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We may not have Sebastian Stan around for long.
After all, the “Apprentice” alum just took President Donald Trump to task at the Cannes Film Festival. And, as we all know, the president loves nothing more than locking up actors who speak out against his regime.
Here’s a full list of the celebrities currently rotting in Trump’s gulag for defying his reign.
Oh, wait.
Stars have spent the last decade raging against Trump. Some wished him dead. Others pushed endless lies about him.
None has suffered as a result of their words, at least not by Trump’s hands. Kathy Griffin endured professional cancellation after she shared a ghoulish image of Trump’s bloody head for all to see.
That was common decency kicking in, nothing more (or less).
More recently, Trump critic Stephen Colbert learned his “Late Show” gig will expire on May 21. Did Herr Trump get ’em?
No. The show’s $40 million a year losses did the trick.
Yet star after star insists we’re living in unprecedented times and that by calling out Trump, they’re putting their careers and freedom in jeopardy.
Hogwash. This is a PG-rated outlet, after all.
Now, it’s Stan’s turn to play the Victim
.
The actor, speaking at a press conference for his upcoming film “Fjord,” trotted out the usual misinformation to attack Trump’s America.
“I think we’re in a really, really bad place. I really do. And to be honest with you, when you’re looking at what’s happening, right — if we’re talking about the consolidation of the media, censorship, threats, the supposed lawsuits that seemingly never end but don’t actually go anywhere. You know, the writing was on the wall. We encountered all that with the movie.”
He, of course, brought up Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel as fellow free speech martyrs. Kimmel endured a one-week suspension last year after he lied to his audience about the person allegedly responsible for Charlie Kirk’s 2025 murder.
An affiliate revolt sparked the suspension, but Kimmel was back several days later without having apologized for the misinformation. He later signed a year-long contract extension with ABC.
Few dictators are as incompetent as Trump, apparently.
This part must still be said.
President Trump will often bloviate about punishing his critics for their words. It’s an awful tic, one that’s deeply unpresidential and an anathema to free speech.
And, as we’ve learned over the past decade, it’s all talk and zero action.
In fact, President Trump has been far more generous with free speech than his predecessor. Team Biden used social media to punish wrongthink, attempted to create a disinformation czar and targeted concerned parents who objected to the teachings at their local schools.
So no, Stan doesn’t have to worry about being snatched up by the secret police anytime soon. He can rage against President Trump early and often.
And after a few more years of doing that sans punishment, maybe he’ll learn to regret his fear-mongering shtick.
UPDATE: Even Kimmel knows his faux free speech martyr status is a joke. Here, he yuks it up with the suddenly anti-Trump “South Park” creators about their attacks on the president.
“Why aren’t you guys in a gulag somewhere, like, shackled down in a basement?” Jimmy Kimmel asked South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, alluding to the animated show’s constant attacks on Trump, including repeatedly depicting the president naked with a micro-penis.
The post ‘Censored’ Artists Can’t Stop Slamming Trump appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
What do you call an economic system that's neither a free-market economy with a small state and light-handed regulation, nor a state-owned economy run by bureaucratic, politically-driven trading departments -- it's neither, sometimes both, but mostly a mongrel grab-bag of bits from small govt and large. They're wrestling with that question in the UK at the minute -- and we could just as easily ask the same question here:
The left call it neoliberal but neoliberals have had no meaningful influence on British governments for thirty years. The right call it socialist but neither the Tories nor Labour have shown much [recent] interest in seizing the means of production.
Liberty Scott puts the question:
Of course the Greens, TPM and parts of Labour will say t[that New Zealand] is under the oppressive yoke of neo-liberalism, and their latest scapegoat "billionaires" and "foreign capital"; and, of course, people like me will rail against the "commie kids" on the left in Parliament and in local government, but [in truth] there's little real evidence of NZ embarking on [either] Douglas/Richardson Mk. 2 or becoming the DDR ....
It's not to say the Douglas/Richardson ... reforms have been unwound. New Zealand isn't returning to rampant protectionism, nor has Labour embarked on vast re-nationalisation ... ["but hold my beer!" says Winston], but what has happened is an accretion of central command and control.
This is one reason some pundits are beginning to realise that, beyond the usual vitriol, there's so little separating the two tired main parties that a Grand Coalition would at least be more honest than continuing their pretence of difference. They've both kept the institutional structure established by Douglas/Richardson, while quietly growing an activist state to increasingly dictate how (and by whom) it will be run -- "regulatory control of the private sector remain[ing] at the heart of what the Wellington bureaucracy advances to meet [their] social goals."
Some might call this Fascism, i.e., the pretence of private property with an activist state dictating terms. But we're not there yet.
Ludwig Von Mises, who'd seen and escaped from the Nazi's fascism, would probably have simply called it a Hampered Market:
Some might call this Fascism, i.e., the pretence of private property with an activist state dictating terms. But we're not there yet.
Ludwig Von Mises, who'd seen and escaped from the Nazi's fascism, would probably have simply called it a Hampered Market:
The system of interventionism or of the hampered market economy differs from the German [i.e., the Nazi] pattern of socialism by the very fact that it is still a market economy. The authority interferes with the operation of the market economy, but does not want to eliminate the market altogether. It wants production and consumption to develop along lines different from those prescribed by an unhampered market, and it wants to achieve its aim by injecting into the working of the market orders, commands, and prohibitions.
BOTH MISES AND HIS student Ayn Rand were quick to point out that the Hampered Market, or what Rand was happy to dub the Mixed Economy, was of course a mongrel mixture on the way to something else -- that no matter how tired the state's representative might seem, it is still their coercion that is pulling the strings. Any analyis of the Mixed Economy must logically, she said, begin by identifying the two elements that are being mixed: A mixed economy, she identified "is an explosive, untenable mixture of two opposite elements,” freedom and statism, “which cannot remain stable, but must ultimately go one way or the other.”
A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. ...
A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalised civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government—i.e., by force. In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy's only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalised plunder from running over into plain, unlegalised looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure. ...
The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.
If there's one thing New Zealand's so-called opposing parties do agree on, beyond their love for the activist state, it's their hatred of the groups their erstwhile opponents appear to favour., their cronies or voting fodder But as Rand points out,
If parasitism, favouritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.
ECONOMICALLY, WE LIVE IN a Hampered Market. Politically, we live in a Mixed Economy. Realistically, we should be aware that neither can exist indefinitely. Things "must ultimately go one way or the other."
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