During her viral acceptance speech for the Screen Actors Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award on Sunday, Jane Fonda looked back to the start of her career. “I made my first movie in 1958,” she said. “It was at the tail end of McCarthyism, when so many careers were destroyed. Today, it’s helpful to remember, though, that Hollywood resisted.”
Sadly, McCarthyism has become relevant again in Hollywood over the last year. “In my lifetime, I haven’t seen anything like this,” says actress Poppy Liu. Best known for her role as Kiki on HBO’s Hacks, she’s also a vocal critic of the war in Gaza. Liu has spoken at the Palestine Festival of Literature as well as last year’s Oscar-night rally for Gaza on Hollywood Boulevard, and currently coordinates fundraising for three displaced families in Gaza. “I think people keep saying ‘McCarthyism’ because that’s the closest example where a political stance is causing people to have professional repercussions.” Liu and I are talking about the backlash pro-Palestinian activists in Hollywood have faced in the 18 months since the Israel-Hamas War began. “There’s so many scare tactics,” she says. “People are self-censoring because they aren’t aware of what the repercussions are. I know so many friends in the industry that are like, ‘I can’t be visibly pro-Pal. Otherwise, I don’t think I’m going to work again.’ ” As Liu points out, McCarthyism is the closest forerunner to what the industry is seeing now.
For most, the Hollywood Blacklist of the 1940s and ’50s means grainy black-and-white clips of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) asking indignant studio-era screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?” It’s US Capitol Police physically removing writer John Howard Lawson for loudly denouncing the committee instead of answering that question. It’s TCM heartthrob Robert Taylor, aka Mr. Barbara Stanwyck, getting raucous applause from the spectators for saying of his leftist colleagues in Hollywood, “If I had my way about it, they’d all be sent back to Russia or some other unpleasant place.”
An ugly Cold War relic, the blacklist was the result of craven collusion between the major film studios and HUAC to ban leftist actors, writers, and directors, or simply suspected leftists, from working. It would be nice to blame Republicans, but loyalty oaths first began under the Truman White House, and control of Congress changed hands repeatedly in those years. In Los Angeles, it began in 1946 with The Hollywood Reporter’s editor Billy Wilkerson publishing names of suspected or self-proclaimed reds and communists. Nicknamed “Billy’s blacklist,” it supplied a handy target list for ambitious red-baiters on Capitol Hill who used it to build their own. The blacklisters hounded some openly, grandstanding for newsreel cameras and radio mics, and grilled others behind closed doors. It’s a moment of such shameless moral cowardice that many believed it could never happen again. And yet, in this post-shameless Trump 2.0 America of ours, lists and whisper campaigns are back. With work drying up and clients being dropped, it’s understood by many that to speak out means to end your career. While we’re definitely not at the level of the agreed-upon, industry-government collusion of the 1940s, the clear signs that began it are here—this time to silence pro-Palestinian voices in the entertainment industry, the university, and elsewhere.
Popular
"swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe →
“A lot of people are uncomfortable speaking publicly,” says actor Amin El Gamal. El Gamal, seen in shows like Good Trouble, Prison Break, and the indie movie Breaking Fast, who chairs SAG-AFTRA’s committee on Middle Eastern and North African members and co-organized the SAG-AFTRA & Sister Guild Members for Ceasefire petition. That petition sounded the alarm about a new “McCarthyist repression” in the industry to deny work to pro-Palestinian artists. “It can be tricky to document this, because you almost never really know why you don’t get a job in our industry,” says El Gamal. “Anti-Palestinian decision-makers intentionally hide behind this ambiguity. Plus, things have been slow post-strike, so it can be hard to say what’s what.” (El Gamal was referring to the overlapping strikes mounted by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America [WGA] last spring.)
Given the blacklist’s toxic history, and sympathy for Palestine among many A-listers, nobody in Hollywood wants to be seen reprising it—but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to do it. “I don’t know what phase we’re in right now,” says Liu, “but it feels like it was phase two, at least, of the pro-Palestine repercussions. When Susan Sarandon was dropped from [United Talent Agency], that was really public. When Melissa Barrera was dropped from Scream, that was really public.” Now, however, Liu says, “the repercussions are more covert.”
Kendrick Sampson, who costarred in HBO’s Insecure and plays Quincy Jones in Antoine Fuqua’s upcoming Michael Jackson biopic, has a similar sense of this murky moment. As a cofounder and the president of the racial justice nonprofit BLD PWR, he’s long been an industry activist in LA and his hometown of Houston. In 2020, his Instagram followers and CNN viewers saw him hit with LAPD rubber bullets on a livestream during the George Floyd protests, and he has challenged industry leaders on racist imagery and stories and to divest from the police. “It’s a very tricky circumstance right now,” he says. “Because there’s the excuse of Hollywood corporations offering so little work. The assumption would be that I and other people who are speaking out who have larger platforms and longer résumés would be on a shorter list of people available for the few projects that are out and would be working somewhat. And I’m not saying that everybody’s not struggling, but some of it lends itself to the possibility of blacklisting.”
That possibility looks more and more like reality in view of the past year of backlash in Hollywood and political action in DC designed to silence pro-Palestinian speech. Congress held HUAC-style show trials targeting college presidents; Trump threatened to revoke student visas and deport pro-Palestinian protesters, and then announced his plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The original Hollywood blacklist began in a similar climate of state-sanctioned backlash, and without Washington’s help. Billy’s blacklist formed the basis for a sweeping set of subpoenas in 1946 to coerce testimony about leftists in the film industry. HUAC cited a group of mainly writers who refused to comply—known later as the “Hollywood 10”—with contempt of Congress. Within days, Hollywood’s top executives, meeting at the Waldorf Hotel in New York, distanced the industry from the 10 by issuing the Waldorf Statement. Signed by Louis B. Mayer, Darryl Zanuck, and Jack Warner among others, and cosigned and by the group’s adviser, James F. Byrnes, President Harry Truman’s former secretary of state, it flatly stated, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods…. To this end we will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives.”
Goaded on by a red-baiting press’s go-get-’em headlines and the film industry’s total capitulation, HUAC continued its hearings for years and made itself the only way for those accused of far-left politics to clear their names and go back to work. The price, however, was steep: In order to revive their careers, the accused had to publicly renounce their beliefs and cooperate with HUAC by naming other leftists. Sooner or later, everyone from Lucille Ball and Gary Cooper to Sterling Hayden and Elia Kazan testified. HUAC exponentially expanded Billy’s blacklist. HUAC’s list, never published or clearly defined, kept hundreds from working. It also ensured that movies stayed silent on vital social issues. The civil rights and labor movements enjoyed a postwar boom of progress. You could read about it in the papers, but you’d hardly know it from 1950s movie screens. The Cold War right scored its biggest culture-war win: It silenced Hollywood’s progressive left from late 1947 into the 1960s.
While we haven’t reached that level of oppression yet, one thing our era and the 1950s share in common is a fear of speaking out. At one union event, El Gamal recalls, “So many people came up to me and they were like, ‘This company was firing people for this.’ And there was either a spoken or unspoken rule that you couldn’t post or talk about the genocide. And I was like, ‘OK, can you share more info?’ And then they would just freeze. Their fear of retaliation is so strong…. I think the fact that so many people express support behind closed doors but are afraid to speak up demonstrates the level of repression.”
The silence is understandable. People’s careers are at stake. On Capitol Hill, it’s already 1947 again. In early 2024, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce staged a camera-ready HUAC revival to shut down campus dissent. Under the agitprop title “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism,” MAGA Republicans presented themselves, straight-faced, as crusaders against antisemitism—minus their own talking points, caucus members, and dinner guests, of course. Just as with HUAC’s inquisitions, the hearings resulted in headlines, high-profile firings, and institutional collusion within the private sector. Former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and her counterpart at Harvard, Claudine Gay, lost their jobs. The media circus ensured that the image-conscious and donor-prostrate Ivy League schools abandoned their presidents just as the Hollywood guilds of the 1940s and ’50s left their blacklisted members to twist in the wind. The Senate Judiciary Committee held similar campus antisemitism hearings led by Senator Lindsay Graham. By that time, like later HUAC celebrity-driven hearings featuring witnesses who named names, the people summoned before the committee knew what the senators wanted to hear and said it for them.
Last October, New York Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres crossed the line to entertainers, going after popular streamer Hasan Piker, whose show mixes gaming and satirical political commentary for eight to nine hours a day. In a campaign-season publicity stunt to woo pro-Israel voters, Torres sent letters to Twitch and Amazon to “stop popularizing” Piker for his “amplification of antisemitism.” The gambit endeared Torres to donors, but in an era of free speech repression and ideological retribution, there’s little difference between publicity stunts and witch hunts.
To be sure, silencing pro-Palestinian sentiment in Hollywood hasn’t required any outside encouragement from Congress or the political press. The October 7 attack happened as SAG-AFTRA entered the closing weeks of its strike against AMPAS, the association of producers and studio bosses. Actors felt its impact immediately. SAG-AFTRA suspended picket lines, citing an abundance of anti-terrorist caution. On October 13, SAG-AFTRA released a one-sided statement on the Hamas-Israel war, which opened, “SAG-AFTRA deplores and condemns the horrific acts of aggression against the Israeli people on Oct. 7”—but offered no show of compassion for Palestinian civilians, whose deaths had already reached into the thousands. “We were told that they suspended picketing ‘in fear of retaliation’ around the October attack at a time when we should have been escalating the fight against the studios, right?” says Sampson, who now looks back and wonders, “Should I make any association with suppression?”
The union’s show of sympathy for only Israeli victims has yet to be corrected, and it left many guild members determined to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians without an institutional voice. El Gamal worked internally to get SAG-AFTRA to issue a revised statement, then publicly as a co-organizer of the SAG-AFTRA and Sister Unions for a Ceasefire petition. That petition also pushed to defend its members against McCarthyite tactics of intimidation and blacklisting. A SAG-AFTRA officer reassured El Gamal that the union stood firm against blacklisting—but one can’t help but wonder how SAG plans to do that. Blacklisters aren’t holding open hearings, and fear of retribution can quickly subdue the desire to speak out.
El Gamal says he now hears of “producers and production companies with Excel documents and WhatsApp groups with prominent casting directors sharing lists of people who they see speaking out. I heard at one point there was talk of building an app just to collect names of people who express sympathy with Palestinians on social media.” Still, he says that the same general pattern holds whenever he has pressed people for more information—details become scarce, and a chilling silence sets in.
Pro-Palestinian advocates like Poppy Liu hear ominous overtones in that silence. “As time went on and it became more evident in popular culture and just mass consciousness of what was happening in Gaza, as people were educating themselves, the repercussions became much more covert,” Liu says. “And in this next phase, they won’t name that that’s what it is.”
Liu cites her own experience over the last year, and hears similar stories from friends who feel beset by a backlash that won’t come out in the open. As she announced on her Instagram account, a negotiated job offer with set terms vanished at the last moment: “In a highly unprecedented and unprofessional move, I just had a job offer for a TV show with a 6-year contract suddenly retracted yesterday with no real explanation, and I’m almost certain it’s because I’ve been outspoken against the genocide of Palestinians.”
“The industry is pretty Zionist,” Liu says, “but it’s also small, and everyone talks. I don’t want to reveal stories of friends of mine. But as I was looking into stuff, I knew that one agent had let go two of my personal friends very suddenly. Objectively, these two people are very much rising stars at the top of their career and were suddenly dropped from their agency. And their agents just weren’t able to even come up with a reason. They were just like, ‘We just don’t feel like we’re the right fit suddenly anymore. We feel like we can’t get people interested in you.’”
That, too, is a throwback to the 1950s. Russian émigré director Lewis Milestone recalled that back then, even though HUAC canceled his interview and never declared him “unfriendly,” his career dried up. The mere association landed him on “something worse, a grey list—which was bad enough. It took a long, long time to get rid of it. You had adversaries, you see, but you never knew who they were, so you couldn’t face them.… You couldn’t put your finger on it; you couldn’t accuse anybody because they were all looking out the window-—everybody was innocent. That’s when I went to Europe. I left in 1950, and I didn’t come back until the middle of 1955.”
For Kendrick Sampson, the attempt to silence him was a far more overt throwback to the tactics of the 1940s. It even resulted in an actual list. On October 17, 2023, Sampson posted a series of images to his Instagram page beginning with a Slow Factory repost that called the bombing of the l-Ahli Baptist Hospital “genocide.” At the time, Sampson had an association with Ashlee Margolis, founder of The A-List, an organization Variety describes as at “the forefront of brand integration with celebrities.” As Margolis describes her business, “Our agency specializes in the juxtaposition of influence and authenticity. We create and nurture relationships between brands and influencers.” That is, they hope to give high-end brands like Armani Exchange or Veuve Clicquot a currency outside of Bond movies and Mar-a-Lago brunches by getting celebrities with street cred to use them in public—i.e., people like Kendrick Sampson. Sampson’s politics meshed with hers to a point, but things got a little too authentic for Margolis when Sampson recirculated the Slow Factory post. As an influential pro-Israel activist, Margolis coordinated celebrities’ wearing yellow Bring Them Home hostage awareness ribbons to the 2024 Golden Globes. Sampson got an e-mail from her that day: “Kendrick this is mis-information that has to come down asap. that bomb was a mis-fire from Hamas please please check your facts b/c it’s very very dangerous!”
The IDF denies responsibility for the l-Ahli bombing, and officials with Human Rights Watch did cast doubt on the IDF’s responsibility, but they also made clear that an on-site study was impossible because of the ongoing fighting. Conclusive assessment of responsibility for the attack has never been reached. “I posted that [Slow Factory post] and then immediately got e-mails from Ashlee demanding me to take it down,” Sampson says. He refused, and remains amazed that a brand promoter would tell him how or what to post. “No one has ever had the audacity to suggest that.”
Sampson considered his association with Margolis over, but soon learned she was prevailing on well-known producers, actors, and directors Sampson has worked with, as well as donors and consultants to BLD PWR, to get him to take the post down. Sampson declines to name whom Margolis contacted publicly, but in her group e-mail, she argued to them that his posts provoked antisemitism: “I saw that Kendrick did a big post blaming the Jewish people and i emailed him twice to take it down and also called someone I know who works with him. He is spreading Mis information and adding to the hate .. ‘kill the Jews’ is now being chanted all over the world …. Kendrick is my friend who I have supported for many years now with his activism and silly things like gifting and events. This isn’t fair. I know he stands on the side of truth. If you don’t mind asking him to take it down, I would be so grateful. I am asking more people to apply the pressure and doing what I can.”
Sampson recalls that Margolis “started calling my fundraiser, the development person for our organization, the person who runs all of our fundraising, to lay into him and tell him that he shouldn’t associate with me, that this is terrible, that he needs to get me to take it down right now, and threatening him and yelling at him, calling him back to back to back to back.”
“She just harassed the people around me until she realized they didn’t think what I did was wrong,” he says. As Sampson sees it, it was a strategy “to attack our funding, to attack my reputation. E-mailing lies, saying that I’m ‘encouraging screams around the world to kill all the Jews’ has very harmful implications. In my opinion, you’re threatening my career and my activism, the philanthropy work that we’re doing, the relationships that we have with the community and grassroots organizers.”
The Nation reached out twice to Margolis for comment, but got no response. Months later, Margolis’s name made the trades when an e-mail she issued to her staff plainly stated that The A-List was monitoring the feeds of, and refusing to work with, “anti-Israel” talent. “Gentle Reminder … Currently we are not working with anyone who on their feed is posting against Israel,” Margolis wrote. “If you are unclear if someone’s post is merely sympathetic to the tragic lives being lost in Gaza versus being anti-Israel, feel free to ask me. For example, anyone saying that Israel is committing a ‘genocide’ is someone we will pause on working with, as that is simply not true. While Jews are devastated by the loss of innocent lives in Gaza, we are feeling immense fear over the rising Jew Hatred all over the world. The Anti-Israel sentiments are causing a lot of Anti-Jew Rhetoric.”
While Margolis acknowledges the loss of innocent life in Palestine more than many pro-Israel activists, her instructions include asking her staff to vet the social media accounts of prospective clients, and made it clear that she is keeping a list of names—a list that functions in lockstep with the current Capitol Hill rationale of using anti-Semitism to silence Israel’s critics. As the proprietor of a private firm, she can work with whom she wants. But keeping a personal database of pro-Palestinian artists, combined with her earlier orchestration of a whisper campaign to pressure talent whose politics she disapproves of into silence, goes beyond an isolated personal choice, and starts to look an awful lot like classic blacklisting. In 1947, Billy Wilkerson’s personal blacklist turned into HUAC’s list, and it’s not hard to see how a list from another Hollywood media figure today could turn into something just as bad during Trump II.
Kendrick Sampson isn’t new to activism. He weighs the pushback against the larger fight to change public opinion around issues such as the Gaza War. “I’ve challenged studios directly, publicly,” he says. “Build Power has done transformative cultural work in this industry and created a list of demands directed at the studios, calling them out for their harm. There’s many reasons that people who are powerful in the industry might say, ‘He’s a problem.’ But there’s also many people who support our work who are like, ‘I want to work with you because of that.’ There’s people who want to work with us because we are standing up for the things that are most important, but the obstacles in their way, most times seem bigger than the people who might smile and seem supportive but secretly sabotage us.”
