At the Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais Exposed Hollywood’s ‘Woke’ Culture

At the annual Golden Globes, an awards show for both movies and television, on Sunday night, host comedian Ricky Gervais was actually funny, lampooning Hollywood in general and its “woke” culture in particular.

“Let’s have a laugh at your expense,” Gervais said in opening his monologue at the Globes’ 77th awards ceremony, presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. “Remember, we’re all going to die soon. And there’s no sequel.”

It was quite a performance, though it’s clear that while some celebrities laughed along with the jokes, many others were not amused, or had uncomfortable reactions.

During the course of his monologue, Gervais joked that this would undoubtedly be his last awards show, so he didn’t care if he offended people.

His speech ended up being a phenomenal takedown of an overly political and absurdly left-wing Hollywood that’s become obsessed with self-righteous crusades, such as the #MeToo movement, or with bemoaning the supposed lack of racial and gender diversity in movies.

Gervais said that he couldn’t begin the show with a rundown of the celebrity deaths in 2019 because “when I saw the list of people who died, it wasn’t diverse enough.”

He then mocked the entertainment industry for being shamelessly transactional—despite its moralistic pretenses.

Apple roared into the TV game with “The Morning Show,” a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing—made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.

So, you say you’re “woke,” but the companies you work for, Apple, Amazon, Disney … If ISIS had a streaming service, you would be calling your agents.

Gervais also poked fun at the smug—yet clueless—way Hollywood talks down to everyone else.

“You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything,” he said. “You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.”

Gervais concluded his monologue by making an appeal for award recipients to drop the political lectures.

“Don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You are in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world,” he said.

What was particularly great about the Gervais monologue is that Hollywood was exposed on its own turf.

Of course, not everyone was pleased. Some in the media—the less-glamorous handmaiden of the Hollywood set—groused that it was inappropriate to mock celebrities, who are clearly having such a tough time right now.

“At the Beverly Hilton, where the three-hour-plus ceremony took place, the mood was already somber, thanks to an impeachment, the threat of war with Iran, and devastating bush fires in Australia,” wrote Lorraine Ali, the Los Angeles Times’ television critic. “The last thing anyone needed was for the smirking master of ceremonies to reprimand them for having hope, or taunt the room for trying to use their influence to change things for the better.”

Maybe the speech wasn’t for them. Maybe it was simply a comedic reminder to the entertainment industry that their talents are best put to use by sticking to entertaining, and that the country really is sick of their tedious and often mockable political sermons.

At the very least, it exposed a vapid Hollywood for what it is, while deflating the superficial virtue-signaling of hypocrites who use their platforms to lecture America and the world about their sins.

Perhaps, through mockery, this really is the beginning of the end of Hollywood’s “Great Awokening.”

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Transgender Clinics Are Ruining Young Lives

Gender clinics blithely guide 18-year-olds through the radical steps of gender transition, but abandon them later when they regret it.

After exploiting these troubled and vulnerable youths, the clinicians often want nothing more to do with them, and even deny the existence of regret among patients they assisted in transitioning.

These clinics need to be held accountable for ruining young lives. But don’t expect the liberal mainstream media, which practically celebrate transgenderism, to do so.

Three teens who transitioned at age 18 or 19 and who regretted it soon after contacted me for help in going back. They are living proof of that cavalier attitude prevalent among gender clinics.

Their stories illuminate the ease with which doctors and clinics facilitate gender change on vulnerable youths, but turn their back on these young adults when they want to undo a tragic mistake.

The Callousness of Trans Clinics

Take the case of Abel Garcia, a 22-year-old born male from Southern California. (Able is a pseudonym to protect his identity.)

Abel first wrote me in June about the conflicting feelings he’s had about continuing along the path of transition to female. He allowed me to share his story here to warn others.

“Hello, Walter, I am a transgender woman who’s been struggling with myself in regard to continuing or to detransition for the last year,” he wrote. “[I’ve] been watching videos about you and interviews you’ve been in. And since then, I have been questioning myself more and more every day.”

Abel began his journey from male to female with cross-sex hormones in November 2016 at age 19. He changed his legal identity six months later, and in May 2018 had breast augmentation, aka “top surgery.”

His attitude toward transitioning is a bit different from most. He decided to take it slowly so he wouldn’t regret his decision. After he recovered from top surgery is when the questioning began.

In the year and a half since his breast augmentation, Abel has had a job that helped him mature, which has made a big difference in his decision.

“I am much more mature [at 22], compared to myself when I was 18,” he said. “I had a feeling that there was a small chance I would regret my decision, and I would want to detransition.”

Abel felt unappreciated as a young boy and subconsciously thought transitioning would make him the focus of attention.

“Growing up, I was a very shy, quiet boy compared to other boys my age, and I also didn’t see my father growing up, because he worked almost every day as a truck driver, which left me and my two brothers being left alone to be raised by my mother and not having much of a male role figure in my life growing up.”

I knew I would never be a real woman. I would just be a man with a mutilated body to present as a woman.
Abel has concluded he wants to go back to identifying as a man.

“Ultimately, I knew even if I transitioned 100% completely, I knew I would never be a real woman,” he said. “I would just be a man with a mutilated body to present as a woman.”

The gender clinic doctors could have prevented Abel from a needless gender transition through psychotherapy, but they preferred the reckless use of hormones and surgeries. It’s criminal what’s happening to young people.

Then there’s Sydney Wright, a young woman from the South, who wrote to me last spring.

“Hey, Walt! I myself was searching for positive detransitioning articles when I found your website,” she wrote. “I transitioned from female to male as soon as I turned 19 … it has been the biggest regret of my life.”

Sydney shared her story with The Daily Signal, “I Spent a Year as A Trans Man. Doctors Failed Me at Every Turn,” in which she wrote:

It’s insane to me that our society is letting this happen to young people. At age 18, I wasn’t even legal to buy alcohol, but I was old enough to go to a therapist and get hormones to change my gender.

Sydney related how she had no trouble finding a therapist willing to write her an approval letter for cross-gender hormones and a physician who gave her a prescription for testosterone and told her to watch YouTube videos to figure out how to inject herself.

Neither so-called “professional” questioned her motives or recommended counseling.

Nor did clinicians counsel or caution Nathaniel, a young man from the Northeast, who started on hormones at age 15 with his parents’ approval and underwent the full surgical reassignment from male to female at age 18.

After he regretted having the surgery, the clinic washed its hands of him.

Less than a year later, he wrote me about his regret and wanting his male body parts back. With Nathaniel’s permission, I shared his story, “1 Year After Sex Change, This Teen Regrets His ‘Frankenstein Hack Job,’” in November.

Nathaniel, like so many others, received no effective counseling before surgery—which would have prevented this horrible mistake. Instead, the gender clinic and surgeons affirmed his false thinking and enticed him down the primrose path.

After he regretted having the surgery, the clinic washed its hands of him.

Hold the Clinics Accountable

People who regret their gender change contact me for help because their gender doctors and clinics abandon them when they want their life back.

None of us will ever be counted among the regretters or detransitioners in any studies or statistics. In fact, the doctors and clinics routinely refuse to acknowledge the existence of even one patient who regrets transitioning or detransitions.

As I reported in my book “Paper Genders,” 90% of transgender research subjects are lost to follow-up, so no one knows how many go back to identifying as their birth gender.

We who detransition do exist, and we deserve to be heard.

The gender doctors and clinics need to be held accountable for destroying people’s lives, especially for the vulnerable youths they exploit.

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Did Dennis Prager ridicule Anne Frank?

Dennis Prager

If decent people working in mainstream American media want to know why many Americans do not trust them and are willing to use the term "fake news" to describe the mainstream media, I offer one of the most glaring examples of a lie in my lifetime.

Last week, Newsweek headlined the following: "Conservative Radio Host Ridicules Anne Frank: 'I Don't Get My Wisdom From Teenagers.'"

Now, imagine how that must have struck any reader not familiar with the "conservative radio host" or with what he actually said. "Ridicule Anne Frank" – what kind of terrible human being would do that?

Well, it turns out the "conservative radio host" was me. Yes, me – a religious Jew who has devoted much of his life to the welfare of the Jewish people, served on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, made the most widely viewed pro-Israel video in the world, written a book on anti-Semitism that is in its third printing, and founded a synagogue and a Jewish day school.

To understand how terrible a lie this is, you need to know what happened: Every week I do a video podcast for PragerU called "The Fireside Chat." In it, I offer thoughts on life and then take questions from around the world (we have received questions from 52 countries).

A few weeks ago, I received the following question from Sam in Meridian, Idaho: "On your most recent Fireside Chat, you said that people are not basically good. We've heard you discuss this topic before. Anne Frank is quoted as saying, 'Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.' How do you respond to her quote?"

Here is my response (this is a word-for-word transcription, except for the words in parentheses added for clarity):

"She wrote that in her diary, the most famous Holocaust document. (She was) a teenage girl, a Dutch Jewish girl, who hid with her family until they were betrayed by someone to the Nazis, who then shipped them to death camps. And she died, murdered by the Nazis in the death camps. She was about 16 years old, maybe 15. Her diary is very famous. It gives a face to the horror of the Holocaust.

"I know she wrote that, and my answer is it doesn't matter that she wrote it. I don't get my wisdom from teenagers. That she was a wonderful young woman and wrote an unbelievably powerful document that will last forever is beside the point. I don't expect 16-year-olds, unless they grew up in a religious Jewish or Christian home (where it is taught as basic religious doctrine that people are not born basically good).

She was a secular Jew. Most kids believe that (people are basically good). But it is not true. So, it has never been an issue for me – 'Well, you disagree with Anne Frank.' So what?

"And, by the way, to be very serious for a moment, I would be very curious – I've thought about this a lot – if I were to be able to visit Anne Frank while in a concentration camp, would she have still believed that? We don't know."

Only someone who deliberately seeks to smear someone would claim that what I said ridicules Anne Frank.

The person who wrote this is Benjamin Fearnow, a deputy editor at Newsweek, who previously worked for the left-wing site Mediaite.

When I looked up Fearnow, I came across this December 2018 tweet from talk-show host Mark Levin: "Newsweek's Benjamin Fearnow is a very, very sick person."

And Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, one of the most revered Jewish scholars in America – author of such Jewish classics as "Jewish Literacy" and "Biblical Literacy" – called me to say that Fearnow's article saying I ridiculed Anne Frank is "the most despicable lie I recall reading in a mainstream news source."

Yesterday, Newsweek published Fearnow's column headlined, "Top Iranian Presidential Adviser Says Tehran's 'Sole Problem Is Trump,' Not Average American People."

Apparently, Fearnow has chosen to serve as a useful idiot for the Iranian regime, which hates America, not only Trump. (Does Fearnow believe that the Iranian chant "death to Israel" only means "death to Netanyahu"?)

The Iranian regime has gathered millions of Iranians to chant "death to America" since long before it ever heard of Donald Trump. It has been wishing death on us and killing Americans (not to mention Iranians) since it came into power in 1979. But Fearnow cites the Iranian dictator, Ayatollah Khamenei, as having said last February that "'Death to America' means death to Trump, (National Security Adviser) John Bolton, and (Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo," as if it were credible.

Meanwhile, multiple left-wing sites have picked up Fearnow's and Newsweek's lie that I ridiculed Anne Frank.

If Newsweek has any honor, it will remove Fearnow's article and apologize to me.

But neither is likely. As I wrote 30 years ago, "Being on the left means never having to say you're sorry."

Next time someone challenges you for using the term "fake news" to describe mainstream media, just cite Newsweek and Fearnow.

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The maddest nanny-state ideas of 2019

From inedible eco-diets to bans on snacking, public-health campaigners outdid themselves this year.

The nanny state has had a bit of a quiet year in the UK. With all the shenanigans over Brexit, it seems our parliamentarians haven’t really had the time to devote to making serious new dents in our personal freedoms. Given that, in recent years, we’ve seen the introduction of all sorts of bans, regulations and tax hikes on tobacco, minimum prices for booze north of the border, and sugary drinks taxes, maybe it was time to take a breather.

But that hasn’t stopped the public-health wonks, campaigners and academics from floating ever-more stupid and illiberal ideas about how our lives can be micromanaged. And if our behaviour can’t be changed, the authorities will simply apply pressure to the companies who make the products we consume.

Christmas time is always one for the old favourites, and one of the classics is food reformulation. This is the idea that if manufacturers would only tweak the recipes for our favourite foods, it would do wonders for the fight against obesity. Some things are (relatively) easy to tweak, like cutting the amount of salt in biscuits or crisps – up to a point. But other changes are easy to notice. You can’t easily replace sugar with artificial sweetener without anyone noticing. The likes of aspartame simply taste different and have nothing like the bulk of sugar. Diet drinks taste different to full-sugar drinks and you either tolerate that difference in flavour or you don’t. As long as you have the option, it really is a matter of taste.

But as AG Barr, maker of Scottish soft-drink favourite Irn-Bru, has found out, denying your customers that choice altogether in an effort to avoid the sugary drinks tax can seriously hurt your bottom line. The reduced-sugar version of Irn-Bru has been a flop. No wonder the firm suddenly discovered an old, very sugary recipe to flog as a ‘limited edition’ over Christmas and New Year.

Getting Whitehall involved in how our food is made is, er, a recipe for disaster (pun intended), as Josie Appleton found out while writing the report, Cooking For Bureaucrats. She notes that calorie-reduction targets have been proposed for a bizarre range of foods, including ‘olive ciabatta, boxed salads, sushi, bao buns, vegetable crisps, protein balls, yoghurt-covered raisins, croutons, braised cabbage, mushy peas, pesto, hollandaise sauce, quinoa (with additions), spelt and barley (with additions), guacamole, pease pudding, and prepared salads’. Hardly the most obviously unhealthy foods.

The real upshot of food reformulation is food that tastes worse – or comes in smaller portions because changing the recipe is just impractical. So, well done all concerned at making our lives just that little bit worse for practically zero impact on calorie intakes or obesity.

Another public-health crowdpleaser is the advertising ban. Earlier this year, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, promised to ban adverts for ‘junk’ food on Transport for London (TfL). But within weeks, we had news of collateral damage. Farmdrop, an organic-food home-delivery firm, were told by TfL bosses to cut out parts of an ad containing such treats as bacon, butter and jam. It even had to confirm that other foods featured, including shortbread, juice, biscuits, yoghurt and elderflower, were in compliance with the new rules. Advertising bans may be stupid, irrational and a restraint on free expression – but at least TfL’s rules have the merit of bone-headed consistency.

In 2019, we had the chance to examine the merits of nanny-state policies introduced in the previous year. For example, the stats on Scotland’s policy of minimum pricing for alcohol, introduced in May 2018, are now available and show alcohol sales are down. However, that seems little different to the long-term trend in Scotland. Initial estimates of mortality seems to show a decline – but there was also a decline in England.

Clearly, the policy has had either zero effect, or the effect is so marginal as to be indistinguishable from long-term trends. Minimum pricing has been bad news for anyone who likes a cheap drink and good news for booze shops just across the border in England. But it’s doing nothing (or at least, vanishingly little) to prevent booze-related deaths.

But if minimum pricing is pointless, that’s nothing next to the maddest of madcap public-health ideas: the diet proposed in January by the EAT-Lancet Commission, bringing together the biggest moonbats from the worlds of public health and climate-change activism – what I called at the time the ‘Avengers Assembled of food bollocks’. Our flatulent, eco-friendly food future should be built, we were told, on grains, fruit and vegetables. These could be supplemented by a small amount of milk and cheese, but that’s about it. The diets suggests just seven grams of pork or beef per day (a quarter of an ounce in old money). Luckily, there is the option of a whole ounce (28 grams) of chicken per day and a wondrous 1.5 eggs per week each. The potato ration would be just 50 grams per day.

Of course, this is the most echoing of echo chambers, a committee of the great and good cooking up dietary drivel between themselves. No normal person would even attempt to eat such a diet. The danger is that having set the mark for utter dietary nonsense, politicians might be persuaded to accept a diet with slightly fewer restrictions as somehow rational.

Finally, a word for those we have lost this year. No, not an obituary, but a fond farewell to the retired chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, aka the ‘Nanny-in-Chief’. As Christopher Snowdon has pointed out, Davies was appointed in 2010 and was, for a few years, relatively sensible. But after half a decade of pickling in the asylum-like world of public health, she started coming out with statements about how she worried about breast cancer every time she had a glass of wine. Her parting shot on retiring was to call for a ban on pretty much all eating and drinking on public transport. It was for the benefit of everyone that she was put out to pasture.

While Christmas at Chez Davies may be more paltry than poultry, to everyone else – a merry Christmas and a happy, indulgent New Year!

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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