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Here’s How Trump Supporters Lose Acting Gigs

There are plenty of reasons people don’t get parts in Hollywood.

They’re not tall enough. They don’t fit the character in question’s physical profile. They arrive with a lousy reputation.

The casting director had a bad day, perhaps?

Here’s a new one: They want the current president to Make America Great Again. Trump supporters in Hollywood might find work even harder to come by since Jan. 20, according to a revelation by comic actor Jimmy Yang.

Silicon Valley: Bloomberg Clip (Season 4 Episode 4 Clip) | HBO

Yang dropped by “The Adam and Dr. Drew Show” earlier this week to talk about his HBO series “Silicon Valley.” And, of course, “help save some babies,” as frequent guest David Alan Grier calls the hosts’ advocacy.

RELATED: How Reporters Bullied Jimmy Fallon Into Bashing Trump

The podcast chat soon steered into ABC’s cancellation of “Last Man Standing.” The popular sitcom starred Tim Allen, a conservative playing a conservative named Mike Baxter. Some on the right questioned why ABC would ditch a ratings winner featuring one of TV’s biggest stars. The show’s star himself couldn’t believe what happened, either.

Could the industry’s hard-left politics be to blame?

That’s when Yang dropped this bomb on the podcast hosts.

Yang described a conversation he had recently with a casting executive at “one of the studios” in Hollywood. Yang wanted to know if the person cared how many Instagram followers someone had before hiring them. In our social media age, having a large cyber following can be attractive to some employers.

“I do check the Instagrams to see if there’s anything weird, if they get drunk every day or if they’re a Trump supporter,” Yang recalls her saying. “Then, I don’t know. I would have a hard time…”

“That’s messed up, though,” Yang says about her confession. “Aren’t you being a bigot in a way?”

It might be more than just one casting executive, though.

Intolerance on the Rise

Earlier this year The Los Angeles Times wrote about the discrimination conservatives face in Hollywood for simply espousing a different political viewpoint.

Trump supporters, apparently, have it the worst.

For the vast majority of conservatives who work in entertainment, going to set or the office each day has become a game of avoidance and secrecy. The political closet is now a necessity for many in an industry that is among the most liberal in the country.

The Hollywood Reporter also weighed in on the subject. A magazine columnist decried the “new McCarthyism” facing conservatives in the entertainment business.

In an astonishing reversal of Hollywood history, just as liberals here once considered themselves an endangered species, so do conservatives today. They no longer are free to talk in the open, because they feel — rightly — we’re no longer prepared to listen, any more than they’re prepared to listen to liberals. There’s deafness on both sides.

Comedian Heather McDonald told HiT last year that Trump supporters in Hollywood should genuinely worry their preferences could cost them work. The director of “2016: Obama’s America” shared how some crew members of that film worked under pseudonyms for fear of backlash tied to the right-leaning film.

Unanswered Questions Remain

Earlier in the conversation, Adam Carolla, Dr. Drew Pinsky and Yang weighed in on whether Allen’s politics influenced his show’s cancellation. Pinsky cautioned the move could simply be a case of new executives wanting to promote their own products first.

Carolla wasn’t buying that.

“People don’t normally get rid of top two TV shows on their network,” says Carolla, referring to “LMS’s” robust ratings. “It’s hard to make a case [for cancellation] when you’re on the podium and you have 70 shows in your network, and it’s in the top five.”

Carolla wouldn’t come right out and blame the cancellation on politics. He wouldn’t discount it, either.

“I don’t think it’s one thing [that led to the cancellation]. It’s a combination of payroll and contracts and, bleeding in, it’s possibly politics,” he says. “I’ll say with certainty this didn’t help.”

Free Speech, Love Speech, Hate Speech

Carolla expanded the topic to include the assault on free speech on college campuses nationwide. It’s the subject of his next documentary, “No Safe Spaces.”

Join Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager: No Safe Spaces

He recalled an interview with a college student who demanded vetting for potential university speakers. And who would do the vetting?

The student, of course.

“Aren’t you for free speech? 100 percent. You just get to decide who gets to speak,” Carolla recalls. “The people you’re vetting are often times doctors or professionals … [liberal students] would hear a homeless man’s perspective rather than letting a conservative Jew like Dennis Prager take the stage.”

“We’re now living in a world with this crazy hypocrisy is coming at us 24/7 and nobody even blinks anymore,” Carolla adds.

(Photo Credit: John P. Johnson/HBO)

43 Comments

  1. Not just Hollywood. High Tech is another one. It’s one big reason they want H1B.

    And it’s not that no one blinks; it’s that unless you are willing to use the same violent tactics as Leftists or Muslims, no one cares because they can hurt you worse if you cross them.

    1. Those days are coming, soon. If you count the free speech rally at Berkeley on 15 April 2017, they are already here.

      The ctrl-left has _no_ idea the depth of the contempt most people hold them in, and they are about to find out.

      1. That is because they are still listening to everything the dishonest media is telling them. That is why Hillary’s loss produced such a meltdown on November 8th.

  2. As Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit says, it’s time to end the Eisenhower tax cut on movies. Hollywood needs to pay their fair share. While we’re at it we should rationalize our intellectual property laws by making copyright protection last exactly as long as patent protection.

    1. Actually you should cut tax on incomes and tax title protection (government’s main product) such as copyrights and patents.

      It’s basic capitalism

    2. Add to Insty’s modest suggestion of ending the Hollywood tax cuts his further suggestion that the IRS be turned loose to audit Hollywood’s books. Top movies and best-selling records going for decades without making a profit? Yeah, sure.

      1. I remember the actor Cliff Robertson getting punished for complaining about the dodgy accounting practices of Hollywood back in the 70’s. It is all designed to cheat the actors out of monies they are owed for working on their films.
        If the accounting can be made to look in a certain way, they get cheaper taxes and they don’t have to pay the actor’s contract clauses. Hollywood has been running one of the greatest accounting scams ever created, and it is time that they get called on it.

    3. Hollywood and the NFL both need to lose any tax cuts/tax breaks/exemptions they are getting right now. I notice that when Obama gifted them with a whopper of a tax break after his 2012 election, they stopped immediately discussing corporate welfare. It is surprising how much corporate welfare this industry gets.

  3. Ask TIm Allen – his show (2nd highest comedy ranking on NBC) was cancelled after he said … BEING CONSERVATIVE IN HOLLYWOOD IS LIKE LIVING IN 1930’S GERMANY

    and they proved him right.

  4. It’s happened before, and not for the reason you suspect.

    The A&E network had the highest-rated scripted drama with “Longmire” based on Craig Johnson’s crime novels set in Wyoming. It went on for four seasons before A&E went to the studio and said, “We want a piece of the show.”

    The producers told A&E to piss up a rope.

    A&E said, “Nice show … hate to see something happen to it, you know?”

    When the studio said no, A&E cancelled the show. Fortunately for the show, Netflix picked it up and it’s in its seventh season.

    ABC also has a reputation for mismanaging the shows it owns, the primary one being “Lost.” The creators wanted the show to end with all the plot lines wrapped up. The network said no, keep it going. The creators left, new producers were brought in, and the show sank into irrelevancy and ended with a widely hated episode.

    Channing Dungey, ABC’s Entertainment President, pretty much said so: “She also said studio ownership, future creative direction, ratings and viewer engagement were factors she considered in making her decision.”

    1. Unfortunately, Longmire is wrapping up its series after this season. But I am glad they picked it up to finish the show better.

    2. Seems to me holly wood has always had this problem…new management, new direction, dead shows…in that order.

  5. A confiscatory tax increase on the rich (yearly salary more than a million) would clean this up ASAP. The rich – people like studio heads and high level executives – were very conservative when they were paying 90 percent of their salaries on taxes.

      1. …Aaaand all the real socialists in the party were murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. Sorry. Some of us are fairly well-informed about the period.

        Speaking as a “little r” republican I am weary of people abusing the terms Fascist and Nazi when they really mean “people I really don’t like.”

        The NSDAP was no more socialist than the DPRK (North Korea) is a democratic republic, new & improved Coke was that, or Obama was a moderate.

        1. I agree with you, calling people names like nazi, fascist, socialist and others do nothing to convey the intent as it is all mixed up together. ‘The left’ and ‘the right’ are good enough to denote the differences. Whether or not either side is exhibiting tendencies of any one group is not really helpful as most of our young people seem to have no clue as to what they reference. I spent many years in college and do not remember a single reference to the past political scene beyond high school, which was back in the early 70s. Not in the ethics classes, history, or even current events. I seriously doubt if it has changed.

        1. Because the Lefties have a support structure in Hollywood, they’ll keep getting work. Those on our side need to prove themselves successful, in order to “justify” keeping their jobs. The solution is not to “Boycott it all!” The solution is to seek out the good guys and support what they’re in.

      1. Most of the crews that work Hollywood sets are where most of the conservatives are found I suspect. You are right, they would be hurt.

  6. Not much future for freedom of freedom of expression is suppressed. Ben Franklin was right when he said sunlight was the best disinfectant.
    But to not allow your views to be challenged, that’s living in a closet with no sun.

    1. That is because they know they hold views that cannot stand up under challenge. That is why they use other tactics.

        1. Well, step one, support those NOT in hiding. (Easily Googled, “Conservative Actors/Celebrities”; there are lots of lists with different names)

          Step two, support any and all actors who offer gestures of goodwill to our side, at the very least (Nicole Kidman, Mark Wahlberg, Matthew McConnaughey, Zoe Saldana, Taraji P. Henson, Jamie Foxx, and Amy Adams come to mind).

          Step three, Support any and all celebrities who are mostly silent on politics, but have come out supporting a Conservative point of view on certain issues (Chris Pratt and Brad Pitt on gun rights, or Amy Adams on gender dynamics and “pay gaps”, for example).

          Step four, support celebrities who are silent on politics.

  7. One argument for this being a political hit is the timing – in the SIXTH season? When the syndication potential skyrockets for series with 7 or more seasons?

    1. The studio has stated that they will save a ton of money by not needing to re-negotiate contracts for the shows’ stars. For what that’s worth.

  8. Hollywood Reporter: “just as liberals here once considered themselves an endangered species,”

    Liberals considered themselves an endangered species in Hollywood??? When, pray tell, did that occur??? There was never a time that Hollywood wasn’t full of liberals. This is complete fiction.

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