How Did Orwell Know?

A few days ago, a reporter from one of the trades asked me for an interview. I knew there could only be one reason she would want to interview me, and it wasn’t to talk about how I ran a website for 25 years on the Oscar race.

It wouldn’t be that I raised a baby as a single mother and launched my site out of a guest house in Van Nuys, California, or that I’d worked as a sports photographer, a fake horoscope writer, a film reviewer, a janitor, and a teacher’s aide to raise my daughter without sending her to daycare and somehow built a successful business anyway.

No. This had to be about my politics and why they changed.

How did a Barack Obama devotee, an I’m With Her Hillary Clinton supporter, and a Joe Biden faithful from way back find my way into not only voting for Trump but actively trying to help the Republicans defeat the Democrats?

Now that’s a story, “How Did an Oscar Blogger become a far-right radical?”

The pitch wasn’t exactly about that. It was more about how I plan to navigate being a dissident heretic while also running a successful business in an industry that is now the same organism as the government.

I’ve been asked this question many times by people on the Right and have given many interviews to explain “what happened to me.” But this is the first time anyone on the Left, or inside the bubble of the Left, asked me to explain it.

And that’s because one, two, three, all eyes are on me. I did a boo-boo on Twitter that now has me in the crosshairs at long last. It was one thing when I stood up for JK Rowling or Ansel Elgort or when I pushed back on the hysteria that Green Book was “racist.” When Trump is involved, it’s bigger than just your average internet pile-on. This time it could mean the end of whatever it is I’ve built over at AwardsDaily.com.

The story will be about how my politics changed, or more specifically, why I felt like I could get away with a satirical tweet that said “White Power” while mocking the “White Dudes for Harris.”

Is it bad to mock white people? I thought they were fair game. Or is just saying those words bad? Some people decided that it meant something beyond that. I don’t check my mentions anymore, so I had no idea this wave of hysteria was even occurring. But then a friend wrote to “ask me about it.”

It was as though I was secretly joining the white power movement on Twitter and was signaling to all of my friends in the KKK that, look, it’s cool to be white people celebrating our whiteness again! Of course, it’s not. It’s just that they have a habit on the left of memory-holing their insanity and moving the goalposts. We’re all supposed to keep up.

Four years ago, there could have been no “white dudes for Biden” or “white dudes for Barack Obama.” It would be called any number of things, from white saviorism (which this most surely was) and even borderline racism. But not in 2024! Anything goes because they say so.

I could have deleted the tweet and apologized profusely. But I know the game, brother. They once called me a “white supremacist” for saying it wasn’t only white people who committed hate crimes (fact check true). But in my world, no matter how crazy or blatant the hypocrisy gets, you should never say a word about it.

Apologize and beg for forgiveness. Maybe they’ll give you a break. No, they won’t. They will screenshot the tweet and send it around and around. By the end of this madness, it will land in the lap of a reporter who wonders, “What happened to her?”

How did Orwell know enough to write Children's Spies in 1984? How did he know the young would be so susceptible to fanaticism? Because, of course, he knew. That’s why capturing the youth is so important to cults and utopias and why they separate the kids from the parents, as the Democrats are trying to do now.

It’s my own fault. I could have shut up, kept my head down, and complied with all of the demands—think they do, write like they do, believe what they believe, and always apologize for “mistakes made.” I could have done that. But then I think about Winston Smith and 1984. How did Orwell know?

He knew that utopias must become totalitarian dystopias because how else to maintain the purity and the vision? We’re living everything from that book, even a government that has now been weaponized to punish thought crimes.

They have condemned and convicted Trump and his supporters as “racists,” which means anything can be done to them, and no one will say a thing. Steve Bannon is in prison for the crucial months leading up to the election. The last time someone was in jail for that crime was Ring Lardner of the Hollywood Ten.

If Orwell wanted to write a book that would call out to the future to warn us that this isn’t what we want for our country, much less our culture, then loudmouths like Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and me will have to take the hit because no one else will.

Winston Smith is an obedient member of Oceana whose thoughts take him to dangerous places. Big Brother doesn’t like him remembering great books or language deemed useless. Even love is strictly forbidden. That’s how Winston finds himself being forced to admit 2+2=5.

I still feel like a liberal at heart. I still care about climate change. I still believe we should all have access to good healthcare, no matter how rich we are. So many of the issues that used to be standard for Democrats have been warped and distorted beyond the point of recognition.

“Safe, legal, and rare” became forceful urgings to have abortions to defy the GOP and the Supreme Court. Just to have them. Have them all the time. Go to California, and Gavin Newsom will pay for them. And though I think women should have the right to choose, only a monster would think that unlimited abortions are good for the soul of this country. They should be rare because they’re always a tragedy.

Gun control has also been warped into yet more dogma for them. They blame the guns, only the guns, but never really talk about the “root causes,” do they? They don’t talk about psych meds. They don’t talk about what’s happening to men in this country. They don’t talk about crime in the cities - they can’t — it is verboten.

Hollywood doesn’t yet realize just how bad things have gotten for them, how catastrophic the box office is, how bland so much of the endless content on streaming is. They know they can’t make movies as good as they used to be, and they will never have that same resonance. They don’t realize they’re missing the essential thing they need to be a thriving industry: the freedom and the courage to tell the truth.

There are so many great stories to tell, yet no one is brave enough to tell them. Just look at what just happened with the Biden presidency. But to tell it, they’d have to tell the truth, and there is no way they can, not with George Clooney, Reid Hoffman, and Jeffrey Katzenberg calling the shots.

Imagine, Netflix is not only a major donor to the Democrats and actively involved in pushing out Joe Biden and installing Kamala Harris, but also has a production deal with Barack Obama and is the number one entertainment streamer for the public. Their version would have to be pure propaganda. How could it not be?

Or this, a former reality TV host runs for president almost as a lark, accidentally wins, and thrusts the entire country into chaos. The establishment government does everything it can to take him down, and yet, here he still stands. The Hero’s Journey.

Hollywood will never tell that story. Although it once did. It was Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Jefferson Smith, like Trump, is thrust into the world of Washington. He is framed and crushed by the powerful establishment government. Trump isn’t pure like Smith, of course. But it’s close enough.

And once upon a time they made a movie called Primary Colors that dared to criticize the Democrats — The Clintons! Imagine that.

There’s a reason the two names are Smith - Winston and Jefferson - because there used to be a thing called the everyman. That doesn’t seem to exist anymore in movies, not really. Oh, they are all over the place in America, but Hollywood doesn’t really care to tell those stories.

It’s been said that Aaron Sorkin is working on a sequel to The Social Network, only this time it will be about how Mark Zuckerberg allowed the January 6th “insurrectionists” to mobilize on the app—and look where it got us!

No, their version of all of this must end with Trump in jail because no other ending will do. Where else can it go? It always has to go to prisons, or gulags or concentration camps or labor camps. But if they go that far, that might just wake everyone up to what this country has become.

Hollywood can only save itself once it abandons its mass hysteria and mass delusion over Trump. It can’t stop on its own. But if Trump does win, that might help dislodge some of it. It might speed up the empire’s collapse.

Every day on TikTok, I see another person who has gone through something similar. It always follows the same pattern. They become curious about Trump. They investigate. They find out who he really is, and they can’t believe that they’ve been lied to by the media and the Democrats for almost ten years. The truth is out there, but you just have to know where to look.

So here’s the bottom line: I left the Democratic Party after the 2020 election when I saw just how corrupt they’d become with all that money and power.

I decided I would vote for any Republican once I saw that all of the Democrats were behind “gender-affirming care” on minors and that they want gender ideology foisted on young kids and pre-schoolers up through high school.

I kept my politics mostly off my site and my public Twitter because I didn’t want to jeopardize my business. But at some point, I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. I had to use whatever dwindling platform I had to speak the truth.

I decided to vote for Trump when they raided Mar-a-Lago. I became a Trump supporter when he became a convicted felon. I couldn’t believe they went that far, even knowing everything I do about mass hysteria and what happens when it gets into government.

If that means studios no longer want to advertise, so be it. I’ve spent over 20 years trying to help them get nominations and wins. Once that silent agreement is broken, well, maybe I can finally tell the truth about what really goes on in the Oscar game. I’m kind of looking forward to it.

I’ve lived half of my life online, almost 30 years by now. That’s a long time. The one thing I always loved about the internet was that it was the one place where I could speak the truth and write from the heart, and if people wanted to read it, great. I’ve been compelled to do this almost every day of my life.

The truth is that I haven’t changed. The Left changed. I was part of it. I followed the rules. I spoke the language. But when my survival depended on my going along with what I knew to be lies? That was when I had to jump off the fast-moving train and find solid ground.

To do it the other way is the end of 1984. You see, it’s a love story, not between Winston and Julia but between Winston and Big Brother. It isn’t enough to comply, follow the rules, do your job, and be a good citizen, no. You have to love Big Brother. And so Winston finally does.

I couldn’t live with myself — or live at all — if I did not have a mind that was free. If you take that away, you might as well take everything.