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As I mentioned last week, I took a Substack poll regarding my readers’ preferred topics, and the top vote-getters were “scolding idiot rightists” and “musing about Hollywood.”

So how’s about this week we do Hollywood?

In 1986 my high school AP history teacher—the finest instructor I’ve ever known (I’d name her but she’s still alive, in her 90s, and because of my continued baffling toxicity I’m concerned that naming her might cause Media Matters to harass her)—got me an apprentice casting gig at a movie studio.

To my Appalachian readers, “casting” is the job of choosing actors for a movie or TV show. A director says, “I need an actor to play a hard-edged private eye who’s also a werewolf,” and the casting director auditions actors and chooses the best “Werewolf P.I.” for the director.

Casting directors are gatekeepers, the people who control which actors get passed up or passed along.

I loved casting. It combined my appreciation of acting with my desire to have godlike control over the fate of others. Indeed, I soon tired of being an apprentice, so I transitioned to head casting director for a company that, in 1986, was pioneering the “direct to video” market (the “streaming” of the late 1980s). Now I was the big gorilla. And I helped launch a lot of actors. Again, I won’t name them, because Media Matters.

The trick to being a casting director—indeed, the artistry of it—is more than just giving an actor the sides to read (sorry, Appalachians: “Sides” means a segment from a script. Like how a “side” of beef is a cutting from a carcass, as in when you sever that possum dick for a snack tonight). The skill is spending twenty minutes with the person to learn if, talent aside, they’d be a blessing or burden on set.

In 1986 most hot white chicks did coke. So, you had to look for the signs. You had to be able to differentiate allergy nasal issues from coke nasal issues. Cokeheads are great when they’re high, but when they crash, they’re a nightmare. They won’t get out of bed, they won’t show up on set. You had to eliminate the cokeheads because casting them meant burdening the director with an eventual problem, even if, on paper, the girl was a good choice for the role.

Boyfriends? When casting a bimbo, you had to ensure that she was not under the thumb of a Biff or Zeke or Deke. If an actress came to the audition with her boyfriend in tow, I’d never cast her. The presence of a controlling boyfriend meant that the bimbo was at risk of an emotional breakdown should Zeke leave her (“Bwaaaaa-haaaa-haaaaa, how can I go on without him???!!!”), or, conversely, he could become an on-set pain should the bimbo leave him, best typified by the experience of my friend Bill Sachs, who, in 1980, was shooting a film with Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten when her abusive boyfriend blew her face off and totally ruined the movie.

You wanna shoot someone, fine. But don’t queer the box office of an Avery Schreiber film.

Most of the women I’ve dated in my life were actresses, and they all wanted me to accompany them to auditions (“I want you to support meeeeeeeeeeeee!”), and I always refused, because the one thing a casting director doesn’t want to see is a bim who can’t go anywhere without “her man.” Because that means she’s dependent. And whether it’s coke or Zeke, directors don’t want dependent bims.

From 1986 to 1992, when I “transitioned” to the exciting new field of Holocaust revisionism because I just knew it would never impact my life in a negative way (maybe I’m not in any position to criticize the intelligence of bimbos), I’d become exceptionally good at reading people. Again, that was the artistry of casting. Twenty minutes in a room with a stranger, taking mental notes about their every move. Asking the right questions to understand their psychology…and their weaknesses.

In my revisionist years, I always knew how to present my Holocaust work to a stranger. Give me twenty minutes, I’d know the manipulative angle to employ. It was predatory, and I’m not proud of it.

So it’s January 1994 and I’m on a plane to NYC.

Coach. Because NBC’s flying me out to do a talk show, and ain’t no way they’re gonna pay for ol’ Dave to fly first-class. Hell, I was just grateful they didn’t send me via FedEx freight. Besides, with my rumpled shirt and unkempt hair, I looked like someone who belonged in coach.

The lady sitting next to me didn’t. She was so WASPy, so proper, so Mayflower-descendant nonethnic, she made Ann Coulter look like Nell Carter.

I’m sure Ann won’t be offended by that line.

Oh, I just got a text from Ann…

…damn, I’ve never seen her use that kind of language before.

Anyway, thirty minutes into the flight, I ratiocinated three things (sorry, Appalachians; stop raping Ned Beatty and buy a thesaurus) about my seatmate:

(1) She’s an equestrian; she didn’t say so…I just knew.

(2) She’s never once admitted to farting. Oh, she’s farted. She’s farted plenty. But at social engagements she keeps by her side two borzois to take the rap for her gas. In high society these are called “digestional support animals.”

(3) She had that old Anglo sense of decency, fair play, and Christian sentimentality. It’s the weakness that (as I’ve pointed out before, and as Steve Sailer recently did as well) led “foundational white Americans” to get all weepy and protective of nonwhites long before the 20th-century flood of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

I knew I could exploit that weakness, and I did. “I’m a Holocaust revisionist Jew oppressed by the forces of censorship and intolerance! I’m just interested in free speech! Fairness! Asking QWESTCHINS! By gosh, shouldn’t we explore the uncomfortable truths?”

Turned out Frequent-Flyer-Miles Standish was the headmistress at a fancy-ass New England school for wealthy girls who don’t give head. And by the time we landed, I had an offer to lecture her history classes.

In my day, I was good. Damn good.

But it ain’t my day anymore. I couldn’t go back to casting even if I were miraculously cured of my toxicity, because three things killed the casting business.

First thing? Covid led to casting being online-only. No more twenty minutes in a room with an actor. Now you just get video submissions, zero personal interaction. It’s not that there exists any remaining fear of catching the disease. That year when L.A. forced casting to be online-only made casting directors lazy. Turns out they preferred being at home; they got used to it. And it made studios, in a time of falling profits, see the benefit of getting rid of physical casting offices (note to Appalachians: L.A. real estate is super expensive).

Why am I picking on Appalachians so much in this piece?

So the casting biz has lost its artistry. Actors hate it; my actor friends despise online casting because it robs them of the ability to charm their way into a part. Also, it ends one of the most important aspects of casting—asking an actor to do the lines again, with spontaneous notes on how to do it differently (this determines if an actor can take direction on the fly, a hugely important trait). When James Gandolfini auditioned for Tony Soprano, he gave a terrible first read. But then he asked for another chance, and he nailed it. When there’s no personal contact, that kind of thing can’t happen.

Second thing? Racial casting. Casting’s become increasingly about race box-checking. There’s less creativity in the process because casting directors are hamstrung by directives. Producers will say, “I need a Namibian transsexual for this role,” and the casting director might say, “But I got the best reading from a white girl,” and the producer will say, “Follow the quotas.”

The age of casting creativity—discovering talent based on talent alone—is over.

And third, when it comes to bimbos, there just aren’t as many of them around anymore. Bims in my day were drooling for film roles. Today? TikTok, OnlyFans, and Instagram give them immediate fame, instant gratification. Why slave away for years doing Attack of the Zombie Areolas for producer Schlemkin Scheinowitz, hoping to get a big break as you’re paid peanuts, when you can get paid fast cash directly via Twitch for eating an apple in an ASMR vid?

Sure, that kind of “fame” is fleeting, but bims never think long-term.

So casting became more racially regimented, while, at the same time, the pretty white actresses fled for more immediate gratification online.

BTW, those three things, though complementing each other, all happened independently. It’s not always a conspiracy. Sometimes events just converge.

That’s the first lesson rightists can learn from my casting experiences.

Lesson 2? Over the past few weeks, Holocaust-denier Twitter—Elon’s favorite and most coddled niche—has gone nuts with “piles of shoes” memes. “White Americans (or the West) have no rights (or are forced to admit immigrants, or are enslaved) all because of a pile of shoes” (the gist being, the pile of shoes at Auschwitz is why whites are subjugated and the West is dying).

Elon’s favorite million-follower denier accounts, and small-follower rightist accounts, have been madly partaking in this fad. Groypers and MAGAs have even been using AI to write “pile of shoes” ballads.

If you want to see the scope of it, just Twitter-search “pile of shoes.”

In January and April, I wrote about this idiotic far-right myth, that the Holocaust, and not white Christian sentimentality, is responsible for the West’s decline. And what was my reward? An explosion of “the West’s being destroyed because of a pile of shoes” memes. Proof that nothing I write matters, and I swear to God if I weren’t drawing a paycheck I’d be so out of this madhouse.

But let’s “circle back” (does Psaki still say that?) to that blonde airplane WASP. Yes, I sold her on Holocaust revisionism. But I just as easily could’ve sold her on open borders or prison abolition for black criminals. My message wasn’t what mattered; her weakness was. The ADL and NAACP understand that; they understand whites better than the so-called “white advocates.” While Elon and the Twitter Nazis try to make whites more Nazi, the “other side” realizes that the true power lies in harnessing white sentimentality. You can only bring these WASPs around by appealing to “kindness, decency, and fairness.”

Not “kill the kikes.”

Far-rightists can’t suss out psychology and weakness. They lack the intellectual ability. They’re children, idiot children, who’ll forever lose because the people they lose to are smarter.

I try to counsel these imbeciles—and I fail—with the knowledge I came to via casting.

A field I so dearly wish I’d stayed in.