2024 was a cultural earthquake but the Left isn’t giving up any of its cultural monopolies. Consider the elite freakout in the media over After the Hunt.

After the Hunt stars Julia Roberts, but is not too dissimilar from a variety of predecessors like David Mamet’s now ancient 1992 play Oleanna which foreshadowed much of the current campus insanity, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and the recent and much more enthusiastically pro-cancel culture Tar in staging a very theatrical drama about intellectuals caught in a web of lies, manipulation and accusations. The prototype of this sort of thing goes back to French novels, but we needn’t go that far down the cultural rabbit hole.

The tagline for Olenna is “Whatever Side You Take, You’re Wrong”.

You can see it in the trailer here, but the actual play is better than the movie. (Usually is.)

After the Hunt lacks Mamet’s bracing use of language to expose people’s inner agendas. It’s daring, by today’s standards in that dares to suggest that a black lesbian making a sexual assault accusation against a white man might not be fully trustworthy, is actually mediocre, has a history of plagirism and will become a power player leveraging an accusation about an assault that may not have ever happened.

After the Hunt is about #MeToo and cancel culture, but it has no ‘right’ side. None of the characters are really trustworthy. There are some lines that people who want to see a shot taken at smug wokeness will enjoy, but the larger picture is of a broken culture where no one can trust each other.

But that’s enough for leftist harpies, headed by the execrable Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times to descend on the movie. Her ‘external’ clickbait headline is ‘The New Julia Roberts Movie Seethes With Anti-Woke Resentment’.

There’s a few problems with that (beginning with the fact that Michelle Goldberg has a New York Times column which she can use to spew her hatred at the world) including After the Hunt’s pedigree.

The movie was released by Amazon’s MGM which is currently the most woke of any part of the industry. (Yes, more so than Disney.)

Its director, Luca Guadagnino, was a member of the Communist Party. Wokes loved him when he directed Call Me by Your Name about a gay teenage romance. And being an old school Italian leftist, it’s quite possible Luca has no enthusiasm for wokeness or cancel culture, he also hates Trump and American conservatives.

Leftists have fastened on to Brian Grazer, After the Hunt’s producer, an industry superstar, who admitted to voting for Trump. Yes, Grazer produced Hillbilly Elegy (he’s a longtime partner with Ron Howard), but before this he was a Jewish (or half-Jewish) liberal who liked Obama.

Reviews for After the Hunt are predictably bad. And while the movie doesn’t seem all that ‘whelming’, if its message had been the opposite, it would have been an Oscar nominee a few years ago. An industry world in which Get Out won Oscars simply because it hated white people has little credibility when it comes to quality.

Take Harvey Weinstein’s pre Hunting Ground, a nonsense documentary claiming that everyone was being raped on campus (After the Hunt’s title may be riffing on it) which was celebrated even when it got everything wrong.

There’s a reason Oleanna disappeared while Tar was celebrated. The Left has a particular narrative it wants to tell and anything that gets in the way must be shut down.