admin
Dennis Quaid’s appearance on Jesse Watters Primetime was a welcome burst of common sense amid Hollywood’s predictable pieties, as the veteran actor bluntly declared that “Hollywood still hates Reagan” while lamenting the industry’s flight to shoots outside Los Angeles and overseas. His comments weren’t a fluke of cable chatter — Quaid praised efforts to bring filmmaking back to American soil and argued that patriotic storytelling is being squeezed out by a left-leaning entertainment culture.
The policy conversation Quaid and Jesse Watters pushed onto national television is not theoretical: President Trump has publicly urged Congress to establish a federal film production tax credit to reverse the hollowing out of domestic production, a practical proposal that would level the playing field against Canada and the U.K. where generous incentives have lured countless projects. This isn’t about subsidies for showbiz elites; it’s about defending an American industry and the jobs tied to it from ideological and financial outsourcing.
Quaid went further, cheering the idea of “Make American Movies Great Again” and saying the country needs its own storytellers to restore a sense of shared national purpose. That line may rile the coastal elites, but it captures a straightforward truth: culture matters, and when Hollywood abandons mainstream audiences for ideology, our cinematic mirror breaks.
The mechanics behind the exodus are no mystery — runaway production driven by state and foreign tax credits has long tilted the scales away from California and Los Angeles, turning what used to be an engine of domestic culture into a global shopping list for cheapest production value. Conservative critics have warned for years that tax policy and hostile regulatory environments invite outsourcing, and the result is fewer American-made jobs and less storytelling rooted in national pride.
Predictably, Quaid’s appearance drew outrage from the usual corners and even calls for boycotts from some fans who learned of his political leanings, which only proves the point: Hollywood’s intolerance for dissent is a business risk as much as a cultural one. The backlash underscores why a federal incentive matters — if studios face market pressure to chase incentives elsewhere, bold artists who buck the orthodoxy will be squeezed out of the industry they helped build.
If America wants to reclaim its culture and its jobs, conservative leaders and lawmakers should champion targeted, temporary production credits that bring work back without rewarding runaway spending. It’s time to stop apologizing for patriotism and start building policy that fosters American-made movies, scripts that celebrate liberty, and an industry that answers to the public instead of to an ideological elite.
