What is the consequence of taking a bunch of high school dropouts, paying them millions of dollars for performing tasks that most civilizations delegated to the lowest dregs, and surrounding them 24/7 with a lapdog press and fan base?

Celebrity activists.

I had to grow up with Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, and their ilk lecturing me about how I should vote, speak, and think.  Gratefully, Team America: World Police summated their eminent vacuity better than I ever could.  Matt Daaaaamon.  But we now have a new generation of celebrity activists, whose arrogance is matched only by their lack of authority.  Here is a brief sampling:

JENNIFER LAWRENCE

Jennifer dropped out of school at age fourteen and never pursued her GED, calling herself “self-educated”.  It shows.  Her parents gave up their own careers and zigzagged the country to support her.  In an overwhelming spirit of generous reciprocity, she “worked so hard” to “forgive” her father for his conservative political views.  My, that’s big of her.  She also has nightmares about Tucker Carlson.

She threw a staged tantrum some years back about her male co-stars Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper in American Hustle raking in $2.5 million each while she was left with a paltry $1.25 million.  Poor girl.  And those Hmong sweatshop children thought they had it bad.  But here’s where her middle school math skills could have been put to use.  She worked only 19 days on the film, whereas Bale and Cooper worked 45 days and 46 days, respectively.  When broken down per day, Lawrence actually earned more than the men.  Equal pay for equal work?  How about equal work for equal pay.

SETH ROGEN

Seth isn’t one to quit.  Unlike Jennifer, the Amazing Beta hung on in high school all the way until age sixteen before dropping out.  But beyond that, he’s an unimpressive mess of leftist contradictions: He’s a Canadian-American who disdains America, a Jew who detests Israel, and a multi-millionaire who embraces socialism.  He doesn’t need a therapist, he needs a team. 

He handles dissenting opinion not by making rational arguments, but by throwing around the F-bomb from the safety of Twitter.  Once, when approached by Paul Ryan’s children for a picture, he refused and used the occasion to rant at Ryan, in front of his kids, about politics.  Stay classy, Seth. 

BILLIE EILISH

If Greta Thunberg and Marilyn Manson had an unaborted child, it would be Billie.  But she has an act, and it sells.  She swears capriciously (ooh!), doesn’t follow the rules (oooh!), and isn’t afraid to take on The Man (OOOOH!).  Never mind that it’s just an exhumed carcass of the 1990’s Reznoresque self-pity masked as rebellion against tradition.  She’s perfected that obnoxious “teen angst” facial expression, which is as calculated and marketed as Mark Zuckerberg’s “untucked-shirt-everyday-Joe” facade.  Her interviewers lap it all up with shameless sycophancy.  

But there’s nothing more antithetical to genuine rebelliousness than bland predictability.  And Billie is nothing if not blandly predictable.  If you want to know what Billie will say next month, listen to what NPR said last month.  Her ruminations are as shallow as a puddle of green hair dye, and her political stances reflect the knee-jerk yard sign philosophies one would expect from someone who was homeschooled by parents who are “actors” who support themselves with a “mix of jobs”  (and if that’s the logic, then I’m an “astronaut” who supports myself with a “mix of jobs”).   

MARK RUFFALO

Mark is the leader of this highbrowed pack, having actually graduated high school!  He then spent ten years tending bar and honing his talking points about why we should listen to him regarding abortion, hiring white people, fracking, and Kyle Rittenhouse.  He cited antiracism as his justification for joining antisemite Roger Waters to support the candidacy of antisemite Jeremy Corbyn.  And despite netting himself $35 million, he insists that capitalism is ”killing us”. 

He claims he was put on Pennsylvania’s terrorist watchlist (spoiler alert: he wasn’t) because of his opposition to drilling.  And he’s a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.  “Buildings don’t fall down like that,” the former bartender informed us. 

Hi Mark, I’m Earth, have we met?

EMILY RATAJKOWSKI

Like the ogling hordes of groping cavemen she (rightfully) opposes, Emily wants all the perks of the Sexual Revolution without any of the consequences.  Her incoherent ramblings about “sexual empowerment” redefine the concept of tediousness, and not in a good way.  Emily is eye candy posing as a martyr, a depthless materialist desperately searching for meaning and identity.  There are hundreds of millions of women worldwide bleeding under the scimitar of systemic oppression, but fighting for them would take actual courage (I can’t find a peep from her regarding the ongoing Iranian protests).  Emily plays it safe, reenacting battles that actual feminists fought and won decades ago.

It’s convenient that Emily’s elusive definition of feminism just happens to rake her millions of dollars.  She bemoans societal expectations of female sexuality, but apparently not enough to turn down cover shoots and “hottest women” rankings in Maxim, FHM, Vogue, Allure, GQ, Rolling Stone, and all the rest.  She complains that she’s been pigeonholed as a “sex symbol” and can’t land a serious role in Hollywood.  Right, because Ryan Reynolds and Channing Tatum are getting them all.  Other leftists rightly call her out for her highly profitable posturing. 

Bonus:  Emily doesn’t “believe in straight people”, she justifies the existence of ISIS, and thinks every drug should be legalized. 

LEONARDO DICAPRIO

Leonardo leaves quite the carbon footprint.  He vacations on $110 million superyachts, which uses more gas in seven miles than your car does in a year.  He travels by private jet.  He currently owns homes (many labeled “retreats” but are more like compounds) in Manhattan, Hollywood Hills, Palm Springs, Malibu beach, Los Feliz, and Beverly Hills.  Not exactly the most committed stylite. 

Like most people, I have no qualms with Leonardo’s wealth, extravagance, or spending habits. For someone who dropped out of high school (are you noticing a pattern?), he in many ways embodies the rags-to-riches American dream so often derided by those he votes for.  But his incessant sermonizing about “climate change” to the flyover country truckers and Appalachia miners barely scraping by repels would-be converts in its belittling conceit. 

This sampling is the tip of the unmelted iceberg.  Leonardo’s climate change schtick, like most celebrity faux concerns, rings hypocritical to rational people.  Their not-so-veiled message is this:  You fly coach, in its current degeneration into a UFC fight on an airborne pet store.  You take the subway to work, if you don’t first get pushed onto the tracks.  You send your kids to pedophilic public schools.  You wear the COVID masks.  You take in busloads of illegals.  But not us. 

What’s telling is that they don’t find it hypocritical.  At least the 1980’s televangelists knew enough to go through the motions of public repentance when caught in a seedy motel with a prostitute.  But our celebrities see no contradiction in behaving in ways they forbid us.  Like Politburo “comrades”, they consider themselves an intellectual vanguard of sorts.  And with this status, they sincerely believe they’re entitled to extralegal rights and liberties not afforded the lower castes.  This is the literal definition of “privilege”. 

But not since Caligula Caesar has there been such celebrated hedonism and lack of competence coupled with such undeserved influence.  Their “talent” doesn’t extend beyond the proclivity of grown adults to don costumes and play pretend for the cameras.  None of these bejeweled apes could survive, much less win, a formal stage debate, which is why they scurry off to social media where they know dissenting opinion will be blocked, censored, or shouted down. 

They owe their good fortune not to ability or education, but to the freak accident of being born at the right place at the right time, during the height of convergence of the Big Screen and the Internet in amplifying the meritless, in probably the only country worldwide whose moral corruption and crumbling self-respect could produce a chasm wide enough to allow such cretins to make bank with their mediocre juggling.  That the woke Hollywood/Disney/MSM triumvirate keeps bleeding money and public trust has yet to instill them with any sense of humility. 

We have no obligation to endure their nonsense, and the default mode of mature adults is to just ignore them.  But narcissistic cult members respond to lack of attention by shrieking that much louder.  So the bad news is neither they nor their tweeted ignorance is going away anytime soon.  The good news is Elon Musk. 

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License