After years of mainstream television poking fun of conservatives and Christianity, it appears that with the election of President Donald Trump — that trend may be changing.
“The White Lotus,” a popular HBO show, stunned viewers when a scene between three of the main characters — who are well-off women — took a turn for the conservative and seemed to poke fun at liberal bias.
“I didn’t know you went to church,” one of the women said to her friend Kate, played by actress Leslie Bibb, asking if her church was full of “Bible thumpers.”
“The people are more conservative than, like, L.A. people,” Kate replied.
“Is that weird for you?” her friend asked, adding, “If I was just around a bunch of Texans who voted for Trump, I guess I’d just feel a little alienated.”
The conversation got even more awkward when Kate explained that she herself is an “independent,” married to a Republican, and when she was asked if she voted for Trump, she smirked before saying, “Are we really going to talk about Trump tonight?”
Her friends looked on in horror.
“I think that that is probably an accurate representation because a lot of people moved from California to Austin, their husbands were already conservative, but especially after everything in 2020, they started going to church,” Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” comments.
“They started seeing, ‘Oh, these Trump supporters, they’re not these deranged neanderthals that the media tells me they are,’” she continues, “And then they get this kind of reaction from some of their friends who have been distanced from them.”
According to Bibb, the episode was actually written in 2022, before the season was originally set to be filmed in January 2023. The show was put on hold due to the SAG strike.
“Now that the episode dropped after the 2024 election, it takes on a new significance,” Bibb said in an interview, adding, “Everything feels so divisive, yet we’re not. I mean, they’re all sort of passionate women, and have all these feelings with all these different stances.”
“Oh, this is conservative-coded,” Stuckey laughs. “To say that there are all different kinds of women with all different kinds of stances, it’s only conservatives who talk like that, especially when you’re in Hollywood.”
“It also just seems a part of this cultural shift that it’s kind of OK to not depict Trump supporters as stupid and ugly all the time,” she adds.
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Democrats lost the White House and both chambers of the U.S. Congress in the November election. President Donald Trump, who won the popular vote and, more importantly, beat his opponent by 86 Electoral College votes, continues to enjoy relatively strong approval ratings.
Third Way, a liberal think tank founded by former Clinton administration staffers that is hostile to populism on both sides of the political spectrum, organized a retreat for Democratic operatives in Loudoun County, Virginia, last month so they could "begin to chart the Democratic comeback."
Third Way produced a summary of the Democratic attendees' thoughts on why their party is loathsome to working-class Americans.
Rather than resume the Democratic practice of blaming imagined racism and sexism for the party's disconnect with voters, the summary obtained by Politico revealed that attendees actually engaged in some soul-searching.
Regarding the party's cultural disconnect, attendees noted that Democrats have alienated working-class voters with their overemphasis on identity politics; progressive elitism; prioritization of imagined issues over voters' real economic woes; intolerance of dissenting voices and political correctness; simultaneous defense of "elite institutions" and criticism of "institutions working-class people value" like churches or small businesses; ideological capture by radical leftists; and negative messaging about America's national identity.
Attendees noted further that the Democratic Party has lost the trust of the working class due not only to its general hostility toward success and Americans' entrepreneurial spirit but to its support for both government overreach and climate alarmism as well as its proponents' inability to own their mistakes.
'Their future is not bright.'
Democratic attendees of the 1.5-day retreat determined that the way for their party to reconnect with voters would effectively be to plagiarize from the Republican Party's playbook — to ditch identity politics; "embrace patriotism"; avoid "condescending messaging"; "allow candidates to express personal faith and values without fear of backlash"; minimize the influence of radical leftists; invade the "real communities" progressive elitists have long thumbed their noses at; and embrace "rugged individualism."
The attendees at the Democratic retreat also acknowledged that their party, whose presidential candidate scraped together only 43% of the male vote in November, needs to "be more accepting of masculinity and male voters who feel alienated from the party."
Doing so would mean breaking from the elements of the liberal media and leftists like Jillana Enteen, a professor of instruction in "gender and sexuality studies" at Northwestern University. Enteen characterized as "harmful" Vice President JD Vance's Feb. 20 suggestion that young men should embrace their masculinity rather than fall into the camp of "androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same, and act the same."
Many of the suggestions noted in Third Way's summary were previously raised by Democratic strategist James Carville and evidently unheeded months ahead of the election.
Carville told the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, "A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females" dominating the culture of the Democratic Party.
"'Don't drink beer. Don't watch football. Don't eat hamburgers. This is not good for you,'" said Carville. "The message is too feminine: 'Everything you're doing is destroying the planet. You've got to eat your peas.'"
"If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election," added Carville. "I'm like: 'Well, 48% of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?'"
Carville also hammered the party's elitism and leftist bent, suggesting that between the "feminine" browbeating, the "faculty lounge" attitudes, and "woke stuff," the party was headed for trouble.
Third Way noted in a report last month, "If Democrats cannot build a broader cross-class alliance, one that includes a larger share of non-college voters, their future is not bright."
In addition to rebuilding a relationship with the American working class, the liberal think tank recommended stemming the "alarming erosion of their margin in blue states" and generating an appeal in swing states.
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Liberals everywhere are sharing Jane Fonda’s acceptance speech for her SAG Life Achievement Award — but what they don’t know is that while she might believe she means what she says, her actions tell a different story.
“Make no mistake. Empathy is not weak or ‘woke,’” Fonda said in her speech. “And by the way, ‘woke’ just means you give a damn about other people.”
Fonda has been an activist for decades, beginning in the 1960s.
“Maybe you weren’t alive during this time, but you heard about it when she posed for a picture in the 1960s with an anti-aircraft missile in North Vietnam,” Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” explains. “South Vietnamese and Americans were obviously very upset about this because it seemed like a stunt to show that she is pro-communism.”
In March 2023, Fonda also joked about murdering pro-life politicians and activists with her friends on “The View.”
“We’re not going back, I don’t care what the laws are. We’re not going back,” Fonda said. When the other panelists asked what women could do outside of protesting or marching, she replied, “I thought about murder.”
“She’s sitting there very seriously looking off to the side so everyone knows she’s serious, we should murder pro-lifers. Shouldn’t be surprising at all that the very people who believe that we should murder unborn babies also want to kill people outside of the womb for disagreeing with them,” Stuckey comments, adding, “But now she gets to lecture us on empathy.”
During her SAG speech, Fonda also said, “A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way, even if they’re of a different political persuasion. We need to call upon our empathy and not judge, but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent.”
“We are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what’s coming at us,” she added.
“So she thinks, you know, Trump is a fascist, and we’re going to have tyranny and totalitarianism. She expects people who voted for Trump to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, Jane Fonda, all of you liberals were right, Kamala Harris really would have been a great president,’” Stuckey says.
“Well, it’s not going to happen. And by the way, their empathy gets people killed. Their empathy means killing babies in the womb, mutilating kids' bodies, opening the border so more Laken Rileys die, releasing murderers from prison. All so Jane Fonda and other people can feel better about themselves,” she continues.
“And that is why it is not healthy empathy, but it’s actually toxic empathy. Ignoring the true victims on the other side of the moral question,” she adds.
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Writers should stop inserting distracting gender ideology into entertainment.
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