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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right? These commenters point out how outlets like Rolling Stone defended Cuties (the infamous Netflix movie about pubescent girls dancing in modern sexually charged style) and didn't seem to have a problem with Taken, the 2008 movie with an obviously exaggerated human trafficking plot. But that was a decade and a half ago, and we know why this is happening now: it's culture war, pure and simple. While Righties are accusing the Lefties of covering up for their corrupt pedo elites, I theorized this might be legacy media feeling threatened by upstart conservative alternatives, but after researching I don't think there's much more to this than "Red Tribe likes this, so it must be bad". Or perhaps I am not blackpilled enough yet to believe that the slope is so slippery that pedophiles are already being introduced into the pantheon of Letter People.

The culture war angle is even simpler- Jim Caviezel is One Of The Bad People, so nothing he does can be good. Nevermind that he took credit but wasn't the brains behind the operation. It's straightforwards cancel culture dynamics against the heir apparent to Mel Gibson.

I don't follow Hollywood and didn't know anything about Caviezel before writing this, so I missed this angle, but it sounds plausible. There's definitely a larger "red vs blue" dynamic here, however, given how much space the articles dedicate to trashing the audiences.