Hollywood groupthink is even more pervasive than we think.

Sure, the industry has plenty of libertarian and conservative denizens, but the vast majority stay whisper-silent lest those views damage their careers.

Most stars happily toe the progressive party line, thinking it may help their job prospects or because they’re true believers.

A sprinkling of stars has been slowly, but surely tip-toeing off the progressive plantation.

The following artists won’t be pulling the lever for former President Donald Trump or even Governor Ron DeSantis anytime soon. Still, they are speaking out, betraying the unofficial talking points of their ideological peers.

More, please. We need independent artists sharing independent thoughts. And it might start with Ice Cube.

The rapper-turned-actor/director is reliably left of center, including his support for reparations for black Americans historically mistreated by Hollywood. He doesn’t align with any firm progressive playbook, though. We learned that when he exchanged visions with the Trump team on his plans for black America.

Now, Ice Cube is targeting the culture’s “gatekeepers.” He promised a tour, of sorts, of podcasters from all walks of life to work around existing roadblocks that limit debate.

People “know who [the gatekeepers] are,” the artist said. Left unsaid? We also know they’re religiously left of center, and that’s an understatement.

‘So what am I going to do to deal with those motherf***ing gatekeepers? Well, what I’m going to do is go on a f*** the gatekeepers podcast tour … and I’m going to talk to everybody. And get a chance to get my message out to the people. Be able to let people hear from me, you know.’”

Podcast giant Adam Carolla shared on Twitter that he’s already made contact with Camp Cube.

Oscar winners Tim Robbins and Mark Rylance bucked the Hollywood system, which followed every last letter of the Lockdown Playbook™, by questioning pandemic overreach.

Robbins opened up last year about his mixed feelings on COVID, admitting he fell for the media and government lines that we all had to stay home and accept mandatory doses of a newly-developed vaccine.

“I bought into it,” the “Bull Durham” star told podcaster Russell Brand. Then, he started to do his own investigating on the subject. He came to radically different conclusions that didn’t involve silencing speech or shuttering small businesses by default.

I noticed a lot of people were not adhering again to these requests made by their government. I thought, well, they’re going to have a hard day coming up, that there will be some serious death here …. When I saw that there wasn’t a huge death rate, after I witnessed personally what was happening, I started to wonder more and more about what we were being told and whether it was true or not.

“Bridge of Spies” star Rylance came to a similar realization. The 63-year-old actor, known for his progressive activism, said he took a “distilled garlic solution” daily, along with Vitamin C, until he was forced to get the jab to visit family stateside. What drove his hesitation?

Science started to sound like a religion. And really science is no different than religion, just an attempt by men to describe reality.

Critics can say, and they have a point, that both Robbins and Rylance spoke up long after the problem impacted Americans. It’s still bold of them to speak now for two reasons. 

First, the COVID regulations were embraced like a religion among the Hollywood Left, with radical players like Jimmy Kimmel and Howard Stern suggesting that unvaccinated Americans should be denied health care. 

Second, a new wave of COVID or a similar virus would likely trigger many of the same draconian measures that didn’t work the first-time around. The more public figures tarnish those measures, the more likely big government would back down next time.

Woody Harrelson took a more confrontational approach to pandemic mania. He used his monologue time on “Saturday Night Live” earlier this year to question the vaccine mandates with humor and a sense of mischief.

He brought up an alleged movie plot he turned down for one big reason. It was too crazy to be true.

So the movie goes like this: The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over. I threw the script away. I mean, who was going to believe that crazy idea? Being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day.

It might be the most rebellious “SNL” moment since a 2017 sketch dubbed “Woke Jeans.”

Another core tenant of woke Hollywood is the war on comedy. You’re not allowed to criticize the Thought Police’s impact on humor lest you be canceled (or forced to give a mewling, hostage-style apology). Jennifer Lawrence poked the woke bear anyway.

The Oscar winner, while promoting her quasi-raunchy film “No Hard Feelings,” defended both the film and the hunger for R-rated comedies, the kind Hollywood abandoned over the risk of bruised feelings.

I think it’s time for a good old-fashioned laugh and it really is hard to make a comedy where you’re not offending people … everybody in some sense will be offended by this film — you’re welcome.

The film over-performed box office predictions by $5 million in its opening frame.

It’s a sad state of affairs when we must celebrate stars thinking for themselves, ever so slightly, and for sharing their thoughts with the public. It’s the new, unhealthy normal, and bold thinkers deserve some sort of praise.

Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at @HollywoodInToto. 

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

A new Danish landmark study finds that suicide rates and psychiatric conditions are much higher among trans-identifying people.

Trans-identifying people in Denmark had a suicide death rate 3.5 times higher and a suicide attempt rate 7.7 times higher than people who did not identify as transgender, according to the study, which was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

There were 92 suicide attempts and 12 suicide deaths among the study’s 3,759 trans-identifying people between 1980 and 2021.

The study analyzed the medical and legal gender change records of nearly seven million people in Denmark, including the nearly 3,800 transgender people, over the last four decades.

Trans-identifying people also tended to die younger overall, whether by suicide or something else, the study found.

However, suicide rates in both groups decreased over the four decades the study examined.

“Results suggest that transgender individuals had significantly higher rates of suicide attempt, suicide mortality, suicide-unrelated mortality, and all-cause mortality compared with the nontransgender population,” the study said.

Meanwhile, the rate of psychiatric conditions was higher for the trans-identifying group.

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Nearly 43% of the trans-identifying people had a psychiatric diagnosis, compared with just 7% of the non-trans-identifying group.

“This is beyond doubt a huge problem that needs to be looked at,” said one of the authors of the study, Dr. Morten Frisch, a sexual health epidemiologist at Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen.

The study’s authors suggested that their findings might possibly apply to the U.S. as well since the U.S. and Denmark have similar suicide rates, about 14 suicides per 100,000 people.

However, the rate of people who identify as transgender could be as much as ten times higher in the U.S. than in Denmark, data from the Williams Institute at the University of California in Los Angeles suggests, although the Danish researchers also noted that they may not have captured newer waves of trans-identification that are more prevalent among younger populations.

Gender ideology activists in the U.S. often argue that trans-identifying people, especially youth, are at a higher risk of suicide if they are denied drastic medical interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or gender surgeries such as double mastectomies and later genital surgeries.

However, Denmark is famously progressive on the transgender issue and rates as one of the most LGBT-friendly countries in the world, even above the U.S.

The group of Danish trans-identifying people analyzed in the study were recognized as transgender in either their legal or medical records.

In 1989, Denmark became the first country in the world to legally recognize same-sex partnerships. Denmark has allowed people to undergo sex change operations and receive hormone therapy since at least the early 1950s. Since 2014, Danish people 18 and older can legally change their gender simply by stating that they want to do so.

In the U.S., critics have sounded the alarm about the permanent effects of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries. Young people who previously identified as transgender have also spoken out about regretting getting medical intervention.

At least 17 states have moved to restrict hormone treatments and gender surgeries for children as more minors seek them out.

Meanwhile, it is more popular than ever for youth to adopt new gender identities. An estimated 300,000 minors aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender as of last year, a sharp increase over the previous few years. From 2017 to 2021, gender dysphoria diagnoses in children nearly tripled.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a free hotline for individuals in crisis or distress or for those looking to help someone else. It is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255.