If you’ve been complaining that we just don’t have enough entertainment that paints conservatives as totalitarians, HBO has been listening.
Hulu’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale has whipped feminists into a red hood-wearing frenzy, and Amazon’s got a show working the Trump-Nazi allusions hard. Now, HBO has greenlighted The Plot Against America. Nellie Andreeva of Deadline Hollywood reported on Nov. 8 that the new miniseries will be “frighteningly relevant and less farfetched following the Pittsburgh Synagogue massacre,” and will be provided by screenwriters Dave Simon and Ed Burns at the order of HBO. The alternate historical fiction plot (originally a novel by Philip Roth) follows aviator Charles Lindbergh’s fascistic rise to power in America, told from the perspective of a New Jersey Jewish family.
It’s worth noting that Dave Simon is no stranger to HBO -- his most recent labors have been for the show “The Deuce,” which portrays the 1970s porn industry of New York. It was “The Deuce” that triggered HBO’s hiring of an “intimacy coordinator” to supervise scenes of intimacy or abuse. Whether he will add “denounce conservatism as Nazism” to “normalize graphic sex at the expense of actors” on his list of lefty activist bona fides remains to be seen, but given the current direction of Hollywood it seems likely.
If The Plot Against America does turn out to be yet another media vehicle built to careen directly into Trump’s already constantly battered media profile, HBO should know that they are attempting to defame one of the most pro-Israel and pro-Jewish presidents in American history. Ben Shapiro has often spoken this way of the President, especially after the embassy move to Jerusalem, and Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu was very supportive of the President’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
