The #BlockTheMerger campaign has brought together an unprecedented number of power players to stop David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance from buying Warner Bros. They don’t care about a monopoly—they are the monopoly. This merger would break it up and maybe, just maybe, give the rest of us a chance to see Hollywood come back. Maybe they can do it, maybe they can’t, but there is no question that what has happened to Hollywood has been a tragedy.
All you need to know about Hollywood’s ideological monopoly is that two of the most popular shows on television, Landman and The Madison, not to mention Kathy Bates in Matlock, were blanked by the Emmy voters.
Dig further and you’ll see that the nominations went to ideologically compliant shows, including all the late-night talk shows: Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Jon Stewart. Do you think they’re getting nominations and wins because they’re good at what they do and entertain most Americans every night?
No, friend. It’s because they are part of the ideological monopoly that has overtaken all of Hollywood and nearly every corner of American culture. There is no breathing room. If the Emmys were honest, and not part of this monopoly, they would have nominated Billy Bob Thornton in Landman and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Madison, because these are the best performances of the year.
None of this should be a secret to any thinking person. It’s just that everyone is afraid, so no one says anything. Well, I’ve never been afraid. I’ll admit it was a terrifying freefall to watch friends I’d had for 15 years end their friendship, and to experience all the ways I was punished in 2024 for the crime of having a different opinion than the monopolistic power that controls our culture.
It wasn’t even a question. If you do not go along with the status quo, you’re out. They say it’s about morality. But it is not. It is about power, and it is about control.
A lot of people since then have said to me, “All you had to do was not support Donald Trump. All you had to do was not confront the ‘gender-affirming care’ madness of the left. All you had to do was say nothing.” But to me, that was like confessing as a witch in order to live. Not only wouldn’t I ever do that, but the Hollywood I used to know—the people like those who signed their names, the 5,000-plus objecting to the merger—wouldn’t have done it long ago either.
Donald Trump’s win in 2016 changed everything. They drew a line: you’re with us, or you’re against us. In so doing, they wiped out half of their audience. How did they think it would go after that? A business that used to care about box office and ratings now has no need for either, because streaming allows them to have their utopia and say fuck you.
That, more than anything, has led to the collapse of the system. As Hollywood took its lead from the Democratic Party — not to listen to its voters, but to decide top-down who should be the candidates –Hollywood doesn’t listen to its ticket buyers or its viewers because it doesn’t have to, not with a media that functions like a magic mirror.
The Odyssey is their Hail Mary because it pushes their ideology while also being a hit. You see, there’s no problem here. There’s no such thing as “go woke, go broke.” We’re not going to listen to you anymore, ticket buyers, because now we have a hit, and this proves that nothing is collapsing. The industry is thriving!
Except that it isn’t, regardless of The Odyssey’s success. I always knew it would make $1 billion, and I’m happy for all involved that it has. They should throw Oscars at this movie and allow a Christopher Nolan film to once again be the gold standard for the kinds of films that should win Oscars.
The tragedy is that it will probably win not because of its excellence so much as because it projects the utopian ideal of the Left’s monopoly–just as One Battle After Another did, just as late-night comedy does, just as all of the documentary nominees do. Art is politics and politics is art. There is no dividing line.
If nothing had ever happened to me or anyone else who voted for Trump, or if white men hadn’t been so systematically shut out of Hollywood to elevate women and minorities, or if there weren’t a climate of fear and a culture of silence that prevents anyone from thinking freely or writing freely or making great movies regardless of The Message, then you could say there wasn’t a monopoly. But I am living proof that there is, and they will punish you for thought crimes that will destroy your career.
HFPA Sues Penske
Today brought the news that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was suing Jay Penske for having pushed a smear campaign against the Golden Globes to weaken them in order for Penske to then buy them and add to its considerable share of the industry, which also includes The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, IndieWire, Gold Derby, and Rolling Stone.
“This case arises from a clandestine scheme to fraudulently acquire the prestigious and valuable 80-year-old Golden Globe Awards, destroy their founder and former owner, the HFPA, and exert monopolistic control over the Hollywood trades, awards, and advertising markets,” states the complaint.
Penske Media didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2023, Dick Clark Productions, a large producer of televised live-event entertainment programming, which shares the same ownership as THR, and Eldridge bought the Golden Globes from the HFPA, the organization of non-American journalists that founded the awards show in 1943. [HR]
So they can lie to themselves and fool themselves into thinking all this is about keeping things free and open. They can’t fool me. I’ve been working in this industry for 26 years. Half my life I’ve been online, and I know what free looks like. I know what happens when you listen to the majority, when you listen to the ticket holders, when you listen to audiences and give them what they want.
I also now know up close and personally how monopolies work. I know how the Left’s ideological monopoly works and I know how the Penske monopoly impacted me personally, not to mention the entire awards industry since all of them are under the same oppressive control that has wrecked Hollywood.
Let’s not forget what happened when Rebecca Keegan wrote an investigative piece in The Hollywood Reporter about my political shift. That meant my career went up in flames overnight, and Jay Penske was able to indirectly take out a competitor. I can’t say for sure that’s what happened or if he even cares or knew about it, but the song remains the same – a competitor was taken out and, more importantly, one of his loudest critics was now rendered moot.
Beyond that, Gold Derby, also owned by Penske, “benched” me, which further helped to marginalize me and my site amid cancellation. There is something sinister about having the same ownership of the trades and the Golden Globes, as I have been saying ever since the sale.
Monopolies are bad for Hollywood, but especially so when one as big as the Left’s chokehold on Hollywood has now become. It gets into everything and has weakened Hollywood’s voice at a time when there are more exciting stories swirling around us than at any time in my lifetime—only those stories can’t be told.
Variety announced that the merger is delayed in a tweet below:
This merger is like Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. These are not creating monopolies; they are breaking them up, and only billionaires like them have that kind of power.
If we’re fighting a virtual civil war, our battles are not fought at Antietam but on social media. The left lost one significant battle when they lost Twitter. But it’s not over yet for them. They’re still fighting. They want their utopia back, and how that translates into practicality is to retain total control over the message—whether it’s the Democrats pushing it, or Hollywood pushing it, or schools, or museums, or cultural institutions. That influence, that hold, has meant half the country is no longer welcome because they do not comply.
Think about the Kennedy Center or America 250. Think about how easy it was for all of them to pressure and intimidate artists. Don’t you dare participate, or else. And they think they’re the good guys. They think they’re the heroes of this story for suppressing art and preventing the public–at least half the country–from participating in it.
I can only hope that David Ellison, Paramount, and Skydance are up for the fight. Not everyone is. Most people buckle when they see this kind of public pressure–the Writers Guild suing them, SAG-AFTRA going after them, Benedict Cumberbatch demanding that this is unethical. Benedict Cumberbatch said, in effect, “You better comply, David Ellison.” It is their delusional fever dream that Bari Weiss overtaking CBS has turned it into a mouthpiece for Trump.
What threatens Hollywood now is less about the monopoly of the trades and more about the culture of silence, the climate of fear, and the one-party ideology that has become soft totalitarianism. I am living proof of that, as are all of those who were canceled, including the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
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