This is just a defense mechanism the leftist employs to avoid having to actually examine their movement. Cult members need to have criticism of their cult obscured. It’s the equivalent of “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club…”

There’s a grain of truth here, though. All leftists share core ideas – particularly hatred of conservatives and an infinite faith in big government – but there is a range of thought, not unlike denominations within religions. There are variations in doctrine and tactics between Marxists, Alinskyites, Mother Jones populist progressives, Nation socialists, Daily Kos Democrats, Counterpunch communists, and Dissent social democrats. Grouping them all together under the label “the Left” is no more inaccurate than describing Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans as Christian.

Today, thanks to the extraordinary journalism and research of Ben Shapiro for his must-read book Primetime Propaganda, the focus is on one “church” in particular: the Hollywood Left.

Primetime Propaganda is not a content analysis of the last 60 years of TV. Instead, Shapiro wore his Harvard Law baseball cap and interviewed some of Hollywood’s most influential television creators. Assuming from his alma mater and last name that he was one of them, the Hollywood insiders were too honest for their own good. Time and again Shapiro found them confessing that A) Yes, the Left dominates Hollywood, B) Yes, conservatives are blacklisted, C) Yes, they did try and use television to push their politics, and D) No, they did not see anything wrong with any of this in the slightest.

(For the evidence on tape see Big Hollywood’s thorough archive of the many damning admissions from the creators of history’s most influential TV shows.)

The revelations Shapiro unearths are only the beginning. This is also a masterful history book that will transform readers’ understanding of television. Shapiro leaps back to the 1950s and in the first 220 pages of the book interweaves his blockbuster interviews with the story of how a small clique of executives, producers, and writers created most of the TV shows that have shaped four generations of Americans. The heart of the book is the second and third chapter, focusing on the history of TV comedies and dramas. Shapiro goes down the line from The Honeymooners to All in the Family to Cheers and Friends. He documents the subversion of the cop and legal dramas from the early days of righteous cops and prosecutors to the nihilism of Hill Street Blues and Picket Fences.

The picture that emerges from Shapiro is of Hollywood leftists distinct from Washington, DC Democratic Party leftists, ACORN community organizing leftists, and the academic Ivory Tower leftists. The defining characteristic of the Hollywood leftist is an embarrassing abundance of anti-intellectualism. Most of the producers and writers Shapiro profiles have barely thought through their politics. If that’s the case then what drives Hollywood to embed leftist ideas in their programs and exclude conservatives? Superficial notions about what feels right. The Hollywood Left fantasizes that they are the champions of the “have-nots,” the outsiders, the oppressed.

This anti-intellectualism is why in Hollywood the ABSOLUTE MOST IMPORTANT politics are the social issues. (As evidence that Hollywood leftists care about these subjects above all others, observe how they will tolerate hawkish, fiscally conservative Republicans as long as they’re pro-gay and pro-choice. Shapiro’s example: “Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry.)

Hollywood is not a town of deep thinkers. It’s a bubble filled with deep feelers. Next time a Hollywood leftist is on TV spouting their clichés note how often they “feel” instead of “think.” That’s a Freudian slip confessing a disagreement not with what conservatives think but in how conservatives think. The rejection is not just the Western tradition of individual liberty, but in the Enlightenment process of rational thought.

What are the unique implications for apostates of this church of the Left?

In parts two, three, and four of this series I’ll explore Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, and Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation. Each author’s book is an important component in the revolt against the Hollywood Left’s mental gulag. They each bring the best of what their generation has to offer in the fight to retake our culture and our country. Read all three along with Shapiro’s book and a comprehensive picture of the Hollywood Left – and the means for defeating it – emerges.

Hank is the first of two family-oriented comedies ABC is running back-to-back on Wednesday nights beginning at 8 p.m., with each show featuring a big former sitcom star.

Most TV sitcoms, and that goes double for ABC, are largely about what the great filmmaker and satirist Preston Sturges referred to as Topic A. That is because Americans presumably have nothing else on their minds–other than being murdered or having to go to the hospital, the subject matter of most TV dramas.

Hank bucks that restriction, attempting to mine humor from family relationships, romantic love, and social conditions–which used to be the central subjects of Anglo-American comedy before the relaxing and eventual discarding of social and cultural restrictions on discussions of sex freed Hollywood to parade its inner sex maniac with impunity and in fact great financial success.

The concept of Hank is this: newly fired big-business CEO Hank Pryor—played by Kelsey Grammer—moves his family out of their now-unaffordable Manhattan apartment and goes back to his hometown, River City, to start over.

Without money and servants to take care of them, the family members have to live like actual human beings. And without a job at which to hide out, Hank has to deal with his family. Those are reasonable ideas on which to build a comedy. Unfortunately the pilot episode does not try to go for many really amusing jokes, and the second episode is funnier but definitely does not conform to the contemporary trend of trying to mine as many laughs per episode as possible.

If the standard for judging a situation comedy is simply the number of laughs per episode, Hank will not do well. However, that is not necessarily the best way to look at the genre. Older classics such as The Honeymooners, The Andy Griffith Show, and Cheers were actually short dramas with varying amounts of humor deriving organically from the characters and situations, instead of cardboard characters and merely skeletal plots on which to festoon a string of double entendres and outright sexual references intended to be funny by virtue of their exceeding public vulgarity.

One could even argue that Seinfeld, far from being a “show about nothing,” did a fine job of showing the rootlessness of ‘90s America and the dismaying results of the lurch into relativism.

Thus one can surely make a case that the situation comedy can be more than just jokes—and perhaps that it should be. Hank attempts to do just that, affording some insights into the characters and their situation, in particular the title character. For example, Hank’s attempt to connect with his family, as he has never done before, rightly suggests that overcoming one’s selfish impulses is essential if one is to have a truly satisfying life.

A scene in which Hank awkwardly tries to connect with his son in the pilot episode illustrates this theme and is both funny and touching in the odd way the best TV sitcoms often manage such scenes, and it shows the series has the potential to be effective.

In this fish-out-of-water scenario, Grammer’s Hank becomes the type of clueless, would-be Autocrat of the Breakfast Table character made famous by William Powell (Life with Father) and Clifton Webb (Cheaper by the Dozen, etc.) and reiterated by countless sitcom actors since then.

Like those predecessors, Hank also has a wholesomely attractive, smart wife who keeps the household running, and a pair of intelligent, quirky children who continually point out his personal shortcomings.

In addition, Hank’s attempts to get back on his feet and start up another business, suggested in the first two episodes, are both ripe for comedy and, if developed, will be a welcome treatment of an essential and characteristic aspect of American life which is all too seldom given positive attention by Hollywood: entrepreneurship.

Hank ultimately supports bourgeois, middle-American values, which is rather unusual for both ABC and contemporary TV sitcoms. As such is it quite refreshing. Mainstream critics, however, will not like it, for it does nothing to contribute to the devaluation of all values and the effort to transform the United States into an oversexed socialist paradise.

Quite the contrary. Hank doesn’t try to break any new ground, and it doesn’t grasp for too many memorable jokes. However, the characters are largely likable, and with Grammer leading the way, the show might survive if ABC gives it time.

But that’s a big if.