HOLLYWOOD…MEET THE DEPLORABLES

“You dumbasses, we should’ve stayed silent until we were long gone,” fumed one agent.

But the odor of danger hadn’t reached the ground unit until they shifted their camera from the field to the lone house in the pasture. That’s when they too got a whiff.

“Some faggot tweeted the owner of the house,” blurted Intel to the field operatives.

“The people are outside,” the field operatives nervously replied. 

At that same moment, listening to a police scanner, Intel heard a call come from precinct dispatch that confirmed their worst fears. “700 Moon Creek Road, Blue Dodge Neon taking pictures.” The property owner had just alerted the cops, who were now in route. 

“Get the fuck out of there! You’ve been made,” barked Intel.

But any opening of a quick getaway disappeared. The cops had already closed in, driving up as the ground operatives stood conspicuously on the small country road – with surveillance equipment in tow.

This was it. The entire operation, methodically moved forward by hundreds of operatives, was now on the verge of being completely compromised. Pranks were nothing new to these guys, but this time it was different. It was personal. They’d aimed their vast intelligence agency at Hollywood, and in particular, God’s gift to the arts…Shia LaBeouf. And when they did, Season Three of the Internet’s greatest reality show – He Will Not Divide Us – went into full swing, ultimately showing Tinseltown just how far the people it routinely insults will go to fight back. Before the web series was over, there’d be a celebrity arrest, gang intimidation, indecent exposure, alleged assaults, vandalism, gunshots…and yes, even hurt feelings – all in route to the most remarkable game of capture the flag that the Internet has ever known. And to a legion of online viewers – it was simply must watch TV.

“I’m supposed to be studying for a test tomorrow, but I’m on here instead lol,” claimed one riveted web viewer as the ground team was facing arrest.

This is the new age of entertainment…where Hollywood’s only credited role is in playing the victim.

After two generations of being pummeled by La La Land, the newly constituted right is punching back with a force that has Tinseltown scrambling. Up to 2002, the right took the hits from Hollywood, but continued to open their wallets. That year, domestic-tickets-sold reached a modern all-time high. But as America entered the Iraq War, the environment in Hollywood took a darker than normal turn.

“I can remember at a table read, the day after Bush was reelected in 2004,” recalls Peabody award-winning actor Nick Searcy. “Somebody at the table read said, ‘I was so furious this morning I stuck my head out the window and screamed why doesn’t somebody assassinate this man.’ And I was like…there’s a lot of people that agree with you but they’re mostly called terrorists.”

In the early years of the new millennium, Hollywood entered a more vitriolic stage of bashing the right. And combined with its shift to a global box office which had just began eclipsing the domestic for the first time – Tinseltown started paying even less attention, and respect, to the other half of the country.

In an apparent response, U.S. moviegoers began shunning Movie City with its pocketbooks – with the Right turning away at a much higher clip. By 2016, domestic ticket sales have fallen by over 250,000,000 tickets per year from its 2002 high – a downward trend that started before the proliferation of social media, the third screen, or streaming services…and a decline that happened with an increase in population, quantities of movies made per year, and number of operating U.S. theaters. And 2017 isn’t looking any better…with the summer take at a twenty-five year low. The box office isn’t the only place feeling the pinch either. Cord cutting, the phenomenon where people are terminating their cable services, is accelerating, and home entertainment sales have plummeted nearly 50% over the past decade.

But where the old right was content with closing their wallets to Hollywood, the new right thinks stopping there is the stuff of cucks. This politically incorrect movement has galvanized in a way that was unheard of just a few years ago. Instead of the Kum Ba Yah rallies of yesterday’s Tea Party, this new right prefers a more active approach. They bombard film reviews with negative grades, inundate show sponsors with calls to drop their advertising, and hit the most hate-filled celebrities with a flurry of boycott campaigns usually only seen coming from the left.

No longer afraid to be called racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, or xenophobes – because they know they’ll be branded these no matter what – the new right is going directly after their perceived enemy, rejecting traditional content, creating their own entertainment, and organizing on a scale that should make Hollywood take pause in their daily putdowns. Social norms are no longer barriers, and some are even willing to flout the law…all to even the playing field. These are the fruits of Tinseltown and Big Media’s years of abuse, and nothing shows this phenomenon better than the Internet sensation He Will Not Divide Us. It’s a cautionary tale for the kind of blowback Hollywood celebrities should learn to expect if they continue to disrespect The Deplorables.

The whole ordeal started rather innocently in mid-January 2017 when, during an Instagram-live rant from his car, a visibly distraught Jaden Smith, the scion of Will Smith, was seen succumbing to one of the heaviest pressures in the life of the privileged…the DMV. In his melancholy brain dump while waiting for a driving instructor, this oppressed artist from the mean streets of Malibu declared that he wanted to move out of Los Angeles because there was just no one there willing to support youth creativity. A few days later he joined Shia LaBeouf of The Transformers fame in tweeting the vague remark “He Will Not Divide Us.”

By 9am on January 20^th, at the same time that the Presidential Inauguration Ceremony kicked-off, the cryptic message became clear, as Jaden stepped up to a live streaming camera mounted on a white wall outside an NYC museum, chanting the same phrase. Minutes later, an image of the anti-Trump protest was tweeted to his then roughly six million Twitter followers and within six hours, what initially started as a solo protest grew in number to fill the entire museum lot housing the live stream.

That could have been it – a single-day, perfectly executed protest starring two products of Hollywood. But it wasn’t to be just a one-day soiree…it was scheduled to last the entire length of President Trump’s term. There are possibly only two people with the composure to keep a protest of that length civil. The Dalai Lama was busy. Shia LaBeouf wasn’t – and he was destined to show Hollywood the lengths to which some on the right are willing to go to seek revenge.

After Jaden kicked off the protest, Shia joined in, setting off the kind of media fanfare that we’ve all come to expect for anything anti-Trump. “Shia LaBeouf Launches Four-Year-Long Trump Protest Live Stream With Jaden Smith,” screamed a Variety headline. “Shia LaBeouf Kicks Off 4-Year Anti-Trump Live Stream,” added Deadline. Instead of just pointing out the usual “what if we did this to Obama on the day of his inauguration” hypocrisy, the opposition reacted more aggressively. In a matter of just twenty-four hours, Trump supporters from 4chan, the wildly (and sometimes perversely) politically incorrect online chatroom that gave birth to the infamous hacker group Anonymous, coopted the live stream and began triggering Shia so hard that by day five the confused actor was arrested for reportedly attacking a man that was his own supporter.

The live stream trolling was so effective that the museum hosting the protest ended the exhibit after just three weeks. It was an undisputed win for Trump supporters, and it looked like the end of the shenanigans. But the web series sensation got renewed for a Season Two when Shia LaBeouf moved the live-stream from New York to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It was doomed from the outset.

With the humor instinct of Sinead O’Connor, Shia stepped to the camera in a rage that was something to behold – talking with such fervor that he had to wipe the saliva shooting out of his mouth from the camera. “You’re our president, but we’re watching – you fuckin’ liar! He will not divide us…He’s working with fuckin’ Russian spies!”

With an 18^th Street gangsta – thought to be the largest transnational criminal gang – by his side, Shia taunted the “Nazi” trolls to come down to the protest. Within the first few days, two people flashed guns, two others flashed genitals, and there were several near fistfights. But despite the intimidation tactics, the trolls kept arriving to trigger the celeb. In less than a week, gunshots were heard off camera. Shia’s tweet was soon to follow. “We have taken the stream down after shots were reported in the area.”

Game over, right? Not quite.

With Jaden now nowhere in sight, Shia came up with the brilliant idea of continuing the anti-Trump protest by placing a flag emblazoned with the words “He Will Not Divide Us” in an undisclosed location, with a camera live streaming it for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.

The anonymous users of 4chan, or “anons” as they call themselves, often operate like a mercenary intelligence agency – analyzing satellite imagery, audio, and various other online data sources to attack their targets…not unlike the characters from Mission Impossible. For kids that have both grown up on the Internet and learned to hate Hollywood right back – this activity is their version of escapism…replacing traditional TV shows and films. The anons took Shia’s new live stream as an invitation to capture the flag – and were determined to take it down and replace it at all costs…even if it meant breaking a few laws.

Hundreds of anons began the arduous task of analyzing the live stream for clues to its whereabouts. Within minutes they pulled up images of Shia at a diner in Greeneville, Tennessee just days before the feed went live. But their biggest hint came moments later. Contrails.

Planes had been seen entering the live stream. So anon agents looked at published flight patterns, narrowing in on the airspace above Greeneville, to see if they matched what was being seen on camera. Within an hour and a half, they were able to predict when planes would fly into frame – eventually deducing that the camera was pointing northward to the sky above Greeneville, capturing three known plane routes.

Another agent used advanced geometry to guesstimate that the camera was sitting approximately six miles south of the flight pattern. And with audio from the live stream suggesting a nearby river and tires hitting a large seam in the road, they reviewed satellite aerial imagery to look for bridges crossing waterways. The search was narrowed down to areas along the Erwin Highway, near bridges that crossed the Nolichucky River. This work was done by hundreds of unpaid, giddy online users. But a new team was now needed to advance the search.

If you travel southeast down the Erwin Highway from the center of Greeneville, the town quickly transitions to a setting from a David Lynch movie – a seemingly quiet country vibe with huge, open green pastures, a mountain view off in the distance, and a beautiful swerving river traipsing through the county. After just five minutes from the heart of town, there really isn’t much. There’s a furniture shop that sits off the highway, with a rustic assortment that doesn’t scream modern. Near the river there’s a gas station and auto repair shop. The residents by the Nolichucky River live on huge plots of land. And besides some construction here and there you get the feeling that people from Greeneville have opted out of living around commotion. So being the epicenter of a divisive Hollywood protest was an unwelcome intrusion.

“He has a right to protest, I respect that,” said one of the members of the ground team who called himself Tennessee Outlaw. “But he is protesting a man that has traded a lavish billionaire lifestyle to try and fix the train wreck that has been building over the last 16 years. Just to have his whole family ridiculed. Made fun of. Called liars. Racists.” In his eyes, it was Shia that was the one dividing, not Trump – and he didn’t want this movie star bringing chaos to his quiet hometown of Greeneville.

Tennessee Outlaw had never been on 4chan, but within minutes of being contacted by an anon agent he didn’t even know, he agreed to hit the road in the dead of night in pursuit of Shia’s flag. That’s the kind of enemy the anti-Trump celeb inspired. He jumped in his car with his son, also a Trump voter, and began the conspicuous effort of honking down the Erwin Highway while listening for his car horn in the live feed playing on his phone – all while updating viewers in the anon chatrooms.

It happened at 12:37 AM. Incredibly, the horn and a faint voice came through the stream while nearing the Nolichucky River, just as the Intel team predicted. The online audience erupted. They knew they were close, but it was too dark to get eyeballs on the flag. The search would have to continue at daybreak.

The next morning, a new team of anon field operatives went to the area where the chase left off the night before. Within a few hours they got an eye on the flag, sending pictures and the address to the anons online.

Agents quickly identified the landowner through property tax records, confirming the owner to be a friend of Shia’s through her Twitter account. These hundreds of anons, with nothing but a live feed of a flag waving in the wind, found their prize. But unbeknownst to the field operatives, a supporter of Shia had been monitoring their communications in the public anon chatroom and started tweeting the owner of the property to warn them of the heist in progress.

Before they could fully grasped what was happening, Intel heard the call come through the police scanner from precinct dispatch. “700 Moon Creek Road, Blue Dodge Neon taking pictures.”

“Get the fuck out of there! You’ve been made,” barked Intel.

As the online viewers watched, riveted to the building drama, the cops cruised up to the field operatives on that dusty country road.

But just as it all appeared to be falling apart, another call came through the scanner. “They’re actually on Moon Creek Road,” said the cop to dispatch. “They’re not on anybody’s driveway.” And as quickly as the crisis started…reality sank in. The cops couldn’t do anything. No laws were being broken. The anon operation was free to continue.

The Season Three finale of He Will Not Divide Us swelled in viewership as word of the flag’s imminent capture spread online.

Now wise to being monitored by a chatroom intruder – field operations’ communication moved outside of public view. Intel agents carefully mapped out a ground passage to the flag, with an escape route that was impossible to quickly follow by vehicle from the flag property.

Anxious online viewers were in the dark to what was transpiring offline until 1:20 AM, when the flag suddenly lowered out of sight. “Flag is down!” posted the frantic audience. And just a few minutes later, it was replaced by the two items that were sure to trigger Shia: a “Make America Great Again” hat and Pepe the Frog t-shirt.

As the perpetrator ran passed the camera, he whispered to the live stream, “Fuck Shia LaBeouf.”

Less than two weeks later, a demoralized Shia mounted a new flag – this time on an “inaccessible” museum rooftop in Liverpool, UK. Within twenty-four hours, anon agents leapfrogged adjacent buildings to get to the flag. It was quickly removed by the museum at the advice of local law enforcement. Shia’s luck would not get better. When his new movie Man Down debuted in the UK just a few days later, one ticket was sold on opening night.

When Ghost in the Shell starring Scarlett Johansson became a major box office flop, Hollywood postmortems pointed to a litany of reasons for the failure, except for the obvious – leading up to its release, the actress had been on an extended anti-Trump tirade, punctuated by an attack on the President’s daughter Ivanka. Her box office bomb Rough Night only underscored the problem – the unwashed half of America doesn’t approve of her brand of activism.

When Joy clocked in with lackluster numbers, and Passengers was a box office dud, some thought Jennifer Lawrence was just having a bad streak. But those of us on the right know her anti-Christian, anti-Trump bigotry has taken its toll on her mainstream box office appeal. And her latest bomb – mother! – appears to have sent the same message to the actress herself. She recently announced a two-year acting hiatus.

Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs biopic, starring Seth Rogen, was overwhelmingly predicted to be a box office success. Then, during the movie’s promotional push, Seth Rogen blasted off a “Fuck You @realBenCarson” hate tweet after the Republican presidential candidate suggested German Jews could have better defended themselves against the Holocaust if the Nazis hadn’t confiscated their guns. The blowback against the alleged funny man was swift. Steve Jobs became a bonafide flop-a-roo.

In the wake of an assassination attempt of GOP public servants by a Bernie Sanders volunteer, Central Park’s Public Theater decided to continue its Shakespeare in the Park performance featuring a brutal assassination of Donald Trump as Julius Caesar. Investigative journalist and rightwing activist Laura Loomer charged the stage as the knifing of the president was to commence, demanding, “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right!” Journalist and Trump supporter Jack Posobiec joined in as she was taken off stage.

The new right is beginning to use the tactics of the left – and most notably, they’re having fun doing it.

Show business analysts have long been charting the demise of the movie star. Politically mouthy actors like George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Johnny Depp, and Jennifer Lawrence no longer provide insurance against a flop – as the growing list of their bombs reveals. This summer, the comedy sector nosedived like CNN’s credibility with four box office underperformers in a row. Can anyone guess why? Three of the four – Snatched, The House, and Rough Night – were all headlined by vehemently anti-Trump actors. Fifteen years ago, when Hollywood celebs pissed on half of America, there were no real repercussions. Now, the right returns the favor – it projectile vomits all over Tinseltown’s bottom line.

With The Deplorables active revolt against Movie City in full swing, there is another monumental breach that should have Hollywood sweating like a whore in church. The barriers to entry that have kept the same film studios in power for roughly 90 years, are beginning to show cracks. Something new is happening with Amazon Studios and Netflix – both threatening the traditional distribution model with startling success. And if these brand new players can expand a field that has been limited to the oligopoly of 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Columbia, Universal, and Walt Disney Studios – there may soon be an opening for a deplorable-friendly studio to break the thought monopoly as Fox News did with Big Media.

And technology has also created another incredibly disruptive line of attack on Tinseltown.

“That’s the Kodi box,” a Trump supporter recently told me when I asked what that AppleTV-looking hardware was at the side of the television. The device allows users to watch pretty much any film or TV show that has been offered digitally to the public…for free. The remarkable interface rivals Netflix. And along with Popcorn Time, an insanely popular app that allows you to stream content for free on Android enabled devices, some on the right are punching back at Hollywood through what’s being dubbed “purposeful piracy” to affect Tinseltown’s wallet.

Most of Hollywood is completely oblivious to these developments. Not a single person I’ve spoken to in show biz was aware of either the Kodi box or Popcorn Time. And now, in an attempt to boost home entertainment sales, studios are investigating hastening the time that movies are available for download after theatrical release. With the combination of Hollywood’s constant attacks, and the proliferation of these free content platforms – it’s possibly the dumbest idea yet to fix Hollywood. The quicker you make a digitize copy available for the public, the sooner it will end up on these platforms. Just look at the music business for where it will lead.

If Hollywood’s old guard truly hopes to strengthen its floundering business model, it really only needs to do two things to see a major bounce back.

The first, in technical jargon, is to invoke the shut the fuck up protocol. The industry needs to reign in its most vitriolic talent by making bigotry towards the right a major career dampener. No one is saying celebrities can’t hold political views, or even speak about them. It’s the complete lack of respect for the Deplorables that’s biting them in the ass. And as media analysts have noted – Breitbart News has made exposing their hate into an art form…and the rest of conservative media typically follows our lead.

In a September 2015 interview promoting her new movie Sicario, Emily Blunt quipped, “I became an American citizen recently, and that night, we watched the Republican debate and I thought, ‘This was a terrible mistake. What have I done?’” Breitbart News mined that quote from deep within the interview and made it the centerpiece of a story the same day. Within 72 hours, the newly christened U.S. citizen found herself on NBC’s liberal Today Show apologizing for disparaging America. If you’re going to backpedal that quickly, why go there?

But even with the numbers painting a potentially dark future for the domestic box office and data showing a majority of Republicans have avoided movies based on a star’s politics, the industry hasn’t tried to moderate its loudest voices of hate.

“I think that there’s no one strong enough, like there was in the studio days, to say to the stars, ‘shut the fuck up,’” says Orson Bean. “Nobody’s got the balls, even the bosses, to stand up to this political correctness.”

This would be so easy. Hollywood’s shot callers just need to send a message to the Kathy Griffins of the world – continue your vitriol at your own peril. The right has been screaming for this solution. To show just how loudly, on the night of Donald Trump’s astounding victory, Breitbart News readers, known for their pro-Trump leanings, shared a story announcing his win 34,562 times on Facebook – a phenomenal amount compared to the average article on the site. Breitbart’s story on Kathy Griffin’s beheading of Donald Trump – an event that ripped the fabric of space-time in conservative media – was shared a remarkable 104,632 times. But the story that topped them all was an article headlined “Mark Wahlberg Tells ‘Out of Touch’ Celebs to Shut Up About Politics.”

That story was shared on Facebook by our readers an astonishing 871,107 times. It should come as no surprise that Wahlberg now sits atop the Forbes 2017 list of highest paid actors.

If Tinseltown were smart, it would invoke the STFU protocol. Hollywood’s monopoly on entertainment is gone. There are other options. The industry needs to act accordingly.

The second – and possibly hardest for this liberal colony to enact – is Hollywood must stop its institutionalized discrimination. This company town is diverse…if you think liberals, progressives, socialists and communists constitute diversity. Hollywood has become a content plantation policed by liberal supremacists. Woven into the fabric of this company town is a cult-like level of intolerance against the Right…even amongst friends.

My wife was recently invited to a going away party for an ex-Hollywood producer’s spouse. Mrs. Jason Hall, the wife of the American Sniper screenwriter we met earlier, also made the list. When Mrs. Hall saw my wife’s name, she went into action – gleefully disinviting my better half in a bitchy scene reminiscent of Mean Girls.

Before this election, my wife had no beef with this woman. They never had a disagreement, or exchanged a harsh word. They were friends that turned to each other in times of need. There was absolutely no problem until my wife conveyed to her that we were Trump supporters. Thankfully the Halls took off their masks, and we’re happy to have two less intolerant pricks in our life.

This type of blind discrimination in Hollywood must stop, or political violence will intensify nationally – and that’s not hyperbole. The city’s hometown bigotry comes out in its products – and radicalizes the divide. Tinseltown has thumbed its nose at conservatives for decades through its movies, sitcoms, talk shows, award shows, media, and public quips. It labels Trump Hitler, making all of his supporters by extension Nazis. And we all know how in vogue it’s become to punch a Nazi. Filmville reentered the silent era when Trump supporters were literally getting chased down, punched and bloodied during the presidential campaign. When their election dreams crashed like Michael Moore’s no-carb diet, celebrities like Judd Apatow, Debra Messing, and Sarah Silverman became unhinged when they seemingly condoned and encouraged the violent rise of Antifa during their terrorizing riots in Berkeley. Hollywood and Big Media’s dehumanizing of half the country has helped inspire anti-Trump zealots to pull people from their cars and beat, scar, torture, shoot, cripple, and perhaps even murder suspected Trump supporters. With all of this violence being silently condoned, was anyone really surprised when GOP congressmen were almost slaughtered while playing softball?

Where are the leaders in Hollywood to demand an end to this madness?

Hollywood…whether you see it or not, right-wingers and Tinseltown liberals are similar in many ways. We’re both tired of a political system that fails to meet the needs of Americans. We’re both worried about our country’s most vulnerable citizens. We both despise ill-conceived foreign conflicts. And we both want to correct a system that rewards political and corporate malfeasance while creating an uneven playing field for our people. We just have different prescriptions for the problems. Is what separates us on these issues worth devolving into a bloody tribal conflict? Of course not.

Besides signaling discrimination is justified, Tinseltown’s bigotry also sends another message to the public…it conveys that the industry is willing to flush its business model down the drain to maintain its ideological purity. Entertainment investors should take notice.

An enormous genre, with mainstream appeal, is being overlooked every year because the Hollywood establishment inhabits a liberal echo chamber with no access or knowledge of what makes the other half of the country tick.

There is ample evidence that anything of quality that appeals to the right, and is promoted through conservative media, ends up being a massive win. The success of Passion of the Christ was staggering. The Blind Side even survived a blind side from liberal film critics to smash the box office. National Treasure became a treasure chest of profits. The low budgeted comedy We’re the Millers, not even intended for right-of-center audiences, became a surprise conservative hit – beating out the blockbuster-budgeted, pro-liberal issue Elysium in domestic sales. Last Man Standing killed it for six seasons in the TV purgatory of primetime Friday night. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper broke box office records for an R-rated film. Liberal media and celebrities attacked that flick. But no one promoted the movie, and defended it from its detractors, more than conservative outlets…with Breitbart News and its 45 million readers leading the way.

The problem is, no one in this company town is stepping up to shield others within the industry that want to build bridges. A major player – Clooney, Angelina, Denzel, Apatow, Streep, Damon, Spielberg, Freeman, Iger, Oprah, Lorne, and others – could speak out to help bring an end to the decades of Hollywood’s hate towards The Right. Tinseltown could organize a summit with all of the key stakeholders to start the process of coming together. It needs to be done because Hollywood will only recover when it starts giving The Deplorables the respect they demand…and deserve. Otherwise, if the maligning continues, The Right will ramp up its attacks on your product and create its own content until the need for Tinseltown’s output is ground to dust. Believe it Gatekeepers. It’s already happening.

So La La Land…I know there are some really decent people in this company town who happen to have liberal views. Some of them I know personally. This message is to you and your ilk. Don’t let the loudest, most unhinged voices define Hollywood any longer. Speak up. Marginalize their intolerance. You must recognize that the decades of bigotry towards The Right has had a cost – not just on Hollywood’s bottom line, and not only on the human beings living here or the Americans that take it on the chin with every insult. Hollywood’s bigotry towards The Right has also had a cost on the same liberal ideals you so cherish. Your worst nightmare was elected president…largely because the victims of Tinseltown’s hate felt they needed a bare-knuckled brawler to fight back. Contrary to what President Obama thinks…you built this. Hollywood’s one-political-party dystopia has contributed to its slow demise. Like it or not, diversity of thought will light up the box office – and put this company town back on track. The choice is yours. Stop the discrimination against The Right or expect the defacto boycott of liberal Hollywood to grow. That’s not a threat…it’s just an inconvenient truth. For the sake of a treasured American art form, choose wisely.