A predictable closing for Participant, the ESG film firm
Participant, a film firm purpose built to drag Hollywood even further left, has finally closed down. Good riddance. I had the goods on the meltdown three years ago.
“. . . of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema.”
Three years ago last month, I tried to make a joke of it:
Crafting clever jokes about Hollywood’s leftism has always been treacherous business because the truth is frequently more absurd than fiction . . . Did you hear the joke about the billionaire who purposely built a left-wing film studio because he thought Hollywood wasn’t lefty enough?
Thus began my profile of Participant, the film studio created by eBay co-founder Jeffrey Skoll. It was easy to forget the name, but not always the work. One inconvenient entry was Al Gore’s serially wrong Inconvenient Truth.
Who could forget that?
Today, Jeff Skoll closed the cinema curtain for the last time on his little ESG picture project and let go of all 100 employees, an ending the NYTimes introduced like this:
For 20 years, Participant Media has been Hollywood’s pre-eminent maker of activist entertainment, backing socially conscious films like “An Inconvenient Truth,” a climate change cri de coeur, and “Wonder,” about a boy with birth defects. Its movies have won 21 Academy Awards.
But the company never quite managed to do good while also making money, at least not consistently. Matt Damon in a fracking drama (“Promised Land,” a 2012 Participant effort) has a hard time competing with “Avengers: Infinity War” in 3-D.
That’s a bit overly charitable, as was the headline, which read “Participant, Maker of Films With Social Conscience, Calls It Quits.”
Well, okay, but let’s just look at two of the three films mentioned, starting with Promised Land. When I looked into its “social conscience” I found only useful idiots for OPEC:
Participant released Promised Land in early 2013, a propaganda effort aimed at killing the U.S. natural gas boom while it was still in its infancy . . . In the years since the film’s release the American energy boom has made the U.S. a dominant world energy producer for the first time in decades and the functional equivalent of energy independent for the first time in the lifetime of nearly everyone alive. Falling prices for abundant domestic natural gas also led electricity producers to switch away from using coal as their base fuel.
For each unit of energy, burning natural gas emits 50 percent less carbon than coal. Not coincidentally, the International Energy Agency reports total U.S. carbon emissions in 2019 were 5.4 percent lower than in 2013, despite a growing economy and population.
Unsurprisingly, Promised Land promoted baseless conspiracy theories about the American energy industry. But as it turned out, there was a real conspiracy hiding in the film’s closing credits:
The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal reported that Promised Land was partially financed by “Image Media Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media” … a “wholly owned” enterprise of the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). At the time, the UAE ranked “seventh worldwide in proven natural gas reserves.”
The United States is currently topping the world in natural gas production, by a lot, according to
.The Russians are number two. Would the regime media editors at the NYTimes consider it Participant’s “social conscience” if Vladimir Putin had funded Promised Land and then used the proceeds to send heavy armor rolling over Ukraine?
Then there is Inconvenient Truth, which had some inconvenient errors:
In October 2007, a British judge ruled An Inconvenient Truth had introduced “nine scientific errors” within a “context of alarmism and exaggeration” . . . An example of what the judge ruled to be a “distinctly alarmist” claim was the film’s assertion that melting ice in Antarctica and Greenland would result in a 20-foot sea level increase within the “near future.” The film horrifically presented this outcome by showing computer-generated images of South Florida and Manhattan vanishing under the waves.
In truth, NASA’s online “Vital Signs of the Planet” database shows sea level increases since January 1993 to be averaging 3.3 millimeters per year—about one-eighth of an inch. Twenty feet is equivalent to 6,096 millimeters. So, at the current rate of sea level rise the 20-foot surge will be complete not in the “near future,” but after 1,847 years.
A lot can happen if you have almost 2,000 years to play with:
Adaptation to (very) slowly rising seas is also quite doable. Rotterdam, one of Europe’s largest, oldest, and most prosperous cities has been engineered to exist with most of it below sea level—significant parts 15 feet or more below.
So, don’t start building an ark just yet: We have options.
Another of Participant’s shoddy propaganda efforts was Slay the Dragon, a puff piece promoting the partisan fiasco that gave rise to Michigan’s ludicrous legislative redistricting commission:
Viewers not in the know might watch Slay the Dragon (2020) and come away thinking they have witnessed a victory against legislative gerrymandering by underfunded, apolitical grassroots citizen-activists in Michigan who vanquished sinister political professionals. At one point the film shows a leader of the deceptively named Voters Not Politicians (VNP) ballot campaign somberly speculating that the allegedly big money political establishment will outspend VNP by at least 4 to 1. And VNP founder Katie Fahey is presented as a newcomer to the political process who “doesn’t do politics for a job.”
Yes, sweet, politically innocent Katie …
What doesn’t make it into the film is what happened almost precisely two years earlier, the morning after the November 2016 election. That morning the Associated Press reported on Hillary Clinton’s concession phone call to then President-elect Donald Trump, and quoted the reaction of just one attendee of Clinton’s ill-fated “victory” party:
“My disappointment makes me not trust the rest of the world,” said Katie Fahey, who had flown to New York from Grand Rapids, Michigan, wearing a red pantsuit, expecting a victory party. “I don’t even want to go out. I want to wear sweatpants and curl myself up in a corner.”
Naive young Katie’s rag-tag little group of supposedly neophyte politicos managed to rake in $13.9 million from mostly out of state lefty donors. Her supposed “big money establishment” opposition in Michigan scraped together just $3.2 million, all of it from local sources. Rather than get outspent 4-1, Katie and the supposed rookies had a greater than 4-1 advantage.
Gee, which side was the “Dragon” that needed slaying?
Close followers of Michigan politics know the rest of the story, which I wrote up in January:
. . . on December 21, 2023, a panel of three federal judges ruled that 13 of Michigan’s state legislative districts were drawn in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The redistricting maps were successfully challenged by what the court described as “nineteen African-American Detroiters who live in thirteen different Michigan House and Senate districts that each include a portion of Detroit” who sued because they thought “the boundaries of their districts were drawn predominantly on the basis of race.” [ . . .] Rebecca Szetela, former chair of the redistricting commission, testified that their map drawing process “became all about race.” In their December 21 order, the federal judges quoted Szetela again, this time from the commission’s hearings, when she encouraged the creation of map lines that would “get rid of the highly concentrated [African-American] districts.”
I titled that analysis: Michigan’s Racist Redistricting “Reform”
So, thanks for all that Katie!
And a big thank you to Participant and Jeffrey Skoll for 20 years of misleading the “social conscience” of America. Take a big ESG bow for us all . . . and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
The four-part profile of Participant for Capital Research Magazine is here:
Part 1: Dragging Hollywood Even Further Left: Participant Media
Part 2: Dragging Hollywood Even Further Left: Follow the (Dark) Money
Part 3: Dragging Hollywood Even Further Left: Useful Idiots for OPEC
Part 4: Dragging Hollywood Even Further Left: Promoting the Agenda
For more on Jeffrey Skoll and Participant, there are InfluenceWatch profiles:
And finally, for more on Al Gore and the real Inconvenient Truth, there is Al Gore’s 30 Years of Climate Errors: An Anniversary Analysis: