How George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Missed the Moment

The hit play is an exercise in selective outrage and confirmation bias

George Clooney wants to warn America about the spread of paranoia, fear, and censorship. In the process, he made some history.

On Saturday, CNN aired a performance of a hit Broadway play Clooney co-wrote and starred in, making it the first Broadway play to be broadcast live around the world. The play highlights a time in American history when paranoia and fear ruined lives.

You might assume Clooney’s play explores Cancel Culture.

After all, so many disturbing controversies have erupted over the past decade. Maybe the A-lister co-wrote a play about Roland Fryer and Zac Kriegman’s doomed attempt to warn America about the false narrative about policing that claimed thousands of lives.

Maybe his play examines the paranoia, death, and destruction delivered by the COVID response. Maybe it explores how paranoia and groupthink gave America the Biden mental fitness cover up.

Thanks to Donagh Healy who, by becoming a paid subscriber, is directly supporting this substack and our message of free speech, anti-fragility, and hope.

But no, Clooney’s play doesn’t cover any of the events of the past decade.

Instead, Good Night, and Good Luck reaches back a half-century to remind Americans about McCarthyism. It highlights CBS newsman Edward R. Morrow’s clash with Joseph McCarthy over the senator’s infamous effort to root out communism in America.

Clooney’s fellow thespian Kevin Spacey also recently invoked the dangers of McCarthyism, the Hollywood blacklist, and the careers unfairly ruined. Americans should learn about McCarthyism, but like Clooney and Spacey, the arts and entertainment industries suffer from selective amnesia. In countless movies, shows, and plays, the entertainment industry lionizes those wrongly accused of being communists, but forgets that many in the film and theater scene really were members of the Communist Party.

Productions may depict them as noble dissidents standing up to a corrupt system, but in reality they supported one of the most corrupt systems history has ever seen, a system with a death count that approached 100 million people. As Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh detail in their book Red Star Over Hollywood, the Soviet Union really did infiltrate Hollywood. The Soviet’s useful idiots in America’s entertainment industry might depict themselves as free speech martyrs, but they supported a system that never missed an opportunity to imprison and murder artists who refused to fall in line.

Contemporary artists who continue to tell half truths and lies about American communism contribute to younger generations' naive view of history. Today lots of 20-somethings get warm fuzzies at the mention of the word socialism.

Even the term “Red Scare” invites younger generations to think of the 1950s as a time when America had nightmares about a monster under the bed that never really existed. You have to wonder how Hollywood would have framed history if, instead of aiding communists in the Soviet Union, our arts industry had snuggled up to Nazis in Germany.

But all the controversy about McCarthyism is, in one sense, beside the point.

Avoiding the Obvious

Clooney and his comrades don’t have to harken back to a pre-internet, even pre-ER(!) age to find an example of witch hunts run amok.

Too bad that for our most eminent storytellers, Cancel Culture remains the elephant in the room. For those eager to raise awareness about the ever present threat of mass madness, it also offers key advantages over McCarthyism. Cancel Culture is much more recent. Indeed, it’s still going on. And, as I recently outlined, it’s also been more destructive.

Hold on, though.

Clooney tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper that what’s happening today is even worse than McCarthyism. Maybe this is when Clooney heroically highlights Cancel Culture. Maybe this is when he admonishes his colleagues who so often choose to downplay, ignore, or even pretend Cancel Culture doesn’t exist. Maybe this is when he establishes himself as a principled defender of free expression.

Nope.

Turns out Clooney’s referring to the “fear stretching through law firms and universities” since President Trump moved back into the White House. He also highlights the threat Trump poses to media outlets. Institutions such as academia and the legacy media were long overdue for a reckoning. Trump delivered that, but did so in a predictably ham-handed way.

So, by all means, criticize him. Have at it.

But it’s like Clooney bought a ticket to a play called America, and took his seat during the intermission.