For the first time in eight years, Netflix lost subscribers in the U.S. — dropping a net 130,000 for the second quarter of 2019 — and added nearly 2 million fewer international customers than expected, sending the stock tumbling. Paid subscribers grew by 2.7 million, including 2.83 million internationally, almost half that of Netflix’s previous guidance of 5.0 million net adds (300,000 in the U.S. and 4.7 million for the international segment). Netflix had 151.6 million paid streaming subs as of the end of June.
Netflix shares fell more than 12% in after-hours trading. The company said the Q2 subscriber results were the result of a weaker content slate in the quarter, which drove fewer paid net adds than anticipated, and said price hikes also hurt subscriber additions. Over 100,000 Americans had already cancelled their Netflix subscriptions over the streaming giant’s threatened boycott of Georgia’s economy after the passage of the heartbeat law, but no mention of that by the PR team. Connections between Hollywood and government, and the Obamas in particular, are revealing a much bigger and much darker agenda at play.
Netflix lost 16 billion dollars in market value the day after the streaming giant’s Q2 financial report showed that it lost subscribers for the first time in 8 years. The company had projected to gain around 300,000 new U.S. subscribers, but actually lost around 130,000. Since the release of its quarterly report on July 17th, the company’s stock has continued to decline.
Visibly shocked analysts attempted to explain this dramatic downturn by blaming Netflix’s recent $2 increase to its basic membership plan, the general saturation of the streaming market in the United States, or the loss of a couple of popular old TV shows.
And yet, for Christian conservatives, Netflix’s poor report was not unexpected or surprising. After all, over 100,000 people pledged to cancel their Netflix subscriptions by signing the Personhood Alliance/Citizen Go and LifeSiteNews petitions after Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, threatened to boycott Georgia’s film industry over the passage of the heartbeat bill.
The media backlash
When announced, the petitions against Netflix attracted the attention of many major media outlets such as Newsweek and Fox who covered the story as an ongoing chapter in the American culture wars. Back in the early spring of 2019, as the Georgia heartbeat bill was getting ready to pass the legislature, a group of Hollywood actors, headed by the infamously pro-abortion actress Alyssa Milano, signed a letter vowing never to work in Georgia again if the legislature passed the heartbeat bill. Undaunted by the threats, the legislature passed the law. However, it wasn’t until Governor Kemp signed the bill into law that Netflix became the first major studio to attack the legislation, quickly followed by the gender-confused folks at Disney and their fellow Leftists at Time Warner.
The fact that the big money waited to threaten Georgia until after the bill became law is not surprising, however, because Hollywood makes a handsome profit from filming in a state that offers a 20% tax credit for major productions. The tax credit, like all reductions in taxes, benefited not only the people of Georgia who found jobs in the film industry, but also the liberal Hollywood companies themselves, which have been fleeing the anti-business dystopia of California.
The sound of silence
Coming off of several successful threatened boycotts of pro-family states by corporate America, the Hollywood elites were feeling pretty good about their immoral virtue-signaling on abortion and their threats against Georgia’s economy — that is, until Netflix’s quarterly report came out. As soon as it became clear that the pro-lifers’ campaigns to boycott Netflix had been successful, the media coverage of the boycotts went completely silent.
The boldness of the Hollywood elites in openly threatening a very large section of their client base (around 50% of the American people consider themselves pro-life), while shutting themselves out of a tax haven, is yet another indication that the cultural chasm which separates religious Americans from their secularized neighbors is increasingly unbridgeable for either side. More importantly, it is also an indication that the radical Left is no longer happy with the steady progress it has made since the 1960s to establish an atheistic cultural dominance. Now, the Left wants to completely silence dissenting Christians who dare to implement the biblical worldview through public policy.
Straight from the Marxist playbook
The idea of cultural supremacy, or hegemony, was one of the central principles of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. He viewed the cultural hegemony of the ruling class at the turn of the 20th century as the main obstacle to bringing about his desired worldwide communist revolution. Of course, at that time, cultural hegemony was solidly at the capitalist end of the spectrum and was supported by religious and folk traditions. Gramsci argued that, in order to create the necessary conditions for a communist state, communist values would have to become culturally hegemonic. In other words, before the revolution could succeed, the people would have to view communist ideals as being commonsense ideas. Marxists called this “politics without politics,” and it was one of the key principles of American Leftist community organizer Saul Alinsky, a man whom Barack Obama credited in his autobiography as shaping some of his thinking.
This conscious drive to achieve cultural hegemony explains why Hollywood is so blatantly iconoclastic. In other words, they set out to intentionally attack settled beliefs and destroy religious symbols and traditions. What the Soviet communists attempted to achieve with tanks and a nuclear arsenal, Hollywood has largely succeeded in achieving through a constant debasing of Western culture and religiosity. The institution of the family — defined as a married virtuous couple open to caring for the previous and the next generations, and of religion being the guide to such a virtuous life — has been under attack from Hollywood elites who are following Gramsci’s guidebook to create a Marxist State.
The play-by-play: Netflix and the Obamas
But going back to Netflix and the attempted pro-abortion Boycott against Georgia that backfired so spectacularly.
Why would Netflix in particular lead the way in so brazenly insulting conservative American’s distaste for the liberal “sacrament” of abortion? Why would they jeopardize their wildly successful march towards cultural hegemony with such a move? To find this out, we can go back to Barack Obama’s campaign promise to “fundamentally transform America.”
