90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, January 16, 2020

Breaking: 5 New Democrat Candidates Enter The Race!

Morning Mistress

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It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

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This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

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Vince Vaughn On The Consequences Of More Government...

27 Problems With Media’s Latest Failed Attack On Attorney General William Barr

Every paragraph in the nearly 10,000-word New Yorker article has significant problems. Taken together, it is just one long string of innuendos insinuating that William Barr is evil.

Some days it seems as if Attorney General William Barr is one of very few adults in Washington, D.C. The highly respected attorney is serving his second tour at the head of the Department of Justice. The first was during the George H.W. Bush administration. A brilliant legal mind with a candid and no-nonsense attitude, Barr is able to withstand pressure from the media and other members of the Resistance.

Partisan media vehemently oppose Barr, partly for being an effective advocate of President Trump’s policies at the Department of Justice, but mostly for admitting and expressing concern about the Department of Justice’s role in the Russia collusion hoax that undermined the Trump administration.

Nearly the entire political media establishment worked with anonymous sources inside the government and Democratic offices to spread the false conspiracy theory that Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. This false and dangerous conspiracy theory negatively affected national security and foreign policy, sidelined Barr’s predecessor at the Department of Justice, and generally made it difficult to run the executive branch or secure good political appointees to work in the administration.

As the media did with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who accurately raised the alarm about Russia collusion story, they have put out a series of attacks and hit pieces on Barr and John Durham, the federal prosecutor Barr appointed to investigate the FBI’s spying on the Trump campaign. The playbook is for the media and Democrats to discredit whomever they decide is a threat.

Rep. Adam Schiff, who spent years falsely claiming to hold evidence of treasonous collusion with Russia, called Barr “the second most dangerous man in America.” One Washington Post headline: “John Durham has a stellar reputation for investigating corruption. Some fear his work for Barr could tarnish it.” As in...

Why Hollywood’s Cozy Relationship With China Could Face An Ugly Reckoning In The 2020s

From the Golden Globes to 'Mulan,' the foreshocks of a fight over Hollywood's cozy relationship with China are trembling beneath our feet.

At some point after viewers watched Ricky Gervais needle begowned Golden Globe revelers over their affiliations with China, those watching at home would have seen the trailer for “Mulan” play during a commercial break. (Disney was one of three companies Gervais named in his monologue.) It was fitting, in Hollywood’s first big party of the 2020s, to see shadows of a conflict that roiled the waning days of its last decade.

The very next morning, director Judd Apatow was quoted in an exhaustive New Yorker article probing “The Future of America’s Contest with China.” It’s a drama in which Hollywood plays a supporting role.

“You would not see a major film company or studio make a movie that has story lines which are critical of countries with major markets or investors. The question becomes: what’s the result of all of this?” said Apatow. “The result is, there are a million or more Muslims in reeducation camps in China, and you don’t really hear much about it.” Let us not forget the country’s treatment of its Christian citizens either.

Will this be a key plot line in the industry’s next decade? With tensions mounting between the United States and China, some in Washington are reevaluating the wisdom of our vast cultural and financial entanglements with the country—and from both sides of the aisle. Hollywood, as Gervais demonstrated, is ripe for a grilling.

The Era of ‘Preemptive Censorship’

“What you don’t hear about,” Apatow continued in The New Yorker, “is all of the ideas that get killed at the earliest pitch stage, at all of the studios and networks, because people don’t even want to consider dealing with it.”

Just before Christmas, I asked Chris Fenton, a Hollywood executive who collaborated with Apatow as a producer on “Blockers,” about exactly that. Fenton, formerly of DMG Entertainment, has worked extensively on distributing major American films in China. Is Hollywood practicing a form of “preemptive censorship?” I wondered. “One hundred percent,” replied Fenton, calling the practice “commonplace.”

“The studios are smart about the global market, wanting their films to resonate everywhere. When it comes to China—the soon-to-be largest market in the world—a studio fully vets a film before submitting it to censors. Anything blatantly offensive is...