Shots Fired - James Gunn Part Two

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 57 seconds

"FREEDOM OF SPEECH...JUST WATCH WHAT YOU SAY" - ICE-T

On July 27th, I published an article at RT.com about Disney firing Guardians of the Galaxy 3 director James Gunn over some nearly decade old tweets in which he made bad rape and pedophilia jokes. In that essay I made the argument that Gunn's firing was the result of expansive corporate power and the effects of suffocatingly myopic political correctness on both corporate and American culture.

I got a lot of push back from readers of the piece in my inbox and at the comment section at RT. A reader left a comment on this website (oddly enough on a different article) that accurately represents the arguments made against my essay.  The comment is as follows:

"Just read your spirited defense of child rape enthusiast James Gunn. I have to assume you haven't read those vile tweets by Gunn, and that they go back nearly a decade doesn't make them funny, nor is it an excuse to defend this vile filth.

There is NOTHING funny, tweeting about doing degenerate perversions to kids, no matter what movies he directed.

But I see you're part of that Hollywood crowd that chortles about raping kids and babies, so either you're a pedo or just trying to protect your business.

Either way, that RT article almost made me vomit, they way you vigorously defended Gunn, making him out to be the victim of a nation gone mad on PC. I'll agree the PC/SJW crowd have gotten out of control, but not in this case.

What's your next article, defending Dan Harmon's skit about raping a baby doll? Oh yes, that's a real knee-slapper. Or maybe you'll claim that 'Steve-O' from the aptly name "JACKASS" franchise, who had a tattoo of a grown man sodomizing a baby was just youthful ignorance, and he has since repented by covering up the baby with the man now engaging in bestiality with an ostrich.

This is the crowd of sickos that love, and support that traitor Hillary Clinton, who had a good laugh about Qaddafi getting sodomized to death with a bayonet, and that crowd still wonders why she lost?

Looks like the Hollywood casting couch is still very much alive.

Greg Bacon"

THE JOKES POLICE

Mr. Bacon's thinking, or lack thereof, is emblematic of the rot at the core of American culture. He agrees that "the PC/SJW crowd have gotten out of control"...except in the case of Gunn. This sort of intellectual acrobatics is always how it goes when it comes to issues like this...we want freedom of speech for the things we agree with but not for the things we dislike. There is always some bright red line but it is always drawn around only the topics we hold dear. Mr. Bacon is either genuinely distraught by James Gunn's rape and pedophilia jokes or is cynically using them to take down a prominent member of the opposing political tribe, either way, Mr. Bacon is cooked in the grease of his own lack of intellectual integrity.

So, for example, while Gunn's rape/pedo jokes offend Mr. Bacon no end, there are people I know who would find his calling Hillary Clinton a "traitor" to be extremely offensive. He would laugh that off as absurd, just like others would laugh off Gunn's poor attempts at humor. Should Mr. Bacon lose his job as a probation officer or exotic dancer or whatever he does for a living just for his comment? Obviously the answer is no, and in my opinion, neither should Gunn.

Mr. Bacon's entire comment is soaked in the sort of emotionalist distortion that so often clouds rational and logical judgements. For instance, he repeatedly claims that I made a "spirited" and "vigorous" defense of Gunn's comments. If you read my piece it is pretty clear I do no such thing, what I argue is the overarching philosophy that currently drives our corporate and online culture is demented and damaging. I never quote Gunn nor do I defend him, what I am defending is a calm, cool rationalism.

THE SCURRILOUS AND THE RIDICULOUS

As Mr. Bacon's comment continues he descends further and further into his emotionalist fury, ejaculating out accusations that I am either a pedophile or selling my soul in order to "protect my business". If Mr. Bacon had done even a modicum of reading prior to commenting, he would've noticed that if there is one thing I certainly do not do in my writing it is put my business interests above my search for truth. I have written scathing articles here and at RT that have no doubt infuriated and offended numerous clients and prospective clients, the result of which is I have been made a pariah in some circles out here in Hollywood...so this charge is scurrilous at best.

As far as my being a pedophile or giving a pass to pedophilia, Mr. Bacon would be wise to read some of my yearly Slip-Me-A Mickey awards articles, where I repeatedly call out the worst sex offenders in Hollywood for their immoral proclivities. Even before the Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement came to the forefront, I had implored actors and actresses to come forward and take on sexual predators in Hollywood.

Mr. Bacon's lazy charges that I am a pedophile also highlight another issue with his lack of reasoning, namely that James Gunn wrote jokes about rape and pedophilia, he did not rape anyone or prey upon children. Mr. Bacon would be wise to learn that words are not action and there is a big difference between the two. For example, joking about rape, even if it is child rape, is in fact, not rape. This is the biggest difference between me and apparently everyone else on the internet...I do not care what someone says on Twitter (even, as I wrote immediately after the election, President Trump) or Facebook (and cannot understand why anyone would ever be on either of those platforms), what I care about is what people actually do.

THE BEST DEFENSE IS TO TAKE OFFENSE

In terms of being offended by something...here is some news for you...you do not have the right to NOT be offended. If someone or something offends you, that is about you, not the person or thing allegedly offending you. If you do not want to be offended, dig a bunker with no internet access and stay in it for the rest of your life.

If you do venture out into the world and are offended, take that as an opportunity to sharpen your argument against the offender or open your mind to their point of view or to grow thicker skin, but do not take it upon yourself to make sure that the alleged offender loses their job when others like their work or is otherwise punished just for saying something that hurts your delicate sensibilities.

PRINCIPLES OVER TRIBALISM

For me it is pretty simple, I think James Gunn should not have been fired. I also think Roseanne Barr should not have been fired. I also think Sarah Jeong, an Asian woman who just got hired by the New York Times, and who has a history of tweeting racist and hateful things about White people, and who remarkably blames White people for her tweeting those racist things, should not be fired. I am "offended" by Ms. Jeong's tweets, but I think it is more important for me to sit in my discomfort than demand that others rights to free speech be diminished in any way...to react any other way would be hypocritical.

If Roseanne Barr's tweet comparing a public figure, Valerie Jarrett, to Ari from Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes movie, offends you and you think Barr deserved to be fired, but you think Jeong should keep her job, you have zero intellectual integrity. You are nothing but a tribal activist wanting a "win" over the other side. The same exact thing is true if it is reversed, and you support Roseanne but not Jeong, or in the case of Mr. Bacon, you think PC/SJW's are out of control EXCEPT for when it comes to James Gunn. Now if you want to talk about truly offensive things that deserve to end in not just firing but imprisonment, torture and maybe even the death penalty, then Tim Burton and his atrocious Planet of the Apes movie is a legitimate target...I am just kidding...sort of...but not really.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

In terms of Roseanne Barr, I know I am in the minority in not wanting her fired but my reasons are not just principled but strategic. Liberals were elated by the take down of Ms. Barr especially as a proxy in their war on Trump, but I find this thinking to be backward and self-defeating because in my eyes the Roseanne scandal was an opportunity, not for revenge, but for strategic gains.

Roseanne's show was enormously successful and it was a direct line into the living rooms of the Trump voters that liberals need to convince to come back into the Democratic fold. Her ratings were spectacularly high and the top ten cities where she performed the best were in order...Tulsa, Cincinnati, Kansas City (Mo.), Pittsburgh, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis and Indianapolis.

Some may say that getting Trump voters to flip is an impossible task, but the numbers say otherwise, as many of the Midwestern Trump voters were Obama voters in 2008 and 2012...in fact Roseanne used to be a Democrat. Looking at the list of the cities where she performed highest, two are in Missouri, which has a female Democratic senator, and one each in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan...all states where Democrats lost in 2016 and could use all the help they can get in 2018 and 2020.

In my eyes, using Roseanne's racist tweet as leverage to get Roseanne, whom Midwestern Trump voters admire and respect, to use her show as a conduit to reach White working class Mid-Westerners and explore commonalities between working class people of all colors would have been a much more thoughtful and strategic thing to do rather than just emotionally firing her the same day as her infraction.

Two things could have happened in the Roseanne situation if liberals hadn't reacted so emotionally...the first is they could have attempted to use her as a direct line to communicate their message to White working class voters in the  Midwest, and two they could have maintained the high ground in regards to free speech. By firing Roseanne so quickly, liberals shot themselves in the foot and lost an opportunity to erode some of Trump's voting base. 

If liberals hadn't been so desperate to fire Roseanne and instead saw her situation as an opportunity, they could have not only started to sway Trump voters to change their votes, but maybe even change their perception of people of other races...then that would really shake things up...which is probably why ABC/Disney, the corporate embodiment of the establishment, acted so impulsively (and if Roseanne failed to live up to her end of the bargain than you fire her). ABC/Disney and the rest of the establishment, do not want things to change, they want racial animosity to divide the working class because then they are able to control the working class...but that is a story for another day.

"THEY MAY TAKE OUR LIVES, BUT THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!" - BRAVEHEART

The truth is that I am also one of those crazy people who thinks that NFL players should not be stopped from protesting during the national anthem and that Colin Kaepernick should have a job. I also think flag burning should never be a crime and that White supremacists should be allowed to march in Charlottesville or anywhere they damn well please as long as they get the proper permits to do so. I also think that corralling protestors into "free speech" zones at political events violates both the spirit and the rule of the law and degrades our Constitutional rights.

I vehemently oppose liberals who demanded the ACLU not defend groups that carry legal weapons to protests. I also vehemently oppose tech companies or any other Orwellian entities policing the internet or anywhere else for content they find offensive.

I have been called a First Amendment fundamentalist by both liberal and conservative friends of mine for these stances. I find that hysterically funny. I've also been called a Second Amendment fundamentalist for my stalwart support of gun rights...and called even worse for my unbending support of all our constitutional, God-given rights.

YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW

Liberals and conservatives who are so quick to socially police the speech and thought of their opponents will quickly learn that double edged sword will be the tool with which the establishment powers execute you. If you are comfortable with an online mob or the totalitarian tech companies or big media being in charge of policing thought and speech in America, you are a brain-addled fool of epic proportions because they won't silence your enemies, they will end up silencing you.

In our current emotional pique, we have devolved into short-sighted fools who disregard the rights of others while we demand subservience to our personal feelings and whims. As the classical liberal foundation upon which our culture and civilization was built is torn asunder by the impulsive and despotic, we are quickly being stripped of any and all defenses save our over-inflated, self-serving sense of moral outrage and righteous indignation. When the manically totalitarian arbiters of thought and speech come for us, one by one, those flaccid defenses will leave us all at the mercy of our enemies...who, just like the rest of us...have proven themselves to be both vicious and merciless.

In this age of hyper-polarization and emotionalism where we no longer make arguments but only accusations, and where tribalism trumps principles, we are quickly spiraling down into an abyss of vacuousness and vapidity where the foundational pillars of our civilization will be crushed under the weight of our own insidiously myopic narcissism.

©2018

Guardians of the Galaxy Defeated by the Most Fearsome Super-Villain of All...Political Correctness

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 08 seconds

America is spiraling downward into a politically correct madness and big Hollywood corporations like Disney are hastening the descent.

On July 20th Disney fired outspoken liberal writer/director James Gunn from the film Guardians of the Galaxy 3 for a series of tweets he had written from 2008 to 2011 which the company deemed “offensive”.

The tweets in question, which were Gunn’s attempts at humor, were jokes about rape and pedophilia that were dug up by alt-right firebrand Mike Cernovich looking to bring the archliberal Gunn down a peg. Cernovich and his merry band of alt-right tricksters couldn’t have imagined in their wildest dreams that due to their twitter/media campaign against Gunn, the man who wrote and directed the first two  highly successful Guardians of the Galaxy franchise films, he would end up being kicked to the curb by Disney.

Many liberals in Hollywood are outraged that Gunn was fired and a petition with 200,000 signatures is even going around to get him re-hired.

Others in the film industry, like the writer and director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (a Disney production) Rian Johnson, are quaking in their designer space boots over Disney’s reactive and swift punishment of Gunn. Johnson wisely erased his entire twitter history in the wake of Gunn’s firing, no doubt fearful he may have unwittingly violated Disney’s moronic retroactive bad joke policy.

Regardless of how entertainment professionals feel about Mickey Mouse being quick on the draw to take down Gunn, they better understand that this sort of hypersensitivity combined with zero tolerance is now the new normal in corporate Hollywood.

Proof of this is that Gunn is not the only Tinseltown big shot to have recently had their careers tossed overboard from the good ship Hollywood after running afoul of the p.c. police.

The most high profile case occurred on May 29th when ABC, a subsidiary of Disney, fired vociferous Trump supporter Roseanne Barr from her show Roseanne, the most popular new TV show in America, after she had tweeted racist remarks about a former Obama official.

Also, the same week that Disney had Gunn walk the plank, Paramount fired Amy Powell, head of their television division, after Powell allegedly made a comment about “angry Black women”. Powell strenuously denies the allegations, and is planning on suing Paramount for wrongful termination. The irony is that the comment in question was made during discussions about Paramount’s production of a series based on the film First Wives Club that has an all-Black cast.

While the obvious through line of all of these stories is political correctness run amok and the internet mob targeting and destroying people’s careers, another common feature of these stories is just as insidious…the expansion and abuse of corporate power.

It is bad enough that corporations are so short-sighted as to only make decisions based on quarterly earnings rather than long-term financial health, but now these business behemoths no longer seem beholden to shareholders or the bottom line at all, but rather, like impetuous adolescents, are slavishly and myopically addicted to such frivolous and fickle short-term measurements of their success as online popularity.

The fact that Disney would fire Gunn, whose two previous Guardian of the Galaxy films made the company nearly two billion dollars, over years old bad joke tweets, is astonishing for a media giant that has built its exorbitant power making money, not friends.

ABC/Disney’s decision to fire Roseanne, while more understandable in terms of the offensive content and recent timing of her tweets, also goes against the financial bottom line as it is estimated that it will cost the network tens of millions of dollars. And yes, firing Roseanne will appease people who were offended by her tweets, but in this hyper-polarized political atmosphere it will also alienate people who are her fans, making the whole enterprise a public relations wash at best.

Paramount’s firing of Powell will no doubt hit the company in its pocketbook as well, since Powell has stated she will sue for wrongful termination, and from all of the information currently made public, she has a very strong case.

This recent upsurge in political correctness and zero tolerance in the entertainment industry is born out of impotent liberals in Hollywood needing to vent their rage at Trump, so they use any chance they get to punish a proxy, whether deserving or not. Barr and Powell are no doubt stand-ins for racist Trump in the eyes of Hollywood liberals and make for useful and momentarily satisfying scapegoats.

The big studios have now co-opted the mindset of their liberal La La Land neighbors, enshrining into corporate policy the idea that error has no rights, and that those who don’t preach the politically correct party line are not only wrong but irredeemably evil.

While liberals cheered Roseanne’s firing as a victory over “racist” Trump supporters, hubris blinded them to the uncomfortable fact that using politically incorrect tweets as a cudgel to bludgeon their enemies is a tactic that others could turn against them, thus the alt-right used the same approach to bag their own big game in the form of James Gunn.

The inevitable outcome of Hollywood social justice warriors using revenge fueled, emotionally driven political correctness as a weapon is that it will invariably devolve into a self-defeating circular firing squad where liberals destroy and alienate just as many allies as enemies in their scorched earth approach at policing speech and thought.

This approach also conditions corporations into abandoning context and logic from their decision making, such as being able to see the difference in severity between Gunn’s old rape jokes and Roseanne’s recent racist barbs, and replacing them with a draconian and manic zero-tolerance policy in order to satiate whatever online mob, regardless of their political affiliation, targets them.

And so, while Trump-loving Roseanne is out at ABC, so is devout Democrat James Gunn at Disney. And while the liberal goal is for more diversity and racial sensitivity in studios, Amy Powell’s quick-trigger firing from Paramount will result in White studio executives being less willing to work with minorities for fear that they will unwittingly say something offensive and instantly lose their jobs. In mediation this is what they call a lose-lose scenario.

The scariest part of all this is that since the disease of zero tolerance political correctness has spread from universities to Silicon Valley and now to the behemoths of corporate Hollywood like Disney, which is on the precipice of controlling an astounding 40% of the box office market with their pending purchase of Fox, the contagion will only spread further to the rest of American industries through the mindless and spineless group think of human resource departments in corporations across America.

Being beholden to the whims of whatever mob of snowflakes or cynically inspired career assassins shriek the loudest is no way to run a business, an industry or a nation. The sort of Orwellian, Stasi level policing of thought and speech that brought down James Gunn, Amy Powell and even Roseanne Barr is pure and utter madness. I can assure you one thing…this insanity can not and will not end well for Hollywood or America.

A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT RT.COM

UPDATE: Right on schedule...Sarah Silverman is the newest Hollywood liberal to be idiotically raked over the coals for old pedophilia jokes on twitter. Once the Politically Correct beast is unleashed it cannot be controlled...a lesson Hollywood liberals are learning the hard way.

©2018