Dems Must Deploy Best Weapon: Hollywood

Start The Mid-Term Elections Now With Storytelling From The Oppressed

To protect ourselves from Donald’s second reign, we gave ourselves a Novacane injection – numbing ourselves into believing there was reason to hope for a White Horse. Only to be left with an ache when the numbness waned.

Now – a mere month into our newly unrecognizable country – we’re feeling anesthetized, pulled into a state of helplessness, powerlessness, utterly without control. Republicans have been castrated by their feckless leader, President Musk, and the rule of law is teetering.

The question is where to turn?

The most exhilarating moment of this past week was when a viral video on social media popped up on our phones. Filmed in black and white, a menagerie of celebrities including Scarlett Johannson, Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, and Woody Allen, flaunted their Jewishness, telling Kanye West (aka Ye) to go fuck himself for his Nazi oriflammes he uses as propaganda on his cheap promotional swag. So many thoughts took hold: is Jake Gyllenhaal Jewish (he is), how did they recruit Woody from exile (he’s still cancelled)? And who’s the black guy? Soon enough we’d learn this startling PSA with A-listers wearing a white T-shirt incorporating the “bird” into the Star of David and playing a remix of Hava Nagila, was an AI generated video created and posted online by Guy Bar and Ori Bejerano, clever auteurs from an Israeli AI company. Let’s face it, when it comes to warfare, yarmulkes off to Israel.

The AI controversy aside, the video landed euphorically because it was simple, minimalist, chilling, unambiguous. Ye was beside the point because his rap has wrapped. He’s not relevant. This was way bigger: it was a viral missile sent to Donald, Herr Musk, and the cabal of antisemites who wet dream of a second Nazi coming. You might be tempted to say: “Oh no, Donald is on Isreal’s side. Look at those big boy threats he issued to Hamas to release all the hostages or else!! What Donald, the cartoon conqueror, is really salivating over is Mar-a-LaGaza, where he’d like to plant his next phallic flag and build a tacky gilded resort with his name on it: Hotel Trusk.

The rapid-fire sharing of the “We are Jewish and that means something” video was both a temporary salve to the feeling of helplessness and a reminder we have the most virulent weapon of any nation on earth: Hollywood, and the broadcast media, when it remembers there’s nothing more powerful than visual stories of oppression and violence beset against our democracy. Recall the atrocities of the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights movement that played out on our black-and-white boob tubes back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Reporters showed us the gore, the firehoses, the attack dogs, the body bags. The pivotal moments in our country weren’t changed with statistics and charts and stiff news anchors interviewing stiff experts. We were shown what being under siege looked like. We witnessed human beings with fire in their eyes, grit in their bellies, handcuffs on their wrists, lying in pools of blood. Cinematographers pulled the curtain away from government secrecy by showing us human sacrifice.

Elected officials had no choice but to listen.

Republican politicians today have massed into one tone-deaf blob of smug callousness. Red State Congressman and Senators think they are bullet-proof. But constituents feel pain, and when that pain is reinforced in visual messaging, the monolith will crack. And so might the Red/Blue divide.

In Donald’s first spin in the fun-house teacup, reporters jumped on human stories. We were taken immediately to the airport where chaos reigned over Arabs caught up in the Muslim ban. We saw the United States government and ICE snatch wailing immigrant children from the clutches of their parents. We saw humans housed in cages. We witnessed Donald throwing paper towels in Puerto Rico. We watched millions of people dying in hospitals during the pandemic. The inadequacies of Donald’s first regime were on view, visceral, vicious. He couldn’t hide.

If the Democrats were strategic (and realize they have not been euthanized just yet), they’d initiate the mid-term elections right now with a constant hose of Hollywood-grade human-centric vignettes that unpack stories about hungry Africans’ whose supplies have been cut off after Musk pulled the plug on US AID, of transgender youth whose medicine regime has been abruptly interrupted, of schools or churches being invaded by ICE, of federal workers who’ve been sent packing, even The Kennedy Center, hollowed out by Donald’s egoless desire to settle scores. Memes are not going to get the job done here. Call in the professionals. Make movies and blitzkrieg them from here to the midterms.

The American public must realign with the party of empathy, which also is the party of Oscars and cinematic talent and storytelling. Have you ever watched one of those God movies made by the Christian right? Not their strong suit. Hollywood has been influencing how we think, feel, and act for a century. They’ve got the chops. Dems and their PACs need to hire filmmakers to create a fusillade of PSAs and videos that remind us of the peril we’re in, constantly. They could start right away with rising inflation at the grocery store, with the elderly who are panicked over losing Medicaid, with mid-west farmers and car makers worried about tariffs.

While Donald steers his army into a blizzard of empire-building and lawlessness, Dems with the help of cinematography can ground and possibility re-unite the public – Red State and Blue State alike – by showing that no one is immune to the cruel policies the Robber Barons and Villainaires are orchestrating.

As the former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” There’s no trip wire within the Republican party. Look at the Cabinet appointments, the complicity, silence. Ironically, those that have power have abdicated it. In contrast, the Dems do not have a lot of arrows in their quiver, at the moment. Except storytelling. Humans have responded to storytelling from the beginning of mankind. The Dems should endeavor to make this a two-sided war to breathe life and energy into the crestfallen good people who feel like zombies in Donald’s dystopia.