Hollywood Apartheid Is Ready for Its Close-up

{snip} Hollywood might be leftist in its racial politics, but in past decades adherence to profitability always took precedence. The desire to artificially elevate the newest black one-legged transgender half-breed Eskimo flavor-of-the-month was always kept in check by the box office. If Jamaal the hopping dickless Yupik didn’t pack the seats, he was out.

But that changed in 2020 following the videotaped death of Wheezy Metherson in a Minneapolis street. Hollywood decided to toss the rules that had kept the business afloat through depressions and recessions great and small. Race would now trounce the bottom line. Success, profit, and growth would be of secondary importance; skin color and that alone would dictate hiring and retention.

The major streaming networks, at the time the “future of Hollywood,” created an apartheid system in which blacks got the jobs and whites (including Jews, who, for the purposes of the new apartheid, were marked with the scarlet W) didn’t. This apartheid was formally codified in summer 2021, with the announcement of numerical hiring caps for whites and quotas for blacks.

This was new territory for Hollywood: racial caps and quotas not tied to ability or profit potential. But it was also new territory for American racial schemes like affirmative action. Up until 2020, such con jobs were sold to the public as a way of assisting the underrepresented. Evening-up the numbers. Giving a chance to those who’d previously been “shut out.”

But since at least 2001 (the first year journalists and academics began crunching the numbers) black actors have been overrepresented on TV and in movies. By 2009, that overrepresentation had spread to TV commercials. So this wasn’t like blacks in STEM or women in firefighting. The caps-and-quotas scheme would benefit a group that was already represented beyond its percentage of the population.

This wasn’t a defensive action, it was an offensive one. It wasn’t pro-black, it was antiwhite. Whereas affirmative action (especially in education) also dings Asians, Hollywood’s apartheid would help everyone but whites. It was a system in which keeping whites out was more important than bringing nonwhites in. It was the first major U.S. racial scheme that wasn’t sold as necessary to help the underserved. It was an instrument of punishment, a reckoning, a bill come due to be paid by people with evil skin.

This new apartheid’s been in effect for a little under a year now.

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And the good news is, it’s failing. Holy cannoli, is it failing. And in ways that only racial fanatics with zero understanding of basic economics couldn’t have foreseen.

I’ll give you the broad strokes. The cap on white hiring drove up the asking price of the white actors who’d achieved some level of name value before the cutoff. Due to the rationing of white roles, talent agents, concerned solely with finding work for white actors they already represent, stopped allocating resources toward developing new white “ingenues.” So no new (read: cheap) white blood was coming in. An artificial shortage of white actors was created; what few roles there were for whites went to already established performers (if you can only cast one whitey, make it one with name recognition who can attract viewers).

The time-honored tradition of casting a well-known white actor alongside an undiscovered “potential next-big-thing” white actor ended. The limited slots had to go to marketable names.

With established white actors (and their agents) understanding that they were now the only game in town, with the door closed to new, young, “I’ll work for pennies just for the opportunity!” competition, salary demands skyrocketed.

At the same time, black actors, who be gettin’ all the roles, demanded (along with their agents) that no white actor could make more than a black, because that be racist. Hence, even though there was now a glut of black actors, their salaries rose along with white salaries, lest Netflix or Amazon be accused of payin’ black folks less.

This dynamic occurred behind the scenes as well, with the few veteran white/Jewish showrunners who were allowed to stay commanding large salaries, as they were the only competent ones left, and their expertise was needed to train roomfuls of affirmative-actioned novices (who of course demanded equal pay because, you know, “racism”).

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And at the end of April, whoa, did they get woes. Netflix went full Hindenburg, taking a $54 billion hit in market value, becoming the worst-performing stock of 2022 in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. The company lost 200,000 subscribers with a projected loss of another 2 million subs in the next quarter. Add to that a 67.8% plummet in daily page views, and you get a panic.

There’s no one single reason for the crash {snip} The main reason given by Netflix itself and seconded by many analysts is that its production costs were too damn high {snip}

As Vulture noted, Netflix’s policy of “throwing all the money it can” at race hustlers like Shonda Rhimes led to “cost inflation in Tinseltown, with Netflix bidding up the price of talent at every level.”

Worse still, those inflated salaries weren’t leading to the production of content that could attract or keep enough subscribers to justify the expense.

Plus, as Bloomberg pointed out, Netflix lost subscribers internationally. First quarter 2022 wasn’t just a disaster in the U.S.; Netflix got slaughtered in Europe and Latin America as well.

{snip} Those inflated apartheid-caused salaries coupled with crappy all-black programming emanating from the quota-writers-of-color crippled the company. {snip}

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