Critical Drinker to actor-podcaster Clifton Duncan (6.26.22): “The original Star Trek series, from back in the ’60s…a lot of the writers had served in the military in WWII or Vietnam…giving them all kinds of experience…how chain of command works and how [soldiers] relate to each other in high-pressure situations, and also [they were different] in terms of general maturity about life. But when you look at it now, the people who are writin’ it, the worst hardship they ever had is that someone got their Starbucks order wrong or someone misgendered them on Twitter. That’s not comparable…they don’t have that same well of experience to draw on, and it shows.”

I’m not familiar with Duncan’s acting history (The Good Fight, Scrooge: A Christmas Carol with a Twist, Bluff City Law, NCIS: New Orleans) but he’s a smart, smooth-spoken interviewer, and his discussion with the Scottish CD (aka Will Jordan) definitely gets into the myopic, identity-driven, woke-terrorized nature of screenwriting these days…the climate is too nice, too safe, too sanitized.

YouTube commenter Konstantin Dahlin: “The people in the industry only virtue signal to the people around them. The people they fear. They do not dare step out of line because that can mean losing their jobs. This is a self-sustained ideology where you can have a room with 10 people and none of them is woke, and yet everyone will behave and talk as if they’re woke because they are afraid that some of them, or all, might be. Its a radical ideology that is self-sustained and based on fear. No one except authoritarian types and people with head issues [are cool with] this. Most people are normal, and normal people don’t like radical wokeness.”