Wednesday, December 11, 2024

The Leftist Truman Show

 

Recently and ironically a PBS station in Southern California aired The Truman Show, Jim Carrey’s most intellectually probing film.  It’s ironic because PBS, like the movie’s director, Christof (Ed Harris), is constantly engaged in creating a fantasy world designed to keep ignorant American voters on the Democrat island.

For those unaware of the movie’s plotline, Christof, a typically megalomaniacal Hollywood type has created a gigantic, self-enclosed island world in which he technologically controls not only the faux-sun, moon, sky, and weather, but also the hundreds of actor-inhabitants living within the island studio whose movements and dialogue are dictated by the director.  Only Truman Burbank (Carrey), is unaware of the ruse—a non-actor whose life from birth to adulthood forms the rigged focal point of the mega-popular show.

As Truman grows older, he develops a strong desire to see the outside world, but everything in his controlled environment is designed to discourage and frustrate that desire.  Even Truman’s closest buddy repeats scripted advice from the godlike director, words designed to convince Truman that he shouldn’t leave this paradisiacal island.  In the climactic scene Truman takes a sailboat and eventually confronts an orchestrated storm that almost drowns him.  But finally the storm abates, and the televised journey ends when the bow of the ship punctures the frame of his artificial environment, and Truman discovers an exit ramp to the outside world.

Though doubtless not viewed this way by its Hollywood creators, The Truman Show serves as an excellent allegory for the deceits perpetrated by the Left to keep voters on its political fantasy island.  Blacks thinking about leaving are told that the other party is filled with vicious racists who’ll “put yawl back in chains.”  Dismiss that warning and Barack emerges from his Martha’s Vineyard mansion and lectures potential escapees that a vote for Trump is a sign of their own misogyny.  The idea that black men can think for themselves and are entitled to make up their own minds about their lives isn’t a premise in the Democrat script.  

Likewise, if working class voters consider bolting to the GOP due to falling wages or crime arising from an open border, these largely male laborers are assured that the border is secure, that “migrants” commit fewer crimes than they do, and that anyone blaming the supposedly open borders for crime, poor wages, or crowded hospitals and public facilities is xenophobic.  If these workers continue to trust their lying eyes, Democrats employ envy and assure them that billionaire Trump pays little or no taxes.  (“It worked,” Harry Reid said proudly when the then Senate Majority Leader acknowledged he lied in 2012 about Mitt Romney having not paid taxes.)

While Christof’s island actors aren’t at the top of the film’s manipulative hierarchy, they do have a vested interest in continuing to keep Truman in the dark.  In this respect they’re analogous to players in Congress, the media, and Hollywood who serve as the major chess pieces needed to keep the deception going.  When Christof’s islanders all locked arms at night to scour the city for the runaway Truman, the scene provided a cinematic symbol of the Left’s lockstep shock troops that reflexively do what their leaders say. Dissent is forbidden.  Just ask Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.   

It’s unlikely that, like Christof, one person ultimately pulls the strings to create the enticements and warnings designed to keep Democrat voters and Americans generally divorced from reality.  Instead, I envision a relatively small junta consisting of Obama, Soros, Axelrod, Pelosi, maybe Hillary and Bill, and certainly a klatch of corporate and tech titans (e.g. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Google’s Sundar Pichai) whose failure to fund another Biden campaign triggered his post-debate ouster.   

Like Christof, this small group envision themselves as entitled world-shapers willing to crack more than a few eggs for the sake of their self-serving visions.  Scores of Americans murdered or raped by illegals plus over 300,000 lost “migrant” children, many trafficked, pale in comparison to the godlike power these masters of the universe wield over human lives.  Borders and once-cohesive communities disappear at their command.  The adrenaline rush from the sense of self-importance dissipates any guilt they might feel over tenuous climate policies that burden Americans with outsized energy bills and condemn huge swaths of the globe to grinding poverty for the foreseeable future.  

The Left’s most astonishing recent fabrication, akin to Christof’s phony island paradise, has been the creation of a plausible Presidential candidate out of an historically unpopular V-P who couldn’t gain a single party delegate in her first-to-drop-out 2020 POTUS run.  With the help of Hollywood convention aides, scripted teleprompter addresses, rigged debates, a surreptitiously revised 60 Minutes interview, a handful of puff Q&A sit-downs,  plus probably a half-billion dollars worth of carefully crafted and largely mendacious advertising, a woman who previously promised to ban fracking on day one, confiscate guns, decriminalize illegal border crossings, eliminate private health insurance, provide transgender surgery for prisoners, and support “transgender” men in women’s sports is transformed into a champion of the middle and working class.  The same woman who said she wouldn’t have done anything different than Joe Biden, under whom she served, is presented as an agent of change.  

Fortunately, our world isn’t yet as uniformly controlled as Truman’s, but the de-radicalizing transformation of Kamala Harris in the last few months thanks to Davos-dining Democrat Christofs is proof of the awesome power possessed by these would-be totalitarians.  The result of this year’s Presidential election will tell if that hideous strength is capable of quashing individual freedom in a living space that conforms only to the dictates of their elitist script.        

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

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