mamet, david

picked a fight with Disney, biggest employer and beloved corp?! Gavin made offer to refugees?!

BEAST 6 25

David Mamet Goes Nuclear on Bill Maher Podcast: ‘You’re Full of S**t!’

https://forward.com/culture/484749/david-mamet-donald-trump-kanye-recessional-capitalism-milton-friedman/

no lnx

Embracing Trump’s politics, David Mamet has become the Kanye West of American letters

By Jackson Arn

April 04, 2022

I should have known.

It took five weeks and two follow-up emails for the usually reliable Harper Collins publicity department to mail me a copy of David Mamet’s new essay collection, “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch.”

At first, I thought this was an honest mistake, but now that I’ve read the book, I wonder if someone had been instructed to deal with critics in slow motion. If so, it was a smart move. Each day of delay means one extra day free from scathing reviews, one extra day for Mamet fans to order their copies, unaware that the author of “Glengarry Glen Ross” has gone full free-market, anti-mask MAGAhead — and, even more appallingly, thinks that “Our F’ing Town” is the greatest American play.

Of course, it’s possible that this was all just an honest mistake. But David Mamet doesn’t believe in honest mistakes, just conspiracies — so why shouldn’t I indulge in some harmless conspiracy-theorizing myself?

Mamet’s conspiracy theories aren’t exactly harm¬ful (the only two kinds of people who’ll finish this book are those who already agree with it and those who’ve been paid to review it), but they’re often breathtakingly stupid.David Mamet believes mask mandates were designed to train Americans to obey government tyranny.David Mamet believes college graduates know they’ll never have to pay off their student loans, because the Democrats will cancel them first. David Mamet believes he has been “blacklisted” for his conservative political views and explains his blacklisting in the book he’s just published with Harper Collins. He claims he’s “sworn off the news,” which might be a roundabout way of admitting that “Fox News” is a misnomer.

People, even icons of Broadway and Hollywood, tend to drift rightward with age — if you’re a conservative at 25, the saw goes, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at 40, you have no brain. The political transformation of David Mamet, age 74, culminating in “Recessional,” a book lacking both heart and brains, is something else.

Mamet was never a full-on leftie, but he thrived in a world where left-wing politics were the air everybody breathed, and “American Buffalo,” his Broadway breakthrough, is a scabrous portrait of small-time capitalism that even Trotsky might have clapped for. Thirty years later, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, he defended CEO bonuses on the grounds that “it’s none of our goddamned business.” Nowadays he thinks eating gluten-free is a sign of “nascent totalitarianism” and thus very much his goddamned business.

[RELATED

Why Peter Bogdanovich’s overlooked masterpiece still matters (and so does the rest of his career)]

Mamet didn’t drift to the Right, he sprinted. My theory is that the economist Milton Friedman is at least partly to blame. No, really, hear me out. The University of Chicago economics department’s accomplishments include 31 Nobel Prizes, the decline of the postwar welfare state, and the deregulatory policies that led to the Great Recession. Friedman, the most influential UChicago economist and a 1976 Nobel laureate, is probably most famous for making the argument that businesses’ only moral responsibility is to maximize profits — ergo, everything else they do — from CEO bonuses to wrecking the U.S. economy to filthying the environment — is none of our goddamned business.

Whatever the technical merits of his ideas, they caught on with a neocon political establishment happy to rationalize its own greed. Mamet, a Chicago boy himself, cites Friedman quite a few times in “Recessional,” always to show that thefree market is an unalloyed good, self-interest is the highest virtue, and progressive taxes are the lowest evil.

“I see life from a different perspective,” he said of his conservative turn, which makes sense if by “different perspective” he means “different tax bracket” — it’s a whole lot harder to paint scabrous portraits of capitalism when you’re a millionaire.

“What am I going to do,” he asked, “go on denouncing capitalism all my life?”

In “Recessional,” Mamet has moved on to denouncing the kinds of liberals who pay $300 to enjoy his plays.Liberals are destroying America, they have a sickly kink for victimhood, they don’t believe in science. He has nothing but contempt for the herd instincts of the American media elite, but there isn’t a single opinion in this book that crosses the Fox/Breitbart party line.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, though, and every dozen pages or so he’ll say something blunt and insightful and pretty much true — e.g., the recent push to censure professors for saying words that sound vaguely like the N-word is a manifestation of white guilt. But then he’ll blow it all on something like, “An insistence on pansexuality has replaced previous injunctions to chastity with an equal vehemence,” which could be the silliest thing written about hookup culture since Tom Wolfe described Charlotte Simmons losing her virginity.

[RELATED

Is the most popular song about New York really a stealth Jewish anthem?]

“Recessional” has its share of pleasures, mostly unintentional but pleasures all the same. For someone who thinks liberals are indifferent to facts, Mamet has an adorably flighty relationship with the concept of evidence. He provides multiple footnoted sources, including Thorstein Veblen and Mary McCarthy, for the claim that the university system is bad, but zero for the claim that urban properties “will be found to have been purchased not only by canny observers but by those who engineered the decline [of American society],” which is both a massive tease and a very creative use of the future-perfect tense.

When crafting a hypothetical, Mamet defaults to the traditional “he” rather than the PC “she,” but somebody at Harper Collins (maybe the same somebody who told the publicity department to sandbag me) made him capitalize “Black” — imagining how that Zoom meeting went is almost enough to justify the entire book’s existence. One more: Mamet is shocked by the hypocrisy of Colin Kaepernick, who “loathes the country whose citizens have made him rich and famous.” As my uncle likes to say, the thing that most bothers you about other people is usually the thing that’s most wrong about you.

Mamet’s favorite trick is to psychoanalyze people he dislikes (lefties don’t want to grow up, fans of “12 Years A Slave” secretly want to celebrate Black inferiority, etc.), so allow me to do him the same favor. It’s painfully easy.

Mamet got famous by breaking taboos, stuffing his plays with curse words as a sausage casing is stuffed with ground meat. That was decades ago. What was once taboo is now tame as a golden retriever. Like his fellow Chicagoan Kanye West, he needed new rules to break and, finding few, turned to Trump. In doing so, he made plain what his fans knew all along: there was always something aspirational about his macho egomaniac characters; “always be closing” was as much a manifesto as it was a satire.

I should add that “Recessional” shouldn’t be canceled or banned or dropped — that would only encourage him to write a sequel, which somebody will definitely publish, and I for one hope that Mamet has a few more good plays left in him. Unlikely, judging from this book, but stranger things have happened. And what’s he going to do otherwise — go on denouncing the Dems for the rest of his life?

Jackson Arn is the Forward’s contributing art critic.

cspan booktv 6 22 simi vly RR library rants that reiff on metaphors, kinda wacko

friedman, sowell, shelby steele, von hayek

mod kept talking about marxists

lots of OT 10 command rules punishent, says trump magnif prez but did not know hpwto lie

mod sasks new covid surge premise for 2022 vote by mail steal

false flag

do not give up your children to gubmint public schools, techr union dems cash cow

broadside bks

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

“Savagery appeased can only grow. Once you give in to it, it must escalate, like a fire searching for air.”

The man who won the Pulitzer Prize for GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, who wrote the classic films THE VERDICT and WAG THE DOG sounds his alarm about the Visigoths at our gates.

In RECESSIONAL he calls out, skewers, mocks, and, most importantly, dissects the virus of conformity which is now an existential threat to the West.

A broad-ranging journey through history, the Bible, and literature, RECESSIONAL examines how politics and cultural attitudes about rebellion have shifted in the United States in the last generation. By screaming down freedom of thought and expression, Mamet explains, we kill invention and democracy – the foundations of security and growth.

A wickedly funny, wistful and wry appeal to the free-thinking citizen, RECESSIONAL is a vital warning that if we don’t confront the cultural thuggery now, the commissars and their dupes will transform the Land of the Free into the dictatorship at which they aim.

freq bot w/

:{The War on the West:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block;margin-right:4px;max-width:750px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

by Douglas MurrayHardcover

$18.39 Get it as soon as Saturday, Jun 25 FREE Shipping on orders over $25 shipped by Amazon

:{The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block;margin-right:4px;max-width:750px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

by Victor Davis Hanson:{

r c pol

laywright, screenwriter-director, and author David Mamet appeared on Bill Maher's HBO program to discuss his latest book, "The Recessional On The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch," and what the impact of cancel culture could mean for the future of America.

"Let's be honest, a lot of your book is calling out the left for their goofiness," Maher said to his guest.

"I'm not here to flog the book, which is called 'The Recessional On The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch,' people, but the point is we have to have free speech," Mamet said. "Without free speech we have nothing because if one group takes the high road. It doesn't matter which group it is. If they're in power long enough, we're going to have a police state.So when it's not acceptable to have an opposing view, when people who state an opposing view are not disagreed with but are marginalized and canceled, we're going to end up with a totalitarian state because that's the way human nature works."

"We see in the book that you do like Trump, which is fine," Maher said to Mamet. "We're not there together on that one but I've said many times on this show you cannot hate everyone who likes him. It's half the country and I understand why people are driven into his arms because of the goofiness."

"God Bless you," Mamet responded. "Seriously. Because if we don't have free speech, what do we got?"

Mamet also clarified a position that he thought the 2020 election was stolen in favor of President Joe Biden. Mamet said the media suppressed any negative stories about Biden, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, in order to push the election in Biden's favor.

"The more important point as I think about it is that a lot of the information that might have influenced the election was suppressed. And that's true. For example, the 'New York Post' came up with an article about the Hunter Biden laptops two weeks before the election and Twitter shut them down," Mamet said.

"Which was way wrong, I mentioned that on this show last week. Absolutely," Maher said.

"What happened in Bush v. Gore everybody on the left, including me at the time, said 'Wait, they stole the election!' And perhaps they did, I don't know. But this is not a moment in American politics," Mamet said.

no lnx vid twt

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/fox-news/

Fox News dangerously declares war on teachers: Calls for violence, accusations of 'inclination' to pedophilia

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement April 11, 2022

From Tucker Carlson to Laura Ingraham to Mark Levin, Fox News propagandists have declared war on public school teachers.The dangerous attacks follow the right’s misleading claims – fueled by Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation – about children inappropriately being taught about sex, homosexuality, bisexuality, sexual orientation, and gender identity starting as early as kindergarten.

Last month, just days afterFlorida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ spokesperson Christina Pushaw charged that anyone who opposed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill was “probably” a “groomer” – essentially, a pedophile, pedophile enabler, or pedophile supporter, Fox News propagandist Laura Ingraham jumped into action.

“When did ourpublic schools,any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?” Ingraham asked, as Media Matters reported. The chyron was less ambiguous: “Liberals are sexually grooming elementary students.”

In fact, on Monday Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz wrote, “With Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, Republicans have weaponized their Fox News base against teachers.”

Sunday night Fox News’ far-right “fringe” host Mark Levin hosted award-winning playwright David Mamet, who has no degree in childhood development, education, or sexual studies, to discuss public schools. He declared that teachers, especially male teachers, are “sexual predators.”

“Teachers are inclined, particularly men because men are predators, to pedophilia,” Mamet charged, pointing to no study that proves his claim.

That claim came just days after Fox News’ top propagandist, Tucker Carlson, called for men to engage in verbal or physical abuse of school teachers, as Media Matters reported.

“I don’t understand where the men are. Like where are the dads? You know, some teachers pushing sex values on your third grader why don’t you go in and thrash the teacher? Like this is an agent of the government pushing someone else’s values on your kid about sex, like where’s the pushback?

But Insider reports that Carlson was “repeating calls for violence he has made previously.” And The Daily Beast apparently agreed: “The Fox News host yet again suggested that violence against educators is called for.”

Rather than apologize for its hosts and guests, Fox News is doubling down.Monday morning the conservative outlet published an article claiming: “CNN, Washington Post, Vice and more fret that Republicans are worried about child grooming, pedophilia.”

On Twitter, Media Matters Matthew Gertz adds to points he made in his article.

“Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law effectively deputizes the most Fox-News-and-Facebook-addicted members of the GOP base to act on frenzied smears that LGBTQ teachers are ‘grooming’ children,” he writes.

“This vague law is then enforced by parents suing their school districts. Suits will inevitably come from the most anti-LGBTQ parents, and school districts will chill discussion of a wide range of topics to try to avoid getting mired in lawsuits,” Gertz adds.

“These baseless accusations that the right’s political opponents are actually pedophiles overlap with – and at times become indistinguishable from – the QAnon conspiracy theory,” he concludes, “which is moving ever closer to the GOP mainstream.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/david-mamet-teachers-pedophilia-fox-news-1335736/

David Mamet Comes Out as Right-Wing Culture Warrior, Claims Teachers Are Inclined to Pedophilia

April 11, 2022

David Mamet’s latest plot twist is a dud.

The award-winning playwright and screenwriter went on Fox News on Sunday to rail against pedophilia in the education system, alleging that teachers are “inclined” to pedophilia and that children are being “groomed” for sexual abuse, a popular conservative talking point around Florida’s controversial new “Don’t Say Gay” law. Said law prohibits the discussion of sexual orientation and gender in certain grade levels of the state’s public schools.

“We have to take back control,” Mamet told Mark Levin. “There’s no community control of the schools. What we have is kids not only being indoctrinated but groomed, in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators. Are they abusing the kids physically? No, I don’t think so. But they are abusing them mentally and using sex to do so. This has always been the problem with education. Teachers are inclined, particularly men because men are predators, to pedophilia.”

Mamet went on to suggest that sex education is a way for teachers to ensure children are familiar with sex so that they can use it to abuse them.

The idea that teachers are grooming children for sex has been used by right-wing ideologues to argue in favor of Florida’s new “Parental Rights in Education Bill” — or, as detractors dubbed it, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — which Governor Ron DeSantis signed late last month amid controversy. Christian Pushaw, DeSantis’ press secretary, call it “anti-grooming” legislation in early March, implying that teachers are trying to force gender identity discussions on young children in an effort to “groom” them for sex.

“If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer, or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8-year old children,” she tweeted. “Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.”

The discourse has since spiraled to the point that congressional Republicans are now painting Disney as a pedophilia factory because the company opposed the bill. The party-wide paranoia over rampant child molestation has largely trickled down from QAnon, a baseless conspiracy theory alleging the Democratic Party and Hollywood are run by Satan-worshipping child traffickers. The fringe theory has slowly infected mainstream political discourse and now, apparently, the mind of the guy who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross.

Mamet also, it might be worth mentioning in light of his recent comments, wrote a screenplay for Lolita....

wsj

OPINION THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW

David Mamet Is a Defiant Scribe in the Age of Conformity

The playwright won’t play along with woke signaling, talismanic masking or deference to petty tyrants.

WSJ Opinion: Cancel Culture and The Silence of the Moderate Democrat