After nearly a decade of treating the War on Terror as an act of hubris and greed perpetrated by the proxies of multi-billion-dollar corporations, Hollywood has found a new storyline. But in his August 26 piece for the Wall Street Journal, “Hollywood Tries a New Battle Plan,” John Jurgensen incorrectly identifies the source of the change.

It was not the public’s ambivalence to the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq that caused director Nick Broomfield to portray our soldiers as adrenalized murderers in “Battle for Haditha” or cinema legend Brian De Palma to do the same in “Redacted.” Nor is it a sudden focus on capitalism, as filmmaker Peter Berg suggests in the article, that is motivating Universal Studios suddenly to produce “Lone Survivor” four years after its publication. It is politics.

Numerous books have analyzed politics in Hollywood, including Ben Shapiro’s recent Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. So, the fact that Hollywood is an unabashedly liberal community is no revelation. But filmmakers’ covert attempts to shift public opinion to the left needs to be understood better. (more…)

The best lies are true.

At least, they are factually true. I mean, you spout off some out-and-out falsehood, like say, “I didn’t send that photo,” and no matter how passionately you repeat it, or how condescending you are to anyone who dares to question you, pretty soon some jerk with a website and his own correction alpaca is bound to come along and reveal some actual evidence of your utter lack of honesty and chest-hair.

Peter Guber with Fidel Castro

But when you lie with facts, you lie with the confidence that the rug can never be completely pulled out from under you by simple evidence. A factual lie is a lie of context. It is a nuanced lie. And context and nuance don’t make for good headlines.

This week, in an appearance on America’s Nightly Scoreboard on the Fox Business Channel, media mogul Peter Guber weighed in on Ben Shapiro’s scathing new exposé of liberal bias in Hollywood, PRIMETIME PROPAGANDA and told a whopper of a factual lie.

Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

GUBER: “…I don’t think anybody doesn’t get hired or doesn’t get, or doesn’t get their job or keep their job because they’re Republican or Tea Partier or conservative. I mean, I’m a Republican, and I’ve done pretty good in the business.”

This is pretty surprising news to the interviewer, David Asman, who replies with, “Gee, I didn’t… I never knew that about you.”

Gee, I didn’t either.

(more…)

Scores of people gathered this weekend on the national mall as part of the One Nation Working Together rally, offering, in the words of one of the event’s featured speakers, NAACP President Ben Jealous, “the antidote to the Tea Party,” and promoting liberal answers to issues ranging from job creation to immigration, to education and the environment – namely, more government intervention and higher taxes and regulation.

Actually, the attendance was easily in the tens of thousands, but sometimes it’s fun to take a cue from the MSM and just understate any fact that doesn’t serve your narrative.

Still, despite the impressive numbers, the predominately white rally does differ from Glenn Beck’s recent Restore Honor rally, and the Tea Party movement in general, in one way that illuminates the core difference between left and right.

Specifically, the Tea Party tends to be a movement of individuals, each pursuing their own interests, self-organizing in defense of their own rights, whereas the One Nation Working Together rally was the product of partnerships between over 400 labor, civil-rights, and other liberal organizations, many of whom bussed in their members by the thousands to bolster their numbers.

If there is any better picture of the top-down, coercive nature of liberalism than their approach to “grass roots” organizing, I’m not sure what it is. (more…)

Anne Rice has left Christianity.

“In the name of Christ,” says Rice, she can no longer, “belong to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.”

Rice went on to say, “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life.”

That her very statement itself is quarrelsome and hostile, that her list of refusals is patently disputatious, and that she herself is infamous for promoting a dark and cynical view of humanity in her early vampire novels, places these remarks so far past irony that they border wanton hypocrisy.

They bring to mind a parable about logs and eyes that one assumes Ms. Rice, “in the name of Christ,” has likely heard.

Of course, Progressive Christians like Kirsten Powers, and Christianity-haters like Perez Hilton – two groups almost universally aligned on every issue – were quick to defend and praise Ms. Rice.  According to Jonathan Merritt, author of Green Like God – Unlocking the Divine Plan for our Planet, Anne Rice feels that “Christianity has been hijacked.” (more…)

Don’t expect Matt Damon or Josh Brolin or any of the other celebrities and Hollywood producers behind the History Channel’s The People Speak to issue apologies for their celebration of leftist professor and author Howard Zinn in light of the release last week of file 100-369217 – the FBI’s decades long investigation into Zinn’s alleged communist activities.

Already, Zinn’s far-left sympathizers are poking holes, some more credibly than others, in the 430 pages of documents, and trying to draw focus away from Zinn’s alleged membership in the Kremlin-controlled Communist Party USA and onto the fact that a Boston University administrator turned FBI informant once plotted to have him fired in the 1970s.

To the radical left, trying to interfere with an extremist professor as he dutifully decries his country as a police state is a far more egregious crime than belonging to a political organization allied with and controlled by the sworn enemy of the United States.

It’s all about perspective… (more…)

In Texas we have an expression:  Saying it don’t make it so.  The proof of the saying is all around us.  Take for instance the latest video from that national treasure Naked Emperor News which shows then candidate Barack Obama pledging eight times to play out the health care reform debate on CSPAN, or MSNBC’s assurances that the Ft. Hood shooting spree was not motivated by religion.

For a real case-study, however, spend a little time on the website of the nation’s foremost youth-voter organization, Rock the Vote.

Just before Christmas, when many Americans were turning their attention to faith and family, Rock the Vote, a tax-exempt 501 (c) (3), remained firmly fixed on pushing through the administration’s health-care reform legislation. According to the organization’s website, they asked (commissioned) web-comedy team Funny or Die to create a video to help cut-through voter-fatigue over the issue.  The result, which was then featured in front of the RTV homepage, is called “F the Vote,” and its concluding recommendation to young voters is that they join a pledge to “never, ever, f**k” anyone who is against health care reform.”  That’ll show ‘em. (more…)

As anyone in the entertainment industry will tell you, it is a miracle that any film actually gets made.  From the moment a writer sits down with an idea to the first time the movie actually graces the screen, a film has passed through the care of so many people, so many unique personalities and competing visions and interests, that even the simplest film is a defiance of the odds.

To Save a Life is not a simple film.

From the moment we meet Jake Taylor, high school (and soon-to-be college) basketball star, it is clear we are meeting a young man in crisis.  Jake’s world has been upended by the recent and very public suicide of his childhood friend Roger – a relationship Jake had forsaken in recent years as his own star was on the rise.  For Jake, the burden of guilt for the choices he did and did not make along the way have become a crushing rebuke.  The young man is lost.

Unfortunately for Jake, introspection is not a welcome trait among his top-of-the-food chain peers. Instead, Jake finds common ground with Chris, a local Christian youth-pastor carrying his own guilt over Roger’s death. Chris, who struggles to navigate a true course through the often false world of Christian culture, detects an authenticity in Jake’s growing and self-imposed alienation from his equally false high school aristocracy.  Jake detects in Chris an authentic faith.  As the story unfolds, the two men help one another to stand against the tides of inconsistency in both worlds. (more…)

I enjoy NPR.  That is not to say I think the government should be funding radio programs (actually, in NPR’s case, they don’t).  It is also not to say that NPR is not at times pretty left-leaning.  Of course they are.  Still, I find their programming quite compelling, far more in-depth and even centrist than a lot of television news, and frankly a better option while stuck in LA traffic than a lot of that crazy music kids listen to these days.  Still, I was quite offended last week when NPR, on their new opinion pages, featured a video by Mark Fiore called Learn to Speak Tea Bag.

The video, which has already been discussed on these pages, is an assault on millions of middle-Americans who are distrustful of and frustrated with our federal government.  Frankly, I find it repellent and was disappointed with NPR for running it.  Not that I believe they, or any other organization, should whitewash political differences, but because the piece is beneath them.  It lacks any substance, or for that matter, humor.  Clearly the creator of the piece was not trying to please me with his work, but juvenile is juvenile, and NPR is, traditionally, not a home to juvenile work.   I was pleased to see that Alicia Shepard denounced the piece as NPR Omnibudsman, and found her piece on the matter to be spot on.  Good on you, ma’am. (more…)

Sunday night, the History Channel airs The People Speak, a star-studded presentation of Howard Zinn’s Voices of A People’s History of the United States.  Accompanying this series is the Zinn Education Project, a curriculum meant to expose children from pre-school through high school to American history through the philosophical lens of Zinn.

The plan has many critics, and rightly so.  For one thing, as Zinn openly admits, his is an activist history meant not only to inform the student, but to inspire them to take up his cause.   This puts the teaching of Zinn in public schools on precarious legal grounds at best.  Others draw attention to Zinn’s radical views themselves.  Zinn says of America, with her representative government and guaranteed freedoms, that,  “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history,” parceling out just enough wealth and comfort to its citizens to keep them from revolting.  But to truly understand Zinn, and why his work has no place in public education, all a person needs to know is this –  Howard Zinn is not an historian at all; Howard Zinn is a religious zealot. (more…)

When I first started contributing to Big Hollywood, one of the rules I set for myself was to never discuss non-political figures, specifically folks in Hollywood.  There is plenty to write about without insulting members of the industry you are trying to work in.  So, in writing today about Roman Polanski, my purpose is not to malign the child-raping son-of-a-bitch himself, but to discuss the broader cultural ramifications of Hollywood’s support for his vile, child-raping son-of-a-bitchery.

The Founders of this nation understood full-well that a nation of liberty could not long survive without a strong moral foundation.  If government exists to control people, then limited government naturally would control them very little.  The potential upside was tremendous.  If allowed to live free, a human being might pursue their own interests to the betterment of all of society.  Freedom means a man might strive, risk, and fail, but it also meant that he might strive, risk, and succeed.  As this process played out over time, it might well become the single greatest engine for innovation and wealth creation in all of human history.  (more…)

Last Friday, America was introduced to documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer when he asked an inconvenient question of former vice-president and multi-millionaire climate-change spokesperson Al Gore.  The terse exchange has become a hit on YouTube, and has afforded Phelim several appearances this week on cable news shows.  In it, Phelim asks Mr. Gore to weigh in on a British judge’s ruling that nine facts cited in the vice-president’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, were in fact not true.  After struggling to remember the exact details of the case (it was so long ago…), Mr. Gore and Mr. McAleer wrangle briefly over whether or not polar bears are actually endangered.  Mr. Gore remarks that if they are not, “the polar bears didn’t get the message.”  Cute.

Of course, this answer is really at the very heart of the current debate over global climate change (formerly global warming, formerly global cooling), because whatever the polar bears might think about their own species’ global population, it is obviously far more than most every human environmentalists seem to care about theirs.

“Their is an anti-human element to many environmentalists.”  That was what Phelim told me the day I first met him and his lovely wife Ann McElhinney early last year.  The two had just spoken, quite passionately I might add (everything the two of them do is quite passionate), at a private gathering of conservatives in Sherman Oaks, California.  (more…)

I do not listen to the Rush Limbaugh Show.  That is not to say that I think he of the golden microphone is not worth listening to.  On the contrary, I think that Rush might be the most important voice in America. It just happens that talk radio isn’t my personal cup of tea. 

Still, when I do take in the rare hour or two, I have always found Rush to be a profoundly insightful thinker.  Far from the partisan blowhard the left portrays him to be, Rush is, from my limited listenings, a true philosopher, perhaps a bit more crude than his toga-wearing, boy-loving predecessors, but one of them just the same.  His philosophy is American Conservatism, and he champions it far above party.  In fact, I suspect it is the soft-left members of the GOP that fear him most, since the DNC cannot by their very nature be held to the standards of limited government and natural-liberty over enforced-equality he champions in the first place.  (more…)

In the comment section of a recent post, I drew some fire for making the following, apparently shocking claim:

We [Americans] see America, from the Pilgrims who signed the Mayflower Compact to the Biblical scholars… who birthed the nation, to the spirit of sacrifice and charity that thrives to this very day, not as a nation of Christians (for that freedom is at the deepest core of our common philosophy) but as a Christian nation.

It seems that there is a growing belief that because our Founders were stalwart advocates for religious liberty, and because some of them had very nuanced and sometimes cynical views about organized religion, the United States was somehow conceived to be a secular nation. This belief is not only untrue, but detrimental to an adequate understanding of the underlying political philosophy of the founding, not least of all because it envisions the government as the nation instead of merely the organization through which the nation conducts its civil affairs, and more importantly because it betrays the singular belief that undergirds the entire American experiment: That the rights of man come not from government but from God. (more…)

I am not a Birther. Which is not to say that I think the question of Barack Obama’s US citizenship has in anyway been adequately answered, it has scarcely even been addressed other than through sneers and accusations of racism (and yes, a Certificate of Live Birth and several conflicting CNN statements…).  Rather, I just don’t believe it in anyway likely that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in the country when two Hawaiian newspapers reported at the time that he was.

That said, I find the way that people who do believe that is a possibility are being treated by everyone – from the White House, to the media, to many even in the conservative blogosphere – to be completely unfair. Birthers are treated as kooks and extremists, banned from the comment sections of websites, and given less respect or voice in the media than those detached enough from basic reality to believe that passenger planes didn’t hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 despite, you know, the video of it happening and the missing passenger jets full of people. It begs the question – Is uncertainty about the citizenship of the President of the United States really so offensive? Certainly no one expressed this kind of outrage when John McCain’s eligibility was questioned due to his birth in the Panama Canal Zone. And I say rightly so. Here is why: (more…)

I wrote this piece for some friends a week after John McCain named a relatively unknown woman from Alaska as his running mate.  Since only ten people ever read it, I thought I would re-post it here, perhaps the most revealing day in the storied history of Modern Feminism.  Yesterday, over one-hundred and sixty years after Susan B. Anthony joined the movement for women’s suffrage, just five American women actively held the title of Governor of their state.  Today, there are only four, and rather than be enraged by the sudden decline to less than ten-percent of all state-executive offices, the entrenched modern feminist powers are rejoicing, because it is they who brought down the governorship of Sarah Palin. (more…)

Americans beware. You are not free. Worse, you are being made more and more a slave each day by the very people who tell you incessantly that you are. In fact, the very word itself, FREEDOM, has become your enemy, as it is bandied about proudly and loudly, and distracting you from the encroaching tyranny all around. The word freedom has replaced the substance of freedom that was your birthright, and that is no more.

Of course, Americans were never completely free, which is expressly why freedom was so long sustained on these shores. Our founders knew what freedom is: The natural, God-created state of man, completely unrestrained by the conventions of other men. They also knew that such pure freedom was never practically experienced, and that if it was, it could never be sustained, because it would naturally and instantly consume itself as the powerful and strong exercise of their will without restraint upon the weak. Pure freedom replaces itself with tyranny, rapidly and violently in a shockingly Darwinian fashion. From the chaos of pure freedom rise despots and kings. (more…)

In the comedy classic, “The Jerk,” Steve Martin begins his sad tale with the famous line, “I was born a poor black child…” He isn’t kidding. The film revolves around the life of a pale-skinned, white-haired man who firmly believes he is something he is not, despite all evidence to the contrary. The lie has very little practical value, however, as almost all of his actual behavior is driven by his true nature, not his view of himself. Put simply, no matter how black he believes himself to be, Steve Martin cannot sing the blues.

This is, perhaps, one of the most interesting things about human beings: Our unique capacity for deception. Not the deception of others. Most animals are capable of that sort of deceit. No, it is the ability of man to deceive himself that is so remarkable, and not just the ability, but the proclivity to do it. Like Steve Martin’s character in the film, man seems ever determined to create his own definition of himself based not so much on what he is, but on what he would like to be. This self-image certainly has some effect on what a person does, but strangely, it almost never changes or constrains what they actually are. Despite his efforts to be what he believes himself to be, what he is almost always dominates him. The inner-white-man always emerges if you will. While the human mind seems perfectly capable of believing two mutually exclusive things at the exact same time, it is perhaps only able to consistently act from one of them. (more…)

God-kings are not new on the stage of human history, nor do they exclusively occupy the dusty corners of the distant past. One need only look to the Japanese worship of Emperor Hirohito during World War II to see that an industrialized, modern country can still vest in its leaders supernatural authority. And there are far more subtle ways of making divinity out of men as well.

The Apostle Paul was warned two-thousand years ago that, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Certainly his intention was to illuminate to the self-righteous that they do not live up to an actual standard of perfection, but perhaps there is more. For as surely as a man might be blind to his own failings, there seems to be some propensity in man to be selectively blind to the failings of others as well. This selective blindness may have many causes and find many expressions.  Some in our society carry cultural guilt and fear of accusations of bigotry that cause them to hold entire social, racial, and religious groups to different standards of judgment than others.  Still, it is the elevation of individuals above common scrutiny that creates idols of men. Whether it is a rock-star or actor, sportsman or elected leader, holding any man above reproach is folly, for in ceding to anyone our power to critique them, we grant them power man was not meant to have. (more…)

The last guy you want to meet in the entertainment industry is a writer.  We just aren’t very interesting.  Sure, guys like Joss Whedon seem cool, but that’s only when compared to other writers.  Put him in a room with any actor, musician, or even Key Grip, and Whedon is the pasty guy in the corner having a conversation about the vagaries of the flux capacitor with himself.  So when I had the opportunity last week to travel with a small group of actors (Zachary Levi, Joel David Moore, Kal Penn, and Christian Slater) to the Middle East and Africa with the USO, I jumped at the chance.  Finally.  A perk.

For my actor friends, though, there was a bit more trepidation.  After all, they were the actual celebrities on this celebrity tour, the ones people would want to meet.  I doubt they are alone.  In fact, I suspect that a big reason why more actors in Hollywood don’t volunteer their time with the USO is that they simply don’t know what the experience will be like.  Sure they’ve seen video of Bob Hope out entertaining crowds of troops, but as an actor, you don’t carry your show on the road.  Will the troops even care that you are there?  What will you have to offer them?  Is it uncomfortable?  Is it political?  Fortunately for me, the actors in my party decided to give it a try in spite of these questions.  Here is what we learned. (more…)