Jennifer Lawrence made headlines this week for (sigh) taking a strong, “progressive” public stand – notably that she’s “fighting with her Republican in-laws and having nightmares about Tucker Carlson.”
Lawrence is a young, attractive, wealthy movie star who – like all members of the Hollywood elite – is happy to tow the company line as an obliging mouth piece of the Democrat Party. Actors and their publicists usually time these bold stands – oddly! – right before they release a new movie.
Lawrence is a little bit ahead of schedule in promoting the November release of her next film.
While it’s not surprising for actors like Lawrence to do this, it’s weird how much she missed the anti-elitist point of The Hunger Games, the movie series that made her a household name.
Based on Suzanne Collins best-selling YA series, The Hunger Games depicts a dystopian future where the American, Canadian, and Mexican governments have collapsed, replaced by a new fascist dictatorship called Panem. Operating out of Denver, the Panem oligarchs lord over the rest of the continent with their superior technology. They divide everyone into 13 Districts, keep them in near-starvation poverty, and force their children to fight to the death – all while singing about the bounty they’ve created in a clearly Soviet fashion.
This evil government is so obviously a parallel to communism that the Panem flag uses the same color scheme as both China and the Soviet Union.
In the movies, Lawrence plays Katniss Everdeen, who rallies the 13 Districts – meant to parallel the 13 original American colonies – to overthrow the technocrats ruining their lives. Collins even made Katniss a native of coal-mining West Virginia – coincidentally the state Hillary Clinton lost by the biggest margin.
Don’t tell me Katniss wouldn’t have voted for Trump.
See, the problem is actors are generally not intelligent people. They’re generally good-looking people who excel by doing what they’re told. No, not the Harvey Weinstein “she wound up on the cutting room floor” do what they’re told, actors become famous by reading words written by smarter people.
For what’s it worth, video of Lawrence drooling over a pre-disgraced Weinstein at the GLAAD awards is right here.
Furthermore, celebrity headlines make for good clickbait. (Yes, we’ve done it here too with this article.) People would generally rather entertain themselves than read hard news about substantive issues, and there’s nothing new about that.
The British knight, John Glubb, writes about this in his 1976 treatise “The Fate of Empires,” based on historical research about the rise and fall of the great nations of the past. He said:
“The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. The word ‘celebrity’ today is used to designate a comedian or a football player, not a statesman, a general, or a literary genius.”
By one measure, wealthy entertainers are the worst people to fatuously, dishonestly lecture the world about the need for strong government action to “solve” inequality, but by another measure they’re actually perfect.
So-called progressivism isn’t about solving inequality, if that were true San Francisco would be a paradise, rather than the American city with both the most billionaires and worst poverty. Today’s progressives don’t resemble Teddy Roosevelt at all. Rathert, they want a world where they enjoy the luxury of armed guards, gated communities, and private jets while lecturing normal people about the gun control, racist walls, and climate change.
Katniss doesn’t use a gun, she uses a bow and arrow – the capitol got rid of the Second Amendment.
Calling progressives hypocrites for this hasn’t seemed to alter their behavior so far. Hypocrisy isn’t a flaw of progressive dogma, it’s a design feature.
Modern-day American progressivism is all about recreating aristocracy in a country that did more to undermine aristocracy than any other in human history. Democrats used to be the party of the working-class, but discarded its legacy with the advent of the electric car, when doing “good” became a status symbol. It’s been downhill for them since.
We talked about Taylor Swift a couple years ago, when she used her platform to bigotedly attack Trump/Katniss rednecks, and this summer she was named “the worst climate criminal” on the planet.
Multi- multi- multi-millionaires like Swift, Lawrence, Nancy Pelosi, and the Obamas don’t want the just society they sermonize about. They want to maintain the horribly injust society that put them on top – with the added privilege of finally being able to lord their superiority over all the peasants in the Districts.
Err, red states.
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