First, They Came for The Silence of the Lambs

Deflecting the scolds is an easy out for a ruling class with all of the wealth and power. Just virtue signal and genuflect in the right direction, and the mob will leave you alone. That explains better than anything else why Ted “It rubs the lotion on its skin and puts it in the basket, or else it gets the hose again” Levine is now apologizing for Buffalo Bill, along with one of the film's producers.

This has been an ongoing debate about Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece, as activists attempt to destroy its legacy by saying it has done harm to transgender people. You’d only think that if A) you had not seen the film for yourself, or B) you are irretrievably stupid.

The film goes out of its way to say that Buffalo Bill is not a transsexual. As in this scene, where Clarice Starling says, “There is no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive…”

Hannibal answers with, “Billy is not a real transsexual. He thinks he is. He tries to be.”

Now that we’re seeing a rise in violence from men who are likewise dabbling in transgender ideology, it’s a good time to look back at Buffalo Bill and what it says about men who don’t know where they fit in society. These lovely children were just shot by one such person in Canada.

The shooter wasn’t transgender, though the legacy media bent over backwards to use the proper gender, that "she” shot up a school. No, she did not. This was the work of a violent psychopath who is a man, or perhaps a boy on the brink of manhood, but most certainly not a woman. Women can be psychopaths, but this shooter fit the demographic, and the female shooter in Tennessee was trying to be the demographic - angry, young male, usually white.

So what in The Silence of the Lambs would be offensive to transgender people? Maybe the scene where Buffalo Bill is putting on makeup and fashioning himself female, otherwise known as this iconic scene:

Just like that, a meme was born. Any time anyone hears the first few notes of that song, there is no other way to interpret it. Even Gen-Z probably knows it.

Whatever is happening now in this country with a sect of men becoming both violent and transgender, or dabbling in that kind of identity in the dark corners of the internet, proves The Silence of the Lambs was not just ahead of its time, but an example of Hollywood before it became a strident, micro-managed Woketopia.

I remember when they first came for The Silence of the Lambs. It was just a taste of what was to come. Back then, it was just about the sensitive feelings of some readers on my website, though it did seem odd to me that they were saying this film was offensive. To whom? And why? We weren’t quite at the level of trans activists showing up to screech violently at Kimberly Pierce for casting a non-trans actor in Boys Don’t Cry (Hilary Swank, who then won the Oscar), but we were getting there.

The woke tyranny arrived slowly at first, then all at once. Tasting power for various marginalized groups had the predictable effect power always does — it felt good. Their tyranny spread far and wide throughout the industry, culminating in the Great Awokening, a real revolution on the streets as unhinged white Liberals lost their minds to a fanatic cult. At least that’s how it looked to those of us who ran screaming from the room.

I defended The Silence of the Lambs, though I felt awkwardly doing so, because when I came of age, we did not attack the art. That was what conservatives did, so we protected art and free expression. Well, all of that changed as the Left got religion, and not just any religion, a strident, fundamentalist religion that would ultimately swallow up all aspects of American culture, including film.

Weird stuff was already happening before 2020, like how everyone called La La Land “racist” because Ryan Gosling “explained Jazz” and how everyone called Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri racist because it redeemed a racist cop. Then came the Green Book Apocalypse, where a kindly, warm-hearted film about a bigot befriending a Black gay man was like Trump winning all over again. They lost their minds in a fever dream. That was only the beginning.

Parasite won Best Picture in 2019 because if it hadn’t, all of the Oscar winners in the major categories would have been white. A great movie though it is, Parasite gave the ruling elites in Hollywood a way out of the headlines that would have trashed them for being “racist.” Now, they were treated to glowing ones instead. “The first International Feature not in the English Language to Win!” Yes, all of those words just to replace the “offensive” term “foreign language.”

I should have realized that was the beginning of the end. I attended the Oscars that year. It was early 2020, one month before COVID hit, and the world changed. The film industry would never recover. They’d try, but they’d never get there.

The solution to dealing with the Woke Tyranny was to “fix” films to make them scold-proof. That meant casting had to be inclusive. Most relationships had to be interracial, and no people of color or LGBTQIA+ people could ever be cast as the bad guys. And they had to make an appearance somewhere.

You notice it because in some random TV series or movie, there would be a gay character or a trans character, all bubbly and happy, because this is utopia, after all, and we’ve all of the problems of oppressor/oppressed. It’s just that it stopped reflecting real life in any meaningful way. It reflected this imaginary vision of our Shining Woketopia on the Hill - where everyone gets a seat at the table.

It began to resemble the Lower East Side of Manhattan more than it did anywhere else. Or maybe it just started to look like the internet. Every size, color, and gender had to be present or else. What a mess.

Even if it never fully made sense to me that Jame Gumb or Buffalo Bill would kill women only for their skin, it made for an intriguing movie which has very little to do with transgender ideology at all, except that it was one thing this psychopathic killer wanted to be but couldn’t.

What makes The Silence of the Lambs great is the writing, the acting, and above all, the directing. It’s such a great movie; it’s hard to believe there was ever a time when Hollywood made films this good.

The day it opened, I went to see it three times in the theater, bringing a different group of friends each time. To date, it’s the only film I’ve ever paid to see three times in one day as an adult. As a kid, I did that all of the time with movies like Jaws and Star Wars. I feel quite sure there will never be a time when I will even watch a movie three times, let alone pay to see it in the theater.