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[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]
The view from Mount Olympus is said to be spectacular, but few have ever seen it. Head up past the former homes of long dead movie stars and you can look down from the Hollywood Hills on WeHo’s gay nightlife and Russian restaurants, along with much of the rest of L.A.
With names like Hercules Dr, Zeus Dr, Apollo Dr, Jupiter Dr, and, of course, Mt. Olympus Dr, it’s truly a hangout for any gods with twenty million to spare. Reported celebrity residents and owners of the gated community with 24/7 security include Leonardo DiCaprio, Katy Perry, and Harrison Ford, but even more importantly here is the Ross House, a 13,000 square foot modernist monster, where Hollywood studios hold intimate receptions, screenings and award parties for the small club of those who are famous or can help make them even more famous.
The Ross House of Mt. Olympus is usually a brief entry in industry publications, but it embodies the vast gulf between how people down in L.A. live and how those who decide their fates do.
While Los Angeles has become a crime-ridden hellhole, Mt. Olympus, like many well-off neighborhoods in the area, enjoys private security patrols so that someone is always watching. The celebrities who come and go from private parties at exclusive locations like the Ross House have their own security and studios provide security for their events. In Greek myth, Mt. Olympus may have been difficult for mortals to reach, but the Los Angeles development has a regular commuter class of illegal alien maids, cleaners and gardeners, as well as security.
“The wealthy elite of Mount Olympus are some of the wealthiest and most influential people in all of Los Angeles,” one real estate agent gushes and that may be overstating it, but the 400 or so homes and the 800 or so residents of this Hollywood Hills enclave do live apart from the rest.
As do many of the immortals of the Hollywood Hills where crime is rare and junkies don’t sleep on the streets. And when crime does happen, even the most pro-crime prosecutors are much more responsive to the needs of those on high than to the troubles of those down below.
Every city has its class divides, but the heights of Mt. Olympus and its neighbors in the ‘Hills’ are a divide not only in geographic distance, but topological territory. To pause for a moment at a reception for an Oscar winner at Ross House and cast a brief gaze down below to where street level retail is vanishing and angry hobos roam the streets stabbing people is to be above it all.
Socialism is not an ideology of street-level social reformers, but of aspiring gods who look down and imagine moving people around like so many toys until everything fits perfectly. To be down on the street is to know that there is no perfection and that nothing will ever fit. And that all we have are the imperfect solutions of common sense and whatever character we can wrest from the chaos and technological tricks we can use to stay one step ahead of the entropy horizon.
Hollywood, the people who pretend to tell our stories, play with toys in an industry of them. There are the white roofs of the studios, the large prop rental facilities and a backlot of fake streets on which fake lives will be portrayed and fake lives depicted. And then after playtime is over, the men and women will drive up the narrow winding canyon roads along streets named for old legends, past the Greystone Mansion, where an oil tycoon’s murder-suicide inspired the movie ‘There Will Be Blood’, and where everything from Batman to Star Trek was filmed, to their estates up in the sky. Is it any wonder that they’re socialists? How could they be anything else.
The view from Mt. Olympus is not nearly as glorious as the Alps or the Rockies if what you value in life is natural beauty, but if what you love is power, then the twinkling fairylights of the Los Angeles landscape, the long roads and the endless springtime are ideological ambrosia.
Leftist politics are one part perpetual outrage, two parts magical thinking and four parts pagan godhood. The old days when powerful men could pretend to be gods were dashed by religion and then democracy. Until socialism, wealth bought you only so many privileges. Now it buys you the privilege of looking down and toying with the less well off in the name of social justice.
It doesn’t take much to toy with the really poor, but the genius of leftist politics is that the wildly rich can use it to grind down poorer rivals and aspiring members of the middle class. California’s upward mobility was turned upside down when success was more than just buying a mansion in one of the nicer parts of town, but moving uphill to rain misery on everyone down below.
California’s social justice class is even more effete than in most other places. Gov. Gavin Newsom carries vineyard country wherever he goes. The DSA socialists drive six figure cars when they go to protest for the homeless or Hamas. And their parents benevolently gaze down at them from Mt. Olympus: proud of how much Oliver and Sophia care about the ‘big’ issues.
Radicals are not made out of the molten metal of oppression but poured out of the golden crucible of prosperity. It isn’t the mobs rising up from the streets, but descending down from pricey prep schools like Harvard Westlake where the children of celebrities and their financial planners with few real skills go on to study gender theory at UCLA or USC in between shopping trips to hip boutiques on Rodeo Drive and protests around Grand Park.
The mediocre elites of Mt. Olympus have their McMansion versailles not despite their socialism, but because of it. Stockbrokers call for the redistribution of wealth, doctors demand that medicine be socialized, and celebrities champion the rise of the working man. Up in the sky, idealism seems more real than common sense and reality is for the lesser folks below.
The immortals may have to descend from Mt. Olympus to shop at Trader Joe’s (if they choose not to Instacart their order) where there are bums in the alley and tent encampments under the underpass, but a return to the heights also restores a sense of the rightness of things. In Manhattan, a liberal who had been mugged might become a conservative, but in the nicer parts of Los Angeles County, the liberal drives past the chaos, and escapes that sense of vulnerability by retreating to gated communities and estates policed by heavily armed private security.
It’s vulnerability that makes conservatives out of liberal immortals. Not just a mugging, but mortality in whatever form it comes whether it’s financial reverses, government abuses or just the passage of time. Leftist politics, like casinos and crypto, only work in a cloud of unreality. When reality touches our souls, then the impossible makes way for the realities of life.
What happens to a liberal who never gets mugged? He becomes an idiot immortal, living outside reality, convinced that everyone else could live that way too if only they voted like him.
Southern California is uniquely insulated from those realities. This is where the seasons do not change and time does not pass. Even as the cities decay and the suburbs empty out to Florida and Nevada, the immortals look down from the heights and believe that nothing has changed. Until one day they look down to find that there is nothing left to see underneath the mountain.
DiCaprio claimed that Ignoring Global Warming/Climate Change is rejecting the Truth coming from someone whose whole career is playing big game od Lets Pretend for Cash Robert Redford has claimed Fossil Fuels are Cooking the Earth while he did ads for United Airlines
That was not only perceptive, but quite beautiful.
Thank you so much. We must strive for beauty where we can.
YOU are a beautiful soul, Daniel.
This article is real poetry!
Thank you Mr. Greenfield for writing an honest and beautifully written article!
Leftists live in a fantasy world!
Conservatives live in reality! (although some days I want to live in the fake world like leftists do!!)
Thank you. Reality is also sanity while leftists all too often inhabit an unreality that leads to insanity.
Why single out Hollywood millionaires?
You can be non-religious, you can be agnostic, you can be an atheist, and still believe in the religious moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice. Marxism does just that.
Before there was ever a movie industry there was Christianity teaching Americans that they should sacrifice for the poor, sacrifice for their neighbor, sacrifice for the wretched of the earth, sacrifice for sinners, sacrifice for God, sacrifice to gain salvation and a place in Heaven.
Socialism comes from religion. What happens to a Christian that gets mugged by reality? Almost always he keeps believing in an eternal, magical, after-life, Christian utopia.
“As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.
Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”
The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” – Mark 10:17-24
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” The concept of social justice, which jettisoned the idea that we actually earn and deserve what we get in life, was first adopted by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, as drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.” – Richard Salsman, “Holy Scripture and the Welfare State”
Oooooo, a double hit of the keywords that trigger the THX Beer Drinking game. Specifically the words altruism and Christianity in this oft repeated pick and choose smorgasbord that our rezident scold hopes will finally show the “hypocrisy” of sacrificing for the poor and create a world of rationally selfish (or is it selfishly rational) cretins who would step over the unfortunates if they crossed your path. No doubt you would step over them. This from the clown car who says “I don’t recognize any such absurdity as service to my country. I recognize a moral responsibility to my freedom and liberty and the freedom and liberty of those I love.”
Your freedom, your this and that. It’s all about you isn’t it. Even after you get rebuked again by the editor two days ago:
“May 27, 2024 at 9:22 pm
Hasidic Judaism is a mystical movement dating back to the 1700s which went its own way.
It’s not “pure Judaism”.
And you obviously know nothing about Judaism or Christianity. — Daniel Greenfield.”
You have zero sense of shame, self-awareness and you don’t know when to STFU. You are truly a low rent scumbag.
THX happens to be right. And by the way, since when is being rich a crime? The people who live in that area of L.A. happen to have talent, passion and commitment. I commend them for their success in film. Envy is a bipartisan emotion. The Right is afflicted just as the Left is. Just say the trigger word “Hollywood.”
THX only covered part of what Jesus said. If you read the full test, Jesus also said “with God all things are possible.”
Jesus also said you cannot serve two masters, referring to God and mammon (riches or materialism). Wealth in itself is not a crime but we should seek true spirituality to avoid the corruption of riches.
And finally, is THX saying we should all be bad Samaritans? It sounds like it.
Helping a deserving person, when you can and to the extent that you can, is not a sacrifice, nor is it altruism, it is rational, non-sacrificial, charity.
“…a man must certainly act to help a person in trouble whom he loves, even to the point of risking his own life in case of danger. This is not a sacrifice if he loves the individual—say, his wife—because what happens to her makes a life-and-death difference to him personally and selfishly. If it does not make such a difference to him, then whatever the name of his feeling, it is not “love.” By the same reasoning, a man must certainly not help others promiscuously. He must not help men who defy his values, or who declare war on him, or of whom he has no knowledge whatever. If a man is to qualify as self-sustaining and self-respecting, he must not help, let alone love, his enemy, or
even his neighbor—not until he discovers who the neighbor
is and whether the person deserves to be helped.” – Leonard Peikoff
“My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.” – Ayn Rand
Funny how marxist regimes are in such a hurry to get rid of Christianity then, inn’t?
Marxism demands that the individual be sacrificed to Almighty Society and Christianity demands that the individual be sacrificed to God. Of course, it’s one or the other, but in both cases man becomes a sacrificial animal.
“All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s SELFISH possessions—HIS title to HIS life, HIS liberty, HIS property, the pursuit of HIS own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”
Well, now we know where you get your idiotic and selfish SEFISHNESS from. Mr Totalitarian himself….Lenny Phuck-off.
Is it any wonder you rack up those downvotes like a pig at a slough? I think we have to add the word ‘selfish’ to the THX beer drinking game.
Obviously the duties of a servant also include slavishly repeating the whacked out totalitarian slave philosophy of Ayn Rand and Lenny. Whatever they say you fervently believe even down to your taste in music.
So who’s really the slave? The slave to a dead philosophy.
If the Rich gave all their wealth away to the Poor then this would make the Rich poor and the Poor rich.
Methinks you may have misunderstood the meaning behind the words of Jesus but then you often misunderstand words so theres that…
In a way he’s just arguing about the meaning of words like “altruism”. He uses bizarre meanings then starts an argument with it.
Very good Daniel!
I remember in the 1950s when I was a school kid we sometimes had sports events in other areas which I saw were very clean and safe. Much later walking home from Berkeley I went through those same areas which now were part of the 3rd World and the inhabitants were startled by a white guy setting foot there. Yet driving by on the main street outside things looked pretty much the same as in the 1950s. When I tried to tell people about how things were changing noone understood. They never set foot in those areas, just drive by in their cars, everything from that perspective looks the same, so their worldview doesn’t change.
Even famous politicians, like our former Senator Barbara Boxer, are clueless, not streetwise, not aware of what is happening on the ground. When she got mugged in Oakland, she was outraged that muggers would rob an elderly grandmother like her. But any streetwise person knows that helpless elderly ladies carrying expensive objects are the prime target of street criminals, because they can’t fight back.
Ooh Daniel, such writing! Once again, memorable.
Haha. Now do Atherton! Waaaaay worse.
This essay should be required reading for everyone in America. But I don’t agree that a liberal needs to be mugged to become a conservative. All it takes is some time taken to educate oneself and a determination to adhere to the truth. And there are a very few Hollywood elites who have taken the side of justice.
From leftist in the ‘early ’70’s to libertarian in the early ’80’s to conservatism in the ’90’s I will admit to getting good economic grounding reading libertarian tracts.
9-11 is what sealed the deal for me. The libertarian naivete on culture and the reason for the nation-state with borders had to be jettisoned. The libertarian seeming lack of curiosity on the human situation and why it is what it is, reminds me of when I was an atheist.
“And that all we have are the imperfect solutions of common sense and whatever character we can wrest from the chaos and technological tricks we can use to stay one step ahead of the entropy horizon.’
Life on the physical plane, in a nutshell. Well said.
The liberals can just turn moderate, still be bad but not overt, and everyone will gush over them.
It’s not that they like idealism. It’s that they hate me. Everything they do is trollish.
What works? Toughness. I get it bad. But they get it too. It’s the only thing that shuts them up.
I gotta say, sure Glee killed a lot of people, but it did get ratings. Didn’t watch it though.