DiCaprio Saves the Planet, Again

Hollywood’s favorite pretty-boy activist, Leonardo DiCaprio (neither Martin Sheen nor Robert Redford count these days), has a new movie out called The 11th Hour about how we’re all going to descend into an environmental hell that looks like something out of Constantine because of Big Bad Corporations and Libertarian Meanies (otherwise known as reasonable economists).  OK, that’s not the exact wording from the IMDB summary, but with DiCaprio making pronouncements like "industrial civilization has caused irreparable damage," it might as well be.

Anyway, DiCaprio sent out a note plugging his film to John Kerry’s mega-email list, and Washington Whispers kindly published it for us.  But despite a trailer that starts out with a montage of chaos and disaster and then proceeds into a rapid-fire series of lefty experts telling us just how bad off we are (as well as a title card declaring us to be in "mankind’s darkest hour"), his movie is "not a portrait of a planet in crisis." No! Not at all! (Seriously, I’m glad that DiCaprio is finally coming around to the view that the so-called "climate crisis" has been blown way out of proportion.)

He also tells us that the film ends with a call for "restorative action through reshaping human activity." Through reshaping, eh? I guess that’s what through mandates, through coercion, through force has come to mean.  Well, thank goodness his film decidedly isn’t a portrait of a crisis — just imagine what he’d be resorting to then.