Celebrity Activists Are Dangerous Morons
When the stupidest people in the room have the biggest microphones.
I’m generally against criminalising stupidity. Nobody can be blamed for being born with a low IQ, or for having the misfortune to miss out on an education – although the latter isn’t strictly stupidity, and avoiding a Western university education is increasingly the smart move.
But some utterances are so stupid, so utterly devoid of logic and sense, so obviously designed to win applause rather than connect with intelligent life, that I find myself believing there must be a cost. A price must be paid. I’ll return to this.
Billie Eilish, I’m assured, is a talented singer. She’s the sort of person who can fill a stadium and make teenagers cry with a chord change. She’s also the sort of person who stands at the Grammys and tells the world that “nobody is illegal on stolen land” – and gets a standing ovation for it.
Let’s take a moment to unpack this. If all land is stolen – and it is repeatedly, by different groups throughout history – then the logical conclusion is either that everyone is illegal everywhere, or nobody is illegal anywhere. If the latter, then every country on earth should open its borders to every person who wants to come in.
Even a child can work out that this wouldn’t be practical. But Billie Eilish isn’t a child, she’s a celebrity – completely insulated from the real world and surrounded by sycophants and other moneyed morons who all think alike.
She doesn’t need to understand what the scripted line means. The only calculation she has to make is whether the phrase sounds compassionate. In her world, that’s the same thing as being compassionate – which is top-tier positioning for the status-hungry. The standing ovation confirms it.
Why does this matter? Who cares what singers and actors think?
Well, imagine someone tells Eilish that the Earth itself is stolen land. Stolen from whom, exactly? Doesn’t matter. Maybe the dinosaurs. The point is that by Friday, there’d be a #FreeEarth march in Los Angeles. A pin would be designed in the shape of a T. rex. Celebrities would wear it, and fans would follow suit. Within a month, Greta Thunberg would ditch the keffiyeh for a lizard-patterned onesie and release a spoken-word manifesto called Asteroid about the ancestral trauma of the Mesozoic Era. And anyone pointing out that the Earth belongs to nobody – or, more likely, to everyone – would be accused of being a planet supremacist.
And then someone would blame it on “Israel”. Then they all would.
Hollywood celebrities aren’t ideologues. They haven’t worked out a political philosophy or economic framework. They’re not wrestling with Marxist dialectics or decolonial theory. They’re airheads and useful idiots who’ve spotted a status opportunity and grabbed it. The oppressor/oppressed framework is the most efficient virtue-signalling machine ever invented. You don’t need to understand anything. You just need to know who’s the victim and who’s the villain – and then declare that you’re on the right side of history.
Hollywood is the perfect fit because these are people who tell stories about goodies and baddies for a living. This is what makes them so dangerous. They genuinely believe life is this simple and that they are at the centre of it. Moral narcissists are everywhere, but Hollywood moral narcissists really are everywhere – on every screen, in every feed, telling young people that Israel is evil and brown people are oppressed. There’s no further context or nuance. No complexity. Just a story that gets told and retold, deformed and eventually borrowed by sadists and fanatics for moral cover.
At the Golden Globes, a reporter asked Bill Maher why he wasn’t wearing a “Be Good” pin – a tribute to Renee Good. Half the celebrities in the room were already adorned. Maher’s answer:
“It was a terrible thing that happened. And if they didn’t act like such thugs, it wouldn’t have had to happen. But I don’t need to wear a pin about it.”
Later on his show, he reiterated the point:
“I hope I didn’t spoil the perfect record of pins and ribbons solving the world’s problems. You can’t name a problem – from guns to AIDS to bullying to breast cancer – that still exists after people wore a ribbon for it. Except all of them. You fucking posers.”
Few celebrities puncture the hypocrisy of their own tribe as effectively as Maher. He understands that pins and ribbons aren’t political statements but accessories. They signal membership of a very exclusive club – the club of People Who Care™. Or, more accurately, the club of people who need everyone to know they care.
Which is why the silence on Iran is so damning. The system reveals itself as one that isn’t designed to pick up every genuine cause, only the safe ones. While Billie Eilish rehearses lines about stolen land, the Islamic Republic is massacring its own people by the tens of thousands – the majority of them killed on two days, shot by the Revolutionary Guard on direct orders from Khamenei. Most of the dead were under 30. The government cut the internet to hide it while doctors smuggled footage out via Starlink.
Where’s the pin for this? The hashtag? Where’s Mark Ruffalo?
Nobody’s surprised at any of this because Iran doesn’t fit the template. The oppressor is an Islamic theocracy, not a Western democracy. Criticising Islam is career suicide in Hollywood. So they simply don’t see it. Their radar only picks up signals that come pre-packaged for virtue signalling, and Iran isn’t one of them.
“Our voices really do matter”, said Eilish at the end of her speech. This is true but not in the way she thinks. Celebrities are so convinced that good intentions are the same thing as good outcomes that thinking becomes optional. Their young and unworldly audiences lap it up all the same.
Which brings me back to the cost. The price that must be paid.
It’s tempting to indulge the fantasy of chartering an A380 and flying Hollywood royalty immediately to Tehran to discover the true cost of speaking out for freedom.
But the real cost of moral narcissism ought to be much simpler than that. Holding luxury beliefs should become hugely embarrassing – stigmatised, even. Delivering scripted opinions about Gaza while ignoring Iranian clerical fascism should be career-terminating. Not because some authority decrees it, but because enough people have enough moral clarity to see the hypocrisy for what it is – a game for status junkies. They’ll stop watching the films and streaming the music because it’s all just a bit gross.
And only then, when the status calculation flips, when performance stops paying, will Hollywood’s moral narcissists pause and wonder whether any of it was ever real.
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Your posts are a calming balm to my angry, ranting soul, thank you. At least I know I’m not the only one and with luck there are more like us beginning to be heard.
I think Ms Eilish is about to get a lot of people looking to move in to her Malibu mansion (as no-one is illegal on stolen land), which is going to be very embarrassing, stressful and confusing for her, and just the wakeup call these vacuous idiots need.