Tim Allen, a rather irrelevant actor, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live this week, where he bemoaned the tribulations suffered by conservatives in Hollywood. “You gotta be real careful around here,” he told Kimmel. “You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody else believes. This is like ‘30s Germany.”
You seem confused, Tim, so allow me to clarify matters. You are utterly fucking wrong. Whatever hardships you believe yourself to endure as a wealthy, right-leaning actor, it is, shall we say, inaccurate to liken them to those trapped in Nazi Germany. I’d like to believe you already know this to be true—that any reasonable human knows this to be true—but you haven’t given me much reason for confidence.
As the Washington Post reports, Allen nervously admitted to Kimmel that he had attended Donald Trump’s inauguration, stammering as if confessing guilt.
“I was invited, we did a VIP thing for the vets, and went to a veterans ball, so I went to go see Democrats and Republicans,” he explained feebly. “Yeah. I went to the inauguration.”
“I’m not attacking you,” Kimmel returned, laughing.
But Allen and others who share his political leanings argue that Hollywood has returned to the stigmatizing ways of McCarthyism. Those who support the GOP are forced “into hiding and professional exile” just as Communists were persecuted during the Red Scare.
“In 30 years of show business, I’ve never seen it like this,” an actor remaining anonymous told the Los Angeles Times. “If you are even lukewarm to Republicans, you are excommunicated from the church of tolerance.”
Ah yes, that old chestnut: liberals are hypocrites who preach “tolerance” without practicing it.
I don’t much care about political squabbles between members of the Hollywood elite. But when Allen whimpers about being shunned for supporting the Trump administration, his wealth-enhanced white male privilege distorts the scenario. If it’s particularly difficult to be a Republican in Hollywood right now, it likely has to do with your support of a xenophobic, white supremacist regime that normalizes racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. It should be especially hard to be a Trump-supporter in Hollywood, because it should be hard to be a Trump-supporter anywhere. Certainly they are met with intolerance but, for the most part, it is intolerance for a government that is both incompetent and cruel.
Currently, Allen stars in the sitcom Last Man Standing, where he proudly portrays—surprise!—a conservative whose views echo his own. And there are some who celebrate his character.
“Finally, we have a hero who hunts, fishes, watches sports, and occasionally drives a tank,” wrote the Imaginative Conservative. A tank, huh? Wow. Everyone who hungers for some garden-variety machismo should absolutely check it out.