A few months ago when liberal actor Mark Duplass publicly complimented Ben Shapiro on Twitter, I knew it would be a matter of days before he’d retract his sentiment. I was off. It took seventeen hours.
The reverse was as predictable to me as an Amy Schumer box office bomb. That’s because Mark Duplass and I were members of the same uber-exclusive club – a secret Tinseltown society completely invisible to Middle America. It’s a group best described as an elite leftist cult that demands ideological purity. Mark Duplass’ laudable and seemingly genuine attempt at bridging the political divide could never survive under the ruthless eye of this sect and their many disciples throughout Hollywood.
I first experienced their wrath up close a few years ago, when my wife and I called out a member of this cult for getting in bed with other people’s kids. At first our Hollywood community was appalled. But it didn’t last. All it took for this creepy dad to reverse his fortunes was to tell our community that the people that confronted him were conservatives. Ultimately, these Hollywood elites sided with the kid cuddler over the people in bed with the Republicans.
Today I’m launching a new weekly storytelling podcast called Red Pilled America with an episode that tells the account of my time with this elite Tinseltown cult. It’s an insider’s look at how leftist Hollywood views Middle America and builds on the work of Ben Shapiro’s seminal 2010 book Primetime Propaganda – giving a peek at just how little regard Hollywood has for the Right.
Hollywood’s disdain for half the country has reached a new plateau. Just this year, Tinseltown pole raped Ann Coulter, killed off Trump voter Roseanne Conner, and fantasized about cutting off Brett Kavanaugh’s penis. The Right knows Hollywood is disgusted by their kind, but this leftist mutilation porn is something entirely new. And it is slowly leading to a new phase in the conservative movement – one where we begin creating our own Hollywood.
It’s not just that Tinseltown will never respect Middle America. Hollywood’s gatekeepers will never allow the Right to enter its gilded gates to tell our stories. And this is important because as the late great Andrew Breitbart often said, “Politics is downstream of culture.” Storytelling is one of the most influential forms of human communication. It has the power to change minds. Just a few years ago, one movie – Gosnell – singlehandedly altered my position on abortion. That is the power of good storytelling. The Left knows this, and they will never give the Right a seat at the table because of it.
It’s been 20+ years since the launch of Fox News and just about the only headway conservatives have made into mainstream media is Joe Scarborough and Matthew Dodd – both about as representative of right-wing thought as Maxine Waters. The Right’s response to this shutout was to create its own media eco-system.
Likewise, the Left will never allow the Right to enter the Hollywood storytelling territory it has monopolized for the better part of 60 years. The only way we can ever hope to impact culture is to go on the offense and create our own comedies, our own films, and our own storytelling platforms. Essentially, the Right needs to create its own Hollywood.
As Andrew Klavan prophetically argued in his excellent e-book The Crisis in the Arts, “We need to act like the rebels we now are and stop trying to win the favor of the big studios and publishers and mainstream reviewers. We need to make stuff. Good stuff. And get it out to the audience any way we can.”
We’re following Mr. Klavan’s wise advice with the launch of Red Pilled America. I hope you join us.
Patrick Courrielche is a writer, former applied-physicist, and the co-host of Red Pilled America. Follow him on Twitter @courrielche.