[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2013/06/bel.jpg)Appearing on MSNBC, singer and former civil rights icon Harry Belafonte told President Barack Obama how he should take control of the political debate. His answer? Jail opponents. “That there should be this lingering infestation of really corrupt people who sit trying to dismantle the wishes of the people, the mandate that has been given to Barack Obama, and I don’t know what more they want,” Belafonte told race hustler Al Sharpton. “The only thing left for Barack Obama to do is to work like a third world dictator and just put all these guys in jail.”
Belafonte added that Republicans were “violating the American desire,” and described Republicans as an “infestation.”
This is the true language of the Hollywood left unmasked. The great lie of Hollywood is that leftists may not agree with you, but they’ll die for your right to say it. The truth is somewhat less glorious: they’ll fire you for your right to say it. The same sort of totalitarianism evidenced by Belafonte here runs rampant throughout Hollywood. It doesn’t matter what the issue is: if you take the wrong side, the Hollywood left wants you shut down completely and utterly. If they had the power of the prisons, they’d use it.
When Miss California, Carrie Prejean, told the Miss USA contest in 2009 that she was for traditional marriage, that prompted this little gem of liberal tyranny from rumormonger Perez Hilton, a judge in that contest: “She’s a dumb bitch! And a hypocrite too!” He later said he voted against her because “Miss USA should represent everyone. Her answer alienated millions of gay and lesbian Americans, their families and their supporters.” Forget the fact that there are far more millions of religious people who disapprove of homosexuality. Where Hilton comes from, those who disagree are shut down.
That’s the rule, not the exception. When it came out that Mormon artistic director of the California Musical Theater Scott Eckern had backed Proposition 8, upholding same-sex marriage, the Hollywood community came out of the closet to try to destroy his career. Marc Shaiman, composer of Hairspray, said that he wouldn’t let his musical be performed at the Theater unless Eckern was fired. “I was uncomfortable with money made off my work being used to put discrimination in the Constitution,” said Shaiman. Jeffrey Seller, producer of Avenue Q, joined the anti-Eckern jihad. “That a man who makes his living exclusively through the musical theater could do something so hurtful to the community that forms his livelihood is a punch in the stomach,” he said. Eckern was forced to quit. Shaiman’s take: “It felt fantastic.”
This isn’t rare. Hollywood kook Bette Midler supported the IRS’s crusade against conservative non-profits: “I love the IRS!” she cheered on Twitter. Hollywoodites revel in the new blacklist that allows them to keep conservative creators unemployed. “I hope so,” Nicholas Meyer, director of Star Trek II, told me about discrimination against conservatives in Hollywood.
It’s not relegated to Hollywood, of course. The environmentalist movement has suggested for years that those who do not buy into anthropogenic global warming be shipped to a desert island. “Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay,” says environmentalist Steve Zwick. “Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.”
Inside leftists, the totalitarian impulse lurks: the impulse to control, and the simultaneous impulse to follow a great leader. And in places like Hollywood, where one party control is the rule rather than the exception, such impulses find fruition in industrywide discrimination.
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