We all understand what Ethan Hawke is talking about here, obviously, but my first reaction, frankly, was that he could be talking about the climate of woke terror that began to permeate the Hollywood-journo realm in ’18. This Robespierre climate finally began to weaken and dissipate in mid ’24, thank God, but it’s still with us to a certain, one-could-say-persistent extent.
Hawke’s 2026 words could be my own seven or eight years ago: “I never felt scared about what I was gonna say until ’18 or thereabouts. In which you feel, like, ‘oh, I have to be careful.’ There’s a fear in the air that I’ve never felt before. And it’s not America.”