Daily Wire head Ben Shapiro announced over the weekend that his company will be branching out beyond its current news and podcasts into the entertainment content production business, including movies and television. It’s the Daily Wire’s effort to begin to counter the overwhelmingly left-leaning, woke products that comprise the bulk of what Americans currently consume as entertainment.
As Shapiro wrote at the Daily Wire . . .
My mentor, Andrew Breitbart, always said politics is downstream of culture. What he meant by this is that more people are shaped by the culture that surrounds them than by politics directly: we consume movies and TV shows; we get together and discuss the latest in sports; we join in churches and at universities and at restaurants to discuss our lives. We swim in a sea of culture. In large part, we’re defined by the culture in which we swim. …
[C]onservatives have never truly understood the cultural battle. Yes, we occasionally fight the culture war — from time to time, we fight back against some idiotic TV show or nasty movie; we’ll mobilize others to unsubscribe from Netflix over promotion of reprehensible material; we’ll stop watching the Oscars after being insulted one too many times. But the simple truth is that we conservatives live increasingly in the same culture as those on the Left. Because our media are national in scope, we consume the same sort of material as those who disagree with us. We may yell at Netflix and Apple TV and Hulu and Disney+ and ESPN, but most of us still subscribe to one of those services. And Daily Wire and Fox News and conservative media aren’t competition for those services, either in what they do, or in the numbers they reach. Fox News’ primetime numbers this year, which were stellar, averaged about 3.6 million people. Netflix has over 70 million US subscribers. The difference between the reach of political content and entertainment content is at least an order of magnitude. There is a reason millions of people believe lies about conservatives. They’ve been trained to do so by a culture that despises conservatives.
So conservatives have two choices: they can tune out, or they can find alternatives.
The first entertainment product Daily Wire will bring to market is a movie about a Columbine-style school siege and shooting titled Run Hide Fight.
Again from the Daily Wire:
Run Hide Fight immerses viewers into a day in the life of Zoe Hull (played by Isabel May), a 17-year-old high school senior who is working through a complex relationship with her father (Thomas Jane) while coping with the recent loss of her mother to cancer. Zoe is just weeks shy of graduating when a quartet of nihilistic classmates siege her high school’s cafeteria to perpetrate a mass shooting. She manages to escape the building and help others flee, too, but then realizes she’s uniquely prepared to take on the shooters and save lives.
“Run Hide Fight is ultimately a movie about courage in the face of evil,” said Daily Wire’s [Co-CEO Jeremy] Boreing. “The Columbine massacre was a transformative moment for our country, and for me politically. It was the first time I saw how the media can form a narrative, in complete contravention of the facts, and have that narrative become the dominant perspective on a consequential event.”
Watch the trailer above. Our friends, the hoplophobic harridans and the rest of the civilian disarmament industry, will no doubt hold the movie up as an example of America’s violent gun culture and use the school shooting the movie depicts as a call for more gun control laws. But the movie also appears to present a high school-aged girl — one who hunts with her father and knows her way around a rifle — in a positive light as she fights back against the killers.
The movie will be available online beginning January 14. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.
lots more of this.
anybody want to buy a broadcasting channel?
Shapiro is a grifter and is only helpful when it suits him.
Well then it should be a money maker. Name me a producer that isn’t in it for themself?
That and it doesn’t have any trannies making out, a 14 year old getting an abortion, marxist/socialist undertones, or woke PC political garbage signaling.
Stunning, brave, strong female kick-ass lead detected. If this is another “110 lb. waif kicks the ass of four much bigger evil White guys” action fantasy, count me out.
If it’s another one of those standard Hollywood pseudo-feminist fever dream action scripts, count me out too.
But a strong-minded, courageous woman using the wits God gave her plus an all-American knowledge of guns to kill evildoers and protect the innocent when the powers-that-be can’t or won’t? If that’s what this is, and if it’s done well, then I’m totally on board.
Hope it’s not what the NCIS series(s) has/have become. Gotta keep up with the narative and promote the BS portion of CBS. Shapiro doesn’t seem likely to promote that. we’ll see.
Activist/message-based entertainment rarely fares well; people are really good at making sure they remember their “message” but they forget the “entertainment” part, and nobody likes to be beat over the head with a message. Witness the latest incarnation of “Doctor Who” for how activist messaging destroys entertainment.
With that said, this didn’t look like it sucked in the trailer, it kind of looked like it’s trying to be Die Hard in a school.
Ironically, the best messaging I’ve ever seen in entertainment for the right of self defense is “Harry Potter And The 2nd Amendment” — er, wait, it was actually called “Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix”. It’s a brilliant example of showing why kids should be taught to fight, and not to listen to the morons “in charge” who try desperately to strip them of that right. The saga culminates in a “school shooting” (Deathly Hallows Part II) where the kids themselves fight back.
Rowling would probably be horrified to realize she’s been preaching our message, but she did a great job of it.
The left canceled her so she is ok with it now.
I’m sure she’s worried about being cancelled all the way to the bank. At least she stood by her comments.
I’ve pointed out those aspects of the Harry Potter stories to my kids many times.
Unlike many fantasy stories, it’s not just the “chosen one” that gets to wield a special weapon and save people. Yes, Harry Potter is the chosen one, the subject of a great prophecy, yadda-yadda, but EVERY eleven-year-old kid in the wizarding world is entrusted with a deadly weapon (which is also a multipurpose tool) and taught how to use it for self-defense from day one.
Harry Potter’s role as the “chosen one” is not to be a superpowered savior of the little people. He goes to great lengths to help everyone else develop the skill needed to defend themselves and what they believe in. That they all have the ability and the inherent right is never questioned.
The overarching themes of the story aren’t religious in tone, but they are intensely Christian. Think about it: at the climax of the story, the single most important thing the hero does is not to wield some superhuman power no one else can access, but to willingly make a sacrifice that only he can make — surrendering his life to save everyone else. And when he returns, purified and more or less resurrected, he still doesn’t win the day singlehandedly with some kind of superpower. He brings the knowledge that the enemy — death incarnate — isn’t invincible after all, and it is that renewed hope that binds the forces of good together at the end and allows them to defeat evil.
There are a lot of great themes in those books.
Your assessments include a lot of great insights! I’ve seen all the movies numerous times, enjoying but never spelling out or fully appreciating some of the themes Ing and Texted explored.
The only part of Ing’s response I’d challenge is “the inherent right is never questioned”. As Texted pointed out, in several of the movies the protagonists are primarily opposed – not by the mean, stereotypical bad guy(s) – but by the “nice”, nanny-statist bureaucrats who treat every argument for preparedness as paranoid alarmism. The spot-on caricatures of bureaucratic bloat are all the more ironic because Rowling was an avowed socialist while writing the books.
I should have said the right is never in question *in the theme.* There definitely are characters in the story who take great pains to deny others the right and the tools to exercise it.
In that regard, it’s telling that the character readers most viscerally hate is not Voldemort — it’s Dolores Umbridge. People hate her because she’s cruel to children and punishes them for wanting to learn. And the baseline for that cruelty (and the frustration that readers feel when she enters the scene) is the fact that instead of teaching them self-defense, which is literally her job, she punishes them for wanting to learn.
Dolores Umbridge is the ultimate gun grabber. A saccharine psychopath who finds joy in turning bright young children into a miserable herd of helpless victims for other predators.
Ing,
Agreed across the board, and (again) very well said!
I’ve pointed these things out as well. Additionally, in the books, among the first acts Voldemort undertakes upon seizing power is wand control and confiscation. The Hunger Games also features discussion about how the Capital would have people killed for making and owning bows.
The messages exist in a lot of places because stories about wanting to be free resonate. Therefore themes about having the means to win and keep that freedom flow naturally from those stories.
You should listen to Jordan Peterson’s analyses of various bits of Harry Potter. Apparently Rowling was quite an informal student of mythology and psychology and mastered the craft. She hits all of the marks of narrative story telling and all of the high points of religion and mythology.
You pretty well summed it up here, but Peterson’s analysis might add to your portrait of it all.
People will raise hell about this movie but forget about the Columbine Movies and Documentaries. This is just a movie to piss people off on both sides.
Nothing more than a female teenage RAMBO movie.
What should it be instead? If it does nothing but make people forget most of the documentaries that have been made, that’d be a success in my book.
Just to give those that think Dirty Harry actually shot .44spc in his Magnum. A locker door is not cover.
No, it is not. But John Correia points out regularly that most bad guys won’t shoot through concealment. Those may be the dice you have to roll at some point.
That same critics that raved (appropriately) over Hannah, will surely lambaste this.
Nice casting of Thomas Jane too.
Rest assured Jim Crow Gun Control biden et al are scheming and laying in wait for the next shooting they can use to get knee jerk fools to demand Gun Control.
And where is being ahead of the curve and demands for your members of congress to protect the rights of those who have zip NADA nothing to do with such tragedies? Where such demands always are…NOWHERE.
Knee jerks probably won’t be much of a thing, People are Woke and waking. But yeah, Biden/ Harris , using any excuse to prove the Constitution is null and void.
We The People are in for a ride
Biden/ Harris might even use the action footage as a real school shooting to promote gun control. Remember people are easily lead astray.
This movie will be soundly panned by critics for its lack of originality and its pro-gun message. Mind you, if it were about a teenage girl fighting her way through a bunch of knuckle-dragging rednecks in order to get to an abortion clinic, those same critics would call it “edgy” and “avant-garde” at the Academy Awards.
Conservatives need to make their own films. The left has done it forever. And lets reminded them of all the private armed security Leftist actors have.
Based on the trailer, I’m more than willing to give this movie a shot. Looks like it’s well-made and could be a lot of fun. Plus, I’m all for supporting people who don’t hate me.
Right on! 👍🏻🇺🇸
inb4 this movie is seen / recognized as bad as we all thought it would be. That trailer….lol. Shapiro should stick to what he knows – whining about liberals and espousing as inflammatory-of-views as possible to generate revenue.
Maybe the movie should reflect that no cops are there, they have all been defunded & the social workers that were sent in to save the day have all been “Killed”. Then the conservative parents step up to save the day with their nasty black A-salt rifles while all the leftist are cowering in the corner.
When is Ben Shapiro’s comedy, Hands Up, Don’t Nail, coming out?
Not sure why everyone is shitting on a conservative (fairly) pro-gun group making a film expressing the ideals of being able to take care of yourself. Isn’t that what this blog’s readers have been preaching since it’s inception? Self reliance in the face of uncertainty?
Nothing is ever good enough. Shit on everything, even if it ties to your political/religious/cultural ideology.
Tell me again how it’s all the Democrats fault? Seems the other side is killing much of the country too.
Okie dokie. Does it depict a spontaneous shooting, or a government sponsored one?
I’m in!
The Shapiro connection is the only reason Hollowwood needs to pan this movie. They will probably all take their cues and references from a single critic, and then mimic his opinion and claim that the huge number of negative “reviews” prove how bad the movie is. Look for a handfull of common buzzwords. It’ll be an echo chamber, just like with Trump, “manmade” global warming, leftist preening (e.g., Cuomo’s book), BLM, etc.
My daughter and I will watch and discuss it as an exercise.
What could go wrong?
Watching the trailer it looks like Dad and Daughter have some issues to work out. As long as the attackers are not two dimension card board cut-outs and the girl doesn’t go all super kung-Fu ninja it should be ok to watch.
Can’t be any worse than some of the crap coming out of hollyweird.
However I am looking forward to this one!
You like freedom? You like your 2A rights? Support this movie. I don’t care if it stinks on ice. Rent it, buy it, stream it.
The left owns academia, the left owns the media, the left owns Hollywood. If we don’t grab some of that territory back, we are through.
I’m in. And as a bonus, this film looks really well made, not like a lot of the obviously low budget but well-meaning efforts the conservative film world produces.