Hollywood Didn’t Learn Its Lesson. Then Came Digger

This weekend’s box-office mega-bomb, Digger, could not have come out at a clearer moment. To understand why, you must accept that much of the history and news people consumed for a hundred years has been anti-Western spin by the leftist mainstream media. During all that time, voices and writings challenging the mass deception were quashed or marginalized, including this very magazine.

If much of what you thought was real history has been falsified to disadvantage American power, then so has art to diminish the culture.

When the internet explosion threatened to even the information input score, social media giants combined to silence all disagreement. Some today can’t believe that only four years ago, people were permanently banned from Twitter or Facebook for calling a “trans-woman” “he,” actual doctors for criticizing the COVID vaccine, and the President of the United States for questioning the 2020 election result. Elon Musk saved free speech by purchasing Twitter in October of 2022, and hidden historical truths flooded out. Here are just a few.

Millions starved to death from Stalin’s Five-Year Plan was not “malignant propaganda” (Walter Duranty, New York Times, 1933).
FDR’s socialist agenda did not end the Great Depression but worsened it into World War II.
The Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War were communist butchers of clergy, not the noble side.
The U.S. and the USSR were not morally equivalent, as the Berlin Wall should have proved.
Racist Democrats did not flip to the Republican Party because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The North Vietnamese army was a Leninist force for conquest not liberation.
Deep Throat (FBI Associate Director Mark Felt) manipulated Woodward and Bernstein on Watergate not the other way around (All the President’s Men, 1974).
Reagan won the Cold War with no help from Gorbachev.
Climate Change is a hoax.
Joe Biden was not mentally competent.
Countless critically acclaimed movies are anti-traditional Marxist crap.

Let’s focus on the last point. If much of what you thought was real history has been falsified to disadvantage American power, then so has art to diminish the culture. Which we now know is upstream from politics, to paraphrase Andrew Breitbart. Since the traditional family comprised of patriotic God-fearing men and women is the most powerful bulwark against progressive advance, then art honoring Christianity and capitalism must be displaced by secular idols, most notably in films and film criticism.

Under this criteria, we can reexamine some subversive critical darlings of the last century, and why I don’t share the general respect for them.

High Noon (1952). John Wayne was right. Why should an ex-lawman (Gary Cooper) once hired to protect the town from outlaws spend an hour running around like a chicken trying to get bankers, barbers, and businessmen to get shot along with him? Oh yeah, McCarthyism allegory.

From Here to Eternity (1953). High Noon director Fred Zinnemann brought out this anti-military diatribe a year later. It depicts a dysfunctional Army camp whose soldiers include a sadist (Ernest Borgnine), a ne’er-do-well (Frank Sinatra), a misfit (Montgomery Cliff), and other losers just before Pearl Harbor. Good thing the Korean War had just ended.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969). Three late-Sixties counterculture hits that taught the Kids that being violent bank robbers, slackers, and drugged-out punks was a cool way of sticking it to the Establishment, AKA, functional society.

M*A*S*H (1970). Robert Altman was the Norman Lear of the big screen, painting it with dull, ill-lit, witless hero-less fare. M*A*S*H caught the wave to big box-office but it’s witless and obvious with standard military and Christian targets.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Julia (1977), An Unmarried Woman (1978). Seventies feminist cinema taught women that marriage was enslavement, and the hip thing to do was leave their husbands and find themselves. Many of the miserable single psychotic liberal cat women of today took that lesson to heart and ruined their lives, which they’re trying to do to the rest of us.

The patriotic Reagan ’80s put a temporary end to the anti-military, anti-family, anti-American screen deluge with a treasure trove of patriotic, male-driven conservative hits like First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood II (1985), Rambo III (1988), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), Top Gun (1986), Poltergeist (1982), A Christmas Story (1983), and many more. Unfortunately, the Reagan Revolution contained a poison pill, Vice President to President George Bush, who promptly squandered it and lost it to an even worse dynasty.

Hollywood spent the ’90s celebrating Clinton more than bashing conservatives with pictures such as A Few Good Men (1992), Dave (1993), The American President (1995), and TV’s The West Wing (premiered 1999). That all changed in the ’00s, with George W. Bush in the White House and the War on Terror overseas. A slew of star-studded anti-military films oozed out despite U.S. soldiers being in harm’s way, including Jarhead (2005), In the Valley of Elah (2007), Lions for Lambs (2007), Redacted (2007), Rendition (2007). Every one of them bombed. Yet two pro-military War on Terror films became huge hits, Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor (2013) and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014).

Then Trump got elected and Hollywoke was born. Its players can’t suppress their sheer hatred for him and the over half of America that voted for him. They drew some COVID blood in 2020, but that only made his re-election four years later more frenzying. Now they’re trapped in their own liberal bubble with no sense of the reality that it is they who have been left behind. Case in point, the total financial disaster that is Digger.

I knew director Alejandro G. Iñárritu was a left-wing hack from his last two American films. Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (2014) — the pretentious title says it all — is an unintelligible pompous bore. The Revenant (2015) may be the most unpleasant soulless Western ever made, and that’s a high bar. Of course it won a Best Picture Oscar and a Best Actor for Leonardo di Caprio. Which is why Tom Cruise jumped at the chance to grab one. Hopefully not knowing the woke swamp he would sink into, a pathetic movie about the horrors of climate change, greedy misogynistic oil men, and evil Christians in 2026!

Weekend box-office total is under $8 million for a Tom Cruise movie. Cruise may win his Oscar, but he lost his audience.

READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:

Winning the Cultural Cold War: Why Americans Are Turning Away From the Literary Establishment

Paramount’s Hollywood Exit Could Trigger an Avalanche in Los Angeles

Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels — and Forget the Girlboss

“If ever a city needed a couple of tough guys to bust some kneecaps, it’s Washington, D.C. Go get ‘em, Tristan and Cork.” — Andrew Klavan, Edgar winner and bestselling author on The Washington Trail, book one in my Tristan-Cork mystery series. Book two, The Camelot Trail, comes out November 17.