My kids have been telling me about the Hollywood pedophiles for a while now, courtesy of their own social media sources and the fact they were children of the Nickelodeon years when the channel dominated the tween (10-14) and teenage cable TV markets in the US and in many parts of the world.

Luckily I just bluntly steered them away from the live-action shows because I thought they displayed poor, bratty behaviours for kids, with the parents displayed as clueless, incompetent idiots – especially the fathers. Instead I kept the focus on the animated series (SpongeBob SquarePants, The Fairly OddParents, Danny Phantom, Avatar: The Last Airbender), which seem to have escaped this crap, probably because live humans were not involved for the predators to have fun with on-screen. In fact those four shows hold up very well to this day, with clever adult non-sexual messages and themes – not to mention subversive political themes (meaning not Left), which my kids have explained as being due to the huge Gen-X input into the shows.

As such I won’t be watching the new four-part documentary that has just appeared on the Apple+ streaming network (and others), “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV”:

The program chronicles years of horrors at Nickelodeon that included multiple convicted pedophiles on set, creepy sexual innuendo in television shows and interviews with former child actors who are still processing traumas.

Those horrors including promoting and hiring people who were already known to have sexual and other problems with women and kids, starting near the top after Nickelodeon settled a nasty sexual harassment lawsuit with a show creator named Dan Schneider:

Nickelodeon settled with the women, then proceeded to give Schneider even greater power and control over more shows. Schneider’s scripts included using child actors in scenes and scenarios with obvious sexual connotations. The documentary’s clips from episodes of “All That,” “The Amanda Show” with Amanda Bynes, “Victorious” with Ariana Grande and many others are jaw-dropping. 

The child actors knew it too, and were often uncomfortable with the scenes. If you don’t want to watch the documentary there are mercifully brief videos at the link, matched with current-day interviews with the now grown-up kids. And it does get worse, in all ways.

An actor named Brian Peck, who acted with kids on several shows, was convicted of child molestation for raping one of the kids, Drake Bell (there were others but the cops couldn’t get him on those):

According to Bell, Peck’s side of the courtroom was filled with Hollywood industry supporters at his sentencing in 2004. Oddly, the scandal of multiple convicted pedophiles targeting child actors at a major studio received comparatively little Hollywood press back then…After Peck completed his jail sentence, Disney hired him to work on their tween hit “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.” The company only fired him after media exposure, claiming they were unaware of Peck’s criminal background.

Bullshit, even with the lack of Hollywood press coverage (what a surprise) the fact is that Hollywood is a gossipy little place. Disney executives cannot have been that ignorant, especially of a conviction, and the article brings up the salient point:

If Dan Schneider and Nickelodeon were still churning out money-making hits, Hollywood would still be playing a game of “see no evil, hear no evil” in all likelihood.

In other words, to what extent is all this shit still going on in Hollywood? The place has been a sexual cesspit for child actors since at least the days of Judy Garland to Brooke Shields to Ellen Page.

Which brings me to that question of journalism and wokeness, courtesy of this article looking back ten years to the GamerGate controversy. This started when a “journalist”, Leigh Alexander, who covered the online gaming industry, reviewing new games and such, decided that she really didn’t like the gamesters themselves and in 2014 decided to write about that:

‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice or ‘game journalism ethics,’ straight-faced, and cause genuine human consequences. Because of video games. Lately, I often find myself wondering what I’m even doing here. And I know I’m not alone. All of us should be better than this. 

This was the emerging world of Cancel Culture and what is now called “Woke”, although back then it was regarded merely as “Political Correctness”, which understated its very personally destructive viciousness. The story exploded beyond one mere article because Gamers themselves decided to fight back and the likes of Alexander and her Woke, Far-Left journalist buddies decided on mass war.

The result a decade later is that online gaming is bigger than ever while the gamer news and fan websites like the one Alexander worked for and such as Kotaku are almost dead:

In another life, Kotaku was a relatively fun place to go for gaming news and culture. If you wanted reviews on anything from a video game to a new popular snack for gamers, you’d go there. It was kind of like BuzzFeed but for the gaming and geek community.

Then it was infected by wokeness, and soon it became a website known for doing what many things infected with wokeness do now. It became all about social justice, the social sins of others, and politics more than gaming. When GamerGate began, Kotaku was one of the sites that fought against gamers and subsequently lost that fight in a big way. 

Incredibly the staff are still fighting to keep it this way, even as the management desperately tries to save it by steering them back to producing gaming reviews and stories. Some staff have just quit instead.

The following sums up the reason for this fail, and despite this being known for a bit less than a decade now, we’ve seen it repeated recently by much larger corporations like Disney, Target, Bud Light, PlanetFitness and Google among many others:

They told us they hated us so we stopped clicking on their articles and listening to their game reviews. They told us we were sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and more, so we stopped taking them seriously. They’re now suffocating under their hubris. Gamers picked up the toys they said we should be embarrassed by and went elsewhere.