"The Hunt:" Why Did the Cucks Go to the Mattresses to Defend This Movie? Why Didn't They Ever Show the Same Fire and Fight When the Left Was Deplatforming Something?

This is an update to my previous post, rebutting the "conservative commentators" who were swearing up and down that The Hunt must be a totally rightwing movie just because we know that one (and only one) of the party being hunted will be the heroine.

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In questions about deplatforming and censorship -- indeed, in questions of most disputes in politics -- there are two ways of discussing them.

First, you can discuss whether the person doing the deplatforming or censorship has the naked legal right -- ignoring all moral and ethical questions -- to deplatform or censor speech.

There aren't many institutions which do not have the naked legal right to censor or exclude speech from their physical or virtual premises -- only the federal and state governments are usually forbidden to censor.

Second, in a question of deplatforming or censorship by a non-governmental actor, you can discuss whether it is moral, ethical, or in the public good to act as a deplatformer or censor.

In these cases, there is little question that the censor has the naked legal right to censor. The question is whether it is moral, ethical, or in the public interest to exercise that seldom-doubted right.

Also, the redress for immoral, unethical, or contrary-to-the-public-interest behavior here is not legal. The companies or people have the legal right. There can be no legal claim against them.

There can, however, be a campaign of social pressure lodged against them -- argument, agitation, and tactics of moral suasion on one hand and bad publicity on the other.

Note that neither of these two ways of discussing an act of censorship is an exclusive way of discussing the act -- one can talk about the legality of an action while also arguing that the action was not moral, ethical, or in the public interest.

One could, for example, state both that ABC was within its rights to cancel the Roseanne show over her totally understandable mistake, and also that it breeds an atmosphere of suspicion and a chilling of free speech to cancel a show over such a mistake.

You could talk about the legal right of ABC while also arguing that while ABC has this right, they should be very hesitant to engage in censorship of artists for fear of limiting the free exchange of ideas, even controversial ones.

But that's not how the media chooses to discuss these things. When they support censorship -- usually prompted by leftwing pressure groups, applying pressure to corporations which wish to avoid negative PR and are probably left-leaning anyway -- they will speak only of the corporation's naked political right to commit the act of censorship or deplatforming.

But when they don't support censorship -- almost always when a group on the right is calling for some act of censorship, either on moral grounds or simple grounds of "If this be the rule, then it be the rule for one and all-- then they suddenly dispense with the "Corporations have this right" rigamarole and start talking not about what corporations have the right to do, but whether the action which they have the right to do is moral, ethical, or in the public interest.

Suddenly, to argue against an act of censorship/deplatforming, they abandon their dry legal arguments about companies having the ability to censor someone and shift, lurchingly, to a discussion focused exclusively on whether they should censor someone.

And I'm not talking about the leftwing media.

I mean the supposedly right-leaning "conservative" media.

The leftwing media is more open -- more honest --- about wanting to censor speech because they don't like that speech.

The Fake Conservative Media is the group that plays this sneaky, dishonest game of talking about one thing -- the legal right of a non-government body to censor -- in cases where they support the censorship but wish to retain plausible deniability about it, but then suddenly abandons any talk at all of what rights a corporation has to censor and speaks almost exclusively of whether a corporation should censor, when they wish to oppose it.

This is dishonest, and I think knowingly dishonest. I don't think they're stupid enough not to realize that they change the terms of discussion completely depending on whether they're (sotto voce) supporting censorship, almost always against people who could be argued to be on the right, or arguing against censorship, almost always in favor of people on the left or people in the Fake Conservative media remnant.

When the group I call "The Cucks" support an act of non-governmental censorship -- and they almost always support non-governmental censorship against people the left calls "the right," unless that censorship is directed at themselves or their closely-allied clique -- they speak only of a corporation's naked legal right to censor.

Go look at David French's and Ben Shapiro's writings about the Roseanne Barr deplatforming, for example. It's just all about ABC's legal right to cancel a show.

Which is a strawman, of course, because no one doubts a television studio's right to cancel any show for any reason. Yet they insist on talking about the thing not in any dispute whatsoever, so they can argue by implication -- with plausible deniability-- about the thing actually in dispute, that she should be censored.

They don't want to admit they're arguing that -- just as many of them didn't want to admit they were supporters of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign; sometimes it's bad for business for a public commentator to do his actual job and tell his readers what his genuine, honest beliefs are -- so they hide their support for the substance of the censorship by pretending they are only talking about the procedural, legal rights to censor.

However, when it's time to argue against the right's demands for an act of censorship -- say, when many (but not nearly all) on the right demanded that Disney/ABC can James Gunn for his numerous pro-pedophilia jokes, to demonstrate its consistency on its censorship/deplatforming policies -- then this same group suddenly switched gears.

No longer did they argue for multiple paragraphs that ABC/Disney had the right to deplatform James Gunn.

(Or, if they did: They did so in a tossed-off, single setentence "to be sure" CYA caveat: "To be sure, they have the right to fire Gunn," right before settling into another three paragraph argument that they shouldn't.)

Now they changed the terms of the argument to arguing that ABC/Disney shouldn't deplatform him, talking about all that good stuff like it being good for society for people feeling free to speak and even tell risque jokes without living in terror about being the next to be purged.

Note that they could have said all that about Roseanne Barr -- but they didn't.

With Barr, they stuck to the same old script of talking up Disney/ABC's right to cancel Barr.

With basically the same fucking elements in play -- an artist bringing public heat on the company for comments considered offensive -- this same crew now abandoned discussion of the unchallenged right of Disney/ABC to fire Gunn, and instead began arguing about the deleterious effect such Outrage Scalp Hunting has on society.

And the pattern continues to this very day.

The usual people who live to scold conservatives are scolding conservatives for getting this movie yanked.

Instead of saying, as they say everytime the left deplatforms someone, "The public had a right to complain and the corporation was within its rights to appease them."

Once again, they've flip-flopped from dry legal proceduralism to moralizing and hectoring.

While I continue to wonder: Gee, where was this moralizing and hectoring when the left was deplatforming the right? Why was the only issue under consideration there Corporate Rights to Free Expression?

Ah, but now you have the chance to excoriate the right again, and now we put aside Corporations Can Do Whatever They Want into fulsome denunciations of the idiots and inbreds who dared to stir up the same negative PR that you always tell us is part and parcel of The American Dream when the left does it.

So I want the cucks to shut the fuck up.

Either talk about The Hunt the same way you talk when the left claims another scalp -- shit, Rich Lowry and "The Editors" at National Cuck Review were signing the praises of using the right of "free association" to deplatform 8chan, all because a Slate writer who repeatedly pressures companies to deplatform people she doesn't right told them it was a "hate site".

All I want to hear from you assholes is, "The movie studio behind this project had the right to pull it from exhibition, and it is Good Business Sense to engage in censorship if some on Twitter make noise about it."

Because that's the only goddamn thing you Libertarian Speech Heroes had to say when ABC pulled Roseanne from the schedule. (The show came back -- but only when Roseanne Barr agreed that she'd be personally deplatformed from the show.)

Alternately, if you want to drop that evasive ruse, then you can start commenting on the substance of deplatforming all across the board. If you supported the deplatforming of Roseanne -- which you "Libertarian Speech Warriors" all did -- then you should say so instead of hiding behind your "I'm just thinking about corporate rights" guise.

Either way, I'm going to need you cowardly totalitarians to either start speaking only of corporate rights -- the corporation had the right to yank this person's speech! -- in all of these cases, or speaking about the justness and social implications of such deplatformings in all cases.

Not just speaking about corporate rights when you want to support a deplatforming (but you're too chickenshit to actually endorse it openly -- just as you were too chickenshit to admit you were supporting Hillary Clinton) and speaking of the fairness of a deplatforming when you want to argue against the practice (which is always when someone on the left, or in the cuck clique, is being deplatformed).

By the way, what is purported to be the script for this movie, which the cucks all swore to us was rightwing because the quarry must be the heroes, has been leaked.

Two points:

First, I didn't think this was real because it is incredibly amateurish -- it reads like fanfic, at best. And it's so loaded with break-the-fourth-wall leftwing agitprop points that I thought this must be either a fake script written by a rightwinger hoping to crap more bad PR on to the project, or fanfic written by a lefty because he thinks this would be awesome.

But here's the problem with the "This is obviously a shoddy fake" take: It takes time to write a script, even a very bad one. Obviously, the worse the script is, the faster you can shit it out, but still....

How long has this story even been a cause celebre for? A few days? Since like Thursday?

I don't know if you can tear out a script, even a horrible one that's not even first draft quality, in such a short period of time.

So I don't know. I'm deeply suspicious of this purported "script" -- even the formatting is amateur -- but given the factor of time (and there not having been a lot of it during which to contrive a sham script), I'll leave it to you to decide.

But here's what this script contains.

Are these the real plot points of The Hunt, aka The Most Deplorable Game, that the cucks were so energetic (for once) in defending against unjust deplatforming?

I don't know. But if it is real, here's are some plot points. Almost all of which I suggested were possible plot points when I wrote about this last week.

1. The Hunt was created when rightwing twitter trolls found a twitter conversation in which liberals discussed, as a joke, hunting rednecks for sport.

2. The rednecks/conservatives believed the joke was real, and started spreading Q-Anon like conspiracy theories similar to the Spirit Cooking theories.

3. This resulted in these rich liberals getting fired from their jobs or otherwise damaged.

4. So the rich liberals track down the Q-Anon conservative conspiracy theorists to hunt them down -- making the joke which these inbred buffoons were so stupid to think was real, actually real.

So, in other words: The people being hunted here are actually deserving of their fate.

Gee, I remember saying something about Victims Who Deserve Their Fate being a key trope of bodycount horror.

That kind of ironic reversal is another foundational trope of horror, of the Tales from the Crypt type especially. You claimed the hunt was real; now it IS real. You hunted us online; now we hunt you in real life.

It's a serviceable enough shaggy-dog premise... for a tacky bodycount horror movie.

It makes it... "balanced."

And yet... conservatives are still the bad guys. They drove the liberals to this.

5. The "conservative heroine" all the smart guys got so moist about turns out to not be a conservative at all -- the liberals grabbed her by mistake, because she shares a name with the real conspiratorial conservative they wanted. I called this as a possibility.

6. The people fleeing the hunters do, in fact, get helped out of a jam by immigrants, themselves being hunted by the border patrol. The immigrants, Muslims here, say they're Americans too and are Totally Nice, You Bigots. I called this as a possibility too.

So this is the super-duper-rightwing-"valenced" movie -- allegedly -- that Ross Douthat, AllahPundit, Jim Treacher, and the rest of the Daily Twitter Jerk-Off Party were so outraged The Rubes mistook for some kind of violent fantasy against conservatives.

Well, as I said, it was my guess this movie would be "balanced," and balanced in a strange way: By contrasting the actually-alleged evils of conservatives, which the media are always highlighting, with fictional, complete-fantasy evils of liberals, such as... hunting rednecks for sport.

Which they don't do. Well, antifa does. But not with kidnapping and rifles.

So: Lecture us some more about how dumb we all are.

Come on, Smart Guys. Tell us how dumb we are for knowing that just because one person in a group must be the innocent heroine, that doesn't mean, necessarily, the rest of that group (conservatives) would also be depicted in a positive way.

Especially in a bodycount horror movie, a genre in which Victims Deserving of Their Fates is an important -- nay, foundational -- trope.

If you take the position "Well it doesn't matter what it says, it deserves free speech" -- hey, maybe apply that imperative consistently and don't call for entire websites to be deplatformed just because Slate's April Glaser, who previously bragged about getting FaceBook to censor a pro-life ad, told you it was Super-Important to deplatform it.

A certain group of people nominally on "the right" has learned that it's always safe and rewarding to attack the right, and unsafe and unrewarding to attack the left or defend people on the right.

And we're supposed to call these people "heroes" for always choosing the path of Leftwing Approbation.

By the Way: If this is a real script, then... well, the scandal about the conservative-baiting is only one of the two big scandals.

If actual "professional" screenwriters really wrote this, and actual "professional" movie makers bought the script, and actual "professional" investors said "That seems good, take my money and do this movie" -- well.

That's something. That's really something.

And by the way: Another reason I think this script is fake? Because all they did was take the plot points I had speculated about and turn them into scenes.

Did they just take my post and crank out a Fake Script based on it?

Or am I just that good?

I just feel like this can't be real -- or did someone shit out a 93 page fake script just to vindicate me, personally?!

Did someone actually write "Ace's Blogpost of Last Thursday -- The Movie"?

Seems unlikely.

But who knows.

It's hard to crank out a script, even a terrible, terrible one, in four or five days.

"The hunt"... is kind of a good metaphor for the left's scalphunting -- and the pseudoright collaborationists' enabling of it.

Some of us are being hunted, some of us are hunting, and some of us are safe on the sidelines, piously lecturing us about why corporations have the right to hunt humans for sport.

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:25 PM

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