They Spent Millions Building "Anti-Woke Hollywood." This Is What They Got.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comElon Musk spent part of this week using the platform he owns — the one he paid forty-four billion dollars for — to promote a movie.And he wasn’t pushing the next Top Gun. He was pushing a tiny revenge picture called Citizen Vigilante, directed by Uwe Boll, about a man who hunts down people the film portrays as immigrants and builds to a graphic attack on a Muslim family in their own home. Critics hated it. Audiences barely registered it. But a slice of the online right suddenly started treating it like the future of entertainment.For those of you lucky enough not to have seen this utter garbage, here’s the plot.It follows a man who takes the law into his own hands, hunting down people the film paints as immigrants — Arab, African, Muslim. It builds to its climax with a graphic attack on a Muslim family in their home, after the family’s son gets accused of a sexual assault. Wife, kids, all of them. That’s the payoff. That’s the movie’s idea of catharsis.And here’s the part that tells you everything. For a film this obsessed with painting immigrants as a threat, it can barely be bothered to show any of them doing anything wrong. Critics caught it right away — the people the main character hunts never actually commit the crimes that are supposed to justify hunting them. They’re guilty because the movie says so. It despises an entire category of people and then can’t build a single coherent story around its own hatred.Sound familiar?This isn’t really about one movieI watched some of it. I read the reviews. And I realized pretty quickly this isn’t about one bad film. It’s about what happens when a political movement spends years promising to build its own Hollywood, and this is one of the flagship products it ends up celebrating.Let’s start with who made this thing.If you’re not a movie nerd, let me explain Uwe Boll. Hollywood has plenty of bad directors. Uwe Boll is famous for being the shining example of one. For most of the 2000s, when critics wanted a name for the absolute floor of filmmaking, his came up before they even finished the question. He made movies out of video games that people walked out of. At one point he challenged his own critics to boxing matches — got in the ring, and fought them. You can’t make this s**t up.I’ve sat through some rough stuff in my life. I’ve watched police training videos with more narrative tension than this movie. And I’m not bringing Boll up to be cruel. I’m bringing him up because it matters who your movement’s flagship artist turns out to be. When the right finally rallies around a film and the man behind the camera is the single most mocked director of the last quarter century, that tells you something about the talent pool.Then there’s the star: Armie Hammer. A genuine leading man a few years ago, who vanished from major films after a wave of allegations of sexual misconduct, emotional abuse, and graphic BDSM and cannibalism fantasies — and who’s now attempting a comeback with the only studio willing to take him on.The empire that promised everythingHere’s where it gets bigger than one bad movie. Because this wasn’t some fringe Kickstarter. Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing told conservatives they were going to build an entertainment empire to rival Hollywood. Movies, television, kids’ programming, animation, streaming — the whole thing. And they raised enormous money doing it, because millions of people genuinely believed Hollywood was about to become obsolete and they wanted to fund what came next.Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying people on the right can’t make good art. Of course they can. There are great films and shows made by people all over the political map, and audiences don’t check a filmmaker’s voter registration before they fall in love with a movie. That’s not the issue.The issue is what all that money and all those promises actually produced.Because look at the results. Years in. The defining cultural moment this movement gets to celebrate is Elon Musk boosting a Uwe Boll picture. Critics on the left and the right are calling it incoherent and amateurish. Even people sympathetic to the politics are quietly admitting the filmmaking is bad. The action doesn’t track. The characters are cardboard. And reviewers caught something almost funny — a movie this obsessed with painting immigrants as dangerous can’t even be bothered to show much crime.And here’s the rich irony of it all. These are the same people who spent years complaining that Hollywood only cared about messaging instead of storytelling. That every movie was a lecture. And then the first film they rally behind is almost nothing but messaging. They became the exact thing they said they were fighting.Propaganda has an expiration date. Stories don’t.So why does this keep happening? Why does a movement with this much money keep producing culture that nobody outside the movement wants to watch? Here’s my read, and it comes down to a difference between propaganda and storytelling that these guys refuse to understand.Think about the movies people still watch twenty and thirty years later.Rocky isn’t really about beating a Russian. The Dark Knight isn’t about hating criminals. The first John Wick isn’t about killing gangsters. Nobody walks out of The Dark Knight arguing about Gotham’s tax policy. They walk out because Bruce Wayne is a wrecked human being carrying something he can’t put down. Every one of those movies starts with a person. Something was taken from them — a wife, a mentor, a dog — and you feel it before any bigger idea shows up. The humanity comes first. The meaning comes later, if it comes at all. That’s the order that works, and it’s why people remember them.Citizen Vigilante does the exact opposite. It starts with who you’re supposed to hate. The main character isn’t grieving anything. He’s just a man who hates. He records manifestos, posts them online, rants about his grievances — and if that sounds less like a movie hero and more like the video a mass shooter leaves behind, that’s because there’s barely any daylight between the two. The film has no human being at the center of it. It just has a target list.Again — sound familiar?That’s the whole tell. When your art starts from “who do we want the audience to hate” instead of “who do we want them to feel something for,” you get a recruitment tape with a budget. Audiences can feel that difference even when they can’t name it, and it’s a big part of why this stuff rarely travels past the people who already agree with it.Distribution was never the same thing as cultureWhich brings me back to Musk, because he’s the distribution engine now. He owns the platform. He can put anything in front of fifty million people by tomorrow morning, and that is real power.But distribution was never the same thing as culture, and this is the part they keep missing.Musk can force you to hear a song. He can’t force you to love it. He can put a movie in front of your face. He can’t make you quote it ten years from now, or show it to your kid, or drive across town to see it again. That gap — between what somebody can make you see and what you actually choose to carry with you — is where culture lives. And nobody has ever figured out how to buy their way across it.They keep treating this like a distribution problem, like the right platform and the right billionaire would finally make the audience show up. But politics can get somebody to buy a ticket once. Only storytelling gets them to buy the second one.So here’s the funny part. The people making this stuff keep insisting audiences have been brainwashed — that the only reason their movies don’t connect is that everybody’s been programmed by the other side. And maybe. Or maybe audiences just know the difference between a story and a sermon. Hollywood has made plenty of terrible movies over the years, and here’s the thing nobody on either side wants to admit: bad progressive movies bomb and bad conservative movies bomb, for the exact same reason. Nobody owes you two hours of their life just because you happen to share their politics. That’s not censorship. That’s not bias. That’s just how entertainment has always worked.You’ve got a movement convinced Hollywood is dead and the culture belongs to it now — one blockbuster away from winning the whole thing. And after all the money and all the promises, the flagship it’s celebrating this week is a Uwe Boll revenge picture its own side can’t honestly call good.So judge the project by what it makes, not by the billionaire promoting it. Because the audience that actually loves you back is the one thing on this earth that isn’t for sale. And until they understand that, they’ll keep spending — and they’ll keep ending up right here.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!