Fears Over Paramount Merger Spill Into the Ridiculous, and the Orwellian

I could not believe this tweet by Variety. I can’t believe there are really people this unaware of reality walking around now. The idea that “creativity might be stifled” under Ellison is the most hilarious thing I have seen coming from the film industry, probably ever.

Have they not been paying attention to the last ten years and even longer? Why do they think Warner Bros. has to be sold in the first place? It isn’t just competition from streaming. It’s a creative bottleneck, and it’s been that way a long time. I’ve been writing about it for a long time. Talk to almost anyone, and they will tell you the same thing: movies aren’t as good as they used to be.

Don’t get me wrong, the films up for Best Picture this year are good movies. They had to pull from the international pile, of course, as they routinely do now, which should tell you a lot. That is, if you have the awareness and the intelligence to listen, which sadly, most people locked inside the bubble of the Left do not.

That this is the take tells you everything you need to know about what happened to Hollywood. You don’t have to look far. Just look at this website, one of the only honest websites that cover film, the Oscars, and Hollywood. Why is it honest? Because I refused to lie when I knew I was mandated to do so. I refused to be ideologically compliant when I knew I was mandated to do so. And you’ll never believe what happened to me. It’s quite astonishing.

The blacklists are on the Left, though you only hear about those who are punished for speaking out against Israel. You never hear about the majority of people who are punished just for voting for Donald Trump or even being friends with people who voted for Donald Trump. But it’s not only politics. It’s everything. If you said a word against ‘Gender Affirming Care’ for minors, out you go.

Everyone knows the madness we just lived through, and yet, no one will talk about it, not at Variety, not at Deadline, not at Indiewire. They won’t talk about how Jeff Wells was also blacklisted, and it had nothing to do with Trump. They just interpreted one of his posts and convicted him in the court of public opinion. He was kicked out of the Critics Choice and is persona non grata to the studios. They decide who you are. They convict and condemn you, and trust me, it would only have gotten worse if Netflix had bought Warner bros. Netflix behaves like a monopoly already. They pulled their ads from this site after being faithful advertisers for years and stopped inviting me to screen their films. I was shut out, all over politics.

The same thing happened with Disney and Fox. Disney had already decided not to advertise, so when they bought Fox, which had been one of my most reliable advertisers, they too had to slam that door shut. The ONLY studio that has thus far refused to play that game has been Focus Features. This is not about me and the money I make. I do fine over at Substack, and in fact, it’s a blessing in disguise. It is about how the business is run now. They don’t care about the people anymore. They only care about Woketopia.

The plan apparently seems to have been to exclude the half of America that voted for Trump, most male audiences, and people just looking for good old-fashioned movies and not dogma-infused junk, then to send it all to streaming, where no one will ever notice. The only hope we have is the free market. And just as Elon Musk had to buy Twitter to free the bird and speech, so too do I hope Paramount buys Warner Bros. As with X, it won’t be perfect, but it will be better than the alternative.

Ideological freedom does not exist in Hollywood. You are invited to tell one story one way, and the list of what you can’t say and stories you can’t tell is much longer. There is only one way a person can think and express themselves, and that is not the side that just won the election in 2024. It is the side that claimed culture for itself and locked out half the country in the meantime. It is a side that has absolutely no awareness of how they come off to the rest of the country and even much of the world.

Just look at how they punished Wim Wenders for daring to suggest politics should be left out of the Berlinale. That’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to mandated ideological compliance. The movies Hollywood makes now -- with very few notable exceptions -- must follow the strict “woke” code. All of them must if they want to be included in the Oscars. Some do it effortlessly. Others do it embarrassingly, but they all have to do it. Creative expression? Not for a very long time.

And after all of that madness we’ve just lived through, to arrive here in 2026 with One Battle After Another winning Best Picture - sweeping the season - as a film about racism by a white man versus a Sinners, one of the most successful films by Black artists in Hollywood history, it feels as though nothing has really changed anyway. It’s still the flea circus.

They don’t fear a stifling of creativity - that’s a fantasy that exists in their heads. The truth? They fear losing the power to control thought and speech. They’re afraid of more creative expression, of the wrong kinds of movies being made for the wrong kinds of people, selling the wrong message.

But if the New York Times won’t write about that, and the trades won’t write about that, and no one on social media will talk about it, lest they too be banished to the virtual gulags with the rest of us exiles, how can any of these people ever hear the truth?

They call ICE officers Nazis. They protest the ouster of brutal (real) dictators while LARPing that they live under an oppressive dictatorship. How can they not even see how ridiculous they look to the people who aren’t sucked into their insulated, isolated utopia? When thousands of Iranian citizens were slaughtered just for standing there, it was crickets from Hollywood. CRICKETS.

It Was Just an Accident, made by Jafar Panahi, was supposed to sweep the season. He would have faced jail time -- except that Trump bombed the fuck out of Iran and now, Panahi is free. THAT is the thing these idiots in Hollywood pretend to be going through. And why didn’t It Was Just An Accident sweep the season? Because it’s uncool to criticize Iran, because it’s cool to criticize Israel. It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen, and there are no artists in Hollywood aware enough, or brave enough, to tell that story.

The creative oppression, the silencing of dissent, and the obliteration of freedom of thought and speech happened a long time ago. Hollywood did this to themselves because they’re cowards. They are not afraid of the Trump side. All they do is screech loudly about him being a dictator. There is nothing he has done that comes anywhere close to what they have done. It isn’t even those who have been unfairly shut out of utopia, like me. It’s also the stories that haven’t been told and may never be told. They lie resting in a graveyard because of cowardice, because of fear.

Hollywood and the Left have become 1984. They just don’t realize it. They cosplay the opposite. The side with the power and control is the 1984 side. The side with the blacklists, the climate of fear, the culture of silence is the 1984 side. All Trump is to them is Two Minutes of Hate every second of every day.

So don’t worry, Hollywood. Nothing bad will happen to you that you haven’t brought upon yourselves already. You decided your own image and status mattered more than your audience, and that has collapsed the empire. No one will tell this to you, but I will. As Bob Dylan would say, when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

So please, spare me.