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London, 1911. Two proper gentlemen meet for an ale.

“With this land grant and generous endowment by the Brothers Wilks—who stomp the earth to extract petrol for lamps and whatnot—we shall be greatly facilitated in an endeavor of our choice. Wot say thee, friend Jeremy?”

“My oath, brother Benjamin, I do declare that we should employ the sum to open a vast empire of horse stables. He who controleth a city’s equines doth controleth a city’s culture, so sayeth Andreas de Breitbarte, to whom we owe the aphorism ‘Culture lieth downstream of horseshit.’”

“Then horse stables it shall be. Have you chosen a title for your demesne?”

“Indeed! I shall be Lord Boreing of Balding Badwigge Estate. And thee?”

“Lord Shapiro of Beaniehead Cutcock Manor.”

That back-and-forth between two foppish inbreds was in 1911.

1912, the very next year, marked the first time in which automobiles outnumbered horses on the streets of London, Paris, and NYC. Horse transport was coming to an inevitable end. There was literally no worse, more shortsighted investment a person could make in 1911 than horse transport.

And you know, in 1911 there were morons who didn’t see that coming. Dolts who lived in the past, clinging to outmoded worldviews.

Well, such morons exist today, too. And the entertainment industry’s current death/rebirth cycle, the most radical since the dissolution of the studio system, is making bedfellows of old foes, antagonists joined only by stupidity and a reliance on a rapidly collapsing model.

Mainstream political conservatives and antiwhite DEI czars, seeing their dreams dying as they struggle with their limited cranial capacity to figure out where to go from here.

The Dream

“First, there was the dream.”
—Hugo Drax, billionaire industrialist obsessed with the conquest of space

In the 1980s, there was a dream, a belief, popularized by (but not originating with) Bill Cosby, that “images” of blacks on TV can alter black reality. Portray blacks as doctors, lawyers, and good little achievers who do their homework and never sass their elders or violate curfew, and in real life, blacks will become exactly that.

Cosby employed a “positive images” consultant on his megahit 1980s TV show: Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry, Harvard:

Poussaint encouraged the development early on of Theo’s character as someone who enjoys school. The stereotype he and the show’s staff sought to avoid was that of the young black male as an academic nonachiever. “That is a stereotype, but it’s also a problem right now in the black community,” Poussaint says, “that’s happening to too many black male youths.”

So Theo Huxtable was portrayed as an academic overachiever, and now, forty years later, black student test scores are on par with Asians.

Oh, wait…no, the magic didn’t work. None of the magic worked. After decades of portraying blacks as pure light and goodness, America has higher black crime rates and lower black academic test scores.

Meanwhile, circa 2009, American conservatives got the same idea as black leftists: Movies and TV can work magic. Led by Andrew “politics is downstream of culture” Breitbart, rightists decided that if they began making “positive” films, “patriotic,” “Bible-based,” “moralistic” films (films that, like The Cosby Show, mixed positive messaging with something that passed for humor), Democrats would never win another election. Everyone would vote GOP and the nation would become George Washington’s wet dream.

How’d that work out? Well, we got two Obama terms, one Biden term, Speaker Pelosi, DEI, police defunding, trannies in schools, Covid lockdowns, Covid welfare, and now a second Trump administration birthed not by movies but by Kamala’s preternatural crappiness coupled with Democrat open-borders extremism.

Leftist racial social engineers, rightist self-proclaimed media czars, all sharing the same childish dream that movies be magic. That movies and TV can change a people or a nation. That dream was propelled not just by naivete and ignorance; it was propelled by the old Hollywood model, the implosion of which was covered in the previous parts of this series. The old model, in which movie studios and TV networks were the only game in town—you took their content or you got nothing—created the illusion of media power because you’d get TV and movie “events” that absolutely everybody would watch and excitedly talk about. Mass viewership, not niche.

Witnessing the success of the Roots miniseries in the 1970s and The Cosby Show in the ’80s—watercooler fare that would have everyone chattering the next day—it’s understandable that simpletons believed TV has a mesmeric power that goes beyond “what a fine way to kill a few hours.”

But it never did. The man-children who believed in the magic were themselves the ones being mesmerized by the way in which a particular movie or show could become a cultural event, the “talk of the town.”

“If we could just harness that power, we could use it for good! To raise black SAT scores, to make every black a doctor! To elect GOPs, to make every American a wholesome pro-life prayer-breakfast Republican hetero.”

Always remember the guiding principle of advertising: The point of a restaurant ad is not to make you hungry. That’s hoodoo-voodoo bullshit. A burger ad can’t make a nauseous man crave food. Admen are not trying to make the sated hungry. Rather, they understand basic human nature. They know that you may not be hungry right this minute, but you will be hungry at some point today. The goal of the burger ad is that when you get hungry, you’ll choose restaurant A over restaurant B.

Advertising cannot make you what you aren’t. It’s not magic; neither are movies or TV shows, no matter how message-heavy they are.

Still, the lure of “event” programming, blockbuster films, “must-see” TV shows, made the impossible seem attainable.

The old model kept the dream alive.

The Reality

“Now there is reality.”
—Hugo Drax (tried to kill every human on earth, still a better man than Elon)

I’ve been trying to drive a stake through the heart of the “make movies to change the culture” nonsense for the ten years I’ve been writing this column. But I no longer have to; the dream died on its own. The dream’s over for all the “movies is magic” nutjobs, because the Hollywood implosion means the fracturing of content. With the exception of Marvel films and the other few reliable franchises that merit the expense, the money’s just not there anymore, and the mass-distribution structure’s just not there anymore, for “message” films left or right.

And TV (aka streaming)? The streamers have downsized to such an extent, there’s no such thing as “event” TV anymore. Streaming is all niche now; “boutique” audiences, cliques. No more Roots, or Cosby, or final Seinfeld episode. No more “the thing everybody watches together all at once.” Everybody’s watching something different on their idiotic little phone screens, and that ends, for good, the “change the culture through movies/TV” mania, because whatever content you make, it’s not going to be foisted upon anyone other than those who already want to see it, who are already partial to it. The mania always depended on ghetto blacks seeing Cosby and going, “Man, that show really taught me I gotta get my life together! I’m gettin’ my PhD,” and on white racists seeing Roots and going, “I’ve been such a fool; blacks got a tough break, and I’ll devote my life to helping them,” and that ain’t happening anymore. Nobody anywhere is so hard-up for content that they’ll watch what they aren’t already keen on.

The dream depended on the old model in which the studios and networks could force content upon the entire nation. But now people just watch what they want, and with the studios, networks, and streamers having closed their wallets, that means 99 percent of everything will be smaller. Smaller content, cheaper content, more fleeting content.

Sure, there will still be streaming hits, but even those will be niche. It’s just that some niches are bigger than others.

That’s the irony of conservatives jumping into the biz with both feet right now. They actually already had the present formula without knowing it. From the days of Focus on the Family’s morality videos to Kirk Cameron’s “rapture” movies, it was always about preaching to the converted. Then you had the Breitbartians bitching, “We want to do more than that! We want to create wide-release films that will reach everyone, so that gay communist atheists can have their hearts changed via our amazing Nick Searcy in a cowboy hat films.”

And conservative dumbasses started wasting millions of crowdfunded dollars making “wide-release” films just as the wide-release film market dried up and the industry contracted so that everything became the “preaching to the choir” that rightists had been doing all along.

It takes a special kind of stupid to be that not prescient.

Meanwhile, the leftist racial social engineers are feeling the same pain. Those Amazon race quotas for actors were premised on the model that Amazon streaming would corner the market and evil whites would be forced to watch nothing but obese weave-wearing LaQuedas all day long. But in the current streaming contraction, Amazon’s suffering the most. It can produce all the LaQuedavision it wants; the only people watching it are those who already like that stuff. No whites are being tortured by having to sit through it. Which takes all the fun out of it for the social engineers.

That’s why the quotas have been abandoned. There’s no point to them if whites can’t be forced to see LaQueda. Streaming’s not like public schools; you don’t have a captive audience. So whereas public school teachers can still force a message on captives, Hollywood can’t.

Get my point? The dream, the mad, stupid dream that you could condition people via movies and TV, whether that meant making a black low achiever into an honor student or turning a commie anarchist into a Bible-toting patriot, was always predicated on the ability to corral people, via lack of viewing options, into sitting through content that was outside their bubble. And those days are OVER. For good. And they’re never coming back. And if you give one dime to anyone claiming they can “change the culture” by making an online movie, you’re an idiot. Take the money you’d give Daily Wire and spend it on rope and a chair; you’ll do the world a better service stringing yourself up.

Movies and TV shows were never going to change the culture. But the dreamers could dream.

Not anymore. The business model that allowed the dream to exist is dead.

Thank God. As has been detailed in the previous parts of this series, the current downturn/implosion has led to a lot of misery for the people who used to make a living in the biz. And that’s tragic. But worth it, so very worth it, for putting the “movies/TV to change the culture” imbeciles out of their misery.

And mine.