Suzanne Collins’ series “The Hunger Games,” which will soon see the release of a major film adaptation, is captivating the minds of teenagers and adults around the world. Collins’ unique style has made for an excellent series, appropriate and entertaining for all ages. But after reading and loving all three books, I have to wonder, are the books simply creative fiction, or are they a prediction for the future?

“The Hunger Games” trilogy is based in a country named Panem, which is located on the ruins of North America. Within the country of Panem there are two types of societies, the tyrannical Capitol and the twelve districts.

The Capitol of Panem is the perfect exhibition of power and sheltered opulence. The citizens are rich, well fed, and stocked with everything nice. But while the Capitol is throwing their big parties and buying expensive goods, the districts surrounding them are working hard to fulfill the Capitol’s every need, leaving them with next to nothing.

The twelve districts of Panem are full of misery, poverty, and food shortages. Each of the districts has an assigned duty by the Capitol, from agriculture to coal mining; they work hard and suffer to provide their designated good. The citizens of the districts live within the tyrannical laws of the Capitol, and if they ever decide to break the law, they are sure to pay. The Capitol strives every day to remind the people of the districts that their reign is supreme, and one of their favorite torture devices is the annual Hunger Games.

Every year the Capitol goes around to each of the districts to select two teenagers to fight ’til the death. With 24 in the beginning, only one will win–well, usually, that is.

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Anyone who thinks conservatives can’t rock it out has clearly not come across Jeremy Dodge – a conservative activist with attitude and an abundance of talent.  When Jeremy first joined BigDawg Music Mafia and shared his Tea Party hit I Am American and Stand Up, the fans couldn’t get enough.  The demand from fans for more has Jeremy back in the studio as we “speak” working on some new songs which will, no doubt, be every bit as kickin’ as his others.

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As with the majority of the conservative artists in the Tea Party movement, Jeremy has been traveling around the country performing on his own dime and as many fellow musicians know, studio time costs a pretty penny.  Jeremy has set up a project page where fans can participate in the production of his new songs by helping defray some of his costs, getting a few “thank you” goodies in return, and even a shout-out in his video.

Here’s what Jeremy has to say about how he got started in music and how he ended up using his talents to wake his fellow Americans up:

Correction:  The quote referring to Common’s music as “very positive” was mistakenly attributed to Media Matters in the originally published version of this piece.  We regret the error.

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Have you heard about “Poetry Night” at the White House?  I find it appalling and very inappropriate (yet not at all that surprising) that the Obamas have invited “Common”, a rapper who grew up in the pews of America-hating “Reverend” Wright’s church, who he describes as an “intelligent, strong individual…a great man…a conduit of love.”   He denigrates women with his misogynistic lyrics, promotes killing cops, and burning (President) Bush. Isn’t that special?  His lyrics have been praised by a Fox News reporter as being “very positive.”  Are you kidding me?

Hi Caliber

This is just another tactic this administration is using to convince young Americans that Barrack Obama is just that “cool” and that these are the kinds of artists your kids should be listening to.

Please.

In the New York Times Bestseller Obama Zombies:  How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation, author Jason Mattera describes how liberals successfully launched their highly successful technology-based campaign to take advantage of and brain-wash his generation into becoming “zombies” for Team Obama.  They used every facet of new media to reach our youth through their computers, iPods, and cell phones via new media venues and services like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and text messaging and “rocked the vote” in favor of “That One.”

Thankfully, we conservative keyboard warriors are fighting back with those very same tactics to reach our young voters using every weapon in our arsenal (e.g., conservative websites, blogs, video rants, music, books, artwork, and the list goes on).   In less than two years (since the 2008 elections), through the effective use of  new media, the TEA Party movement managed to rise up and put a major hurtin’ on the Democrats in the House and Senate in the mid-term elections.  It was interesting to note that younger voters seemed less than enthusiastic about voting in 2010.  Perhaps voter’s remorse is setting in?

Good.

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Who is Chris Ross?

Chris Ross is a great American, an amazingly gifted musician/singer-songwriter, and a superb conservative voice in the fight to save this great country.  Upon hearing the first few bars of his song Freedom, I knew I was going to really dig his music.  I was right.  I was instantly hooked.  His songs and vocal style remind me of the music of the band America  which I loved back in the day (and still do).  How very apropos.  When he recently posted one of his newest songs, Restoring Honor, featured on the WatchGlennBeck.com site, I just knew this song would resonate with so many Americans.  And it is doing just that.

After I contacted Chris and told him I wanted to do a BigDawg Spotlight piece on him and asked him for his bio, what he sent me turned out to be so much more that I decided to let him answer the opening question himself. (more…)

As a follow-up to my debut piece, Conservative Culture Warriors Unite at BigDawg Music Mafia, I wanted to write another piece to let you all know that we’re really heating things up on the culture war front at BigDawg Music Mafia.  Since launching the free social networking site for conservative arts & entertainment last Fall, we’ve attracted some seriously talented artists with minimal National press prior to BIGDawg Music Mafia  (represented by yours truly) being added to the BIGHollywood Contributors roster (thank you, John Nolte),  a guest appearance on Breitbart.tv’s The Stage Right Show, and mentions on Foxnews.com and CNN.com.  Since then, we’ve seen a BIG surge in membership and daily traffic at our site.  This bodes well for conservative culture warriors who refuse to sit idly by as so many liberals in the entertainment industry continue to saturate our airwaves and movie screens with their radical, Marxist agenda.  “That’s right, I said it!” (Mark Levin-ism…love that guy!).  The word is most definitely getting out…

The beauty of having a central gathering place online is the great networking and collaborations taking place.  Case in point, one of our gifted members, Joe Dan Gorman, who has some great, hard-hitting conservative messages in his songs and videos (a couple of which YouTube has banned – “You(Tube) can’t handle the truth!”…this will be a topic for another day), recently wrote and produced a new music video entitled We Will Not Submit and invited some of our members to join him in recording some back-up vocals for the song and taking part in his video, and it is already getting tons of great reviews and being aired on conservative internet and AM/FM radio stations across the country.

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Other recent collaborations include  AlfonZo Rachel, Nate Smoove, and Rufus Troutman on their latest song, Government Not the Answer.  Bobby Powers and Party Time, my songmate, BigDawg, and I recently collaborated on Freedom Reigns and performed an acoustic version at our CPAC Liberty Fest.  Several other cool collaborations are currently underway between members of our site – something BigDawg and I are thrilled to see.

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After a long hiatus, ABC’s sci-fi drama series V returns to the network’s regular lineup tonight at 8 EST. It’s a show well worth watching. Based rather loosely on a 1980s limited-run series from NBC, the new show tells the story of the coming of a large group of extraterrestrials to the earth and the world’s reaction to them. In the twelve episodes of season 1, the aliens presented themselves to the world as interested only in making things better for mankind, offering us new technologies and healing abilities. The aliens are all physically attractive, and the great majority look like humans in their twenties and thirties.

That, of course, was just their public face; in reality, it soon became clear, they are ugly and reptilian under their human skins and have an agenda to exploit humanity in some way, either as slaves or as food or both, or perhaps some even worse and more horrible fashion. And a small group of people have divined this agenda and set up a small, loose, but dedicated resistance organization.

Central to the narrative is the resistance against an intrusive government that claims to be for nothing but the good of humanity but is in fact pursuing sinister, elitist, and exploitative hidden agendas. As such, the show makes a strong commentary on contemporary political issues and constitutes one of the most frankly libertarian TV series seen in many years. In addition, it suggests strong approval of religion, specifically Christianity, in a way that makes the resistance group a spot-on analogue to the current-day Tea Party movement. (more…)

You had to hide it somewhere that no one would find it:  your very first record, tape, CD– whatever medium– that Mom and Dad didn’t approve of.  You had to listen to it through headphones or when they were out of the house.  You had to do this because you knew it was an act of rebellion; your parents did not want you hearing that music performed that way with those lyrics, and you decided that you wouldn’t obey them.  According to the new documentary Rockin’ The Wall, that simple moment of defiance, experienced collectively by the citizens of the Soviet Union, contributed to and may have even defined the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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Co-produced by Big Hollywood contributor Larry Schweikart, who first wrote about this issue in his book 7 Events That Made America America, and narrated by Adam Baldwin, Rockin’ the Wall gives viewers an intimate look into life in East Berlin, where citizens were restricted by a literal concrete wall from the same free enterprise and thought that their neighbors in the Western half of the city enjoyed.  Commentators in the film range from bow tie-wearing historians to shaggy-haired rock musicians, with the most interesting tidbits coming from individuals who had lived under Soviet rule in East Berlin (some of whom escaped before the wall fell).  Noting that this was the first time in history where walls were used to keep citizens in rather than invaders out, the film conveys a palpable feeling of the quiet rebellion simmering against a regime so petty as to restrict women from putting their hair in ponytails.

The film’s thesis, that rock and roll music brought down the wall, seems spurious at first.  After its fast-paced introduction, we’re treated to a montage of aged musicians opining on the nature of rock and roll, how it embodies liberty and rebellion, and we’re thinking, “Okay, but how does this relate to–” right as director Marc Leif unleashes a barrage of information that convincingly portrays rock music as the driving force of anti-Communist subversion.  We learn about Radio Free Europe, whose modern music penetrated the wall and was forbidden by the Soviets.  We learn about the black market for Western records, where demand was so high that a single LP could cost 1/10th of a week’s wages.  We learn about the conferences for young people warning them of the physical and mental dangers of rock and roll.

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I have never heard Tom Petty talk politics. When it comes to performers, that generally is a good thing.

Last week my wife and I took our kids, 13 and 11, to see Petty and the Heartbreakers. Having seen them a few times before, they put on a predictably tremendous show, (though doing “Jammin’ Me” and “Change of Heart” would have been great). Mike Campbell, Petty, and crew belted out raw, old fashion rock and direct, soulful, no nonsense lyrics. Awesome.

As the band played “Refugee” I couldn’t help but focus on the audience, including my children, singing in unison “everybody’s got to fight to be free.” Like many Petty lyrics, its a simple, direct, powerful line; easily repeated but probably rarely internalized.

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We, as Americans, do have to fight to be free.

The upcoming generations need to understand that. Our grandparents had to fight to be free of Nazism. Our parents and my generation (though we can discuss The Who at another time) fought to be free of Soviet style communism.

But for this generation and the at least the next, not only do we have to fight to be free of radical Islam but more insidiously we have to fight to be free from the tyranny of our own federal and even local governments’ designs on our liberty. We, who are parents, have a responsibility to educate our children. Our freedoms are threatened by those within and without. (more…)

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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…)

“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” –Michelle Obama

There is a right not specifically spelled out in the Bill of Rights but implicit in every restriction on the federal government: the right to be left alone.  Our nation was founded by individuals seeking relief from overbearing governments and religions.  Rugged individualism isn’t merely a conceit of John Wayne movies.  It has been and will continue to be a way of life for Americans who believe this nation was founded on the rights of the individual.  Not the rights of government. (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…)

Her name was Neda. In Farsi, it means “the voice.” True to her name, she loved music; sought freedom; and she’s dead – shot down in the streets by the Iranian regime’s state sanctioned murderers. She must not have died in vain.

Today, Iranians and Americans face a generational chance for freedom – one that ensures a rogue regime’s implosion prevents a nuclear confrontation.

Regrettably, our president’s “post-American” foreign policy presumes talk can thaw the murderous mullahs’ hearts and attain a “grand bargain” for peace in our time; consequently, while Iranians demanded their freedom from a barbarous regime, the president vapidly opined: “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be… We respect Iranian sovereignty.” (more…)

I’m far from a perfect father. For example, just the other day, on my watch, my one-year old, Ben, who is now rumblin’, bumblin’ and stumblin’ all over the house, took a dive on the corner of our entertainment center and gave himself a nice shiner.  Within a few minutes, he’d forgotten about it and was wobbling around on two legs again, proud of his newly acquired mobility.  But I felt bad for not catching him. I suppose the President, who made it a point on Saturday to pontificate to us dads about what kind of fathers we should be just ahead of Father’s Day, has never missed either of his daughters just before they got an “ouchie.” If neither Sasha nor Malia have ever scraped a knee, had a black eye, or even fractured a bone, then I guess he can pretend to be the perfect daddy. But then, you could also argue that without said minor injuries, the First Kids probably haven’t lived much of a life.

President Obama’s righteousness about fatherhood comes from the recognition that his own dad was, indeed, a douchebag. He knocked up Obama’s mom and quickly fled the country, only meeting his son once, and bringing him a basketball. There are fathers like that out there, but they’re few and far between. And they deserve our scorn. And I understand the President’s desire to talk about his own experience as a fatherless child. I get it. It must have been terrible and I’d probably talk about it too if my dad Bruce Wilson hadn’t been the incredible dad he is to this day (see my movie “Michael Moore Hates America” for an interview with Pops). (more…)

Yes, you heard me. “Screw Europe,” I say to you. With all of this “repairing of international relations” going on, the press (along with every “Green Day Liberal” in the Western hemisphere) seem to be getting quite giddy. Finally we’ll be more like the Europeans and maybe, just maybe, that will allow us to be on better footing with them. To all of you I ask… Why?

Why on EARTH would the United States ever want to be more like Europe? Correct me if I’m wrong, but we left, did we not? Not only did we leave that older, lesser world behind, but we left skid-marks along the way with an entire continent eating our proverbial dust. Those were good times… Not to mention the asskickery that followed suit.

The truth is we’ve been doing things far better than Europe for centuries. We’ve built a stronger military and a much more dynamic economy than any of our European counterparts… And we’ve done it in record time. We left the world’s greatest superpowers one century only to blaze past them the next. (more…)

The British government’s decision to ban Michael Savage from entering the UK based on his political viewpoint and opposition to the global domination of Islamic shariah law puts Savage in the same company as Winston Churchill, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the same company as Neville Chamberlain.  Savage, the recipient of the Talkers Magazine 2007 Freedom of Speech Award (Al Franken is a former winner), is an ardent advocate for liberty and freedom and the leading opponent of global Islamofascism.

During the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain pursued a policy of appeasement that brought Europe to its knees before Adolf Hitler.  Even as Hitler planned his domination of the globe, the British Broadcasting Company banned Winston Churchill, Hitler’s leading political opponent, from the radio.  Even after the beginning of World War II, the BBC censored Churchill, considering him too inflammatory in his description of the Germans. (more…)

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and earth, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live… — Deuteronomy 30:19

It’s 11:57 in Hadleyville. The movie is “High Noon.” Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) seals an envelope containing his last will and testament. He writes, “To be opened in the event of my death,” on its front panel. A train carrying a freed murderer, Frank Miller, who wants to gun Kane down will arrive in just three minutes.

Marshall Kane has been abandoned by everyone. All that he believed is tarnished. He stands alone without a badge, with only his conscience. His new bride, the church, the state, old friends and allies have all turned their backs. (more…)