Parent Company Guts Woke-Stained Turner Classic Movies

Instead, TCM is broadcasting a censored version of a Best Picture Oscar winner, The French Connection (1971). Who knows what else is being censored that we don’t know about. The trust is gone.

The French Connection, Gene Hackman (screenshot 20th Century Fox)

Instead, TCM is now telling viewers what to think about a Best Picture Oscar winner, Gone with the Wind (1939).

Instead, TCM is smearing certain classic films as “problematic.”

Censorship? Telling people what to think? Shaming? Attacking timeless art as “problematic?” There’s a word for that, and the word is McCarthyism.

Generally, demanding purity is stupid and self-defeating, but not in the case of art. Without purity, art ceases to be art and instead becomes someone else’s propaganda. Sure, I’m guilty of interpreting art. I talk about movies through my own worldview all the time. But interpreting art is my job, and it’s my favorite part of this job. TCM is different. TCM is supposed to act as a museum, as a curator. Here’s the art, they once said. Here’s the story and history behind the art… From there, we took over. It was our job and pleasure to interpret what we saw through our own experience.

Once you strip away the individual’s right to interpret art, you deny them art’s greatest pleasure: how it stays with us as we think over what we saw and what it meant. These complicated emotions are healthy for the culture and human spirit. Whether it’s in our own lives or through a story we’ve been told, grappling with complicated emotions matures us, thickens our skin, and makes us wiser.

Let me put it this way…

How long would you stare at the Mona Lisa after someone told you the reason behind her smile? Not long. There’s no reason to stare. The mystery has been solved, and, along with it, the pleasure that comes from savoring that mystery.

How long would you stare at the Mona Lisa after someone told you the woman in the painting was racist?

The moment TCM started dictating interpretations, shaming, censoring, and labeling art, the network went from being presenters to propagandists, from curators to authoritarian scolds… This approach is un-American, immoral, insulting. and off-putting.

We once counted on TCM. We can’t anymore. The only answer is to buy hard copies of your favorite films. Become your own museum. Curate your own collection. Do this before the Woke Reich eliminates hard copies. Once everything goes digital, the Woke Nazis have and will sneak into your collection and defile away. And if you don’t think that’s the goal, you haven’t been paying attention.

Turner Classic Movies died years ago, and that’s the shame, not what’s happening today to the husk of what once was.

For those who think I’m being too hard on TCM, remember this: within my world of right-of-center media, I’m a unicorn, a dead-ender; a traditional conservative and Christian who loves movies and who never wished ill on the movie industry — until the Woke Reich took over, until the fascist censoring and grooming began. I held on longer than most.

Oliver Stone is the greatest director of his era. Jane Fonda is one of the greatest actresses in Hollywood history. Here are the 25 greatest left-wing movies of all time. Steven Soderbergh’s Che is a masterpiece. I love the art. I’m a purist.

I didn’t leave TCM. TCM left me.