'Gone With the Wind' Sales Are Through the Roof After HBO Yanked It from Streaming Service
Call it the gun control effect.
One day after HBO Max announced it was pulling the classic film “Gone With the Wind” from its streaming platform, sales of the 80-year-old movie put it at the top of the chart for movies being sold by Amazon.
It’s almost like Americans get so suspicious of liberals tempted to ban something they run out and buy it in droves.
Guns are a perfect example.
It’s basically a guarantee that when gun-grabbing politicians take power, or the gun-grabbing movement starts to build momentum, gun sales spike as Americans rush to ensure they’re not going to be deprived the right to bear arms written into the Second Amendment. (Virginia and the Democrats who took it over was just one of the latest states where the phenomenon was documented earlier this year.)
And while the ability to watch the movie of one’s choice doesn’t carry anywhere near the gravity of a right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, the development on Amazon is a pretty good indication that Americans don’t like liberals telling them how to live their lives.
As Breitbart reported Wednesday, the Vivien Leigh-Clark Gable romance, released in 1939, was the “number one bestselling film on Amazon early Wednesday morning, even though both DVDs and Blu-ray discs were sold out.” It remained in the top spot a little before 3 p.m. Wednesday.
It’s probably no coincidence it was sold out Wednesday at Walmart online, too.
It’s a development that isn’t so much surprising as completely predictable, and another example of how little liberals really understand the country they’re living in.
Number One.
They never learn. https://t.co/uJHrRTfNDQ— Praying Medic (@prayingmedic) June 10, 2020
In a nutshell, Americans know they’re decent people living in the greatest country the world has ever known. And decent people living in such a country have a right to resent being constantly attacked as though they and the country are the exact opposite.
The national revulsion that greeted the death of George Floyd, the man who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes on May 25, crossed party lines. Whatever comes from the second-degree murder charge against the now-former police officer involved in the case, the vast majority of the country was united in agreeing the death was unacceptable.
Then came the utterly unjustified riots, the looting and the now the seemingly endless attempts by the mainstream media and Black Lives Matter activists to force contemporary white Americans to assume a collective guilt for the treatment of African-Americans over the centuries and attack President Donald Trump at the same time.
It’s a movement lacking both morality and logic, which, of course, makes it irresistible to Hollywood and the entertainment world.
The HBO Max decision was spurred by a column published by the Los Angeles Times Tuesday by John Ridley, screenwriter of the 2013 Best Picture Winner “12 Years a Slave.”
“Let me be real clear: I don’t believe in censorship,” Ridley wrote. “I don’t think ‘Gone With the Wind’ should be relegated to a vault in Burbank. I would just ask, after a respectful amount of time has passed, that the film be re-introduced to the HBO Max platform along with other films that give a more broad-based and complete picture of what slavery and the Confederacy truly were. Or, perhaps it could be paired with conversations about narratives and why it’s important to have many voices sharing stories from different perspectives rather than merely those reinforcing the views of the prevailing culture.”
Well, let’s all be real clear.
“Censorship” is exactly what Ridley is talking about, even if liberals lack the guts or intellectual honesty to use the word. To take any work of art and present in a framework where it’s inherently shameful, a matter of disgrace, might not be to remove it from the public eye, but it is an attempt to smear it in the public mind. It’s censorship by another name.
Of course, there was no way Wednesday to be sure there wasn’t some less obvious reason for the sudden popularity of a movie that’s eight decades old.
Maybe a country bored to tears after months of stay-at-home orders suddenly had a hankering for a Civil War romance. Maybe speculators decided to corner the market on the movie after learning of the HBO Max decision.
But the Occam’s Razor answer is Americans know censorship when they see it. And they don’t like it — from liberal Democrats, from Hollywood elites, or from major entertainment corporations.
This is getting ridiculous. Maybe we should all just erase everything in history and walk around blindfolded. What a joke.
— Streaming Scoop (@StreamingScoop) June 10, 2020
Hattie McDaniel, was the first black to receive an Oscar because of that movie.
Do not try to erase history bcs it offends you but use it to move forward. Otherwise, generations WILL forget. They always bloody do without the right tools. Good or bad they should exist. pic.twitter.com/aVcU0JXVyp
— Sanoiro (@Sanoiro) June 10, 2020
Shades of Orwell’s 1984 – here’s an example of life imitating Art. In a bad way…..
— Michael S Ellis ⭐⭐⭐ (@MSEllis51) June 10, 2020
Year of the Boomerang. ?
— QathyJo⭐⭐⭐ (@CathyCValerio) June 10, 2020
When do we start burning books?
— smiley_mcmuffin (@SmileyMcMuffin) June 10, 2020
Watch….owning a copy will be a future hate crime ?
— Havana Harlow ?? (@JuJuB59524437) June 10, 2020
Are there parts of “Gone With the Wind” that are objectionable by today’s standards? Of course. And it’s a virtual certainty that any modern viewer of the film would know that.
(By the way, a personal opinion here: “12 Years a Slave” might have been more acceptable on by modern political mores, but as a movie it was barely watchable. It’s Oscar is a tribute to political correctness, and Hollywood’s Maoist obedience.)
What’s really at stake here is the increasing willingness of the woke left to try to dictate what Americans can and can’t watch on their own time – and the willingness of major corporations to grovel abjectly on demand.
There’s a lesson here, though.
When the mainstream media, liberal politicians and the Hollywood elite team up to try to destroy something – like gun ownership or one of the most popular movies ever made – they end up making it even more popular.
That unholy trinity has long been in alignment against Trump and his re-election in November. With the record they’re compiling, that could be very good news for Trump supporters.
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