Tony Gilroy’s Peabody acceptance rant against the “fascists” supposedly running America lands with extra irony now that his latest Star Wars project is cratering at the box office. While the director paints the Trump administration as the Empire reborn, real-world data shows the opposite: the same administration that Hollywood loves to demonize delivered record gun sales, historic concealed-carry reciprocity pushes, and the confirmation of three originalist Supreme Court justices who have already begun restoring Second Amendment protections the left spent decades eroding. Gilroy’s fictional Empire analogy collapses when you notice that the actual federal government under Trump reduced—not expanded—regulatory choke points on lawful firearm ownership, from rolling back Obama-era ATF guidance to championing national reciprocity legislation that would have made the right to bear arms portable across state lines.
For the 2A community the takeaway is straightforward: cultural institutions still dominated by coastal elites will weaponize every microphone to equate constitutional originalism with tyranny, even as their own franchises hemorrhage audiences tired of the sermon. The box-office verdict on Gilroy’s latest effort suggests viewers are voting with their wallets against the same preachy messaging that paints law-abiding gun owners as stormtroopers. Meanwhile, the real-world “rebellion” the left fears is simply millions of citizens exercising their enumerated rights—rights the current Court is finally treating as equal to the rest of the Bill of Rights rather than second-class privileges subject to endless bureaucratic veto.
The deeper implication is that Hollywood’s reflexive Trump-as-Emperor script has lost its power to shape public perception on core liberties. Every time a celebrity equates an administration that appointed pro-Second Amendment judges with galactic fascism, it underscores how disconnected the entertainment class remains from the millions of Americans who see the right to keep and bear arms as the ultimate check against actual tyranny, not a Hollywood plot device.
