Let’s Celebrate Freedom… from Hollywood

Beyond barbecue and fireworks; beyond neighborhood parades and sparklers; beyond watermelon and ice cream; the Fourth of July is first and foremost a celebration of freedom.

We commemorate the vision of our Founding Fathers who declared that we are each of us endowed by our Creator with the right to life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But Americans are facing a new tyranny today. The tyranny of “Big Tech” and a culture that wants to strip our children of their innocence and their right to a childhood unmarred by adult preoccupations with sex, violence and obscenity.

But we can strike a blow for freedom.

We can do it by voting with our pocketbooks.

Americans alone spent more than $15 BILLION on streaming video in 2019. And that’s before the COVID streaming boom! And for what? These streaming services don’t care about you. They don’t care about your family or your kids. They aren’t acting in your best interest.

Our most recent study revealed that streaming content can be far more explicit than what most families are used to from broadcast and cable, and often the parental controls are inadequate to protect children from explicit material.

Why are we giving these companies money to pump content into our homes that makes our jobs as parents even harder?

There is a better way.

Many Americans are dropping Netflix and Prime Video in favor of pro-faith, pro-family competitors like INSP, UP, Vid Angel, and PureFlix.

The Atlantic recently profiled this shift, pointing to the success of Vid Angel’s original production, “The Chosen.”

Have you heard about the hit Jesus TV show? The one that launched with a more than $10 million crowdfunding drive? And that streams for free from its own app, where the view counter has surpassed 194 million as of this writing? … By the standards of independent media, “The Chosen” is a success. On Easter Sunday, 750,000 people tuned in to live-stream the Season 2 premiere; for comparison, the first episode of HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” attracted 1 million viewers that same month.

There is a huge market for more of this kind of entertainment. But it’s a market that is being largely ignored by Netflix, HBO, Amazon and “Big Tech.”

If we want freedom – true freedom – from Hollywood’s corrupting influence, we need to be united in rejecting Big Tech. Let’s declare our Independence from Hollywood and instead support those streaming services that support our values.