Christian Toto’s Virtue Bombs exposes Hollywood’s woke self-censorship, where stars like Scarlett Johansson and Lena Dunham face backlash for perceived political missteps while conservative voices (e.g., Kirk Cameron) are silenced. Mandated identity casting—like cerebral palsy-only roles—and boycotts of comedians such as Dave Chappelle stifle creativity, with "woke" films flopping (Uncle Tom documentary excluded from empowerment lists) while non-progressive hits (Ghostbusters) thrive. Toto warns this trend risks alienating audiences and fuels tech censorship (e.g., Kyle Rittenhouse’s suppressed fundraising), but sees potential in counterculture pushback—like Daily Wire films or viral indie irreverence—to reshape the industry. [Automatically generated summary]
So I wanted to bring on Christian Toto, my friend.
He's an award-winning film critic journalist, and he's the founder of HollywoodandToto.com.
If you have not been on Hollywood in Toto, you should go.
It is a great movie site, and it's done from the right wing point of view.
He hosts the Write on Hollywood podcast, and he's got a book called The Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul.
It's got a forward by some guy named Andrew Clavin.
Virtue Bombs by Christian Toto.
Christian, it's great to see you.
How you doing?
Good to be here.
Thanks so much.
So what does virtue bombs mean?
It sounds like a double entendre there.
You know, it's funny, someone reached out to me recently and said, was it hard writing your first book?
And I thought, no, it wrote itself and that's a cliche.
But, you know, I've been covering all of this information for so long now.
This is all about how Hollywood is bending to the woke community.
It's about how freedom of speech is eroding before our eyes.
It's about how the Hollywood players are scared to death of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, sharing the wrong social media post and the consequences of it.
You know, I love movies.
I got into this whole business because I was just enraptured by film.
I used to watch Abner Costello movies with my dad, and that was sort of the spark that set things going.
And I'm just kind of aghast at what's happening in the culture.
You know, the funny thing about this is that it actually is the left eating its own to some degree.
I mean, people, you know, attack me for saying politically incorrect things.
I don't care.
I'm not appealing to them.
I'm not trying to reach them.
But most of the people in Hollywood are already kind of woke.
They're kind of at least kind of lefty.
And it's kind of the left eating its own.
I mean, you tell some of these stories, you tell a story about Lena Dunham that I'd never heard before.
It's actually kind of amazing what they're doing to each other.
Yeah, you know, listen, it used to be, let's pick on Kirk Cameron because he's a Christian.
Right.
And he was fair game.
But, you know, Tina Faye, you know, she's a liberal writer and a very talented personality.
We're not going to really go near her because she's one of us.
Those protections really don't exist.
Now, there are layers of security you can build up based on your politics.
Alec Baldwin is a perfect example.
He's done enough to get canceled two, three, four times.
And this is even before the recent shooting tragedy.
But, you know, now everyone is fair game.
If you don't do exactly what you want to do, say what you want to do, you'll get trouble.
You're getting trouble.
And I think the actors are just really terrified of this new reality.
So they're trying to bend to the whims as much as possible, but it's never quite enough.
I mean, the Lena Dunathan was hilarious to me because she came on and it was, you weren't allowed to say, oh, she's a dumpy, unattractive dame.
You know, that was not something that you was allowed to come out of your mouth.
So she starts a clothesline for overweight women and they attacked her because the clothes weren't big enough.
There wasn't overweight enough.
It just seems like you cannot possibly, you can't possibly win.
I mean, you're not even allowed to act.
This really bothers me because I love actors and I love watching them work.
And I remember watching Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot.
He played a guy with cerebral palsy.
And there's something magic about watching a guy not afflicted with that transform himself into somebody who is afflicted with it.
But now they would say, well, you got to get an actor with cerebral palsy.
Do the actors fight back against this at all?
You know, some do.
It's a small percentage of the overall community.
You think they'd be louder and prouder about this.
But when they do, they say, listen, I understand I need to be an ally.
I understand these communities are not represented well enough, but I am an actor.
I need to kind of ply my craft.
So there are some voices saying that, but not enough for sure.
And others are afraid to say anything.
And often an actor will say, you're right.
I'm sorry.
I quit.
It's amazing when an actor, you know, all actors, the biggest to the smallest, they want the next role.
So when they quit a role, it's not inconsequential.
It means something.
I mean, who has done that?
Who have quit roles because whoever, the woke, says that they're not the right person to do it.
Scarlett Johansson did.
Halle Berry did.
I think Mandy Patinkin may have done so as well.
It was a Broadway situation that he stepped back.
But again, Halle Berry is an Oscar winner.
Scarlett Johansson, maybe the most powerful woman in Hollywood.
She's beautiful.
She guarantees fannies in the seats in theaters, which is a rare thing these days.
She's really good at what she does.
And you would think any project. that has Scarlett Johansson on board is a winner right off the bat.
When she was going to play a trans person, it went awry.
What did she do?
Did she basically just stand down right away?
No.
So at first, she stood her ground very briefly.
You can actually probably, you can do time-lapse photography.
It was so quick.
But she said, listen, I'm an actress.
This is what I do.
And she pointed to other stars who have done trans performances, including Dallas Buyers Club, Jared Leto, who won an Oscar for that kind of a role.
And so she kind of pushed that, you know, as her defense, which in theory was smart because it wasn't like this was 20, 30 years ago.
This is like maybe two, three, four years ago.
Well, the wave of outrage hit, and we don't even know how big it is.
So just enough that she heard it.
And then she said, oh, you know, she did a speech.
There's a whole chapter in my book.
These were the kind of the speech, the hostage apology.
I'm so sorry.
I'll be an ally.
I'll never do it again.
I've learned that kind of thing.
So it is a question I wonder all the time.
How big do you like?
How big is the threat to her really?
If she just said, get stuffed, pound sand, and she made the movie, do you think that they could shut her down, shut the movie down?
You know, I think it's complicated.
I think the way that the Dave Chappelle situation is playing out now is a great example because he's arguably the biggest comedian of our time right now, maybe the most talented of our time.
And he's not officially canceled because the media always says, well, he can still speak.
You know, like, oh, that's, oh, good for him.
He's still allowed to be in the public arena.
But at the same time, you know, film festivals basically threw his new movie aside.
He says that he can't find a distributor for his new film.
So I think there are layers to everything here.
So Scarlett Johansson would probably be fine.
She'd probably survive.
But there certainly are chances that she would not get a sponsorship.
She would not get a commercial deal.
Maybe some, you know, some directors may say, you know, I want to pick someone else for this role.
So it's a case-by-case thing, but I don't think you get away unscathed.
It's just a matter of if you stand up and other people stand up, then this kind of goes away.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, comedy, you mentioned Dave Chappelle, and comedy is kind of hardest hit because how can you be funny without being able to be a little bit risque and a little bit naughty and all this stuff?
And you would think, I mean, some guys talk about it.
Bill Burr talks about it.
You know, I think Louis Suke, who was canceled for bad sexual behavior, as if like no other comedian or celebrity has bad sexual behavior, all of which, all of his bad sexual behavior, consensual, by the way, he was canceled.
But I noticed that he's been playing across the country to packed houses.
He's just kind of doing it under the radar.
Is comedy a redoubt?
Is comedy a place where people can stand up a little bit more because we expect them to be so out there?
Well, yes and no.
I'm in contact with a lot of different comedians who have basically said, you know, the heck with cancel culture.
I'll do what I want to do.
But they have to reinvent their careers.
It can't be business as usual.
They have to go to podcasting.
They have to kind of go on alternative media websites.
They have to go hit the road hard and build their fan base because the traditional outlets, the avenues, the distribution channels, they shut down if you're canceled enough.
So you can't go to A, B, and C. You've got to go to D ⁇ E.
And that's part of the problem here.
Now, I've met some comedians who say that they're bigger now than they were prior to being canceled.
Tyler Fisher comes to mind, a very funny fellow, happens to be in a daily wire motion picture.
You know, so he's been able to kind of, because he's smart and he's funny and he's creative, he kind of just kind of zigzagged around what's going on in the culture.
But that's not easy.
It's not for everyone.
And, you know, not everyone is an entrepreneur who can make these changes.
It's a really delicate situation right now.
You know, it's interesting.
Jean-Cleese, he was invited somewhere to speak and they had canceled a guy for doing a Hitler imitation during a debate on good taste.
And he was showing what bad taste looked like.
And he did a Hitler imitation and he got in trouble.
And Clee said, hey, I've done Hitler imitations.
I'm not coming.
You know, I'm canceling myself.
So I guess if more people would do that, you just think these apologies are just blood in the water and they devour you for them.
The book is Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul by Christian Toto.
I contributed a forward because I think this is important stuff.
You know, it's interesting.
I read today that women are not going back to the movies.
The movies are reopening up, but women are not showing up.
And I wonder, do you think that that has anything to do with woke or is that something else?
I mean, women seem in some ways hardest hit.
You're supposed to pretend that a man can magically become a woman.
You're supposed to pretend that women don't want the things that they want, the love and security and home and children that most women actually still do want, though they're sometimes afraid to say so.
You're supposed to think all women are strong in the movies.
They all walk around with their fists on their hips.
I always think like, ah, God, I would never live with a woman like that.
Do you think women are hardest hit by this?
And do you think that there are a way that maybe the unwoke can speak back?
You know, I think when it comes to going to the movies right now, I suspect that there's a fear of COVID that persists within this.
I mean, this is anecdotal.
This is just an observation.
When I go to the store, when I go shopping, when I'm in a restaurant, I think generally speaking, I see more women than men who are wearing masks, which sort of denotes a greater sense of fear and worry about the pandemic.
So I think that's what's going on.
It's also interesting that there have been a lot of kids' films, which are usually just catnip at the box office that really struggled to find purchase.
And I think maybe it's mom saying, I don't want to drag my kids to the movies this weekend.
So I think that's part of it.
So, you know, bigger picture, culturally wise, I think it's too soon to tell, but that's my sense.
I think it's a little bit of just wariness of going back in public.
So to play the devil's advocate for a minute, I mean, I detest these woke people.
I got to say, I think their philosophy is actually wicked in and of itself.
But what I really detest is this shutting people down.
But what about the argument that, oh, we put on shows like Will and Grace and they increase tolerance for gay people.
So why can't we increase tolerance for pansexual black men from the planet Socorro, you know, by having Land or whatever his name is Landrau called Driesian or whatever his name is, become pansexual.
You know, is there some argument for kind of pushing Hollywood to include people so that they become normalized?
You know, one of the problems going on in Hollywood now is a collective guilt that they've done badly, that they haven't been inclusive, that they've been kind of pushing aside people for the wrong reasons.
Anne Haiti is telling an older story of when she first started courting Alan DeGeneres.
The movie students are like, oh, no, you can't be an out lesbian dating another out lesbian.
Like that was just, that was just unacceptable.
And that's in the like early to mid-90s, I think.
So, you know, I think that there's a sense that we have done poorly by minority groups and we want to do better.
And that's a good thing.
I mean, I want everyone, every artist, no matter who they are, what they believe, to say, I've got a script.
It's a killer script.
I want you to make a movie out of it.
And I want to see that movie.
So I think that's what's really partly to blame here as far as the current woke situation.
But the bottom line is if you want to make a movie and it has a trans figure and the character is noble and interesting, well, then the market will decide.
Is it a good movie?
Do people rallying to it?
And if not, then maybe you don't make movies of that quality anymore.
I mean, I don't mind more voices, more content, more information.
But we're seeing is the opposite.
Like, you can tell that story.
You can say that joke.
That's where it gets dangerous.
You know, it is interesting to me.
Like, I can honestly say, like, I never cared what the what group a story was about.
I've watched movies about all kinds of Americans.
You know, I always would go to a Denzel Washington movie or whatever.
He's one of my favorite stars.
But now I feel like I'm being preached at.
When I turn on Netflix and it says the Black Lives Matter collection, I think get stuffed.
You know, I move on to the next thing.
And I wonder if they're not actually, as they so often do, achieving the opposite of what they're trying to achieve.
One thing I've noticed is that for a few weeks, maybe even months after the George Floyd riots and things like that, Netflix was pushing a lot of black content.
And you turn it on, there'd just be one film after another about black lives, as they would say.
And I've noticed that's kind of stopped, because especially when you look at what's most popular on these sites, they're almost always, you know, just movies.
I mean, movies that tell good stories.
And frequently, it's a majority white country.
Frequently, these have white people, more white people in them than blacks.
And I wonder, will the market correct for this or are they going to go down?
Is Hollywood going to go down?
I mean, you call your book Virtue Bombs.
And a lot of times I think Virtue does bomb.
And I'm wondering if the market will force them to correct.
Two notes.
One is when all that empowerment was going on, which again, in principle, is just fine.
I noticed that certain empowering films weren't included, like Uncle Tom, a documentary from Hilaria Elder, and created equal Clarence Thomas in his own words.
They didn't crack that list, by the way.
So that's interesting.
But I think that Hollywood is going to really need to be punished severely.
I'm not saying I'm not rooting it on, but I just, I think as an observer, they don't get the situation that they're facing right now.
This whole go, you know, get woke, go broke.
They don't see it.
They don't understand it.
They don't respect it.
They don't process it.
And it's going to take a few more mega bombs before they do.
And just a quick note: when Ghostbusters came out, the all-female Ghostbusters, the press was just enraptured.
You can't not like this movie.
Otherwise, you're a misogynist.
And then I think a year later, Wonder Woman came out, which was wonderful and charming and interesting.
And Gal Godot was just spectacular.
They didn't do any of this woke stuff.
They just said, here's our movie.
Hope you like it.
And everyone did.
And that's the real message there.
And you know, it was funny in Wonder Woman.
One of the things that was charming about Wonder Woman was that she was so girly that, you know, when she first saw a baby, she was like, oh, a baby.
You know, she was like, actually, adorable.
Resistance Keeps Flaring Yet00:04:08
And it made a big difference.
Yeah.
You know, this is interesting.
I mean, you talk at one point in Virtue Bombs in the book, you talk about the cultural revolution in China.
And I guess I wonder, like in your imagination, do you see this going so far that it actually becomes impossible for people to speak their minds?
It's something that keeps me up at night and it's something that scares me.
And I think we see flickers of it.
We also see pushback.
But when you think about what's going on in big tech and the suppression of ideas and thoughts and arguments and consequences, that it's not just the Hollywood stuff I cover and that you and I talk about and enjoy.
It's far deeper, far more frightening than that.
And that's my big fear.
Listen, I think part of that would be Hollywood will continue to kind of clamp down on the stories we can tell.
That's certainly, that's a side effect, you know, a collateral damage here.
But that's the bigger worry is that, you know, does it matter that what we told, what we told were conspiracy theories a year ago are now likely and very possible?
Yeah.
And that stuff was hidden from us.
I think the Kyle Rittenhouse situation, I think there were forces that were preventing him from raising money, from telling his story.
Well, we didn't see the trial yet.
Why did big tech sort of clamp down?
It really scares me.
And the consequences are all across the culture, not just Hollywood.
One thing I think they're not seeing quite yet is that ultimately the internet is uncontrollable.
You know, ultimately, unless you're actually going to become an oppressive China-style government, the internet is something that people can use.
We at the Daily Wire have started making films, and we're going to keep going.
And I know it takes a while.
People don't understand that you don't just suddenly make a plate of terrific films.
It really takes a while to get going.
But once we're making films with our values and people show up and watch those, it's going to be pretty ugly for Hollywood if they're making woke films that bomb and we're making not woke films that make money.
That's going to be a very tough situation for them to be in.
And I'm really hoping that, you know, I'm hoping that that'll change things.
You know, I have an agent, a really talented agent who loves his work, who quit because he couldn't, he retired because his white stable of writers could no longer get hired.
They simply would not hire white writers.
He said to me that I am the only white writer he knows who's getting hired because I'm hired by conservatives, you know, and which I thought was good payback for my experiences in Hollywood.
But, you know, that's illegal.
That is probably illegal to do that.
Is there some point again?
You know, I just keep wondering, is there any pocket?
When you look at the field, is there any pocket of resistance, true resistance, not the resistance, which is not the resistance, but is there any pockets where you turn and think like, am I hearing any rumble here?
Or is this just Hollywood-wide?
They're just not going to, no one's going to stand up for this.
I don't think we're there yet.
You know, I thought we were getting close when Dave Chappelle's last special hit, Sticks and Stones, and then Bill Burr put out Paper Tiger.
That one-two-punch, really kind of savaging what we're talking about.
I thought, wow, maybe this is the moment.
This is the time.
And then the George Floyd situation happened and we went multiple steps back.
I don't know.
I do think there is a sort of a tipping point where the comedians like Tyler Fisher and Ryan Long and JP Sears and Tim Dillon and Joe Rogan, if they keep making gobs of money, if they keep drawing throngs of fans, I think that's where we really have the hope is that people will keep using their dollars and their support and their loyalty to these figures who are just counterculture heroes in the very best sense of the word.
So I think that's when it's going to change.
And I also think if we just had one knockout comedy, indie, bare budget, no stars, that was funny and outrageous and crazy and harkening back to Animal House and the hangover.
Cultural Moments Unavoidable00:00:24
And it was so uproarious that it couldn't be denied.
I'm waiting for that movie.
And I think that might be another cultural moment.
And they'll try to fight that one tooth and nail.
But I think that's those are two possible paths out of this situation.
Interesting.
The book is Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul by Christian Toto.