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- Photo by De'Andre Bush on Unsplash Mainstream publishing has a profoundly left-wing bias. There are exceptions, as in most things, though you’ll find most of them as small publishers that were created expressly to push back against the bias.
But every now and then, someone who has a name too big to ignore takes a shot that publishing might want to silence, but can’t really afford to do so.
Tilting At Windmills is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It’s a shame that it’s like that in the first place, but when that author publishes something that’s essentially throwing a grenade into the room of leftist media, it’s a beautiful thing to behold. From Hot Air :
Back in March, Mark wrote about a new novel from best-selling author James Ellroy, whose novels Hollywood had made into films such as the James Woods thriller Cop , Brown’s Requiem, The Black Dahlia, and most famously, L.A. Confidential . Mark noted the publication of Ellroy’s latest novel, Red Sheet, set in Ellroy’s favorite setting of 1950s Hollywood, only with a surprising and audacious twist. The novel takes the position that the so-called Blacklist was not only a Hollywood studio manipulation, but that the anti-Communists at the time were right about the Soviet influence operation targeting the American entertainment industry: Red Sheet is an anti-communist novel. It stands foursquare in the tainted tradition of Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane. Ellroy is out to scramble your long-held perceptions and force you into a state of jumped-up disavowal. Red Sheet scorns the mock-martyred Hollywood Ten and ballyhoos the Blacklist and the ’47-’48 HUAC hearings. Red Sheet forces you to live within the twisted and oddly tender soul of Richard M. Nixon. Red Sheet spotlights the Spanish Civil War and atrocities committed by the commie-infested International Brigade, heretofore held as heroic. Red Sheet lionizes name-naming kingpin Whittaker Chambers and bestows kudos on ratfinks Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg.
The question at that time was what Ellroy intended to say with Red Sheet . Did he just want to tell a provocative tale with a counterfactual premise, along the lines of speculative fiction such as If the South Had Won the Civil War and The Man In the High Castle ? Or did Ellroy believe he was telling the real tale of the ‘blacklist’ and exposing Hollywood’s decades-long propaganda that deflects from the disloyal truth?
Wonder no longer. The Hollywood Reporter sat down with Ellroy , who had no trouble setting the record straight from his perspective. He reminds Seth Abramovitch that the Hollywood blacklist was a studio-driven creation rather than a government mandate, and even then, a mainly corrupt filter that intended to duck responsibility for the infiltration of the industry. Ellroy explains that the real heroes of the so-called Blacklist Era were Whitaker Chambers, Richard Nixon, and Elia Kazan – who himself got blackballed by his own industry when the propaganda started:
“The Hollywood 10 — they were either ex-Party or Party,” Ellroy tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Everybody knew what Stalin was doing. They just threw in their lot with Stalinists and with the enemies of America. … That’s who [these] people were.” ...
THR sees this as just Ellroy’s perspective on what transpired, but the truth of the matter is that, yeah, they were actually communists.
Moreover, this wasn’t the United States government mandating commies be excluded from Hollywood, but it was studio execs who simply didn’t want to hire these people due to their political views.
What’s interesting to me here is that not only is Ellroy throwing a grenade into the trench regarding the whole blacklist mythology, he’s laying the groundwork for a reader to potentially recognize that while Hollywood diefies those who were blacklisted today, they fully support basically blacklisting conservatives in the film industry.
James Woods is a legend, but he’s worked very little since he came out as a conservative. Adam Baldwin has what it takes to be a leading man, but he’s never going to play one because he’s too outspoken on his own right-leaning political beliefs.
And let’s get into those who have been explicitly canceled, like Gina Carano. While Hollywood will crank out hagiographies of those who were blacklisted, treat them as if they were wronged by the American government and people, they continue to engage in the exact same behavior, except for one key difference.
No one on the right is seeking to essentially overthrow everything about the United States in order to serve foreign Soviet masters. The commies were.
James Woods doesn’t like Welfare. That’s a whole lot different than embracing the Soviet model of communism that involves killing anyone who disagrees with the communist state.
People on the right aren’t a threat to our nation. The Hollywood commies were, and they were poised to poison the minds of millions of Americans, much as Hollywood does today.
Some will argue that it didn’t matter, that the blacklist shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and I’ll say, sure, that’s fine, but why is it acceptable to blacklist people today, even if it starts because of a social media mob instead of a congressional committee?
Let’s just say that I’m looking forward to reading Red Sheet .
I’ll have to, because there’s no way in hell Hollywood will touch this one, is there?
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