#The woman who beat the studios, and other commentary

“Gone With the Wind” star Olivia de Havilland died this week at age 104.
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Olivia de Havilland, who died this week at age 104, “was the last great living female star of the movies’ golden age,” mourns Todd Purdum at The Atlantic. Her “radiant visage and sinuous voice” in such classics as “Gone With the Wind” (1939) and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) will captivate audiences for another century. “Yet de Havilland’s most lasting impact on Hollywood history is lodged not on celluloid but in the less glamorous pages of California’s law books.” Discovered while she was still underage, de Havilland was ­ensnared in the big studios’ system of “indentured servitude” — punished for turning down lousy roles, suspended without pay and unable to exit her seven-year contract. In 1943, “de Havilland filed suit under an obscure state anti-peonage law, which barred any employer from enforcing a personal-services contract for more than seven years.” She won but was blacklisted for a time — before continuing her astonishing success streak. RIP.

Media watch: What Is Going On in America?

This weekend, members of a Louisville, Ky., “black militant group” posed “a list of demands” to local businesses while marching with “loaded guns” — which, The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher laments, is pure ­“mafia stuff.” Seattle’s city council, meanwhile, “banned the cops from ­using pepper spray and less lethal means of protecting property from violent mobs,” and its county government wants to “abolish prisons” in an ­attempt to dismantle “white culture.” This, even as hard-left violence escalates across the Pacific Northwest. But many Americans simply don’t know what’s taking place, because establishment media ignore or play down stories that go against the anti-cop narrative. Which raises a troubling question: “How can we know for sure” what’s happening to America?

Culture critic: Our Not-So-New Religion

The current “woke” movement, which has swept American elites with “breathtaking speed,” appears to be “a new secular religion,” Katherine Kersten argues in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Yet the new public cult “elevates passion over reason and dogma over data” and is “deeply intolerant” — much like “our nation’s earliest religious zealots,” the Puritans. “Parallels abound”: Puritans believed that “humans are inherently wicked,” just as “the woke” believe that whites are inherently racist, and both groups have the “witch-hunt mentality” of “destroying the reputations and livelihoods of those who show the slightest hesitation to profess true doctrine.” The movement’s leaders, too, have the same goal as the Puritans: Dismantling “the sinful nation in which we live” and building “a new City on a Hill, made in their own image.”

Campaign desk: Joe’s Veep Dilemma

Joe Biden is having a problem finding the “loyal, trusted, experienced” and “apolitical” running mate he wants, reports Politico’s Ryan Lizza. Ideally, the ex-veep would prefer “a friend and confidante,” but he doesn’t have “any previous deep relationship” with any of his leading possibilities, except for ex-National Security Adviser Susan Rice, putting her in “the top tier of candidates.” Many Biden campaign advisers, meanwhile, want the selection to be “as safe as possible,” leaving more left-wing candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris as long shots and dark-horse politicians such as Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo as possibilities. Whatever happens, though, for the time being, none of the possible running mates is an “ideal, home-run choice.”

Conservative: The Woke War on Faith

“The phenomenon of vandalizing and burning religious sites which is ­accelerating in Europe has, like a virus, jumped an ocean and is now among us,” fumes Samuel Gregg at Spectator USA. “Over the past month, statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary have been damaged in states as far apart as Colorado, Missouri, New York, Tennessee and Massachusetts.” The tendency reflects “efforts by the woke left to force America to accept their version of history,” in which Christianity, and Catholicism especially, is bizarrely cast as a villain. The wokesters “will settle for nothing less than submission to their [own] faith.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab Ahmari