The closing credits at the end of the October 25th episode of the popular CBS sitcom Big Bang Theory featured an offensive, anti-Trump prayer of sorts in the latest “episode” of Hollywood-gone-mad.
The message was featured on the show’s “vanity card,” which is placed between the final credits and the Warner Bros. logo. It read,
God, (I call you that even though I suspect thou art well beyond names and words and might actually be some sort of ineffable quantum situation), I humbly beseech thee to make thy presence known on November 6th. Demonstrate your omnipotence through us as we make ink marks on little circles in curtained booths. Of course if you, in your divine wisdom, believe a fascist, hate-filled, fear-mongering, demagogic, truth-shattering, autocratic golf cheater is what we need right now, then, you know, thy will be done. But if thou art inclined to more freedom, more love, more compassion, and just more of the good stuff thou hath been promoting in our hearts or our parietal lobes — either one, doesn’t really matter — I submissively ask that thy encourage voter turnout in that general direction…Amen.
Oh, almost forgot, remind those who collaborate with the darkness that thou art the light, and the light is not above whipping out a little Old Testament wrath. Amen again.
The vanity card does not directly name Donald Trump, though one can assume that the “fascist” demagogue to which it refers can only be our sitting president. After all, those adjectives are some of the Left’s favorite to use for President Trump.
Conservative watchdog Media Research Center noted the irony of a “prayer” to God at the end of a program whose central character (Sheldon) is an atheist who often takes jabs at religion.
Vanity cards are typically used by movie studios and television production companies to brand what they’ve produced and to identify the production company and the distributor of the media. Chuck Lorre’s use of vanity cards for editorial and often humorous purposes has become his “trademark” of sorts. In fact, Lorre published a compilation of his vanity cards in a coffee table book entitled What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Bitter in October 2012.
Vanity cards generally stay on screen for a few seconds, so in order to be read in their entirety, Lorre has them posted on his website.
October 25th’s vanity card was not the first time Chuck Lorre Productions posted an anti-Trump message after an episode of Big Bang Theory. On November 3, 2016, he mocked the “Make America Great Again” slogan as a “bumper sticker for victimhood.”
“Don’t be fooled. Big Daddy can’t save us. Our salvation lies within ourselves,” the message read. “Within our own ingenuity and determined effort. ‘Make America great again’ is a bumper sticker for victimhood.”
In fact, Chuck Lorre Productions has used vanity cards several times to go after President Trump.
In May 2017, for example, a Lorre vanity card took jabs at The Apprentice’s ratings and inexplicably used them to question Trump’s ability to handle foreign policy: “Defeat terrorism and crazy dictators? He couldn’t even defeat Two and a Half Men.” The card featured a chart of that week’s ratings.
In February of the same year, a Lorre vanity card appeared like a mock executive order from President Trump. It read,
By the power vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. It shall be the policy of my administration that, in any given circumstance, the truth is what I say it is, or need it to be.
Section 2. Any statement, photograph or report that does not align with Section 1 shall be deemed “fake news.”
Section 3. Contradiction of Section 1 or Section 2 shall be punishable by mean tweet.
Section 4. Handwriting analysis of my signature (see below) is fake news.
Trump has not been Lorre’s only target, either. Newsbusters reports that in 2012, Lorre directed viewers to an uncensored vanity card on his website that ranted about guns and gay marriage. The card, which featured explicit language, mocked Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney as “a guy who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, keeps his money offshore, stubs his toe and says ‘H-E-double hockey sticks’ and wears magical underwear.” It also implied that President Obama had inherited a “colossal s— storm” from the Bush administration.
Still, consumers should expect this type of nonsense out of Hollywood by now. What’s worse and even more dangerous, however, is the content coming out of the mainstream news coverage on the Trump administration. Newsbusters notes that a study released earlier this month by the Media Research Center found that news coverage from June 1 to September 30 was 92 percent negative.
Image: Screenshot from CBS’s official site for The Big Bang Theory at CBS.com
