As is boldly evident, progressives have captured the country’s institutions and now hold them with a near-monopoly.
- Media
- Sports
- news
- Academia
- Non-governmental organizations
- to publish
- the civil service
Progressives have most of the major cultural levers, and their philosophy controls them. The recent elections have generated hope for conservative recovery.
The environment is rich in purpose, but equally important among our wayward institutions is the entertainment industry, specifically movies and live television. For too long, Hollywood content has generated something like fear on the right side of the political spectrum.
In 2015, she collaborated with screenwriter and novelist Roger L. Simon to raise $12 million to finance a historical drama about 1960s radicals. Think of Bill Ayers, who was instrumental in the rise of Barack Obama; Columbia University professor Kathy Bowden, who participated in an armored car robbery in which two police officers and one driver were killed; and Joan Chesimard, a convicted murderer who escaped from prison and arrived in Cuba, where she was granted asylum.
Violence, sex, crime, courtrooms, cops, prison – they are all proven elements of successful entertainment. This time, the goal will be an honest narrative, detailing just how vile these progressive “heroes” are.
It served the dual purpose of creating an idea, a beachhead, if you will, that there was an underserved constituency that was pro-American and anti-left. In short, it was an audience that Hollywood had routinely served just a few years earlier.
I put together a brief PowerPoint presentation and compiled a list of GOP donors: Mellon, Adelson, Koch, Singer, Fries, McMahon, Walton, Wynn, Johnson, and a host of others, numbering a few dozen.
I can only guess how boring it is to have a ton of money and be besieged by people who want you to give them some of it. However, there are worthy charities, and wealthy people donate generously to them.
None of them offer the opportunity to make a profit, let alone the opportunity to influence and persuade the audience as stories often do. I felt like our argument was good, and that Oscar nominee Simon, at least, presented established talent.
At that time, the Koch brothers announced that they were gathering donors who pledged combined donations $980 million To defeat Hillary Clinton. This means that our target was more than 1% of this amount. Interestingly, when Donald Trump became Clinton’s rival, this donor consortium declined to participate financially.
I call this interesting because Trump clearly won without taking $980 million, a result that seems to make it at least fair to ask: Is political advertising the only path to political victory?
The response to our offer has been disappointing.
I remember a very nice letter from Linda McMahon, a woman who knows and understands show business. There was a particularly thoughtful response from the office of the late Foster Ferris.
However, the only spark of hope came in an email from Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. This is the organization that reportedly sponsored the ephemeral $980 million, and who struck up a conversation with him.
I don’t know what happened or why, but all my subsequent attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.
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Certainly no one has a claim on anyone’s time or money. Rejection is a constant in the entertainment industry, and I learned long ago to accept it with equanimity. Of course, being willing to hear the word “no” makes it much easier to ask almost anything.
The model of filmmaking that has been around for over a hundred years is gone. There will be no movie stars as we once understood them. Netflix, which has massive debt, has weathered the financial crisis, but other streaming services are struggling to turn a profit.
People have paid to watch entertainment since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. This 3,000-year-old data suggests that stories told well will always matter. From an entrepreneurial perspective, it is an asset, very valuable but currently faltering and diminishing.
Isn’t this when you want to seize assets? Doesn’t this moment provide the best opportunity to trample competitors, thus opening avenues for profit and political persuasion?
Who knows, maybe if people could be persuaded of a point of view before the election, it wouldn’t be necessary to pour so much money into the deep pit of advertising when campaign season rolls around.
* Harris outspent Trump significantly in the last election, which reinforces, at least in part, the idea that there are better ways to invest political capital than in ads.
KH Cutts was previously a regional theater actor and sometime screenwriter. He spent the last two years writing under the pseudonym Charles Martel for the Canada Free Press. It can be found on X at @cassandratwist It contributes to both rumble and Federal.