Pretty in Pinko: The Brat Pack And the Anti-Communist Film Festival

    I’m officially inviting the Brat Pack to the Anti-Communist Film Festival. The Brat Pack were a group of actors who were young in the 1980s and the subject of a famous magazine profile by David Blum. Rob Lowe, Sean Penn, Emilio Estevez, and Andrew McCarthy, as well as female stars like Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore and Ali Sheedy, were the hot young actors in Hollywood in the Reagan Era.

    The Brat Pack are grown up now. I’m inviting them to the Anti-Communist Film Festival because they’re my generation, I have a warm spot for them, and at least one of them has shown a proclivity for conservative, or at least critical, thinking. The others I’m hoping to win over. 

    I’m focused on three VIPs in particular: Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy and Molly Ringwald. 

    First, Rob Lowe. Lowe, a family man, has shown conservative and libertarian leanings and might appreciate what we are doing. In 2020 Lowe revealed to Vanity Fair that he’s friends with Justice Clarence Thomas – and that he was undecided about who to vote for in 2016. Here’s Lowe on how he met Justice Thomas:

“I got inducted into the Horatio Alger Society a couple years ago,” Lowe explained of how he and the 71-year-old Justice first met. “It’s a very exclusive, very amazing society that provides scholarships for kids who come from terrible, terrible backgrounds. But they are the best and the brightest in their classes. And the society of people in it are pretty studly. He’s one of them. That’s how we met. They put the medal on me in the halls of the Supreme Court.”

The West Wing star continued, “He’s like, ‘If you ever need anything, call my number. This is my cell phone.’ And then my son Matthew was going to law school. So I had some ideas about clerking and things like that. So I call this cell phone and he answers it. And you’re like, Geez, shouldn’t there be, like, a vetting process? And 45 minutes he’s giving me advice on what my son should do vis-à-vis law school and clerking.”

    The other two at the top of the list are Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy. Ringwald and McCarthy recently starred in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, an Off-Broadway play about about Senator Joseph McCarthy. Yes, it’s a lot of virtue-signaling about bad old Joe McCarthy and his 1950s crusade against communism. And yes, they declare McCarthy guilty even though many of the people he named were in fact communists. And yes, Ringwald and McCarthy are not conservatives.

    Yet liberals are welcome to the Anti-Communist Film Festival, because, unlike the left, we are open to hearing from everybody (and yes, I want to meet Molly Ringwald). I was also intrigued by something said by Adam Kantor, one of the actors in the show. From the New York Theatre Guide:

Kantor reflected on how these historical tactics mirror today’s digital climate of public-pressure campaigns, noting that such ideological enforcement is not limited to one side of the aisle. “There’s a lot that’s strikingly familiar: public accusation, career destruction, this idea of canceling, this demand for public confession and renunciation, this naming of names,” he said. “What I find chilling is that this kind of machinery doesn’t belong to any one political ideology […] The left does a version of it; the right does a version of it.”

According to Kantor, the ease of defining and condemning someone online only exacerbates the problem. “What HUAC understood, and what still holds true today, is that you don’t even need to prove guilt. You just need to make the accusation public, and social media today has really amplified this algorithm of defining somebody,” he noted.

    I don’t agree that the right engages in personal destruction as much as the left. Still, the fact that Kantor conceded that the left does it at all is a noteworthy admission.

    Finally, Andrew McCarthy. As I have written before, I’ve long been an Andrew McCarthy fan. His character in 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire was the only one who wasn’t a jerk. In adulthood McCarthy has written for National Geographic where my father worked, and produced substantive books on topics like fatherhood and male friendship. God help me, I even like his 1987 cheesetastic movie Mannequin (currently rocking it at 20% on Rotten Tomatoes!) 

    Generation X is often called the last cool generation. We are also the last ones to live during communism – the real thing, not the Brooklyn hipster crusade that passes for it in 2026. Some of us actually traveled to the Eastern Bloc when we were in our 20s and saw the repression firsthand. We knew censorship, shortages, spying and evil when we saw it. There was nothing bratty about that.

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