s way before it even got to war. He was able to invade countries, and they barely even bothered fighting back. Why? I don’t know exactly, except to say that people go along with things. They just do. Unless, of course, you aren’t built that way, and I am not built that way. I would not have survived Hitler’s Germany, and not just because I am half-Jewish. I would not have survived Salem in 1692 either. I would not have been able to hold my tongue.
The Left would tell this as a cautionary tale against Trump because they’ve been selling that lie for ten years, that Trump is Hitler and his supporters (half the country) are Nazis, but really, the opposite is true. The side that dehumanizes and demonizes whole groups of people, shuns them, and prevents them from participating in culture until they comply is the fascist side.
It’s true that the Right dehumanizes illegal immigrants, black and brown people, trans people, etc. But you don’t see violent mobs attacking them.
You just don’t see the opposite playing out. We never saw illegal immigrants chased and beaten and swarmed. It was all imaginary, a lie sold to the public that it was the Right that was violent because you saw the January 6th footage on a loop. Well, it doesn’t matter because dehumanizing whole groups of people is always wrong. For Hollywood and culture writ large, it has been catastrophic.
I’m still shocked that the dominant ruling class — people like Steven Spielberg, Rosie O’Donnell, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Kimmel and Robert De Niro believe they are in the right in participating with this madness, shutting out half the country, pointing fingers at them constantly, mocking them. What a mess.
Well, one person who bravely stood apart this past week was none other than Gwyneth Paltrow who said the following:
Here is the whole clip of what Gwyneth said, and if everyone on the Left thought this way, our problems would be solved. pic.twitter.com/z8N9KkNwbk
— Sasha Stone (@realsashastone) June 9, 2026
Only parts of it were clipped, where she says she’s a Centrist and wouldn’t you know it, the puritanical fascist scolds erupted on Twitter as they always do.
Speaking of brave, Natalie Portman, Justine Triet, and others sign a letter protesting a boycott of an Israeli filmmaker. People, what are we even doing here? Why are so many going along with it?
The censorship, the blacklists, the public pressure and cancel culture has been coming from the Right for a decade. It’s time Hollywood reckoned with this and started doing the work to repair the damage.
The 60 Minutes, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert freakout over David Ellison and Paramount, along with the merger with WB, is such gaslighting by people who literally control everything. They have all the power, and they abuse it casually, without even thinking. Yes, Paramount, like Focus, still advertises on this site because someone in those companies is not a fascist scold. It’s shocking that they still exist, but apparently they do.
Learn from history. You can’t shun or ignore or demonize the working class majority and expect it to go well for you. The internet has blasted through what used to be a shared culture. We all knew the same songs, the same TV shows, the same movies. We shared in these cultural experiences. It changed when Obama became the leader of the Left’s massive power alignment. That meant if he was beaten by Trump, then Trump had to be a racist, and that meant war.
So, the entire power alignment turned on half the country. And yet, even after they threw one hissy fit after another, after their violent outbursts, their protests, their impeachments and indictments, Rachel Maddow’s nightly monologue (as she collects, what is it, $30 million a year?), assassination attempts, Trump won again. That should have been the wake-up call, but it wasn’t.
So what’s the plan here? To take back power and then do what with the other half of the country? Throw them in concentration camps? Put them in jail? Either way, Hollywood will not be able to tell really great stories until they get over themselves.
Maybe none of it matters anyway because AI will just zoom right past all of it. Why, because it’s there and because it can. Who wants to wait around while everyone re-arranges the deck chairs on the Titanic? Human beings have always had the urge to create art, not art that tells people what to think and what to believe, but art that expresses some kind of fundamental truth.
This AI film will screen at Telluride, and it was made for just $2,000. You think the gatekeepers are going to slow this thing down?
No one should be surprised when the real revolution obliterates the ruling class that now rules Hollywood. That’s what history tells us anyway. To quote the great Cormac McCarthy: You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.
I don’t know how all of you survive on the inside. I could never live like that. I’ll take my chances on the outside, with the Proles.
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