John Cena’s recent apology for correctly stating that Taiwan was a country might make the smug CCP smile, and appease Hollywoke’s bean counters, but ‘The Marine’ and WWE star’s kowtowing to Communist bullies, won’t wash with his fan base.
Cena’s gone from Rambo-level-cool to Elmer Fudd-level-dunce.
To be fair, it’s probable that the apology issued in Mandarin, was less Cena, more agent, and Hollywood studios threatening to blacklist him.
Such is the sway and swagger of the glitz and glamour Leftist elite currently occupying Tinseltown.
Christians and Conservatives are out. The oppressive Communist Chinese Party is in.
It begins with Hilary Clinton’s 2016 election loss bursting the hermetically sealed “progressive” bubble. Hollywood is nervous.
The hard cold realisation has set in that the world inhabited by radical leftism, wasn’t, and never had been, the centre of the universe.
Clinton’s loss cracked the porcelain facade no plastic surgeon could fix, and the world began to take note.
So, they spent four years trying to reinstate the illusion. Falsely portraying themselves as Antifascists, locking horns in a delusionary Quixotic battle.
Donald Trump became baby Hitler, and regardless of ethnicity, or melanin, middle-America’s mums and dads, all MAGA supporters, became the deplorable extras in Hollywood’s portrayal of Trump as a storm trooping racist, raging apelike through the Republic.
It’s a fiction as fake as much of Hollywood itself.
From Beverly Hills and Malibu beach, the world heard “Open borders” and “Defund the Police.” Each slogan shouted from celebrities behind their high walled million-dollar properties, protected by police and private security guards.
Despite the inconsistencies, dissonance, and hypocrisy, the narrative sold and hardcore woke idolators lapped it up.
While Hollywood fought their pretend war against a pretend enemy, they continued to align themselves with real ones.
Hollywood married into the Chinese economy by signing the Communist Chinese Party’s prenuptial.
In exchange for access to the multi-billion-dollar Chinese market, Hollywood complies with whatever the CCP demands.
It’s why John Cena, like a hostage under duress, confessed on camera to a crime he didn’t commit. The rule is: “stay on script, or else!”
It’s a rule that fits well with the CCP’s own “don’t offend, challenge nor question us, or you’ll regret it” totalitarianism.
As Hollywood executive, Chris Fenton recently told a CBS morning program, Chinese pressure on Hollywood is forcing a narrative into Hollywood movies, and Hollywood is embracing it:
“The [CCP] don’t want anyone talking about Taiwan. They don’t want anyone talking about Hong Kong now. They definitely don’t want anyone talking about human rights or Xingang province issues; and now the studios are aware of this, and they won’t even embark on the development of projects that touch that stuff.”
In ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ for example, patches with the Taiwanese and Japanese flags on Tom Cruise’s famous, iconic Maverick leather jacket, were replaced with CCP friendly nonsense.
For the movie ‘Pixels’, CBS alleged that the original script had the Great Wall of China being destroyed, only to change it to the Taj Mahal, in India.
Likewise, the Brad Pitt film, ‘World War Z’, changed the source of the virus from China to Taiwan.
These were all decisions, made, says Chris Fenton, to satiate the Communist Chinese Party by making the films more palatable to the Communists.
Fenton’s Hollywood CV is lengthy. He’s an insider with experience. He played the tune called by the piper. Now he’s calling out Hollywood’s ‘misguided engagement’ with the CCP, saying he ‘regrets complicity in it.’
Fenton points to his 2020 book ‘Feeding the Dragon’ which set out to expose what might best be described as, Hollywood’s economic alliance with, and dangerous subsequent reliance on the CCP.
In related op-eds, the Hollywood producer writes with prowess about culture and commerce, and how Hollywood, if impartial, is a bilateral bridge between the United States and China.
‘One could argue’, he said in one piece, ‘that Big Macs (commerce) and David Hasselhoff (culture) had more to do with the end of the Cold War than an arsenal of nuclear weapons, so they surely could prevent one too. And this diplomatic effect is also good for business — really good! I witnessed it first-hand as a production executive on the films “Iron Man 3” and “Looper,”and I’ll watch from afar with Disney’s upcoming “Mulan.”
However, Hollywood partiality means compromise through compliance. Ergo, the Chinese Communist Party can run Hollywood as though it were an extension of its own state-owned propaganda media arms.
Fenton isn’t without his critics.
One Amazon reviewer dismissed his experience as irrelevant, saying Fenton was writing more about himself than ‘the burgeoning media business partnership between China and the U. S.’
Nitish Kanan, writer for New York-based, Grit Daily, called Fenton a ‘Hollywood phony’.
Kanan accused him of not ‘knowing anything about the Chinese Government, people of culture’; inferring that Fenton’s claims were flawed because he (allegedly) ‘doesn’t speak Mandarin’. Then claimed that Fenton ‘was writing from a spectator’s perspective, and never really worked in the film industry.’
Personal attacks and defamatory criticism would suggest Fenton hits close to the bone.
Hollywood and Communism have a shared history. The appeasement of the Chinese Communists isn’t far from Hollywood’s celebration of Stalin’s barbaric “antifascists.”
This appeasement is also not far from Hollywood’s decision in the 1930s to maintain neutrality wherever possible. In order to keep from directly enraging the Germans, Hollywood practised a selective self-censorship of anything which displayed blatant opposition to the Nazis, or Nazi ideology.
When Hollywood did move to oppose Nazism, it froze that activism, in support of the Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop-pact from which the Soviets and Nazis carved up Poland.
This two-faced nature of the Hollywoke industry, is probably why A.W. Tozer called the entertainment world one of the ‘sleaziest fields of human endeavour.’
Cena’s apology is a symptom of a much greater problem.
Helping Americans acknowledge that there is a real mistake being played out here, is the first step towards correcting it. Fenton’s whistleblowing doesn’t make him a narcissist. It makes him a hero.
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