Yellowstone Went Full Socialist in its Finale

By Michael Ashley

Oh, Taylor Sheridan. You fooled us all.

For years, conservatives believed we’d finally found a champion in you as the creative force behind Paramount’s hit show Yellowstone.

You did the impossible. Defying Hollywood’s heavy-handed identity politics, you pulled off a show representing patriotic American values.

Here was a real series about family. Not the cynical kind exemplified by The Sopranos’ moral relativism. But rather, good old-fashioned nuclear familial units bound by honor. Tradition. Likewise, we thought we had a show about a real patriarch. Not some dumb oaf like Tim the Tool Man Taylor.

In John Dutton (Kevin Costner) we finally had a man of strength and conviction. A man who stood for fairness and integrity. And in Yellowstone, we thought we finally had a series celebrating American values of fierce independence and capitalism.

Turns out we were wrong.

For context, Yellowstone made a name for itself in the Woke era by going against the cultural grain, especially by offering a meritocratic vision of excellence. From a personal perspective, I found it empowering. Inspirational.

Here were male characters like Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) with actual backbones. Finally! Men like Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) personified manliness and duty, waking before dawn to work without complaint. And even though Beth Dutton’s (Kelly Reilly) weekly hysterics went too far, at least she stood for something.

And she sure could take a punch.

Several weeks after the show concluded its last season, it’s easy to dismiss critiquing it, saying something like, “It’s just a western soap opera.”

That misses the point.

As Andrew Breitbart once said, “Politics is downstream of culture.”

What he meant by that is culture drives our values and identity more than whom we vote for. If the Tavistock Institute and the psychological engineering it perfected has taught us anything it’s that people are malleable. The movies, TV shows, and music we consume affect our psyches. They inform the story we tell of ourselves. They also shape our behaviors and attitudes.

For all these reasons and more, we would do well to understand how Yellowstone undermined its promise in two big ways.

Reason 1: John Dutton’s Fall From Grace

Famously, Costner and Sheridan butted heads creatively. Though the full details remain murky, the prevailing understanding is that Sheridan balked at Costner’s wish to pursue other projects.

The result?

In Part 2 of Season 5, Sheridan offed the celebrated patriarch in the most weaselly way possible. Prior to this, Dutton was a man of fierce spine and heart. He stood up against villains in the form of Native American contenders, government bureaucrats, lawless gangsters, even nature itself. All along, he lent his profound strength to his family, the ranch, and Montana itself.

It’s therefore beyond disappointing that Sheridan killed him off in so cowardly a fashion. Spoiler alert: A hit squad drugs him in his sleep, then plants a gun in his hand so people will think he committed suicide. Pathetic.

So much for the hero Sheridan cultivated. Instead of the real man America so loved and needed in these 2020s, Sheridan went the cynical Hollywood route. It’s just like how the Star Wars postquels portrayed Han Solo as a feeble old man, stealing his dignity before they killed him off in The Force Awakens—a slap to the face for fans. And anyone whose heart still beats.

It makes you wonder if Sheridan is a closeted activist himself—the sneaky sort who will rip down cultural heroes just to demoralize the public. For more on this idea, please watch Uri Bezmenov’s videos on cultural subversion.

Reason 2: The Socialist Solution

Beth says, “we won” to her dead father in his casket at the funeral in the final episode. Did they? Not in any way that matters.

Throughout the series John Dutton’s driving goal was to stop others from taking his family’s property. It was not merely to save the land from scheming private equity firms hellbent on turning it into another gentrified Jackson Hole.

More than mere property, the ranch was the Dutton’s legacy.

And yet, we are meant to believe Kayce’s “ingenious solution” to sell their acres for pennies on the dollar to their former enemies is a victory. It’s not. It’s a betrayal of John Dutton and all his ancestors who fought and died for something transcending words.

When the camera shows us a slow-motion shot of the new owners tearing down the iconic Y of Yellowstone off the barn, this is a coded message. It’s symbolic of all those faithless rioters who tear down our monuments, effacing our history and our own imperfect, yet hallowed legacy.

Yellowstone is not just a show. It’s a stand-in for America. Its denigration before our eyes represents what neo-socialists want to do to our beloved nation, our values, our families, and most of all, our children.

“But the tribes will protect the Yellowstone land so no one can ever develop on it,” you might counter.

What does this remind you of?

Could it be those private environmental spaces the U.N. and other elite institutions want to create—sacred places you and I will never get to visit, much less see? Does that sound like a win—or a betrayal of John Dutton’s dreams, his family’s legacy, American ideals, and ultimately the show’s legacy?

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