George Clooney: Part-Time Champion of Free Expression
The ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ hubbub continues the attempt to memory-hole Cancel Culture
George Clooney wants to warn America about the spread of paranoia, fear, and censorship. In the process, he made some history.
On Saturday, CNN aired a performance of a hit Broadway play Clooney co-wrote and starred in, making it the first Broadway play to be broadcast live around the world. The play highlights a time in American history when paranoia and fear ruined lives.
You might assume Clooney’s play explores Cancel Culture.
After all, so many disturbing controversies have erupted over the past decade. Maybe the A-lister co-wrote a play about Roland Fryer and Zac Kriegman’s doomed attempt to warn America about the false narrative about policing that claimed thousands of lives. Maybe his play examines the paranoia, death, and destruction delivered by the COVID response. Maybe it explores how paranoia and groupthink gave America the Biden mental fitness cover up.
But no, Clooney’s play doesn’t cover any of the events of the past decade. Instead, Good Night, and Good Luck reaches back a half-century to remind Americans about McCarthyism. It highlights CBS newsman Edward R. Morrow’s clash with Joseph McCarthy over the senator’s infamous effort to root out communism in America.
Clooney’s fellow thespian Kevin Spacey also recently invoked the dangers of McCarthyism, the Hollywood blacklist, and the careers unfairly ruined. Americans should learn about McCarthyism, but like Clooney and Spacey, the arts and entertainment industries suffer from selective amnesia. In countless movies, shows, and plays, the entertainment industry lionizes those wrongly accused of being communists, but forgets that many in the film and theater scene really were members of the Communist Party.
Productions may depict them as noble dissidents standing up to a corrupt system, but in reality they supported one of the most corrupt systems history has ever seen, a system with a death count that approached 100 million people. As Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh detail in their book Red Star Over Hollywood, the Soviet Union really did infiltrate Hollywood. The Soviet’s useful idiots in America’s entertainment industry might depict themselves as free speech martyrs, but they supported a system that never missed an opportunity to imprison and murder artists who refused to fall in line.
Contemporary artists who continue to tell half truths and lies about American communism contribute to younger generations' naive view of history. Today lots of 20-somethings get warm fuzzies at the mention of the word socialism. Even the term “Red Scare” invites younger generations to think of the 1950s as a time when America had nightmares about a monster under the bed that never really existed. You have to wonder how Hollywood would have framed history if, instead of aiding communists in the Soviet Union, our arts industry had snuggled up to Nazis in Germany.
But all the controversy about McCarthyism is, in one sense, beside the point.
Avoiding the Obvious
Clooney and his comrades don’t have to harken back to a pre-internet, even pre-ER(!) age to find an example of witch hunts run amok. Too bad that for our most eminent storytellers, Cancel Culture remains the elephant in the room. For those eager to raise awareness about the ever present threat of mass madness, it also offers key advantages over McCarthyism. Cancel Culture is much more recent. Indeed, it’s still going on. And, as I recently outlined, it’s also been more destructive.
Hold on, though.
Clooney tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper that what’s going on today is even worse than McCarthyism. Maybe this is when Clooney heroically highlights Cancel Culture. Maybe this is when he admonishes his colleagues who so often choose to downplay, ignore, or even pretend Cancel Culture doesn’t exist. Maybe this is when he establishes himself as a principled defender of free expression.
Nope.
Turns out Clooney’s referring to the “fear stretching through law firms and universities” since President Trump moved back into the White House. He also highlights the threat Trump poses to media outlets. Institutions such as academia and the legacy media were long overdue for a reckoning. Trump delivered that, but did so in a predictably ham-handed way.
So, by all means, criticize him. Have at it.
But it’s like Clooney bought a ticket to a play called America, and took his seat during the intermission. If only he had paid attention from the beginning. Then he could have called out the leftists who fueled Cancel Culture, and that would have given him more credibility to take on the rise of its right-wing version.
Instead, his performance on and off the stage continues the cycle of selective amnesia and selective outrage. Good Night, and Good Luck might be hailed by journalists and awards shows. It might have enjoyed huge success at the box office, but it’s not some uniquely important production. It’s just another exercise in confirmation bias.
Consider this unintentionally revealing Slate piece. The writer thinks he’s identified what caused theatergoers to throw down hundreds of dollars per ticket to watch the play:
It’s Clooney, and the promise of spending 100 minutes in a crowd of people who share your concerns about the state of the world, people who nod in the same places, applaud the same lines—a crowd that might, as on the afternoon I saw it, find you a few feet away from Anderson Cooper or even, as it had the night before, Barack and Michelle Obama.
If tourists in New York enjoy nodding and clapping in unison, they might also take a quick Uber to check out live performances of The Daily Show and The View. Clooney based his play on his 2005 movie by the same name, so maybe it’s time to re-release that flick. It could spread synchronized nodding and clapping across the nation.
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How Long Will the Threat Be With Us?
Bringing a Broadway play to a global television audience takes a lot of work — all the cameras, all the crew, all those acts of logistical coordination. It seems like the kind of hassle you’d endure to highlight a problem that will be with us for a long time. Yet it’s here that Clooney’s backstory gives viewers one more twist.
Cooper asks if Trumpism will survive Trump, and Clooney says no.
He explains that Trump is a celebrity, and that Republicans don’t have anyone on deck with Trump’s charisma to carry his message. In other words, Clooney thinks Trumpism will be with us for only another three-and-a-half years.
And even if Trumpism survives in some diminished form, it will be no match for the horrors the other tribe delivers. Compare it to Cancel Culture.
Cancel Culture doesn’t rise and fall with one charismatic leader. Let’s employ one of the Eight Percenters’ favorite adjectives — systemic. Cancel Culture heaves out systemic madness. The chief purveyors — Hollywood, the legacy media, and academia — have grown into increasingly intolerant monocultures.
They also misunderstand their relationship with “The System.” They think they’re fighting it, but they’re actually fueled by it. Consider, for instance, taxpayer subsidies for film productions and academia. Think four years of Trump will stop the gravy train? No way.
The monoculture has re-educated generations of Americans, and the new guard is typically more strident than the old guard. Think today’s professors are narrow-minded? Just wait till today’s grad students secure tenure.
Remember, after its excesses grew increasingly absurd, America mocked Political Correctness into hiding. But that Marxist spawn never really went away. It merely morphed into the new iteration of Marxist lunacy known as Cancel Culture. So if Cancel Culture gets mocked into hiding, we shouldn’t assume it’s really gone.
I hope I’m wrong, but I tremble at what might arrive in the near future.
We could be treated to some new strain of Marxist madness with its own asinine vocabulary. If that happens, you can bet Hollywood will still be warning us about McCarthyism.
I think you go overboard on the Marxist and communist front, the bogeyman has always been communists in this country…what about the fascists and oligarchs who are reshaping our country at this moment?