Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

“Social media isn’t real life.” It’s a phrase we hear a lot. But is that really true? When Congress threatened to block China from controlling TikTok, the company riled up a mob of tweens to threaten Congress. If the Senate gives in, the outcome will be real enough. TikTok certainly is real life. If you doubt it, look at the rate of teenage girls who have themselves mutilated because of trans trends on the app, even younger girls who killed themselves over material in the app’s algorithm or the spread of verbal or motor ‘tics’ to teens over the platform. Social media isn’t real in the same way as the wind and the rain, or the laws of physics or economics, it’s an alternate reality spread through the internal realities of our minds. Before social media, there was just media, the concentration of mass media, radio, film and newspapers that wrecked much of the twentieth century and killed millions of people. It is no coincidence that some of the most destructive social and political movem

Agatha Christie, an elderly lady from Devon, had plenty of blood on her hands, all of it fictional. But none of the killers in her many books and short stories are nearly as monstrous or obsessed as the censorious wokes who have been coming after the deceased author for decades. The latest episode in the long-running saga takes place not on a luxurious train speeding through Yugoslavia or on the Nile, but at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) which had performed Christie’s play, “And Then There Were None.” “And Then There Were None” is a natural fit for a high school setting. With lots of different balanced roles and one-note characters who reveal a hidden side, it’s a training wheels production for students learning the basics of performing a character and acting on stage. It’s also fun. Ten people. One island. And a killer. There’s a reason why “And Then There Were None” has remained popular and Hollywood keeps ripping it off for movies like 2022’s ‘

Microsoft. Warner Bros. Electronic Arts. These are only some of the major corporations who appear on the list of clients for Sweet Baby Inc: a DEI consulting firm that some video game players believe is reshaping the industry. Sweet Baby Inc was only founded in 2018, but its clients now include Xbox, Microsoft’s dominant video game platform and subscription service, Warner Bros, whose video game arm publishes Batman and Harry Potter games, Electronic Arts, which is behind the Battlefield series, the NFL, NHL and FIFA soccer franchises, the Sims franchise, as well as Star Wars games, Ubisoft, the makers of the popular Assassin’s Creed series, Square Enix, makers of Final Fantasy, and Wizards of the Coast, who control the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. As well as Valve whose monopolistic Steam platform controls 75% of global video game sales. Of the top 10 best-selling games in 2023, 8 were published by studios that were either affiliated with Sweet Baby Inc. or that, after Microsoft’s

Even as streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ are spending almost incomprehensible amounts of money creating the movies and shows fueling the Peak TV wars, the numbers show that audiences are turning down much of that content to watch old television shows instead. A recent article noted that according to Nielsen, which tracks viewership numbers, “the most minutes last year – more than 57 billion – were spent watching ‘Suits,’ a legal drama that premiered 12 years prior.” The show had more than double the number of viewing minutes than Netflix’s race-swapping woke usurpation fantasy, “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.” The Hollywood Reporter noted that the “top 10 overall titles in Nielsen’s year-end rankings are all acquired shows, the first time that’s happened in the four years streaming rankings have been publicly available.” Acquired means the library of older shows that Netflix bought after spending $17 billion on content, much of it on new shows like “Bridgerton” whose

Origin, the movie, claims to be about the origin of racism in America, but its own origin story lies with the Ford Foundation, Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, the Apple guru, and Pivotal Ventures, the nonprofit started up by Melinda French Gates after she dumped Bill Gates, which provided much of the money needed to fund the $38 million smear of the United States. What kind of movie would two wealthy woke white women fund? A pop history take on racism. Origin is based on Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, another one of those 2020 books about a racial reckoning of the kind that Mrs. Jobs and Mrs. Gates would have encountered in book clubs and while browsing The Atlantic (Mrs. Jobs owns it) or Slate (Bill Gates used to.) Isabel Wilkerson, the protagonist of book and film, is another one of those critical race theory ‘public intellectuals’ with a media platform, a former New York Times bureau chief, who stars in it because it follows her deep thoughts about race which u

“In day-to-day life, I worship the Earth (and its sun),” Alice Walker wrote, explaining that her novel, ‘The Color Purple’, is about among other things, disavowing “a God that resembles ‘the little fat white man who works in the bank.'” The musical remake of ‘The Color Purple’ now in theaters was rewritten to better reflect the more politically correct version of Walker’s writing by playing up its lesbian relationship but also toning down the politically incorrect parts including the abusive black men and boys in the novel. The 2023 adaptation of a musical of the original novel was billed as the first truly black take on it and yet it’s also the one that smoothes away all the rough edges for a movie that is woke, but also bland and inoffensive, and blandness is a signature of woke entertainment. Sometimes, like Taylor Swift’s endless march through pop culture, woke blandness triumphs to rule the day. But ‘The Color Purple’ musical bombed. Badly. After winning the Christmas box offi

The outgoing artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company has announced that from now on only disabled actors will be allowed to play Richard III. In a woke world where vice presidents and Supreme Court justices are chosen based on their skin color and gender, to “prove” a hunchbacked villain, you must be a hunchback or at least have something wrong with you. The RSC boasts that it cast the first disabled actor in the role, Arthur Hughes, a 30-year-old who “has no thumb or radius bone in his right arm” and therefore identifies as “limb different”. The real Richard III had scoliosis, Shakespeare used that to make him appear grotesquely villainous, while the new woke overlords use it to make the long dead king a victim. Next thing you know, actors will need to have syphilis to play Hitler. Now that Richard III is a member of a designated victim group, his namesake play can be reinterpreted as a commentary on social prejudice against the disabled. It may even have to be rewritten s

On the first Friday in December, a production of 1984 is reserved for black people. It’s only fair since a few weeks earlier the show about a totalitarian dystopia had been reserved for ‘LGBTQIA+’ attendees at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California. George Orwell’s masterpiece depiction of Communist totalitarianism is more popular than ever and fewer than ever seem to understand it. A feminist retelling of the book, ‘Julia’ was recently approved by the Orwell Estate (the author had no biological children) which was last seen handing out copyright violations to people printing ‘1984’ on their t-shirts. Like calling someone ‘Hitler’, referencing Orwell and 1984 has become slang for something someone doesn’t like. And often it’s the totalitarians who accuse their critics of ‘Orwellianism’. After Nina Jankowicz, the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Disinformation Governance Board’, a real-life Ministry of Truth institution, had to resign, an interview with her was headlin

Before 2020, movie theaters were dominated by superheroes. After the pandemic and the race riots, it’s been biopics. 2023 superhero movies like The Flash, Blue Beetle and The Marvels bombed, but biopics are booming. From Elvis to Oppenheimer to Napoleon, audiences have grown tired of special effects superpowers and are longing for real life larger than life figures. But Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is every bit as unreal as Batman or Captain America. The lavish but hollow spectacle stretched out at its longest to four hours is not about Napoleon, but about the postmodern idea of him and of all the great men of history as both superhuman and flawed. The seemingly wide range of biopics actually tell the same story over and over again. The protagonists may be rock stars, race car drivers or dictators, but they succeed without really trying and fail because of their troubled personal lives, not their lack of skill. The dramatic arc makes human beings seem superhuman only to cut them down to siz