By Mark Rhoads -
Fall 2015 might mark the boring last hurrah for the geriatric Left in Hollywood. Screenwriters get to indulge themselves yet one more time in a nostalgic visit to the faded glory days of the their youth when their icons such as former Soviet spy Rudolph Abel, played by Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies, and former Communist Party member and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who is played by Bryan Cranston (pictured at right in Trumbo), can be portrayed on the big screen as heroic warm and cuddly versions of their more sinister realities.
Old Left actor Robert Redford gets to play disgraced CBS News anchor Dan Rather as a hero in an ironically-named movie called "Truth" which is completely untruthful. Hollywood just ignores the fact that Rather and his producer Mary Mapes were fired for good reasons when they tried their best to fabricate a story to tilt the 2004 election from George W. Bush to John Kerry by using forged documents to support an false accusation that Bush did not serve honorably as a member of the Texas National Guard.
Reliably Left actors such as Alan Alda and Tom Hanks and predictable Left producers such as Stephen Spielberg get to pay homage once more to their role models of yesteryear and then have the chutzpah to pat themselves on the back for their supposed courage and relevance to their imaginary alternate reality.
Here and there the nursing-home Left gets to slip their old tricks into writing for the small screen too. While actor Tom Selleck has endorsed conservative candidates and publications in recent years, his lead character and other actors on Blue Bloods must bow to the silliness of anachronistic plots from many years ago. In a recent episode of Blue Bloods, a Columbia University wannabe progressive student crusader is allegedly stalked by an arch-patriotic student who scrawls the word "Commie" outside her dorm room door. Does anyone actually believe that archaic slang word from 70 years ago still exists in the vocabulary of today's college students? Or is the word a clumsy artifact of a very old screenwriter left over from a youth dedicated to pleasing older mentors?
The total impact of the old Hollywood Left and the older academic and media left cannot be ignored by people who love freedom. Tens of thousands of young Americans are worshiping Bernie Sanders in part because they have no real concept of what socialism is really all about or the history of where and when it has failed. Their ignorance is compounded by the fact that they they have never been exposed to any alternative intellectual tradition of freedom's principles at any level in their education.
Sen. Sanders himself recently showed in a debate with Hillary Clinton that he too has not kept up to date with what he once in his younger days thought of as European role models for socialism. He ironically cited some countries as socialist Utopias that in fact have embraced free markets in recent years as they evolve in the opposite direction of Utopian socialism.
From the nomination of Ronald Reagan in 1980 to the present time, conservatives have sadly focused so much on candidates and elections that they have not had time for strategic planning to exorcise the dominant Left from the academy, media, and Hollywood. As a result, the necessary intellectual foundation has never been laid to build a bulwark against the superstitions of Left Wing ideology so it continues to come back every year just as surely as crabgrass returns to lawns every year.
If only a handful of some rich donors whose ego demands that they play kingmakers in the GOP would instead focus on long-range cultural change rather than transient election results, the battle for principles of freedom in American culture could become easier down the road.
