Hollywood’s Secular Clerics

Swell, our beloved Hollywood stars are busy crafting their politicized speeches for the Academy Awards program. I'll bet you can't wait.

Oscar-nominated English actor Daniel Kaluuya, in an interview with W magazine, opined that racism is more pronounced in America than in Britain. So happy to learn this and can't wait for his upcoming lecture.

Well, these mega-pundits might as well go three for three so far in 2018. Hosting the Golden Globes ceremony earlier this month, Seth Meyers caricatured President Trump as a xenophobe and lampooned him for alienating North Korea. A few weeks later, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, host Kristen Bell humorlessly jabbed first lady Melania Trump for failing in her mission to end cyberbullying. They must measure up to the Trump-bashing standards of 2017's Emmy Awards, where, following the lead of smarmy host Stephen Colbert, the actors launched merciless volleys against the president, including one from Lily Tomlin: “And in 2017, we still refuse to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”

I've attended many award ceremonies, and apart from politically related ones, I've rarely heard speakers wax political, not only because the events are non-political but because they don't want to needlessly offend those with different views.

It's apparent that Hollywood actors don't have these concerns and therefore exercise no restraint. That they so openly spout off about politics shows they have no fear of offending their like-minded colleagues and couldn't care less about alienating anyone in the viewing audience.

A few examples. “Grey's Anatomy” star Ellen Pompeo tweeted, “News flash… I don't want trump supporters for fans Einstein.” Olivia Wilde, starring in “1984” on Broadway, tweeted, “Trumpy Trolls defending racism as free speech and threatening to boycott my movies, PLEASE F—ING DO.” Don Cheadle, after tweet-slamming someone for being “woefully uninformed and egregiously bereft of empathy and insight,” smugly followed up with this: “If I lose fans over this, they weren't real fans. And I'm only bitter about what's happening to our country. You good with all this? Why?” Michael Shannon, while promoting his movie “Nocturnal Animals,” said: “This country's filled with ignorant jackasses. The big red dildo running through the middle of our country needs to be annexed to be its own country of moronic a–holes. You can call it the United States of Moronic F—ing A–holes.” He also said, “If you're voting for Trump, it's time for the urn.” And last year, Meryl Streep blasted Trump, without mentioning his name, as a powerful bully whose “violence incites violence.”

I've sometimes wondered what makes Hollywood so ideologically unimaginative. Is there some common DNA strain among film industry players that makes them liberal? Were most of those who have grown up to become part of that industry raised by leftist parents? Do actors new to Hollywood arrive as politically blank slates and become instantly converted? Are they shamed into toeing the party line?

Of course, there are Hollywood conservatives, and I'm proud to call some of them my friends, but we all know they are a fractional exception; at least, those willing to publicly admit it are scarce.

I can't think of a group of people more cloistered, more isolated from dissenting viewpoints. How can any group of people — other than political organizations, whose members join specifically to support the particular cause — think so uniformly?

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They aren't just monolithic; they possess the self-certainty of religious cultists, who are contemptuous of those who disagree, thinking of them as lesser beings woefully ignorant and irredeemably immoral.

You've surely witnessed their judgmentalism, their preachiness, their superiority, their ontological certitude. They obviously haven't a single electron of doubt about their own righteousness and our unrighteousness.

But if they are correct in their worldview and we flyover denizens are as depraved as they think, what kind of supernatural coincidence could have caused all of them to assemble in one place and work in one industry? Is there something about the performing arts that draws moral paragons? As there can be no divine sovereignty in the absence of God, maybe it's rather that thespianism constitutes the most advanced form of Darwinian refinement. Excuse us for being unaware that evolutionary perfection resulted in astonishing close-mindedness.

It's noteworthy that their rejection of God doesn't deter them from mounting their secular pulpits to sermonize. Perhaps it's a blessing that they consider us such despicably lost causes that they merely scold us rather than try to proselytize us.

Are you curious as to whether any of them ever self-reflect or contemplate why, if they're such wonderfully kind and compassionate people, they are so filled with rage, rudeness, meanness and smug incivility?

Isn't it ironic that these actors engage in political commentary to demonstrate their intellectual gravitas but, in the very process, instead display that they are malleable sheep, pawns of the most pernicious sort of groupthink, people who are intellectually incurious and shallow and whose free will has been hijacked by the most unsophisticated form of industry-coerced mind control?

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book is “The True Jesus: Uncovering the Divinity of Christ in the Gospels.” Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at www.davidlimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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