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May 6, 2025 - The David Knight Show
13:21
Hollywood Reels as Trump Proposes 100% Tariff on Services and Intellectual Property
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The perfect example of what Trump is doing.
Theatrical stuff.
Maybe he understands, as we all do, films coming out of Hollywood are so bad that they need protection.
But it's not going to help them.
The ones coming out of Europe are not really all that much better.
The New York Times says, the president's call for tariffs caused confusion in Hollywood, and they came after he met with...
John Voight, who he says is his ambassador to Hollywood, his special, special ambassador to Hollywood.
And the reality is that it is absolutely unworkable.
It has immediately caused alarm throughout the industry.
And what they said was, well, you know what we really want is we want some of your money.
Give us some incentives.
Give us some tax breaks and all the rest of this.
And he's talked about some of that because understand that the tariffs are not going to be there in place of the income tax.
They're going to be there in addition to the income tax.
So we want some extensions and so forth.
The president's social media post came out on Sunday, called for a 100% tariff.
It's going to go big, go large.
On films produced outside the United States, it caused confusion in Hollywood.
Wait a minute, we do a lot of our production outside the United States.
Probably the ten biggest production items that we had in the last couple of years all came out of the biggest box office figures, I should say.
All came from abroad.
And the production is distributed.
You know, like he distributed the manufacturing of cars between U.S., Mexico, and Canada.
That was his first administration's goal.
Now that's got to stop, and it's got to stop immediately.
We're going to slam on the brakes, and we're going to start violently twisting the steering wheel.
That's what he's doing.
Left, right, left, right, left, right.
Slam on the brakes.
What do you think is going to happen?
Anyway, tariff on films produced outside the United States caused confusion in Hollywood, which has lost a great deal of local and film production to states and nations that offer rich tax credits and cheaper labor.
Well, again, it's cheap labor and subsidies that they want.
It's what all the big businesses want.
And, by the way, if you cater to the big businesses, and you reshore a lot of these big businesses, They want cheap labor.
They're not going to pay you.
First of all, they're not even planning on having human workers in the factories they're going to bring back.
The reason they're doing this now is because of robotics.
They don't want American labor.
Get that understanding.
Everybody thinks, oh, we're going to get good manufacturing jobs again.
No, you're not.
All the money is going to go to a few pals of his.
I said that in 2017.
When you looked at the tax cut, I said, look, I've seen Reagan did the trickle-down tax cuts and stuff, and I think there's an argument to be made for that.
You know, there's varying opinions about it, but I wasn't as opposed to it in principle.
But when you look at what was happening to it, I said, oh, they're not going to, they're not reshoring.
In response to it, you saw massive amounts of tax credits given to Apple Computer.
What did they do?
They bought their stock.
Bought their own stock.
John Voight, Stephen Paul, his longtime manager, met with Trump over the weekend, shared their plans to increase domestic film production.
They suggested federal tax incentives, changes to the tax code, which is not going to go away, the income tax code, and production treaties with other nations and infrastructure subsidies.
Handouts, handouts, handouts.
Crony capitalism, folks.
That's what it's about.
It's the name of the game.
Hollywood's top lobbying group.
Lobbyists.
We're the lobbyists for the small businesses.
Nowhere.
That's why you're not essential.
Why Trump said you're not essential.
Why he's working to get rid of the small businesses.
Hollywood's top lobbying group, various unions, and the state's representatives who are pushing bills to increase state tax credits.
For the film and TV industry.
A void emerged from these meetings with two one-page documents drafted by the MPA, Motion Picture Association.
And again, this is a New York Times article.
One letter encourages lawmakers in Washington to adopt manufacturing production incentives.
They're not manufacturing anything.
Manufacturing propaganda.
Manufacturing consent, as people said, right?
That's what they're manufacturing.
That's the ultimate propaganda.
You manufacture consent.
That's the purpose of Hollywood.
The other asks Congress to extend a section of the tax code that expires the end of 2025 because the tax code's not going away.
We're going to make these tax cuts permanent or whatever because the income tax is permanent.
This is just a new tax that's being added to everything else.
And they want to be able to expense TV production costs in the year that they incur them, that type of thing.
I guess maybe now they're having to amortize it over a few years or something.
So Hollywood is panicking.
After Trump proposes a 100% tariff on movies filmed outside the United States, of course there will be, if this goes through, there will be other people will match it.
But it creates real issues.
Because what we're talking about here is a service, and services are typically not tariffed.
This could open a Pandora's box of massive tariffs on services.
Guess who that would hurt the most?
The United States, because that's what we do now.
We don't manufacture hard stuff.
We manufacture what we provide.
It's a service economy.
So who's that going to hurt?
Us.
Did they think about that?
The other thing is, the movies are just basically intellectual property.
How do you...
How do you tariff that?
The movie industry in America is dying, he tweeted out, all uppercase.
Dying a very fast death, he wrote on Sunday.
This is a concerted effort by other nations and therefore is a national security threat.
There you go.
It's a national security threat.
So it's an emergency and he can do it by fiat.
In addition to everything else, he said messaging and propaganda.
Yeah.
Therefore, I'm authorizing the Department of Commerce.
And the, by the way, to call the films national security is one of the most absurd storylines, except that he did admit the quiet part out loud.
Hollywood has, for the longest time, it's not the foreign countries any more than it is Hollywood.
Hollywood has been the master of pushing out propaganda on behalf of the American government.
As I've said many times, the CIA had a site where they could go get story Uh, ideas, right?
I said, we'll help you write the stories.
That's why you get so much of the stuff everybody, look at this.
The movies predicted what's happening.
Well, of course they did.
Because the CIA has determined, you know, the intelligence community and DARPA and all the rest of these, they've got their plans for the pandemic and for all the rest of the stuff.
They know what they're going to do.
They write the script.
They practice it with things like Dark Winter, but they also take the scripts and they give them to the movies.
So they can do that to condition the public.
Predictive programming.
And, you know, that has been the case for a very, very long time.
And then when you look at action films, they want to program the public there as well to view our unending, undeclared wars as heroic somehow.
Commerce Department immediately began the process of instituting a 100% tariff, said Trump, on any and all movies coming into our country that are produced in foreign lands.
And then all uppercase.
We want movies made in America again.
Well, you know, we want to talk about propaganda and stuff.
Hollywood is filled with propaganda, and now Hollywood is filled with the most anti-American propaganda of anybody.
Hollywood propaganda is more anti-American than the most foreign films.
It is adamantly set against our society, our history.
Our people and our Lord Jesus Christ.
That is what Hollywood is against.
It is an anti-Christ business.
I would be happy to see them go away, quite frankly.
Well, one person in Variety, one producer out of the UK, said, this makes no sense.
It implies that a US film is meant to shoot in the US.
But the Harry Potter films, Lord of the Rings, Schindler's List, Mission Impossible, Gladiator, Aviator, so many more, are U.S. films that shot overseas for obvious reasons.
Do these films have to shoot in the U.S. from now on?
It's an absurd announcement with no meaning nor understanding of storytelling or creative impulses.
He doesn't understand anything about the business that he's trying to help.
He's a bull in a china shop, and he is full of bull.
About everything.
Officials in France countered that the president's policy idea said that film production in their country is not even subject to tariffs in the first place because they are services, not products.
Trump, do you really want to set up a precedent where services are taxed?
Because we have a big trade surplus in services.
We have a trade deficit.
And products.
We have a big trade surplus and services.
One French film industry insider said you'll end up in court and it'll take months.
We don't sell goods.
We sell a service.
So I don't see how that could be taxable.
It's difficult to know what we're talking about at this stage.
What it concerns.
It's still very vague.
And with Trump, things can change every day.
Many say there's no way to logically react until something actually happens.
Don't take Trump seriously, but you should take him literally.
An Italian producer noted that some films simply can't be made in the U.S. He said, I think the U.S. studios will continue to shoot abroad when they want exotic locations.
They are going to start shooting James Bond in Detroit, he said.
But here's the issue.
A former Abu Dhabi film chief said, ultimately, It's going to push the studios to make much heavier use of AI.
Perhaps that's what Trump is trying to do all along for his AI buddies.
You don't need to have a location with AI.
It provides a backdrop.
I mean, you don't even need to do all the complicated green screen stuff.
And so it'll take the actors and put them in whatever kind of environment you want.
Is that the game?
To push everybody to AI production?
And then what are you going to do if it's foreign AI?
Who wrote the software for the AI?
Where was the computer located when it ran this AI background?
Tariffs on intellectual property are a new issue that can raise questions for the industry.
He's proposing a tax on intellectual property, a tax on services.
That's what this tariff is.
Never had that before.
And that would not be good for America if everybody starts responding in like kind.
So, this is from Time, why Trump's 100% tariff.
100%.
Going large.
Why it doesn't make sense at all.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick immediately responded and said, We're on it!
We're on it!
Yes, sir!
whatever you want.
Music The common man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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