It’s Oscar Sunday, a ceremony fueled by one thing: publicity. We turn ordinary people into gods and goddesses by telling flattering myths about who they are and why they’re important. The “narrative” gives voters a reason to care and almost always drives the win.
In Hollywood, they’re not planning on changing anything, just as the Democrats won’t. They haven’t noticed that, as they’re watching the band play on, the ship is made of iron and will sink.
What do they even stand for anymore? Transing the kids, open borders for cheap labor, and most importantly, the war in Ukraine. Attending the Oscars is like supporting the Democrats, like supporting Zelensky—an alignment of power like no other.
Unsuspecting dreamers who rise in Hollywood are often warned never to believe their own publicity. Anyone who has ever worked in publicity, or the Oscar race as I have, knows it’s nothing but pretty lies. It isn’t journalism. It isn’t criticism. It isn’t the truth. It’s like photoshopping a life.
The Zelensky myth is necessary to keep hope alive that the Democrats didn’t humiliate themselves when they lost to Trump a second time. No, it wasn’t their failures. It had nothing to do with selling false narratives about Hillary and Joe, forcing voters to go along with it. This is bigger than an ordinary election. They are at war with the new “axis of evil.” And why not? They’re the “resistance,” after all.
Zelensky’s entitled behavior in the Oval Office was proof enough that he believed his own publicity and lost perspective of who he was in this fight. He’s not the man who can demand anything from the United States. But who’s going to tell him?
Certainly not the legacy media. Not the Democrats. Not Hollywood.
Almost as soon as the war began, there didn’t seem to be any difference between celebrities, the Democrats and Zelensky. The Ukrainian Tom Cruise was suddenly everywhere, not just at award shows but on television, appearing at celebrity and news events alike, smearing together politics and culture like peanut butter and jelly. His war was supposed to be our war. If you were against it, you were “pro-Putin.”
Co-mingling celebrity with the raw savagery of war and bloodshed didn’t seem to give anyone pause. It was like it all became part of the same illusion. The “resistance” was a proxy war being fought not against Putin but against Trump, a war Hollywood has also been fighting for years.
When I saw Zelensky appear at the Golden Globes in 2022, I thought, "What’s the point of this?" Does he not know that almost no one watches the Golden Globes now? Their ratings are worse than the Oscars have become. Why would this be important to Zelensky?
He was there because Sean Penn demanded it. Penn was “on the front lines” in Ukraine, or at least he positioned himself that way. The problem is that he believes his own publicity too. Like every celebrity, he’s told only what he wants to hear. No one dares to defy him or even criticize him. If he wanted Zelensky at the Globes, no one would say no.
Penn even gave Zelensky one of his two Oscars. I can’t think of a single gesture that illustrates their complete disconnect from reality than that. I’m sure he meant it with the best of intentions. Not to be mean or mean or anything, but imagine giving Winston Churchill one of those. What I would pay to see him try to hand one to General MacArthur.
“When you win,” Sean Penn says, “Bring it back to Malibu.”
What was more strange, that Sean Penn genuinely believed Zelensky would win the war or that Zelensky seemed genuinely thrilled to be holding Sean Penn’s Oscar. The delusions that fed Sean Penn and everyone else who bought into the lie that this war could be won meant that Zelensky couldn’t possibly make a deal to end the war without giving up everything else.
For Zelensky, all of this was life imitating art. He played a fictional Ukrainian president on television from 2015 to 2019, and when that ended, he won the election to become the real president. He became a star and then graduated to an even bigger star, with celebrities like the actress Jessica Chastain throwing themselves at his feet.
And Ben Stiller:
Here is Orlando Bloom:
Other celebrities included Angelina Jolie, the band U2, Liev Schreiber, and David Letterman.
Imagine, going from starring on a television show to leading what might become World War III, nuclear war. No one in Hollywood could write satire this good. But is it that surprising that he vibes so well with actors? How will they all feel when the whole thing comes tumbling down?
The lies sold by the legacy press, Hollywood, and the Democrats have had serious consequences beyond the bloodshed and ruin in Ukraine, lest we forget the washed-up surfer dude who escaped his pineapple shack in Hawaii and tried to shoot Trump. It was for Ukraine. For Democracy. For the “resistance.”
As he’s done so often in the past almost ten years, Trump splashed cold water all over their fever dreams when he confronted Zelensky and then threw him out of the Oval Office. While the “resistance” saw it as a dangerous escalation of Putin’s dominance, ordinary Americans saw it a little differently:
Here are some TikTok users:
That Zelensky believed himself to be Trump’s equal in making demands is proof enough that he, too, was caught up in the narratives written about him. They became a flattering reflecting pool and by the end, he lost all perspective. Zelensky misread the moment and the room.
I’ve never seen so many people attached so emotionally to a war in another country as the Left is to Ukraine. I always found it strange, even when I was still a Democrat. Maybe that’s because I never saw this war as necessary to begin with. Once it began, it seemed like it wasn’t a war Ukraine could win without us, without boots on the ground.
That’s still true. Only now, there are hundreds of thousands dead, and a country utterly destroyed. That isn’t Ukraine’s fault. The question that has to be asked now is how far Europe and the United States are willing to go to win the war for Ukraine.
One thing is certain, the legacy press is not on the side of this country. They’re doing what they’ve done from the beginning: help the Democrats fight their imaginary war against Trump.
I’m guessing tonight at the Oscars, they will all make their collective emotional attachment to Zelensky and Ukraine known. If one of the films about Ukraine wins, like the documentary Porcelain War, then we’ll see a sustained standing ovation by the richest people in the world who see themselves as the most oppressed.
And any of us who are still watching are invited in as long as we, too, believe the myths they’re spinning, the lies they’re telling, and the publicity that props up their collapsing empire just one minute longer.
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