You’ve heard the expression a bunch of times by now: “Get woke, go broke.”

This simple four-word social media response often follows news stories about popular media events suffering huge financial losses after bending to Leftist diversity stereotypes. You heard it with the financial collapse of comic books, ratings dumps for popular television shows, and poor critical response of tentpole pictures. You’ll be hearing it a lot (a lot) with the upcoming James Bond movie, which is already rumored to be beyond subpar in quality.

Basically, what happens is this: 21st Century Diversity wardens swoop into an enjoyable or harmless franchise and immediately demand More Inclusion!!! at every step, even if it doesn’t make sense. Suddenly, the swashbuckling hero is replaced with a transsexual Muslim Filipina with a harelip. Or the smart-as-a-whip princess with the gorgeous figure becomes a corpulent Latina with a sassy attitude and an endless supply of meme phrases and hand gestures. All villains had to be good-looking white males.

Much of this started almost 20 years back, when the producers of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica series elected to replace the male comedic relief sidekick (Dirk Benedict, playing every character he’s ever played the same dopey way) with a tough-as-nails, scrappy woman with a drinking issue (Katee Sackhoff). There was good news and bad news: the good news was Sackhoff played the character way better than Benedict ever did, with a fascinating story of abuse and neglect turning the character into a driven survivor who never gives up. The bad news was she did such a great job that there was now a race to see what other changes producers could bring into tired storylines.

The Czar really liked Sackhoff’s brutal performance, and would have been okay if other franchises made changes of a similar nature.

Alas, this was not to be: from now on, producers and directors wanted to see just how much More Inclusion!!! they could jam into everything they could, whether or not it made sense or, in some cases, it was even plausible. See, it’s not just enough to consider replacing one of the Ghostbusters with a female; we had to replace all of them with three identical white females and one stereotypical black female.

But that’s nowhere near enough to ruin a franchise or even bomb a movie, because there’s no inherent reason that premise couldn’t work, or to put it the other way, there’s no reason that premise was certain to fail. The Czar thinks he knows why all these More Inclusion!!! books, films, shows, and series are all tanking.

The reason: because the viewers know it’s all horseshit.

Hollywood, whether it’s a movie, a show, or whatever, is the last freaking establishment that should be lecturing us about inclusion.

When a director or producer tries to sell us on the idea that women are every bit as good as men in a commanding or leadership role, well, it’s tough to accept this in the Me Too era. Yeah, we can buy a talking raccoon and a walking tree shooting apart alien spacecraft, but hearing about a fictional woman using her strength and intelligence to overpower the sexism of men is a little far-fetched when the movie was produced by Weinstein.

A couple of films starring a mostly-black cast tank at the box office, and it must be our fault because we’re all so racist, says Hollywood, whose record at hiring, using, starring, trusting, or rewarding black talent in the motion picture industry is worse than an Alabama Woolworth in 1950. Surely that’s our fault.

Perhaps what the last Terminator movie needed was a racially diverse cast, decided a room full of aging producers who are all white men that attend Temple Israel on Hollywood Boulevard.

And don’t get the Czar started about racist complaints about putting black actors in lead roles in the Star Wars or Marvel franchises when it’s soon revealed the so-called complaints started within (and were largely limited to) the films’ distribution offices as a way to fire up controversy and ticket sales.

The Czar could go on and on, and probably will, later when he’s been drinking and you’re already asleep. The point is that the people behind the Woke messaging—not just Hollywood, but the whole Woke movements—are such blatant hypocrites that it’s like hearing an overt atheist lecture you on why you need to attend religious services more often. It’s so out of character that it immediately rings hollow.

And it’s easy to point to a book, movie, or show after the release and say “Well, its preening lectures turned me off so I gave up on it.” That’s understandable enough. But audiences have been so beat up by this obvious hypocrisy that they already know to give up on something before giving it a chance. That’s why the Ghostbusters movie flopped on the first day: audiences already knew what it was going to be. That’s why the Picard show is getting such dismal reviews on Rotten Tomatoes: we don’t need sexist, racist, homophobic bastards screaming at us repeatedly about how awful we are as viewers when it comes to women, minorities, and gays.

Because we’re way ahead of you, there, guys (the Czar is pretty safe on using that word). And just like we don’t need Bernie Sanders lecturing us on how economics works, we really don’t need pop culture lecturing us on how society works. We’ve been part of it a long time, ourselves. So we skip your movie, your show, your book, your musical, or your concert and instead do things we’d enjoy. And that’s why you go broke.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.