Brent Bozell and Tim Graham have picked their winners and losers for 2019.
There may be a couple of more days to go in the year, but with Congress out of town until the new year, there’s little chance of anyone breaking into either category.
There’s always next year, and I suspect there will be a lot of losers among the Democrats, mostly on election day.
In one area, an entity is both a winner and a loser.
Disney reaped the most money for their movies in 2019, but because they decided to recast movies that had male heroes and chose to make them women, some of their movies were colossal flops, like “Avengers: Endgame” and “Captain Marvel”.
Rather than recast popular movies with women, why not write original stories starring women?
Actually, the list should have been much longer.
Adam Schiff destroyed what little credibility he had left.
Nancy Pelosi surrendered to the Far Left, and will lose her gavel in 2021.
Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg have spent $20 million combined, and haven’t moved the needle a bit.
Loser: Jussie Smollett, the “Empire” actor and Hollywood race hoaxer who cost the taxpayers of Chicago more than $130,000 for all the time it took police to look for a nonexistent hate crime. Nothing says viral like a black gay celebrity claiming he was beaten by red-hatted Trumpster thugs. For two weeks, the left went nuts. Celebrities, politicians and the “news” media convicted Trump World for what it had allegedly caused. And it never happened. And now all of America knows it.
Winners: The students of Covington Catholic High School. Speaking of viral sensations of “fake news” around Trump hats, these high school kids were smeared relentlessly for several days for allegedly making evil smirks at a Native American activist. But the Diocese of Covington launched an investigation and found “no evidence of offensive or racist statements.” Again it was social media that spread the word to tens of millions across the country about the wrong done to the students. They were vindicated in the court of public opinion.
Winner: “Unplanned,” the movie about Abby Johnson, who converted from Planned Parenthood clinic director to conservative Catholic activist. Major music labels refused to license songs for it. Cable-news channels refused to run ads for it. Newspaper film critics refused to review it. And yet the little film became the talk of social media. What Pure Flix delivered has done more to advance the pro-life cause than the National Right to Life Committee has accomplished in the past three decades.
Loser: The abortion industry. In September, the Planned Parenthood-affiliated Guttmacher Institute estimated that there were about 862,000 abortions in 2017, nearly 200,000 fewer than in 2011. The abortion rate — the number of abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 — dropped to 13.5 in 2017, the lowest rate since Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973.
Loser: Gillette. In January, NPR touted a Gillette ad that attacked its own consumers. “The first half of the ad portrays males as boorish, sexually harassing women, mansplaining and bullying,” NPR reported. It probably saw the ad as an anti-Trump message. The second half of the ad insisted men must change. The ad went viral. Then, Gillette dug in deeper. Shortly before Father’s Day, the company launched an ad about a dad teaching his “son” — a biological girl — how to shave. Sales tanked. But the company claimed it wasn’t the ads. It blamed “lower shaving frequency.”
Loser: The Walt Disney Studios. It dominated the top-grossing movies, but superhero flicks like “Avengers: Endgame” and “Captain Marvel” pandered aerobically to feminists. And for all that energy, leftist sites like Slate still bashed the movies for being “too patronizing, too late.” Why bother messing with superheroes?
