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Business may be booming these days for the great Andy McCarthy, but judicial corruption and cockamamie prosecutions are all a bit wearying. Nonetheless, he has time to join his Ricochet Podcast buddies to discuss the lawfare against the former president, the ever-waning confidence in an impartial justice system, and the political consequences that will result.
James, Rob, and Charlie Cooke also argue about the slump of the entertainment industry.
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Cooke has been wrong from day one. DeSantis was standing up for the People. The People have a right to decide a company does not get special benefits to run a whole private city. Disney has something special and spit in the soup of the voters.
The Acolyte is a clear example of the company setting out to attack the fan base.
They clearly hate the fan base. They hate America.
They hate us.
James is spot on.
I don’t care what someones politics are, just stop telling me I am no good and pushing The Message!
Andrew McCarthy thinks that people go to prison for Obstruction?
Only if they are Republicans.
Here we have clear offenses by Democrats, but McCarthy is 100% OK with this against Trump.
Where is McCarthy on Biden. Where is all of Ricochet on Biden?
Only Republicans seem to be who Republicans are worried about. Democrat crimes? Crickets.
And Trump can’t win.
If Trump does not win, the Republic is over. Democrats will use lawfare forever.
How is this not all the fault of the Democrats.
This is not on Trump.
@jameslileks
You know I know about the notes.
Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):
@ jameslileks
For a moment I thought you meant the memos between top Disney executives and Lucas showrunners.
LOL
I’ll leave those to Rob sources.
Thank you for being the consistent voice of flyover country on the Podcast, James.
It is probably not possible to compensate the opinions of the NYC elites, but a little balance from the “Land of Mondale” is appreciated.
This doesn’t sound promising.
(BUM-bum BUM-bum BUM-bum BUM-bum)
From the land of Walter Mondale (Mondale)
From the land of Libs left and centrist
Comes a voice Midwestern
Comes a mood not festerin’
(no-prize to anyone who gets the reference)
This sounds threatening.
I didn’t want to argue more with Rob about the issue, because we had to get to Andy, but, well, c’mon, man. Sure, creatives have always been out there in varying degrees, but the mantra at Disney in the golden age wasn’t “stick your thumb in the eyes of the core audience because they’re stupid reactionary yokels who need their assumptions overturned and trashed.” If the current Disney leadership had made Fantasia, Chernobog would’ve been an empowered female spirit who snapped church spires like matchsticks. The Dance of the Hours would have been about body positivity. Rite of Spring would have been about climate change.
As I said, it’s possible that the inevitable downward portion of the creative cycle coincided for three studios with Disney’s stewardship, and of course large bloated orgs are more likely to turn out safe slop product. And it might be entirely coincidental that comics and gaming have been alienating core audiences at the same time DEI started flowing freely thorough the veins of the creators. But I suspect there’s something else afoot.
I don’t know yet if it came up here, but Andy has said in other forums that he thinks Hunter Biden has a good 2nd Amendment defense. I wrote a post covering that,
https://ricochet.com/1653595/whatever-else-happens-with-hunter-biden/
“Whatever else happens with Hunter Biden… He should not be the FIRST person to beat charges of illegally purchasing/possessing/etc a gun, because of the Second Amendment.”
what gets me about Rob, Andy and Charlie is that what was done by “Russia Collusion” is not treated the same as Jan 6. (I think Russia Collusion was worse as it had a chance of succeeding and the Jan 6 rioters got charged, not pensions)
I’m not at all interested in what America’s militarily inexperienced and unsuccessful current Commander in Chief has to say about WWII during this week’s commemoration. But I always enjoy reading parts of the official history of Overlord here:
https://history.army.mil/html/books/007/7-4-1/index.html
You were so spot on.
Rob does not seem to be a nerd-fan of these things. He is a professional. Just sees it differently from the inside.
I could prescribe a mess of YouTube shows going back to commentary on Ghostbusters 2016.
Well, it is so clear the fix is in. James was on point.
The Democrats have done so much more and they get ignored.
Sounds like something from the Land of Sky Blue Waters. I love no-prizes!
I grew up at least suspicious of Disney. My father gently cautioned me at an early age (and I am much older than all of the participants) that Disney had turned the Märchen (and not just the German ones) to kitsch. The one Disney film that enchanted me as a child was Snow White, and though it seems rather quaint now, I am still fond of it. Otherwise…No…
I earnestly wish that there were a viable conservative alternative to Donald Trump, but here I am very much with Bryan G. Stephens…To my disappointment, the tone this time seems to have smacked of a relativistic “plague on both your houses.” I am not saying that one should not express the view that Biden is likely to win in November. (I disagree with that assessment, but then I’m neither a pundit nor a lawyer.) But surely one can be more willing to point to the disaster to the republic (and the world) that such a prospect poses.
From the land of sky-blue waters… (wah-hah-ter!)
Good stuff. Aw, I didn’t notice Buck beat me to it.
Yes, but not enough “bums.” It’s one louder, then THREE softer.
(BUM-bum-bum-bum BUM-bum-bum-bum BUM-bum-bum-bum)
There is something in the water.
Here’s a brief look at some of the Boys at Disney circa 1955 (at 2:00). Some of them are smoking cigarettes and some are not wearing neckties! But they all have military haircuts and no tattoos or earrings are visible. Of course these may actually be actors in costume portraying Disney creatives as Disney wanted viewers to think they were. That would have been so ‘Disney’!
On Disney, I think that Rob is right that the creatives there were just as wacky as todays, and that they probably were as left wing, especially in relation to the times they were a part of.
The moral compass of Disney was its founder, Walt. And he knew how to lead creatives. If you want a contrast between Walt’s Disney and the modern Disney, take a look at two stars who became stars as children in the Disney factory.
Annette Funicello and Britney Spears. I think that Walt took a personal interest in protecting the Mousketeers, that the modern Disney factory didn’t.
That’s just a data point among a lot of other datapoints.
On the U.S. winning a cricket match against Pakistan: Given that the U.S. team was composed of people from Silicon Valley, how much would you like to bet that the team was mostly composed of Indians, whether directly from the country or maybe first generation immigrants?
This is the first I’ve heard of it, but just a thought.
So, our Indians were better than their Indians/Pakistanis?
I find myself thinking of John O’Sullivan’s oft-cited law: “All organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing.” Early Disney’s clean-cut, wholesome entertainment was safe, bland, and relentlessly secular. “Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me? M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E, Mickey Mouse. Forever let us hold our banner high…High, high, high…”
American commentators regularly point to Europe’s supposedly empty churches, and yet in American popular entertainment the exclusion of any sort of “house of worship” is relentless…The idea, going back decades, seems to have been “creedless niceness.” The result? Woke thuggery.
Sure.
Don’t ever forget it.
Gee, how does that happen?