America’s Media is Enemy-Occupied Territory
Recently, I forced myself to reread (despite the accompanying torture) Lillian Hellman’s 1976 memoir, Scoundrel Time. Since its publication, this memoir has offered readers a progressive view of the film industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Hellman was a politically outspoken Hollywood scriptwriter who produced scripts for such films as Watch on the Rhine and Little Foxes, and was the longtime lover of fiction writer Dashiell Hammett.
In 1952, Hellman was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and asked about communists in the film industry. She stood her ground and refused to cooperate with what she considered to be a pack of anti-communist witch hunters. For several years thereafter, Hellman suffered as a blacklisted screenwriter. Supposedly others who testified before the Committee shared her views, but unlike Lillian they sacrificed their principles and treacherously turned on their friends.
Except for such details as her previous career and her relationship with Hammett, who was an outspoken member of the Communist Party USA and who advocated for Soviet interests (when he was not drunk or writing noir private eye stories), most of Hellman’s account of her colleagues and the events of the 1950s turned out to be glaringly inaccurate. She had indeed been a Communist Party member despite denying it in her book, and Hammett was still active in the party when Hellman gave her false testimony. The blacklisted screenwriters were exactly what HUAC suggested they were, namely, communists or passionate communist sympathizers. Given that the U.S. and most of the rest of the Western world were then locked in a prolonged struggle with Stalin’s Russia, patriotic Americans had every right to be concerned with having communist propagandists supplying “entertainment” to the American public.
Allow me, however, to register my own reservations about the course pursued by the anti-communist activists of the time. Allowing communist tools like Hellman to appear as martyrs and defenders of artistic freedom did not give the patriotic side a good look. Loyalty oaths were probably also unwise. Communists unhesitatingly lie under oath anyway, and those on the left who refused to swear they weren’t engaged in overthrowing the American government by force could be portrayed by our already anti-anti-communist media as victims of McCarthyism, or some other blown-up right-wing danger. Moreover, most of the scripts produced by such blacklisted writers as Hammett and Dalton Trumbo did not stand out as Stalinist propaganda. Compared to the ideological lunacy that TV and the film industry now inflict on us, the work of the blacklisted scriptwriters then seems by contrast eminently digestible.
We might also note that from the time the HUAC was founded in 1938 into the post-World War II era, its members went after those suspected of Nazi sympathies or who were personal enemies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as Mary Grabar shows in her painstakingly researched monograph, The Roosevelt Myth. Many of HUAC’s pre-Cold War targets were far more blameless than the communist fellow-travelers investigated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those interrogated in the earlier period included America Firsters, Christian pacifists, and hapless journalists, whom the overbearing FDR decided to punish for criticizing him too severely.
But what may be the most misleading part of Hellman’s narrative, and the part that seems embedded in the consciousness of our culture industry, is the depiction of cowardly or opportunistic Hollywood-types. Although such figures may indeed have existed at the time, most of that high-profile community was genuinely anti-communist. The activity of Ronald Reagan as an officer of the Actors’ Guild working to purge his organization of communist sympathizers was not an unusual practice in the post-War era. Indeed, the film industry quickly embraced the anti-Soviet side during the Cold War.
Even more significantly, many if not most actors and actresses and all the major film producers were politically on the right, including Samuel Goldwyn, Cecil B. DeMille, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, and Jack Warner. Actors Adolphe Menjou and Walter Brennan and actress ZaSu Pitts were members of the John Birch Society. John Wayne was openly sympathetic to HUAC’s anti-communist zealots, as was Walt Disney. Bing Crosby was a staunch anti-New Deal Republican who never hid his contempt for FDR. Just a few of the outspokenly Republican film stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age include Jimmy Stewart, Irene Dunne, Loretta Young, Cary Grant, George Murphy, Gary Cooper, Shirley Jones, and (after their politics turned to the right) Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston.
Although there were leftist actors and actresses like Lauren Bacall, who pushed her once-less-progressive husband, Humphrey Bogart, in a leftist direction, they were the exceptions. Most of the movie stars and movie producers of the period were politically closer to the HUAC than to Lillian Hellman and were hardly cowardly leftists who turned on their comrades, which is the narrative Hollywood still pushes in films about the period.
It might, of course, be a surprise to our woke, Trump-hating culture industry that there was a time when Hollywood was not a domain of the cultural or political left. Far more startling for me is what films and actors have become since then, a change that I still have trouble processing mentally and emotionally. One obvious reason people don’t notice the relentless woke indoctrination to which the filmmakers, TV programmers, and advertising agencies are now subjecting this country is the application of what the Germans call Gleichschaltung (“coordination” or “bringing into line”). The all-pervasive scope of the indoctrination to which today’s consumers of media and advertising are daily subject is such that the narratives that our ruling class inflict on us become, for most people, reality.
In a pre-woke Western society, seeing burly black men with dreadlocks being depicted in period films as Russian aristocrats, or a black Mary Queen of Scots surrounded by gay courtiers, would have elicited outrage or laughter. A time traveler from Hollywood’s Golden Age would be astonished at receiving the impression, given by today’s television advertisements, that mixed-race marriages are the majority in America. Certainly, this is not the conjugal pattern I’ve observed in my hometown in southeastern Pennsylvania, or anywhere else on the planet that I’ve visited.
TV ads also predictably depict white men as stupid in relation to women and men of other races. Isn’t it possible that white men are at least sometimes more intelligent than the other characters in primetime advertisements and sitcoms? (Jeremy Carl was recently turned down for a government post by congressional Democrats for raising such insolent questions in his book on antiwhite racism, The Unprotected Class.)
What renders such a fabricated reality almost believable is that one keeps encountering it in the media repeatedly. One also discovers that there are multiple genders and that man can menstruate and have children. Many, if not most, Americans now believe, or pretend to, what the state media, teachers’ unions, and other authoritative sources want us to think. The public therefore accepts what earlier generations would have recognized as lunacy, or at least pretends to accept it, in order to avoid being socially and professionally isolated.
As a longtime academic, I watched young colleagues who entered their profession while still mentally intact begin to take positions as crazy as those that the culture industry is now pushing on the rest of us. A Southern white colleague on whose desk I once espied a small Stars and Bars flag decided, within a few months after being hired, that not only are Southern whites irremediably racist but that all blacks in this country are suffering under “systemic racism.”
That is the effect of total immersion in a culturally and socially woke environment, which is what American youth are now being exposed to in a slightly less intense manner. What has befallen our misnamed educational institutions is not entirely removed from the Gleichschaltung that an all-pervasive left has advanced, particularly through the media and culture industries.
Neither this degree of control nor the chilling counter-reality that our purveyors of culture and “entertainment” have constructed came about overnight. This brain-laundering occurred over decades with minimal resistance from beleaguered and vilified “reactionary forces.” And while the occupation progressed, the occupying left became increasingly unhinged and free to push its anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-American, antiwhite, and antimale agenda.
The gradualness with which this was done sometimes eludes us, because the cultural left operates in staggered phases. Since the election of Joe Biden, or perhaps since the appearance of a MAGA movement, the left has gone into high gear pushing its counter-reality and venting its hatred on the normies. But the “culture” had been moving in an antipatriotic, antireligious direction more gradually before then, and from the 1960s on, Hollywood began to look more like what it has become since.
The major change in our culture industry coincided with the left’s transformation over the last two decades. The older left, as represented by Hellman and Hammett, and then the anti-anti-communist and pro-Vietcong left of the 1960s, always gave the largely justified impression that they sympathized with our communist enemies. They contended ad nauseam that communist dictatorships represented more “advanced” forms of government with a more just distribution of resources than our supposedly economically unjust and imperialistic homeland. In graduate school, I encountered so many “intellectuals” who expressed those views that one could trip over them on the way to class.
Although these fellow students and, afterwards, academic colleagues offered unsettling opinions about world politics, they seemed, for the most part, normal. If you asked them how many genders there were or whether children should be surgically mutilated to be “gender affirming,” they would have given you sane answers. If they saw movies in which white males were persistently degraded, they would have reacted no differently from me. Gay marriage would have been inconceivable to them, and the idea of allowing biological men into women’s sporting events would have struck these leftists of an older generation as a sick idea. Although many of my “educated” contemporaries worshipped communist leaders like Mao and would grow indignant if you pointed out such “problems’ as communist mass murder, they seem to me to have been less screwy in most other ways than the current left.
This older left gradually gave way to a culturally radical one; it is that unrestrained, socially subversive left that has taken over our entertainment and popular culture. Very little has stood in the way of these nutjobs, except protests from religious traditionalists and threats from the Trump administration to use licensing to get the communications industry to behave more evenhandedly.
Making this problem of leftist control even graver is the continuing operation of Gleichschaltung. The make-believe world of our media and Hollywood and their war on bourgeois decencies has been reinforced by the administrative state, educational institutions, and even radicalized churches. Hollywood makes unwatchable agitprop instead of real movies, and the mainstream media talk up this stuff as an act of ideological solidarity. This will likely continue to be the case here and elsewhere in the First World, until the media and entertainment left run into a real roadblock.
Such opposition is emerging in the form of a right that has no interest in playing nice and which increasingly attracts the independent-minded young. Although right-wingers under age 30 are not yet the established opposition here or in other Western countries, they will eventually be heard and likely make a difference as the vanguard of a renewed populist right.
The rising generation may be able to challenge the left’s media control, if our present ruling class has not destroyed all our inherited social structures before that happens. Meanwhile, Hollywood works tirelessly to make sure that the disorder they’ve cultivated remains in place.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/editorials/americas-media-is-enemy-occupied-territory