Patrick Radden Keefe's must-read piece in The New Yorker, “How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success,” is, as you gather from that title, mostly about how we wouldn't be in the precarious situation we‘re in without the Mark Burnett-produced reality show, “The Apprentice,” which restored and burnished the career and the image of the oft-bankrupt Donald Trump. Hell, in some ways, it created that image. And, god, the lengths they had to go to to make him seem like an intellilgent and intelligible human being. Reading, you think, it’s not just “sad”; it's a fucking crime.

And I didn't even mention Trump's mobsters reference yet. 

Anyway, amidst all that, there's the following quote that made me flash back to all the whiny conservative complaints about how they can't be all whiny and conservative in Hollywood for fear of a “liberal McCarthyism.” Never mind Jon Voight, never mind Kelsey Grammer. Never mind that the real blacklist in Hollywood in the 1940s/50s was the result of collusion between right-wing and often anti-Semitic forces in the U.S. Congress (HUAC), the FBI, Hollywood (the MPA) and business (Red Channels); these guys feel bad because they can't wear their MAGA hats to a table reading for “Fresh Off the Boat.” Cry me a river. If you want to make America great again, learn some fucking history. 

Here's what made me think of that. Is Burnett, the man who gave us Donald Trump, and who is still a Trump friend, on the outs in Hollywood? The opposite:

He had now achieved such a level of power that, even in reflexively liberal Hollywood, his association with Trump was discussed mostly in whispers. Many people who spoke to me for this piece would not do so on the record, citing fears of being blacklisted.

I assume they mean blacklisted by him and his shows and his production company. Only a few, like Tom Arnold and Jimmy Kimmel, have spoken up or out. It points out the lie of “liberal McCarthyism.” There's no collusion, per the real Hollywood blacklist of the ‘40s and ’50s; there's just individual tastes, and everyone is worried about stepping on the toes of the powerful—whether they‘re on the left or the right. 

It’s not criminal, it's just sad.