Profile in Courage: Michael Imperioli

Elsewhere in Hollywood, DIE officers in the ‘C’ suites are proving to be luxuries no longer affordable for this nation’s most woke-friendly “industry”

NotFromTexas

Jul 03, 2023

Actor Michael Imperioli is a very brave man.

How is that, you ask?

It doesn’t appear to be so at first, but after thinking it though, there is no other conclusion to reach.

Only a very brave man would so courageously put his utter stupidity, dearth of intellect, and complete lack of reading comprehension on display before God and everybody.

Actor Michael Imperioli thanked the Supreme Court on Saturday for ‘allowing’ him to discriminate after they held that a graphic designer who creates wedding websites does not have to create them for same-sex marriages.
He also decided to ‘forbid bigots and homophobes’ from watching his work.
‘I've decided to forbid bigots and homophobes from watching The Sopranos, The White Lotus, Goodfellas or any movie or tv show I’ve been in. Thank you Supreme Court for allowing me to discriminate and exclude those who I don’t agree with and am opposed to. USA ! USA!’ he wrote.

Hopefully, reading the preceding hasn’t adversely impacted your overall intelligence and your reading comprehension in particular, dear reader, so please compare his imbecilic commentary with what the United States Supreme Court’s decision actually says:

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, in a decision joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. He explained that Colorado cannot ‘force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.’ And he indicated that the court’s decision would provide similar protection to other business owners whose services involve speech, such as artists, speechwriters, and movie directors.
The First Amendment, Gorsuch explained, ‘protects an individual’s right to speak his mind,’ even when others may regard that speech as ‘deeply misguided’ or it may cause ‘anguish.’ And the First Amendment generally also protects an individual from being required by the government to voice a particular message.
In this case, Gorsuch observed, even the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit agreed that the websites that Smith wants to create are speech. But if Smith wants to speak, he stressed, she must choose between following her conscience, which means only creating wedding websites for opposite-sex couples, and violating Colorado law, or following the law and violating her religious beliefs. Under the Supreme Court’s cases interpreting the First Amendment, Gorsuch concluded, ‘that is enough, more than enough, to represent an impermissible abridgment of the First Amendment’s right to speak freely.’1

What this boils down to is that if exercising the rights protected under the First Amendment is crucial to your enterprise as a going concern, your company cannot be compelled to submit to an “…impermissible abridgment …” of those rights by anyone or any entity.

What Ms. Smith’s company is barred from doing is preventing any other similar enterprise that doesn’t share her views from creating websites for other sodomite couples. Surely, hers is not the only firm that creates websites for any purpose or occasion (as an aside, there are now so many tools available – many for free – that rank amateurs can create their own, highly professional-looking websites without knowing the first thing about HTML). Were that the case, the court likely would not have decided the case in the same way.

In contrast, the lawsuits filed against Jack Phillips and his bakery were blatant lawfare designed to send a message to every similar business owned and operated by individuals who identify as Christians and seek to live out their faith. That message being, “Don’t mess with the gay mafia – you will serve us against your Christian convictions.” If the wedding cake was the most important concern, there were likely a number of other bakeries who would have been happy to do business with the sodomite couple.

Mr. Imperioli’s desire to forbid “bigots and homophobes” flies in the face of the court’s ruling, not that it matters to him – he’s signaled his virtue to the woke faithful.

‘Hate and ignorance is not a legitimate point of view,’ he wrote on Instagram.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
–Anonymous

Whoever Anonymous was, he was brilliant.

Mr. Imperioli is fortunate to have amassed his $20MM fortune2 portraying syndicate flunkies on both the silver and small screen. Had he been required to make his living on his wits, exercising common sense and sound judgement, he’d be living hand-to-mouth in some roach-infested matchbox apartment somewhere in NYC.

Michael Imperioli on the left, the contents of a box of rocks, on the right – do you see a difference?

Since I believe in taking someone at his word, I will presume Mr. Imperioli is not only sincere in his nonsensical rant, but serious about enforcing his forbidding “bigots and homophobes” from viewing the productions in which he has been cast. His “conviction,” such as it is, is worthy of being tested.

Toward that end, as a card-carrying bigot and homophobe, I’m going to screen, Goodfellas, at some time over the next few weeks, and then begin watching, The Sopranos, each evening as I decompress from the workday.

I’ll be curious to find out first-hand what happens. Will agents in dark suits and shades show up at my home and make me watch something else? It will be interesting to learn who these agents might be. Will they be an elite contingent of rainbow authoritarians constituted of sodomites, lesbians, queers, and pedophiles dispatched from GLAAD or the Anti-~~Defecation~~ Defamation League?

I’ll be waiting in great anticipation.

Trouble for ‘Diversity’ in the ‘C’ suite

The late Andrew Breitbart once observed that politics is downstream from the culture, and that appears to be proving true. It seems that “rule” can be applied to SCOTUS in light of the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis decision.

This development became public far too quickly for it to be linked to the Supreme Court’s ruling, which means that these positions had already been eliminated in advance of the announcement of the court’s decision re: affirmative action in college admissions.

Three studios and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences laid off or lost top diversity execs in the past 10 days, which gives the impression that the industry is placing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) on the back-burner.3

A more accurate order is Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity – DIE. That’s what happens when any enterprise exists for any other reason than to maximize profit.

Note that this occurred in the most woke-saturated, most woke-friendly industry, in its most powerful member organizations. Imagine when this begins to happen to corporations and organizations in the real world. A social media platform masquerading as a networking website for professionals that will remain nameless and is the professional gal’s best friend, will have a narrative of “systemic misogyny, anti-feminism, and male white supremacy in the private sector” to support for the next decade, at least.

Can you say, ‘winning?’

It may yet be premature to write the obituary for the woke religion and its impact, but I can’t help but recall how I felt when I first saw the movie, Rocky, on the big screen.

In that movie, Rocky Balboa was smarter than that for which anyone gave him credit – he took the worst Apollo Creed could do – he even went down, but didn’t stay there.

Once it was clear that Apollo hadn’t expected Rocky to get back up, Rocky took the fight to Apollo. He landed blows to Creed’s midsection that did some damage. Now, in the movie he wasn’t awarded the fight, but he was still a winner by simply not giving up – persevering.

We – the ones who are content to mind our own business and just be left the hell alone – are Rocky, not just over the past several years, but for decades, now. We take the worst that Democrats, woke’s high priests and priestesses, its clerics, and the left (but I repeat myself) can do to us, but we remain standing.

Well, now it’s our turn. In 2022, it was overturning Roe v. Wade. In 2023, it’s striking down affirmative action in college admissions, and preserving religious liberty as part of the rights protected by the First Amendment. Make no mistake, these three rulings are body blows to Democrats’ legacy of Supreme Court activism, SCOTUS legislating from the bench, and its propensity to create “constitutional” rights out of whole cloth.

We need to keep it going, though, with wins in national, state, and local elections because in addition to the temporal nature of political victory, the left will not stop, as we know all too well.

In the immortal words of the late Rush Limbaugh – just because it feels so good to say it knowing it’s true and not just wishful thinking: “We’re winning, folks!”

Thank you, dear reader, for your indulgence in this my latest anti-Hollywood rant. I’m beginning to suspect that Hollywood, the entertainment “industry,” and celebrity narcissism just may be a hot button, for me.

Cultural Orphan

Discussion about this post