The shark in the movie Jaws is alive and well, but instead of attacking innocent ocean swimmers, it is going after woke ideologues in out-of-water venues.

Recently, the Cabot Theater in Beverly, Massachusetts, managed by J. Casey Seward, hosted a Jaws symposium Q-and-A with Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss. Hundreds of people attended the event, no doubt thinking it was going to be a superficial conversation on Jaws movie nostalgia.

That changed when Dreyfuss walked onstage in a blue floral print house-dress, sashaying and wiggling his hips before the audience after which stagehands then rushed forward to remove the dress and help him put on a sports jacket.

The woman-to-man skit was more sophomoric, self-indulgent SNL-fare than genuinely funny. But it was certainly not a transphobic skit worthy of the attention it received from the progressive, left-tainted mainstream press.

Yet many media outlets “exploded” with sensationalistic breaking news headlines. It was as if Dreyfuss had been found guilty of infanticide. What media outlet didn’t jump into the act? There was Vanity Fair, AOL News, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Blade, as well as hundreds of TV news stations across the country, like WCVB-5 Boston.

Most posted videos of Dreyfuss walking onstage in that tacky house dress. And they followed the actor—dressed as a man—as he sat down with the host of the interview, a short, diminutive woman with an NPR-style, feminist buzz cut, who looked more than a little nervous as she immediately started talking about the award-winning movie, ignoring what had just happened onstage.

In online videos of the Cabot event, what’s noticeable is intense audience applause and enthusiastic appreciation. While media reports stated there were boos from some in the audience from the start, those boos were so soft they were drowned out by the cheers and clamor of approval.

Yes, yes, okay…one can hear a few disgruntled groans when Dreyfuss tells the audience that civics needs to make a comeback in America’s public schools.

Dreyfuss, who founded the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative in 2006, then urged audience members to “make sure your kids are not the last generation of Americans. And you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Here we have a purely patriotic comment that should not be controversial at all—unless, of course, you’re a Howard Zinn fan and want American history rewritten with a Marxist slant.

Saying you favor civics classes in public schools is a mild-mannered conservative talking point, but to woke folks it can trigger something like an epileptic seizure. In fact, many of the “offenses” that Dreyfuss was claimed to have uttered on the Cabot stage were not recorded on video at all, which strikes me as odd considering all the news attention this “story” generated.

Commenting on the immorality of allowing minor children to undergo transgender treatments and/or surgery despite the objections of parents, as Dreyfuss did, is a noble thing that should be awarded and encouraged.

Comments like this are certainly not anti-gay or anti-LGBTQ+. Government-mandated destruction of children’s bodies—without obtaining the consent of parents—has nothing to do with civil rights at all. It is—as the Marx Brothers never said—a high moral crime.

The LA Times was especially vitriolic in its attack on Dreyfuss, stating that Dreyfuss “created a stir at the Cabot in Beverly, Mass., after allegedly ranting about women, LGBTQ+ individuals and the #MeToo movement, prompting several patrons to walk out of the theater.”

That newspaper reported that an estimated 125 people left the sold-out venue —the theater seats 850 people—after some booing. The videos don’t capture these boos, however; for that we have to defer to the director of the Cabot who, fearing for his job after the woke walkout, stated that he encountered many patrons who were “really distraught” about Dreyfuss’ behavior and comments.

“Distraught” as in heartbroken and devastated — really?

I recall that when the outrageous British author Quentin Crisp, author of The Naked Civil Servant, was alive, he came to the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia for a traveling one-man show, “An Evening with Quentin Crisp,” that included a lengthy audience Q-and-A.

The event was held in the early Nineties, when loud woke protests regarding a writer or actor’s opinion about topical subjects—and calls for censorship because of those opinions–were not yet a thing. Crisp, a self-described transvestite who spent his life in London walking the streets wearing women’s make up, told the Wilma audience that the gay movement was headed for disaster because it was becoming too shrill, radical and demanding.

In no uncertain terms he warned about a coming societal backlash. Though transgender and gender movement ideologues had a weak hold on the gay movement in those days, this faction has clearly taken over the movement today, and is largely responsible for the international backlash we see when it comes to the (surgical) mutilation of children’s bodies in the name of transgender rights.

Only in San Francisco was there a ripple of protest against Crisp—and even those protests had more to do with his opinions of Princess Diana than with gay activism.

The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia offered no apology after the highly spirited discussion. It was understood that Quentin Crisp was merely being Quentin Crisp, and he was allowed to speak as Quentin Crisp. He was a man (albeit in lipstick) with the right to an opinion, just like you and I.

How much more mature the world was then.

When Dreyfuss took a swipe at the leftist belief that the government is within its rights to force parents of minor children who think they are the opposite sex to undergo transgender surgery or treatment, some Cabot audience members hurled insults at him before allegedly walking out.

Dreyfuss, of course, was already on Hollywood’s woke blacklist, having received harsh criticism last year when he criticized the movie industry’s new diversity and equity rules which took effect with the 2024 Oscars but implemented as a result of the George Floyd riots in 2020.

Not one to mince words or soften the impact of any blow, Dreyfuss said that the new rules “want to make me vomit.” “No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give into the latest, most current idea of what morality is,” he said. “And what are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. And you have to let life be life.”

The actor then asked, “Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice?”

Finally, it’s truly heartwarming that the actor never even came close to issuing an apology for his opinions.