When the Bad Guys Became the Good Guys
There is no doubt that we are in the middle of a great political realignment. You see it almost everywhere you look. Some of the signs are subtle, like the slow evolution of the GOP base away from a reflexive trust in law enforcement and the military. While others, like the budding onscreen bromance between Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald, are not.
One of the ways you can see this ongoing realignment is by observing the broader Culture and taking note of whom the major entertainment corporations want you to think of as the “Bad Guys.”
Hollywood and the news media have always led the way in determining who are the good guys and who are the bad. Indeed, the reason why the saying “politics is downstream from culture” resonates with us in the first place, is that throughout most of its history Hollywood has been at the leading edge of the Progressive vanguard, and U.S. politics has typically responded to Hollywood’s Progressive output, rather than the other way around.
And Hollywood wielded this power very effectively, for decades.
Hollywood released movies like GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT and THE DEFIANT ONES long before the average Aamerican man on the street was comfortable with the concept of full racial integration. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Civil Rights movement was given a tremendous boost by those movies, and that these movies (and many others just like them) helped to drive the broader culture towards racial equality.
But it wasn’t just Civil Rights issues that were tackled by activist Hollywood. Along with being a part of the Progressive vanguard came a healthy skepticism towards, and mistrust of, authority… particularly that authority claimed by Government. For many Americans, JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG was the first time they saw the horrific footage American soldiers captured when the Nazi death camps were liberated at the end of World War II. A dramatic cinematic moment that taught us all what can happen when Government abandons the concept of equal justice and turns on its own citizens.
In most of the great crime dramas of the 60’s and 70’s, from DEATH WISH to AND JUSTICE FOR ALL, THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 to Sidney Lumet’s entire oeuvre of New York movies (SERPICO; DOG DAY AFTERNOON; PRINCE OF THE CITY), official corruption is as much a villian in the story as any of the criminals who drive the plot. In a similar way, THE GODFATHER movies seem to slyly suggest that as bad as the Mob was, they were pikers compared with the fundamental corruption of the average Government functionary. Sure, Michael Corleone could whack you, but Senator Geary could bankrupt your business, throw your whole family in jail and drop a bomb on your house.
Ditto for ABSENCE OF MALICE in which the villains are the Press, the local cops, union officals, and the District Attorney. The “hero” of the story (Paul Newman) is a (maybe) mob-connected Miami importer/exporter who seems to be under the impression that he has the right to conduct his life and business free from official harrasment, and that to the extent Government believes he is guilty of something, he is still entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence.
I know, crazy right?
DEMOLITION MAN might be the most Libertarian, anti-Government movie ever made. Sly Stallone’s John Spartan is the symbol of everything that was best about America as the bombastic 80’s rolled into the 90’s. Looking back, Spartan may have represented the pinnacle of what it meant to be a free man in America before it all started going to toxically masculine shit.
Former cop Spartan is awakened from cryo-freeze in 2032, to an America that is clean, safe, polite and… utterly devoid of anything resembling life, liberty or happiness. Actual physical sex is illegal, as is dropping a good solid F-bomb. The populace is unarmed and docile, made that way by oppressive laws, an endless supply of inane entertainment content and ancient marketing jingles masquerading as popular music… gee, why does that all sound so damned familiar?
Denis Leary delivers something of a Libertarian manifesto at the film’s midpoint, one which I’m pretty sure I quoted verbatim at several points during the wholly unnecessary COVID lockdowns (more on those in a moment)…
These days, smoking a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinatti in the middle of a California non-smoking section will get you thrown right into the “Kamala Harris Wing” of the Gavin Newsom Memorial Gulag, and we’re probably no more than a couple of years away from a San Francisco public Healthcare surtax on every serving of chili-cheese fries. If you squint, you can easily begin to wonder if the filmmakers got the last two numbers in the year reversed, because the 2032 of DEMOLITION MAN looks an awful lot like the actual 2023 we are currently living through.
The “inciting incident” of DEMOLITION MAN occurs when a Government official named Cocteau, in the spirit of Soros prosecutors in Big Blue Cities all over America, intentionally releases murderers into the streets to terrorize the citizenry. He knows full well that, in their fear, the citizens of San Angeles will turn to him to protect them. This in turn will allow him to further consolidate his power over all the intimate details of their lives.
Hollywood called Dr. Raymond Cocteau a villain. And we all agreed that he was.
But that was then, this is now. Here in the “Now”… modern-day Cocteaus control Big Blue Cities (and States) all over America, and are celebrated by the Press for their courage in tearing those cities (and States) down to the studs.
Remember this speech from PREDATOR?
Well, after spending the last forty years smiting America’s enemies in the name of Freedom, Schwarzenegger has had a sudden change of heart. And so now it’s “screw your freedoms” and obey Anthony Fauci, a man who really did cook up a story (also, probably a virus!) and drop us all in the meat grinder. I guess we’re all just expendable assets now, just like Arnold’s doomed special forces team. Too bad… Arnold used to be somebody I could trust.
These days, when we watch the news, it’s those the same Goverment, military and intelligence officials… those who were once the “Big Bad“ villains in BOND movies, the MISSION; IMPOSSIBLE franchise and a million other thrillers from NO WAY OUT to PREDATOR to FIRST BLOOD, who stare back at us from our TV screens and say “you can trust us, now… this time it’s different.”
Untrustworthy men and women like Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Vindman, Fauci, Walensky, Page and Strzok, are now given a platform and a sinecure by the same Media who used to recoil from such officials like vampires from garlic bread. Each night these officials look us in the eye and tell us that everything we know to be observably true has “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation”… that we should ignore our lying eyes and do whatever our Government tells us to do, all while some brainless member of the Fourth Estate looks on adoringly, nary a single critical question on their well-paid botoxed lips.
Look, I believe in the Deep State is real. I do. My Father was a part of it for 20 years and he told me many times that the Government is not run by The President or the Congress… but by the countless faceless bureacrats of a million unelected Federal State and local agencies. But it has taken a long time for me to arrive at my current level of mistrust. Tucker Carlson said something on Glenn Beck’s radio show recently that really resonated with me. He said he’d spent his whole life in D.C., his father worked for the Government, and so he had a baseline level of trust in Government that was hard to shake. I too grew up in a D.C. suburb, and my Dad drove into the District every day for 25 years to his job at a Federal Agency, and so it was natural for me to say “how could Government be bad? My Dad works there?”
But it is sometimes bad. It’s too big, it’s too powerful, and it’s too dumb. It is too often a hammer when what we need is a scalpel.
What I don’t believe, though, is that the Deep State is a malevolent serpent, slithering its way through the halls of Adminstrative DC pushing the dark agenda of the the Globalists or the Military Industrial Complex or the Pharma companies or the Intelligence community. I believe that the Deep State is more like Ayers Rock, huge and immovable. You can’t move Ayers Rock, you can’t change it or influence it. The best you can do is chip away at the edges a little bit, but even that requires such a high level of effort that it makes the juice hardly worth the squeeze.
That’s what the Deep State is, it is an immovable rock. A million faceless calcified systems, for which no one seems to be responsible and from which everyone seems to have plausible deniability. Those who work within those systems long ago gave up on changing them for the better and now simply work to maintain them in their zombified states, training their replacements in the same go-along-to-get-along systems for generation after generation.
In a very real sense, Pete Buttigeig is not the “Director” of the Department of Transportation. He can’t be… because no one can. The DOT is too big for any one person to “direct.” The best he can hope for is to be is an effective caretaker. Which means the DOT, and every other Federal Agency, exist outside any one person’s direct control.
Like Ayers Rock, they just… are.
It’s the people that make The Deep State good or bad… or evil. Obviously there are good caretakers and bad caretakers, and Mayor Pete is clearly the latter, but no matter who runs the DOT next, the agency itself will continue to grow and metastasize, forever. Because that’s what Government agencies do. It is their primary function. These caretakers may not be villains, but they are certainly not heroes.
And yet if Pete Buttegieg, or a character very much like him, were to show up in a big studio movie in 2023, would he be a villain like Walter Peck or Senator Geary? Or is it more likely that he would be the hero of the story? If nothing else, the fact that both Pete Buttigieg and Anthony Fauci have had Hollywood-produced hagiographic documentarties made about them within the last few years, is highly suggestive of what the answer might be.
Could STRZOK: THE MOVIE be far behind? I think even the most committed Progressive would have to admit that the chances are non-zero.
Here in 2023, everyone knows that Richard Nixon resigned because he engaged in a massive cover-up of his administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in, a story revealed by the reporting of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein. But to watch ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN is to understand that in 1972 the connection between the break-in and the Nixon Government was never obvious, that the outcome of the story was by no means assured. In the beginning, Woodward and Bernstein didn’t have any idea what they had. They started with a weird penny-ante crime story and slowly and methodically followed it all the way to the White House. The result was a best-selling book and one of the greatest movies ever made.
Now compare that with the way our Media Coporations and Big Tech handled the Hunter Biden laptop story. No honest broker would suggest that the details revealed by the release of the laptop’s contents were any less suggestive of massive governmental corruption than was the initial fact pattern surrounding the Watergate break-in. Quite the contrary… the laptop arrived in the Media’s collective in-box with all the dots already connected. But we all know in our hearts that there will never be a big budget studio movie about The Hunter Biden laptop featuring an ensemble of the biggest movie stars of our time, no matter where that story leads.
Because the Bad Guys have become the Good Guys.
When I was in college I worked for a summer as a greenskeeper at a Golf Course on the PGA Tour. I wrote about it here, in what is still my favorite essay on this substack. I was something like a glorified gardener, that summer. Mostly I pushed a mower for three months. Except on this one particular day after the course got hit by a tornado that knocked over something like a hundred trees. My entire crew was called in over that weekend to do cleanup duty. The head of our crew took me out to where he had a big yellow machine hooked up to the course’s heavy-duty diesel tractor, a big sonofabitch that coughed out great clouds of black smoke as it operated. Boss Man told me the machine was an industrial woodchipper and that it was going to be my job to feed all those dead trees into the mouth of that goddamned thing. I guess he caught me staring at the spinning blades because before he walked away he said ‘listen, if that thing grabs ahold of you, it’s best not to fight it, just let it pull you in. It’ll be over faster.”
The Deep State is like that shredder… it’s not evil, but it is dangerous. COVID taught me that. Nothing in my life, not the threat of nuclear war, not financial collapse, not even 9/11 has scared me as much as watching a majority of my fellow countrymen bend over for every autocratic Federal impulse in exchange for an ephemeral sense of safety from an airborne respiratory virus.
We got too close to the churning maw of Government in 2020 and it pulled us right in. Unfortunately, this time there were no Woodwards or Bernsteins to pull back on the reins and say “hey wait, this doesn’t make sense. Let’s all slow down until we figure this out.” The Woodsteins of the world were all on the government’s side this time, and the Entertainment Corporations were their platform.
Our vertically integrated Entertainment system, once the vanguard of Progressive mistrust of authority, gave the Government cover to do whatever it wanted throughout the pandemic. And then Hollwyood, the News Media, and their enforcers in Big Tech turned these Government COVID officials into heroes, even though those officials knew that much of what they were saying wasn’t true. Hollywood and the Media sympathetically promoted every autocratic Government demand, and they attacked, censored and deplatformed anyone who dared to ask a critical question.
How on Earth did that happen?
It happened because that’s another thing the Deep State does… it captures. And now it has captured Hollywood and the broader Entertainment business, including the “News” Media. How it has done so is probably beyond the scope of this essay, but there is little doubt that it has. What this means for a beleagured American populace trying to figure out whom they can trust is anyone’s guess. But it seems obvious to me that it is an ominous development.
Whom will our cultural vanguard decide are tomorrow’s villains? Well, you know what they say… “if you look around the room and you’re not sure who The Mark is… you’re The Mark.”
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