Colin in Black and White: Miniseries Review and Commentary

Colin Kaepernick’s new Netflix autobiography ‘Colin in Black and White’ is the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism that reveals hims to be an entitled, self-absorbed jerk.  

Colin in Black and White is the new mini-series on Netflix that dramatizes Colin Kaepernick’s teenage years where he struggles against racism and to be taken seriously as a quarterback.

Kaepernick, if you’ll remember, once led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl and made a name for himself by kneeling during the national anthem at NFL games to protest against racial injustice, police brutality and systematic oppression.

I utterly loathe flag fetishism as a mindless display of vacuousness, so I never had a problem with Kaepernick’s protests. I disagree with him on some of the specifics of his stance, but I always respected his kneeling. The way I see it, if the NFL wants to turn their games into de facto celebrations of militarism, then players kneeling shouldn’t be beyond the pale.

I also think it’s obvious that Kaepernick was unjustly black-balled by the league for his protests. While I admit that Kaepernick is a very specific and unique QB talent and that his skill set isn’t a fit on every team, it’s ludicrous to think he couldn’t at least have been a back-up somewhere. Of course, that brings up the question of whether he would accept that secondary role and at a price below what he thinks he deserves.

The reason I mention my moderate stance on the controversial Kaepernick is because I want to make it clear I went into watching Colin in Black and White without an axe to grind against the man, quite the opposite actually.

Having said that, let me tell you that Colin in Black and White isn’t just an amateurish tv show so awful it would be laughable as an after school special, it also exposes Kaepernick as being quite a despicable and deplorable human being.

This show is like the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism and Kaepernick is Bart Starr, Joe Montana and Tom Brady wrapped into one.

The series opens by literally transforming the NFL combine into a slave auction. Besides the fact that the NFL combine is something so elitist most football players of any race can only ever dream about attending, and that players at the combine have worked their whole lives to get there and are competing to become draft picks and multi-millionaires with generational wealth who’ll be worshiped like gods in our culture…yeah…the combine is EXACTLY like a slave auction.

Colin Kaepernick’s ignorance about the horrors of actual slavery is to be expected though since his social justice warrior pose and victimhood addiction apparently makes him blind, deaf and dumb regarding Nike, the company he has a big endorsement deal with that uses slave labor to make its profits. Of course, Nike is immune from Kaepernick’s social justice posing because they give him a fair share of their blood money.

It’s equally absurd witnessing real-life Colin watch and comment as his teenage screen version pouts and preens like a cheap tart at a red-light street over his anger and disappointment that the best colleges in the country want to give him a baseball scholarship, and Major League Baseball wants to draft him and give him a million-dollar signing bonus, and the prettiest white girls in school throw themselves at him, while all little Colin wants is to get a scholarship to play QB and have a black girlfriend. Boo fucking hoo.

What really turned my stomach though about Colin in Black and White is that Kaepernick’s adoptive, working-class white parents, insipidly portrayed by Mary Louise Parker and Nick Offerman, are depicted as vapid racist caricatures.

The fact that Kaepernick, who co-created this series with Ava Duvernay, would belittle, demean and slander the couple (who are still alive) that raised, loved and nurtured him from infancy, and shelled out big bucks by paying for travel baseball and high-end specialized QB coaches to help him achieve his dream, is repugnant and repulsive.

In one episode where Kaepernick’s adoption is briefly explored, the show frames his soon-to-be parents as deciding to adopt Colin only after another adoption falls through. Kaepernick then chimes in with his woe-is-me wail that “since the day I was born, I’ve never been anyone’s first choice.”

Again, boo fucking hoo Kaepernick, you sad sack clown. Your parents actually chose you. They got up in the middle of the night to feed you and change you, they held you and loved you, they gave everything to you and they moved heaven and earth to make your dreams come true, and because they’re a different skin color than you, you reward them, not with gratitude, or respect, or love, but with a tv show that bends over backwards to publicly ridicule them. That says more about you, Kaepernick, than it does about your parents.

Of course, Kaepernick turns everything into racism because he’s a nitwit incapable of understanding anything else. So, when he and his parents disagree over the usual things teenagers and parents disagree over…hair styles, facial hair, wardrobe, choice in girlfriends, Colin sees this as proof of the racist conspiracy against him.

Due to Kaepernick’s desperate need for victimhood, everyone is racist in his eyes…coaches, referees, umpires, opposing fans, opponents, hotel employees, his parents. The fact that schools weren’t tripping over Kaepernick too is because of racism.

The word that kept popping into my head as I watched this self-pitying shitshow was pathetic.  There is absolutely nothing quite as egregiously pathetic as a grown man wallowing in long past perceived slights from adolescence. Nothing.

Adding to the idiocy is that Kaepernick, dressed all in black with a massive afro, looking like Morpheus from The Matrix wearing a wig as a joke, interjects various tidbits of racial knowledge throughout the show. Kaepernick is so hysterically ridiculous in these segments he seems like a character from Dave Chappelle on The Chappelle Show or Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live.

On the bright-side, Jaden Michael plays teenage Kaepernick on the show, and as bad as the show is, he’s terrific. Despite not having a lick of athleticism in his body, he’s a compelling screen presence and an actor who conveys an intriguing inner life. He’s a talent to watch.

A talent not to watch is Colin Kaepernick, whose NFL career is most certainly over, and considering his dead-eyed appearance on the self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, celebration of delusional victimhood, Colin in Black and White, which reveals his truly loathsome nature and intellectual midgetry, one can only hope he disappears from the public eye as well. The sooner the better.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier - Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Utterly useless piece of establishment media fluffery.

Just as MI6 super spy James Bond is back in theatres with No Time to Die, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele is back in the spotlight with the story that refuses to die, in the ABC “documentary” titled Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier.

Steele came to fame as the shadowy force behind the Steele Dossier, the document which sparked a media feeding frenzy and government investigations because it claimed Trump colluded with Russia and that those devious Russians had “kompromat” on Trump in the golden form of a “pee tape”.

Steele’s “coming out of the shadows” consists of him sitting down with George Stephanopoulos and having a cuddle session on fancy sofas in a posh apartment.

Stephanopoulos is the perfect choice for the softball interview since he and Steele have a lot in common - they’ve both worked for Clintons. Stephanopoulos as advisor to President Bill Clinton and Steele as de facto dirt finder for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

ABC tried to stretch the excruciatingly thin gruel of this supposed “interview” into an hour-long documentary by adding talking heads from their own newsroom. They failed, as the end result is a one-hour show that is hilariously shallow and vapid even by ABC News standards.

Out of the Shadows spends considerably more time rehashing the “history” of Russia, Vladimir Putin and Trump than it does actually talking to Steele. Russia is deemed a rogue state virus spreading westward with its villainy, Putin a KGB killer, and Trump a threat to American democracy. In other words, it’s standard establishment media talking points.

Steele’s background is somewhat explored, but being the ever-diligent super spy that he is, Steele never explicitly states that he worked for MI6. I guess he doesn’t want to blow his cover.

What Steele actually says in this interview is of strikingly minimal impact. Thanks to Stephanopoulos’ anti-journalistic, anti-adversarial, deferential approach, no new ground is broken.

It’s well-known that Steele didn’t just compile the dossier, he actively pushed it to media outlets, in effect, actively working to try and scuttle Trump’s election campaign. The fact that he was ostensibly working for Democrats at the time certainly makes it appear as if he was a part of a wider disinformation/interference operation, but of course that’s a topic Stephanopoulos whistles past in this patty cake chat.

Steele admits to no wrong doing or error, despite the U.S. intelligence agencies “eviscerating” his findings after thorough investigation, and the FBI labelling him “untrustworthy”.  

The issue of the “sources” Steele uses doesn’t get the attention it deserves either, as it’s reported that he only used one “key collector”, but Steele is quick to make clear it was “one collector” but not “one source”. That seems like a distinction without a difference.

As the documentary reports, that one collector was not a person in Moscow, but actually someone in Washington D.C. whose name is not revealed. The Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported this person claimed that the information being given to Steele was “word of mouth and hearsay”. In other words, Steele was acting less as an intelligence expert seeking truth with his dossier than he was being a gossip columnist spreading rumor and innuendo.

Steele’s declaration, “I stand by the work we did, the sources we had, and the professionalism we applied to it”, is as devoid of substance as the rest of the interview.

The most damning aspect comes toward the end, and even that is soft pedaled, when Stephanopoulos asks Steele about both the dossier’s allegation that Trump counsel Michael Cohen went to Prague to meet with Russian intelligence and about the pee tape.

Cohen denies the Prague meeting ever took place, and since he has flipped against Trump, one would assume he’s telling the truth. But Steele’s resolve remains, as he conjures up a wild scenario where Cohen is still lying because he wants to avoid being charged with treason.

Stephanopoulos of course let’s this utter lunacy pass almost without notice. He could’ve asked Steele how exactly Cohen got to Prague, since his passport shows no travel to the Czech Republic? Or pressed Steele to provide details or at least a passable explanation for how that meeting could possibly have taken place? But he didn’t, he just smiled and continued playing footsie with Steele.

The “pee tape” is the most salacious accusation in the dossier, and despite it never surfacing and no evidence it exists, Steele still stands by the claim…sort of. He says that the tape “probably does” exist but that he wouldn’t “put 100% certainty on it.”

When Stephanopoulos asks why the tape hasn’t come out? Steele replies that “it hasn’t needed to be released…because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president…”

Look, I loathe Trump, always have and always will, but this sounds like the ravings of someone deeply infected with a ferocious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is maybe why he is still taken seriously by the equally afflicted establishment media.

The more you know about Steele, the more readily apparent it becomes that he’s an absolute charlatan and bullshit artist masquerading as a serious intelligence expert. He’s no James Bond, he’s not even George Smiley. He’s more like a cross between Mr. Bean and Inspector Clouseau, who should, like this vacant and vacuous interview/documentary, be relentlessly ridiculed and righteously dis-respected.  

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Dave Chappelle: The Closer - Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MATERIAL FROM DAVE CHAPPELLE’S NEW STAND-UP SPECIAL!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Chappelle is the greatest comedian of his generation, but you better enjoy him while you can because weak-kneed Hollywood would rather virtue signal than entertain.

Firebrand comedian Dave Chappelle’s newest Netflix stand-up special The Closer has, not surprisingly, been met with predictable outrage by all the usual woke suspects.

Headlines like “Dave Chappelle faces backlash for troubling trans jokes” from Newsweek and Deadline declaring that “executive producer of ‘Dear White People’ are ‘done’ with Netflix” because the streaming service dared run Chappelle’s “homophobic” special, jump out when Googling the comedian’s name.

Chappelle has a woke bullseye on his back once again because in The Closer he’s simply does what every great comedian is supposed to do, humorously speak truths that ordinary people are too intellectually conditioned or socially cowardly to dare articulate.

And make no mistake, Chappelle is unquestionably the greatest stand-up comedian of his generation, and is in the discussion of the best stand-up comedians of all-time, and while The Closer isn’t nearly his best effort, it does nothing to damage his prestigious position atop the comedy world.

Chappelle opens The Closer by informing his audience that this is going to be his “last special for a minute”. Like Michael Corleone, Chappelle is settling all family business with the aptly titled The Closer, and there was a lot of business stirred up by his recent run of six extraordinary Netflix specials, from 2017’s The Age of Spin up through 2019’s Sticks and Stones.

Chappelle’s uproarious evisceration of the sensitivities and absurdities of white feminists, the LGBTQ community, and trans people in particular, in those numerous Netflix specials has been what has made him public enemy number one among the woke.

In The Closer he once again pulls no punches and peppers his audience with quality bits, like his children’s book titled “Clifford the Big Black N*gger” and his movie idea of a conquering group of entitled aliens returning to earth titled “Space Jews”, both of which are masterly woven and defiantly delivered.

It’s his jaunt through the minefield of feminism and LGBTQ issues though that once again have riled the reactionary woke brigade and incensed the Torquemadas of Twitter. For instance, Chappelle’s blistering insights regarding the class and race issues woven into feminism, #MeToo’s performative idiocy, and the notion that “gays are minorities until they need to be white again”, are ruthlessly on point.

It’s when he once again wades into the dangerous waters of transgenderism though that he is most brutally effective as both a comedian and a philosopher, and is no doubt most offensive to the those with delicate sensibilities laying prone on their fainting couches.

Chappelle declares himself, like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, to be a TERF – trans exclusionary radical feminist. He also says “gender is a fact”, and transwomen are the equivalent of blackface, which are such blatantly obvious notions yet are so aggressively labelled anathema in culture today as to be blasphemous.

The hilarious heresy continues when he points out that Caitlin Jenner (formerly Bruce Jenner) won a Woman of the Year award the first year she was ever a “woman”, despite never having menstruated, which in Chappelle’s eyes is like Eminem winning “N*gger of the Year”.

Chappelle then shows off his comedic craftsmanship when he subtly shifts gears towards the end of the show while recounting the tale of his friendship with a trans comedian named Daphne. This sequence is exquisitely executed and funny, but also remarkably poignant and moving.  

Chappelle is accused by the woke of “punching down” with his comedy, meaning that he’s a bully against the defenseless and weak, like the LGBTQ community. But Chappelle goes to great lengths in The Closer to point out the absurdity of this charge, as he observes the LGBTQ community’s enormous cultural power. Chappelle’s evidence for his claim is that the rapper Da Baby actually shot and killed someone in a Walmart in North Carolina and his career never wavered, but when he uttered homophobic remarks, the LGBTQ community quickly got him cancelled.

Nowhere is the woke’s cultural power so evident as it is when it comes to reviews of Chappelle’s own work. Sticks and Stones was adored by audiences who gave it a 99 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, whereas critics gave it a paltry 35% rating. You see, to the woke, especially those in the establishment media or those hoping to work in the establishment media, admitting Chappelle’s brilliance and genius is an impossibility because it’s the equivalent of a hate crime.

The woke approach with The Closer seems to be somewhat similar. I’ve read a few reviews of the show, all of them negative, but curiously enough at Rotten Tomatoes, while the audience rates The Closer at 96%, there is, as of this writing, no critical score listed at all, and only one review posted (it’s negative).  

It seems the woke are changing tactics regarding their boogie man Chappelle, and instead of signaling their virtue through their negative reviews, they’re simply ignoring him.

Unfortunately, Chappelle’s current deal with Netflix is up and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t have him back. The woke wave is a tsunami and it has overtaken all of Hollywood. Even if it costs them money, these streaming behemoths would rather signal their virtue and “allyship” rather than give audiences what they want.

My recommendation is to go watch The Closer and enjoy Dave Chappelle’s brilliance and comedic genius while you can, because the woke are gunning for him, and as much as it pains me to say it, they just might get him.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Fauci: Documentary Review

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This sycophantic cinematic venture and unabashed ode to Anthony Fauci, Narcissist-in-Chief at the NIH, is self-serving agitprop meant to feed the Fauci fetish of fools.

Fauci, the creatively titled new National Geographic documentary airing on Disney +, sets out under a decidedly deceptive guise of impartiality to tell the truth about America’s favorite foremost scientist, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Over the last year and a half as the coronavirus has ravaged the U.S. and marched across the globe, Dr. Fauci, whom the film describes as “a world-renowned infectious disease specialist and longest serving public health leader in Washington, D.C.”, has become a beatified cultural icon to some and a lightning rod of controversy to others.

I consider myself agnostic on Dr. Fauci, but admit that I’ve never understood the media and public veneration of him. I don’t loathe the guy, but he also just always struck me as a blowhard bureaucrat with an ego inversely proportionate to his intellect. But what the hell do I know?

Now, if you worship at the altar of St. Fauci – Patron Saint of “Science”, then Fauci will certainly satiate your Fauci fetish, but if you even mildly question the actions or intentions of the Brooklyn-born scientist/sage then this documentary is definitely not for you.

The film seems like a slick, hour and forty-five-minute campaign commercial meant to solidify the base rather than reach the indecisive. It boasts a plethora of personal interest anecdotes, as well as montages of family time and even shots of a sexy Fauci in the family pool in a Speedo (no, I’m not kidding). Then there’s the requisite conjured tears to indicate Fauci’s heartfelt humanity, and moments of him cursing to reveal how down-to-earth he is, and a healthy serving of pious-filled Fauci faux humility. Oh, and there’s also the cavalcade of establishment endorsements from the likes of Bill Gates, George W. Bush and Bono.

But if you were hoping for an actual investigation into Dr. Fauci, you’ve come to the wrong documentary, as filmmakers John Hoffman and Janet Tobias seem deathly allergic to actual journalism.

Looking for questions regarding gain of function research or a feet-to-the-fire moment over the venerated Fauci’s falsities and flip-flops regarding Covid and masks? Or answers to questions like…if the disease is so deadly, why is the southern border still so porous, potentially allowing in infected illegal immigrants? Or if the lockdown was instituted in order to avoid overwhelming ICU units and hospitals, why weren’t more ICU units built and hospital capabilities expanded over the last year and half? Or if the vaccine doesn’t stop transmission of the disease but only reduces the severity of the illness, then why should anyone care about the unvaccinated since they are only putting themselves at risk?

You’ll have to look elsewhere because Fauci doesn’t only not have answers to those questions, it never even considers asking them.

The whole documentary feels like a bad job interview, where the interviewer asks “what are your biggest weaknesses?” and the candidate replies, “I work too hard, care too much, and am too dedicated to helping people.”

Of course, this is a sentimental, softball cinematic venture so there’s no pushback amongst the prodigious amount of pattycake.

Even when the film does go through the motions of pretending to be impartial, it lets its bias overwhelm it.

For instance, Fauci’s arrogant bungling of the AIDS crisis in the 80’s is transformed into the narrative of a noble public health worker bridging divides, bringing people together and bravely standing up against homophobia.

Fauci’s mishandling of the AIDS epidemic in Africa is also shown in a similar light, but instead of Fauci fighting homophobia, he’s fighting racism.

The filmmakers use of Fauci’s alleged fight against homophobia and racism in these cases is meant to suffocate any liberal questions of Fauci’s record and solidify support among the movie’s ideological base.

The filmmakers and their saintly subject also use Trump as a convenient foil, once again to signal their and Fauci’s liberal bona fides. A red-faced Trump comes in for some very heavy criticism in the documentary, for example, when asked what his first impressions of Trump were, Fauci derisively responds “Yikes!”.

Fauci paints himself as a paragon of truth and Trump as an arrogant buffoon, but the good doctor’s own, sometimes fatal flaws never make a blip on the radar screen of Fauci.

For example, from the very beginning of his career all those decades ago, Fauci’s narcissism is readily apparent as he adores being in front of cameras and at the center of attention. This narcissism directly feeds his blind spot - arrogance, most notably in regards to the AIDS crisis and his failure to tell the truth regarding Covid to the American people. This arrogance has cost countless people their lives.

It’s Fauci’s lack of humility and inability to admit mistake that has done so much damage to the credibility of the medical establishment in the U.S.

If Fauci were consistent and truthful about what he’s done and hasn’t done, and where he’s been wrong, it would go a long way to healing what ails the medical establishment, but self-reflection isn’t Dr. Fauci’s strong suit, self-promotion is, and Fauci is proof of that.

Ultimately, Fauci is a painfully pandering paean to its subject, and an unintentional ode to the relentless narcissism that drives him. If, like Fauci, you love Fauci, then you’ll love Fauci. If you loathe him or are ambivalent, this piece of shameless and brazen agitprop isn’t going to convince you otherwise.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Y: The Last Man - TV Series Review and Commentary

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The show inexplicably and frustratingly trades drama and suspense for vacuous trans virtue signaling.

Y: The Last Man is a new tv show on FX/Hulu that boasts a very intriguing premise – what if all the men of earth, but one, were wiped out in a mysterious plague.

The show, based on a popular graphic novel of the same name that ran from 2002-2008, premiered in mid-September and is now through six episodes in its first season.

The dystopian drama’s basic story is that a sudden bloody illness kills every male mammal on earth except for a guy named Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand. In a mildly clever commentary on the current state of masculinity, the rather ridiculous and feckless poor Yorick, named after a dead clown in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is alas, a failed magician, oops, I mean escape artist.

Yorick’s mother, Jennifer Brown, happens to be a U.S. Congresswoman and she succeeds to the presidency after all the men running things drop dead. If you thought women running the world would make it better, then not only have you never heard of Margaret Thatcher, but you’ll also be disappointed by Y: The Last Man.

Life in a woman’s world is filled with just as much violence, crime, chaos, corruption and cruelty as the man’s world it replaced. The only real difference between men and women ruling appears to be that women seem incapable of clearing away the hordes of dead bodies littered everywhere. Maybe they just lack the upper body strength to get the job done, who knows?

While the show has some bright spots, such as the performances of the terrific Ben Schnetzer as Yorrick, as well as Diane Lane, Amber Tamblyn, and Ashley Romans, it also has some major problems, namely its relentlessly predictable political agenda.

Most of the politics are of the usual vacuous variety you’d come to expect from Hollywood. All the villains are irrational right-wing Republicans and all the heroes are allegedly logical liberal Democrats. Tamblyn’s Kimberly derisively describes the new all-female administration as “a Rachel Maddow fever dream” and she’s correct.

But the most egregious example of the show’s political pandering is that it has veered sharply away from its source material by incorporating gender fluidity and trans men into the mix and in so doing has incomprehensibly castrated its own dramatic power.

In contrast to the comic book – which some deemed “trans-phobic” because it mostly ignored the trans community, trans men are featured predominantly throughout the tv show. A major character, Sam, and his merry band of trans men are one example, as are other groups of trans men who are referenced searching for their precious elixir testosterone, which ironically enough is tough to find.  

In the most recent episode gender fluidity was at the forefront as Dr. Allison Mann, a Harvard geneticist, passionately declares in a long monologue, “not everyone with a Y chromosome is a man!” She also rants about how transgenderism and gender fluidity are much more prevalent than we realize and how it wasn’t “just men” who died from the cataclysmic “event” but “all people with a Y chromosome”.

Ok…but I don’t think the title ‘Y: The Last Mammal with a Y Chromosome’ would inspire much interest.

A major dramatic device in the story is that Yorick is in danger because he’s literally the last man on earth and is the only hope for mankind’s survival. Trans men may “believe” they’re actually men, but the premise of this story, at least the graphic novel version, obliterates that subjective assertion. This is no doubt why trans activists were so up in arms about the show being made and why the producers were so quick to kneel before the altar of gender fluidity despite how that questionable notion neuters the premise and drama of their show.

For example, being the actual last man on earth means Yorick has the utmost value, and when you add in that he’s the current president’s son, then his value skyrockets even more. This is why he continuously wears a gas mask to hide his bearded face and he skulks in the shadows to avoid being discovered. But none of this makes any sense at all since trans men are so predominantly featured on the show.

In this context, if Yorick is discovered he could just say he’s a trans man, and according to the world of the show, no one would bat an eye. In fact, in the latest episode a group of rebel/terrorist women stumble upon Yorick and just assume he’s trans and tell him where a bunch of other trans men are who have testosterone, which needlessly defused a potentially very dramatic situation.

The bottom line is that Y: The Last Man could’ve been great, but its ultimately a foolish and unforgivable waste of a good sci-fi premise. The show is nothing but another example of pandering producers who’d rather signal their woke virtue and render impotent their project’s suspense and drama than actually make something interesting, challenging and worthwhile.

If a mysterious sudden plague ever comes that wipes out just the woke in Hollywood, I’ll look into the vacant skulls of these long-lost producers and muse, “where your gibes be now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.”

Just kidding. What I’d actually say is “God bless and good riddance” and be merrily on my way.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

NYC Epicenters 9/11 - 2021 1/2: Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Never before has a nearly 8-hour documentary talked so much but said so little. Spike Lee marinates 9/11 and Covid in unrelenting identity politics resulting in a documentary that is a tedious, tangled mess of misinformation.

Spike Lee’s new four-part HBO documentary series, NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021 ½ caused controversy when critics pre-screened it because the series finale spent time focusing on the conspiracy theories of the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Lee, who openly disbelieves the official 9/11 story and in 2006 featured conspiracies regarding the intentional flooding of black neighborhoods in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in his HBO documentary When the Levees Broke, is usually an unrepentant firebrand, but under pressure the Brooklyn-based blowhard folded like a cheap suit and cut the entire controversial thirty-minute segment from the project prior to it airing.

I wasn’t granted access to the original version, but after having watched the edited, seven and a half-hour, uneven slog of a series that came to a close Saturday night on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I can report that if truth and accuracy are of prime concern then there’s about six and a half more hours that needed to be cut from the series, which abounds with disinformation, misinformation and propaganda, none of which has anything to do with 9/11.

NYC Epicenters is broken down into four episodes, with the first two episodes focusing on a myriad of more current events and the last two on 9/11 itself. Not surprisingly since this is a “Spike Lee joint”, every topic tackled, and there are a lot of them, is deeply marinated in a manufactured racial resentment.

In episodes one and two the story zigs and zags from Covid in China and New York, to Trump’s birtherism, to Covid’s impact on education and restaurants, to Black Lives Matter, to Trump’s charges of election fraud, to “kids in cages”, to black vaccine hesitancy, to January 6th and beyond. Spike’s approach to this dizzying array of topics isn’t chronological, rendering it virtually incomprehensible.

Watching episodes one and two is like a Bataan death march where every few steps Spike Lee shouts the phrase “disproportionately affects black and brown people” into your ear for no discernible or coherent reason.

These two episodes are entirely devoid of insights, and are like the scattershot, rancid remnants of a social justice binge barfed into an incoherent hodge-podge of alarmist headlines.

Adding to the egregiousness, Spike interjects himself throughout to a remarkably annoying degree by constantly interrupting his subjects and yelling at them to “say it again” when they’ve made a point with which he agrees.

Lee also peppers the program with Spike-isms, like calling ground zero “Da Pile” and Brooklyn “Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn” and referring to Obama as President Barrack “Bruddah Man” Obama and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as “Papa Joe” and “Sistah Kamala”. He also dubs Trump “Agent Orange” or “Der Fuhrer and Il Duce”. I’m a native-born son of “Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn” and loathe “Agent Orange” more than most, but even I found the Mussolini and Hitler comparisons sophomoric and shallow.

With help from his friends in the mainstream media, like Van Jones and Al Sharpton, Spike also vomits out the usual vacuous establishment talking points, like blaming Trump for the moral atrocity of “kids in cages” at the border while ignoring “Bruddah Man” Obama’s complicity in that crime.

He also blames anti-Asian violence on white supremacy and Trump’s rhetoric, even going so far as to show a white man assault an Asian woman, and putting up the white man’s mug shot, but then without explanation or identification of the race of the assailant, shows a series of murky videos where black people assault Asians.

Spike also regurgitates the MSM’s misinformation about the “Central Park Karen” story. That story is told by Christopher Cooper, the black bird watcher in Central Park who videotaped a white woman calling the cops on him. The media destroyed this woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), dubbing her the Central Park Karen. Spike does the same, intentionally ignoring much deeper reporting that puts some desperately-needed context and nuance into the situation.

Spike also declares that all the violence and looting at Black Lives Matter protests was a result of outside “instigators”. And yet, he holds up the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer by militia men as proof of right-wing, white supremacist nefariousness, while ignoring the fact that the FBI were so deeply involved in the inception of that kidnap plot as to have potentially “instigated” it.

Lee’s rabid partisanship blinds him to the obvious, that “instigators” may very well have sabotaged both BLM protests AND right-wing protests.

This possibility also never occurs to Spike regarding January 6th either, which he obscenely labels as being equivalent to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Using a deceptive graphic of those “killed by the Insurrection” is the piece de resistance of deceptive propaganda.

As for the last two episodes of the series, they’re rather standard and occasionally effective 9/11 reminiscences, but they too are peppered with a tedious hyper-racialism.

It’s unfortunate that even when finally focusing on 9/11, racial grievances are given the spotlight when the cataclysmic wars and the rescue workers stricken by deadly cancer post-9/11 are given short shrift.

The bottom line is that this nearly eight-hour, ego-driven extravaganza could’ve and should’ve been whittled down to a taut one hour, stripped of its incorrigible identity politics and solely focused on 9/11, with all of the modern-day political pandering, posturing and propagandizing left on the cutting room floor. But if that were to happen, then it wouldn’t be a “Spike Lee joint”…we should be so lucky.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Cinderella (2021) : A Review and Commentary

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT POINTS AND SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This movie musical really sucks. Just a dreadful piece of amateurish trash.

Amazon Studio’s new Cinderella, written and directed by Kay Cannon, is a jukebox musical that sets out to upend the old-fashioned fairy tale by injecting a powerful dose of girl power into its traditionalist veins.

Starring pop singer Camilla Cabello this woke re-telling now streaming on Amazon Prime, which might have been considered ideologically edgy in 1956, is a bland, flat concoction that looks as unappealing as it sounds.

To promote the new movie, cast members Cabello, Idina Menzel, Billy Porter and James Corden (also a producer of the film) recently got into costume and did a flash mob at various Los Angeles intersections where they sang the grating Jennifer Lopez hit “Let’s Get Loud”.

After having seen a video of this occurrence, which included Corden sexually thrusting his hips in a mouse costume, I’ve been, like Winston Smith, haunted by rodent filled nightmares.

After having watched the movie itself, I only wish I could’ve been at that intersection when the mob of the thirsty and famous broke out and done the world a favor by running over every one of these annoying fools. At least then I could’ve spent the hour and fifty-three-minute run time of the movie hosing Corden’s copious innards from the underside of my car rather than suffering through his bloated performance on screen. (It is important to note that this paragraph is not an endorsement of hit and run or encouragement of violence of any kind against anyone, particularly James Corden…I am just making a dark joke at that annoying fat fuck’s expense.)

Putting the Cinderella story through the woke wash cycle seems like a painfully-typical-for-the-times, Disney channel inspired, algorithm assisted experience. The plot they came up with was that the new Cinderella is a fashion designer who, along with all the other women in the kingdom, is suffering under the patriarchy and its sexist traditions.

As everyone knows, Cinderella is supposed to marry the prince, but in this new wokelandia, she instead literally says, “I choose me!”, and decides on her blossoming fashion design career over love. You see, this Cinderella doesn’t want to be confined to the basement or the Royal box. She wants to toss the glass slipper and shatter the glass ceiling. You go, girl!

Of course, Cinderella ultimately gets to have both her career and love when Prince Robert, played by Nicholas Galitzine who, how do I put this…doesn’t exactly seem like the type of guy who is into the ladies, gives up his bollocks, oops, I mean his claim to the crown, and follows Cinderella in her fashion career.

You’ll be glad to know that Prince Robert’s sister, Gwen, an ambitious Hillary Clinton type bursting with so many great ideas that none of the men ever listen to, now becomes ruler of the kingdom. Girl Power rules!!

If that all sounds really egregiously dreadful to you, then you are not alone.

The problems with Cinderella aren’t just the relentless girlboss bullshit, it’s also the fact that the movie looks and feels like a bunch of ten-year-olds lip-synching to the radio as they put on a play in their grandmother’s backyard.

It has also boasts a nearly incoherent script, is amateurishly directed, embarrassingly choreographed and abysmally acted. But besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

A big problem with the film is that its lead, Camilla Cabello, is an unappealing and unattractive screen presence who seems less a fairy princess in waiting than a rookie waitress stumbling through her maiden shift at a renaissance fare.

The first forty-five minutes of the movie are run of the mill garbage, but then the awfulness goes into hyper-drive when the king of crap arrives, James Corden, who in an uncomfortable bit of typecasting plays an annoying fat mouse.

To add insult to injury, at about the same time Billy Porter (acclaimed star of Kinky Boots and Pose) brings his gay minstrel show to the festivities in the form of the character Fab G, which is described in the film’s promotional material as a “genderless fairy godparent”. Fab G is, you guessed it, “FABULOUS!”, but unfortunately is not genderless, as she describes herself as a “fairy godmother” in the film, which horrified me no end as it seems aggressively binary. Cancel Cinderella for its binary conformism and trans-hate!

As for the rest of the cast, Pierce Brosnan and Minnie Driver play the king and queen and their work seems to embody the attitude that ‘the mortgage ain’t gonna pay for itself’, which as we all know…it isn’t.

Idina Menzel plays the wicked step-mother, but thankfully she isn’t really wicked because women aren’t capable of being bad in wokelandia because they have no agency, instead the wicked step-mother is just a misunderstood victim of the patriarchy.

The music in Cinderella, which features songs from Janet Jackson, Queen, Madonna, Ed Sheeran among many others, falls decidedly flat because the performances are dull and the arrangements so predictable, they seem to be done by a second-grade music teacher.  

I understand this is the world we live in and we have to suffer through these uber-woke movies and tv shows that only care about “the message” and not the quality of the product or its entertainment value, but this feminist monstrosity is beyond the pale.

It astounds me that in our already hyper-feminized to the point of absurdity culture, which denigrates men at every turn and intentionally conflates true masculinity with toxic masculinity, that Hollywood still feels the need to so aggressively indoctrinate young girls and boys into this rancid woke nonsense.

We’ve become a vapid and vacuous nation of clowns, cuckolds and eunuchs, and Amazon Studios, James Corden, Billy Porter and the awful new Cinderella are a sign of how far and how fast we’ve fallen, and we aren’t getting up.  

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Is TV Too Woke?

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

Is TV too woke?

As someone who works with a lot of producers, writers and directors who all privately tell me that if their TV project isn’t woke in conception and rigidly diverse in execution, then it won’t ever move forward, the answer is eye-rollingly obvious.

Unsurprisingly, the epidemic of wokeness is just as virulent across the pond in the UK TV world as it is in Hollywood and New York.

Proof of this was evident at the Edinburgh TV Festival panel discussion of TV professionals unironically titled “Diversity of Thought: Is TV Too Woke?”

At the discussion, Ash Atella, the producer of The Office and The IT Crowd, admitted, “I’m in a lot of meetings now where people tell me, ‘This will never get on because it’s not woke enough.”

The reality is that any sentient being with eyes to see, ears to hear and a brain to think, can tell you that TV is so awash in wokeness as to be hysterical.

Whether it be ideologically biased, identity-obsessed news coverage, or entertainment featuring the performative absurdity of a black Anne Boleyn, the obscenity of white male erasure in Marvel’s What If?, or incessant LGBTQ cheerleading, the trend is clear, the woke revolution is most certainly being televised.

What’s interesting about TV’s woke affliction is that while it’s obvious to regular people, many industry insiders are either afraid to speak publicly about it or blind to it.

A specially commissioned Ipsos Mori survey supports this notion, and shows that the TV industry in the UK is wildly out of step regarding wokeness compared to the viewing public. The survey found that 62% of British TV viewers believe political correctness on TV has gone too far, while only 19% of TV industry professionals agreed. It also revealed that 40% of viewers were proud of the UK, as opposed to 20% of TV professionals, and that 23% of viewers were ashamed of the British Empire while 63% of TV insiders shared that sentiment.

Obviously, TV professionals live in an alternate universe to audience members, and that is reflected in the lack of ideological diversity we see on our screens. But TV doesn’t care about ideological diversity, only in the surface diversity of identity.

The Egyptian-born Atella, who is a big proponent of diversity in TV, gave voice to the reality of the pro-diversity agenda and its effect when he told the panel, “I’m amazed how fast the white people have thought, ‘We can’t get on television’, that’s come in hard and fast in the last two years, and it’s a bewildering experience to be in those meetings after 15 years of the opposite. Now white people think there’s no place for them.”

Well, “the white people” think there’s no place for them in the culture because news channels consistently label them evil and entertainment endlessly denigrates them.

The corporate behemoths that run Hollywood have made it very clear too that white people, straight white men in particular, are not welcome in the industry.

For example, Disney and Amazon have made their worship of all things “diverse and inclusive” official company doctrine with insidiously specific identity quotas that above all target reducing straight white males from the creative and production process.

The same is true of the Academy Awards, which have made racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation box-ticking, as well as straight white male exclusion, mandatory, in order to be eligible for awards contention.

The woke bias of other panelists in Edinburgh, such as Louisa Compton, Head of News, Current Affairs and Sport at Channel 4, was also exposed, as was a shocking level of contempt for the audience.

Compton first claimed that being woke is benign as it literally means, “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone, which seem like fairly important principles.”

Compton heads a news division and the fact that her fidelity is to the subjective principles of “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone” as opposed to searching for the objective truth, is alarming but illuminating.

Compton did admit that wokeness can “alienate some audiences who feel that the world is moving on faster and leaving them behind” and also claimed, “I don’t think anyone in TV would be surprised to hear that a lot of the people who work [in the industry] think differently to the audiences we’re making progress for.”

Broadcast journalist Mobeen Azhar shared a similar holier-than-thou attitude when speaking of the type of shows needed to “move forward the people who think PC’s gone mad, because it hasn’t.”

To Compton, Azhar and their ilk, wokeness is the proper religion populated by the evolved and the pious, and they and their fellow TV professionals are working hard to make “progress for” and “move forward” those knuckle-dragging barbarians in the audience who feel left ”behind”.

Wokeness is now the state religion and entertainment and news its propaganda wings, brimming with missionaries like Compton and Azhar, filled with self-righteous superiority and evangelical zeal.

To these people TV is just an indoctrination machine used to do the public service of spreading the good news of the woke gospel to help spur evolution among the filthy, backwards proles.

So, is TV too woke? If you don’t think so then either you don’t watch TV or you’re a self-involved, delusional TV executive suffering from a severe case of stage 5 wokeness. Hopefully it’s the former and not the latter, as that’s the decidedly healthier and more enlightened choice.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Woke Wet Dream of Marvel's New Series 'What If...?'

The new Marvel series ‘What If…?’ is a woke wet dream where white male superheroes are replaced by women and minorities

The Disney+ show presents itself as innocent entertainment. But its woke agenda is red meat to rabid race hustlers and the identity obsessed desperate to disappear the scourge of white men from popular culture.

‘What If…?’, the new animated Marvel series, follows in the footsteps of the recent live-action Marvel series ‘WandaVision’, ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’, and ‘Loki’ in expanding the storyline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The series consists of nine narrative-bending episodes, the first of which premiered on August 11, followed by the second on August 18, with new episodes available every following Wednesday.

If the first two episodes are any indication, ‘What If…?’ will devoutly pander to the newfound politically correct religious faith of Disney (Marvel’s parent company), as the show’s premise can basically be summed up as ‘What if the woke had a time machine and used it to destroy the Marvel universe?’

The first episode examines an alternative time-line where, during World War II, white guy Steve Rogers doesn’t turn into super soldier Captain America. Instead Agent Carter, a British woman, gets injected with the super soldier serum and becomes the superhero Captain Carter.

Captain Carter not only battles Hydra, Red Skull and the Nazis, but also the greatest villain of all… the patriarchy. She shows her true girl power by overcoming sexism and misogyny from condescending white males in the military power structure. You go, girl!

In the second episode, based on the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ storyline, the Ravagers are sent to earth in 1988 by the Celestial Ego to capture his child, Peter Quill, but they mistakenly take T’Challa, Wakanda’s child prince instead.

Unlike the selfish, stupid and white Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) from the movies, the black T’Challa/Star-Lord (voiced by Chadwick Boseman in his final performance) is so good, selfless and wonderful, he actually convinces Thanos to abandon his genocidal plans and join him on his noble Robin Hood-esque adventures.

The message is clear in ‘What If…?’: if Thanos’ genocidal plan killed just white men, all of whom are awful, then the woke would happily go along with it in the Marvel universe and our own too.

Episode two of ‘What If…?’ so inspired Dr. Jason Johnson, a black talking head on MSNBC, he wrote an article titled, “Disney +’s ‘What if T’Challa became a star-lord?’ is a repudiation of mediocre white men”.

Johnson declares the episode is “a total repudiation of the mediocre white men who’ve been centered in most of the Marvel movie’s blockbuster films.” This is a curious take as Tony Stark was a child prodigy scientific genius before he became Iron Man, Bruce Banner was a renowned physicist before he became the Hulk, Stephen Strange was a brilliant surgeon before he became Dr. Strange, and Thor is a Norse god for goodness sake. There’s not a whole lot of mediocrity on that list of white guys centered in Marvel movies.

Johnson then rants that he doesn’t like movies or TV shows “about selfish, privileged mediocre white men who stumble through life, making costly mistakes that invariably hurt others along the way, but somehow in the end they get to be the hero…”  And yet he was a big fan of President Obama, a selfish, privileged black man who made costly mistakes, like siding with Wall Street instead of Main Street, that invariably hurt others, like working class people, but somehow ended up being a hero in mainstream culture. 

Johnson adores ‘What If…?’ because it shows “what real heroism, through Black guy magic, can actually look like”, which raises the question: what the hell is ‘black guy magic?’ God willing it’s better than the cheesy white guy magic of David Copperfield.

Johnson’s inanity continues with, “White men are bombarded with messages every day telling them they’re special no matter what they have or have not done or earned.”

Are those messages subliminal? I certainly haven’t seen them in the cavalcade of commercials and TV shows where all white guys are punchlines, because they’re the one group that can be ridiculed without fear of cancellation.

As a white male who aspires to the impossible dream of mediocrity, I’ve never experienced this alleged relentless messaging about being “special” regardless of what I “have or have not done or earned”, and neither have any of the other white guys I know.

The irony of all this “mediocre white man” hating is that Johnson is the poster boy for mediocrity himself. He’s an unoriginal mid-wit who has carved out a career on TV and in academia through the sheer force of his kiss-assery and corporate leg-up programs desperate to put a black face on establishment talking points.

He shamelessly belches out mendacious and mindless talking points meant to protect the powerful and maintain the status quo, so that he can keep sucking on the corporate media teat. For example, he once argued with a straight face that billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the oligarch’s oligarch, was “not an oligarch”.

He also got suspended by MSNBC and fired by The Root for calling the black women working on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign the “island of misfit black girls”.

It’s amusing that the Bloomberg oligarch defense and the egregious “black girls” statement sound an awful lot like something one of those mediocre white guys Johnson hates so much would say. To Dr. Johnson, physician of mediocrity, I say, “heal thyself”.

As for ‘What If…?’, I’d love to live on a timeline where corporate media clowns and race hustling hacks like Jason Johnson didn’t exist, and where wokeness didn’t ruin everything it touches. Unfortunately, that timeline doesn’t exist, and I won’t even get to see it imagined on some corny animated show either – it’s just too unbelievable.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

In the Same Breath: Documentary Review

New HBO documentary ‘In the Same Breath’ examines the horror of Covid and the Chinese and American government’s initial misinformation campaigns in response to the outbreak.

The film shows that trusting government, whether it be socialist or democratic in nature, is a fool’s errand.

In the Same Breath, the flawed but at times fascinating new documentary airing on HBO and HBO Max, chronicles the inept response and often deceptive practices of both the Chinese and U.S. governments in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and the power of propaganda to shape perception.

The documentary features some harrowing and horrifying footage from within Wuhan during the height of the Covid outbreak. Scenes of patients gasping for air and dying, and families struggling to decide whether their elderly mother should die in a hospital parking lot waiting for care that will never come or admit death’s inevitability back in the comfort of their apartment, are gut-wrenching.

One of the most unnerving sequences in the film is when a CCTV camera captures the very beginning of the pandemic when it records a cavalcade of people from the Wuhan fish market coming to a clinic with a cough and high fever. The doctor who greets and treats them then develops the same symptoms and goes from hospital to hospital looking for care, but is turned away every time, and later dies.

Director Nanfu Wang, best known for her searing documentary One Child Nation about China’s one child policy, obviously has insights into the Chinese mindset and she is unforgiving when it comes to the Chinese government.

In the Same Breath spotlights the relentless drumbeat of misinformation from the Chinese government that at first diminished the disease’s power, with officials declaring it doesn’t transmit human to human and dissenters arrested for their heresy. When the truth became undeniable, the government shifts into propaganda mode and stories of brave front line medical workers flood the Chinese tv market, with the message that the government and people of China are working hand in hand to defeat the Covid menace takes hold.

Wang, an American citizen born and raised in China, is a skilled documentarian who has a keen eye for Chinese propaganda but a bit of a blind spot for her own American political bias.

The two main villains of In the Same Breath are the corrupt Chinese government and the incompetent Trump administration. Both are deserving of scorn, but at least in the American side of the coronavirus pandemic story, this documentary feels a little shallow as it isn’t just the Trump administration that has misinformed and deceived regarding coronavirus, it’s been the entire political and media establishment.  

The documentary almost seems quaint when it ponders potential Trump authoritarianism when in his absence vicious tribalism and covid misinformation have continued to flourish unabated.

To her credit, Wang does briefly highlight some Democrats as being misinformation agents too, and excoriates Dr. Anthony Fauci, for his repeated deceptions, especially early in the outbreak.

What Wang doesn’t do is challenge the orthodoxy of HBO’s decidedly liberal audience. For example, the scientists and medical professionals who signed a letter in the summer of 2020 saying that protesting against the lockdown was dangerous and but that protesting for Black Lives Matter was mandatory because of the alleged epidemic of racism in America, are never mentioned, never mind ridiculed. This egregious event is tailor made for Wang’s thesis but is undoubtedly a bridge too far for the bigwigs at HBO and their liberal audience.

She also studiously avoids the controversial lab-leak theory.

Wang’s main focus is that she’s afraid of what people in power will do to maintain and expand their power, especially during a pandemic. She highlights China’s numerous authoritarian abuses and the Chinese people’s not only acceptance of those abuses, but outright praise for them, to make her case.

This all seems very relevant to the hotly debated vaccination issue here in the U.S., but unfortunately In the Same Breath only covers 2020, so that issue is never raised.

I’m devoutly agnostic on the vaccine question, but it’s striking to me that the same Chinese tactics and techniques regarding Covid featured in the documentary are currently either being copied or mirrored by the elite in the U.S

For instance, Wang makes a strong case that China has undercounted the number of dead in order to make the government seem more effective, turning a possible 30,000 dead in Wuhan into just 3,000.

In contrast, the U.S. corporate media have used a bait and switch approach where the highest number is always the one featured, possibly in an attempt to scare people into compliance. For example, in the early days of Covid the death toll made headlines, then it subtly shifted to the number of positive tests, and now to the percentage of sick who are unvaccinated.

Wang also expresses frustration with the U.S. government’s refusal to share accurate data with the American public, a sentiment she admittedly shares with ‘deplorable’ Trumpers.

China bullied people into silence and compliance by making emotional and nationalistic pleas, while in the U.S., the argument for people to take vaccines is also emotional – do no harm to grandma, and collective – we need to work together for herd immunity.

The bullying impulse is strong in the pro-vaccine movement too, as restricting liberties and requiring vaccine passports for government aid have remarkably become the default position among elites, many liberals and the media, despite resulting in obvious racial disparities.

As for In the Same Breath, it’s a flawed documentary, but if viewers can overcome its limiting bias and see the authoritarian forest for the partisan trees, it’s worth watching for no other reason than to remind of the insidious and nefarious nature of power and how easily freedom is suffocated by governments meant to protect it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Chris Evans goes full Captain America, assembling a cavalcade of warmongering Washington avengers to discuss the Middle East

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

The gullible Hollywood star exposes himself to be a useful idiot for the military/intelligence industrial complex by producing a blindly orthodox new six-part discussion series on Yemen, Iran, Palestine, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

As the U.S. limps out of Afghanistan with its tail between its legs, and millions suffer and die under the most brutal of American-induced maladies from Syria to Palestine to Yemen and across the Middle East, I implore you to fear not as Captain America is now on the case.

Chris Evans, the movie star best known for playing the patriotic leader of the Avengers, Steve Rogers, in the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe, is out to solve the world’s problems and has set his dazzling blue eyes and decidedly empty-head on the mess that is the Middle East.

In 2017, the dreamy Evans founded a civic media organization titled “A Starting Point” which he unironically claims is “non-partisan”. Thankfully for humanity, on August 31st, A Starting Point will air a new six-part series titled “Influence and Power in the Middle East” where “experts” discuss Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Palestine.

I was hoping that this series would feature such Captain America adjacent luminaries as Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor and The Hulk, but unfortunately the line-up of speakers is considerably less impressive.

“Influence and Power in the Middle East” features a cavalcade of archaic establishment asses like George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, former Secretary of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta, and everybody’s favorite raving lunatic and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton.

This is literally a murderer’s row of Washington warmongers, nefarious neo-cons and CIA criminals who have raped and pillaged the Middle East for the entirety of their kiss up-kick down careers. This is the equivalent of having Ted Bundy on a dating podcast to share his insights about women.

In addition, apparently former CIA operative Will Hurd is going to “host” these discussions, one could only hope that his experience “hosting” detainees during torture sessions in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be replicated with these vile villains.

If I wanted to see Hadley, Haass, Panetta, Bolton and a cavalcade of National Security lackeys and CIA shills spout their obscene and absurd military/intelligence industrial propaganda, I’d just turn on cable news, as CNN, MSNBC and Fox seem to exist solely to platform and/or employ these types of repugnant reprobates.

Speaking of the mainstream media, it’s nice to see Chris Evans, one of those hopeless Hollywood fools who endlessly espouses diversity in movie casting, emulate media business-as-usual with his A Starting Point charade by casting only people slavishly addicted to establishment orthodoxy for these discussions…no diversity of opinion here!

For example, Richard Haas and Dr. Jon Alterman, two pro-Israel shills, will discuss Palestine. I’m sure that will be immensely enlightening.

Another example is having Leon Panetta and John Bolton tackle Iran. Bolton is the John Bonham of banging the drum for war with Iran. You know what won’t get mentioned in that stultifying, establishment-friendly discussion? The U.S. shooting down of Iran Air flight 655, a civilian airliner, over Iranian airspace in 1988, killing all 290 men, women and children aboard.

What would be considerably more useful, noble and interesting would be if Chris Evans had used his oversized public stature to actually feature diverse opinions from diverse people, like…I don’t know…maybe have actual Palestinians discuss Palestine, and Iranians discuss Iran, and Syrians discuss Syria and Yemenis discuss Yemen. You know, platform people who never ever get a platform in American media.

And if Captain America really had a pair, he’d have Jamal Khashoggi’s widow and 9-11 victims’ family members come and discuss Saudi Arabia.

But we all know that Chris Evans is entirely devoid of not only testicular fortitude, but of brains.

Evans is such a moron that in 2016 he actually flew into a rage because he believed that Marlon Brando had literally anally raped his co-star Maria Schneider on camera at the behest of director Bernardo Bertolucci while filming Last Tango in Paris in 1971. Think about how breathtakingly ridiculous that is for a moment.

To be clear, Brando did not actually rape Schneider or have any genital/sexual contact with her while filming Last of Tango in Paris, any more than Clint Eastwood really shot people while filming The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The sex between Brando and Schneider was entirely simulated, but when the egregiously gullible Evans read about a mis-informed rumor that the Brando story was true, he donned his white knight savior costume and valiantly tweeted.

“Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage."

He followed that gem up by tweeting, “They should be in jail." The punchline being that Evans was unaware that Marlon Brando had been dead for a decade by the time Captain America courageously hit send on that tweet.

The reality is that Evans isn’t just an empty-headed imbecile but also a shameless establishment shill. This buff buffoon is no doubt great at doing pull-ups, but he has the intellect of a toddler in pull-ups.

Chris “Captain America” Evans obviously set out to prove with his ‘serious’ A Starting Point venture that he wasn’t just another vacuous but impossibly handsome Hollywood pretty boy, but by the looks of the “Influence and Power in the Middle East” guest list, I can confidently declare “Mission Not Accomplished!”, as he’s only proven himself to be just another useful idiot for the money-hungry and bloodthirsty military/industrial complex and corrupt Washington establishment.

Captain America famously said: “I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from. “ However, it would appear Chris does like bullies, especially if they’re from Washington.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Homeroom: Documentary Review

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A manipulative and meandering documentary devoid of insight or originality.

New Hulu documentary ‘Homeroom’ isn’t an uplifting depiction of the next generation of activists, it’s a depressing celebration of misguided victimhood.

The film is a divisive piece of racial propaganda that will be lauded by mainstream critics for its politically correct and socially acceptable intolerance, racial resentment and prejudice.

Homeroom is the new critically-acclaimed documentary that follows a group of politically engaged, minority Oakland High School students as they navigate their tumultuous senior year as it’s interrupted by Covid and the George Floyd protests.

The documentary, which premiered on the streaming service Hulu on August 12th, is the final installment of director Peter Nicks’ “Oakland Trilogy” (The Waiting Room and The Force) and boasts Black Panther director Ryan Coogler as its executive producer.

The main protagonist of Homeroom is high school senior Denilson Garibo, an undocumented immigrant who’s an ambitious member of the All-City Council (ACC) which represents the 36,000 students of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD).

OUSD has its own police force and well before George Floyd’s murder Denilson and his fellow ACC member Mica, are pushing to have the school board abolish the school police in order to spare budget cuts in other student programs.

Denilson loves politics and certainly plays the part very well. Ever fluent in the emotionalist lingo of the moment, Denilson talks of students feeling “triggered” and “unsafe” around school police, of the “constant criminalization of black people”, and that he will stand up for “black and brown students”…apparently the white and Asian students are out of luck.

Denilson and his cohorts do seem like nice kids, but like most teenagers (and people) they also seem insufferably vapid as they’re constantly on their phones, even taking calls, in the middle of class. They aren’t so much concerned with education, something painfully obvious from their poor diction, vocabulary, and abysmal lack of logic, as they are with distracting themselves and reducing their attention span.

Their slavish addiction to social media isn’t harmless as it distorts their perception of reality by relentlessly inundating them with messages feeding their victimhood identities and fomenting anti-white sentiments.

For example, reports of Breonna Taylor’s slaying, videos of Ahmoud Arbery’s gruesome killing and George Floyd’s murder are passed around these kid’s social media echo chamber like confirmation bias baseball cards.

This focus on white violence against blacks is further reinforced when a black teacher gives a passionate lecture about a black female former student from the school who was stabbed to death in an Oakland park by a white man.

Director Nicks never challenges this distorted racial narrative but rather reinforces it as an objective truth.

The objective truth is that according to FBI crime statistics, the vast majority of black people murdered are killed by other black people. The same is true of whites, of course, as murder tends to be an intra-racial act.

But Nicks has no interest in truth, only in propagating racial propaganda that perpetuates victimhood and resentment.

An interesting example of Nicks’ biased approach is the brief clip shown of Amy Cooper, the infamous Central Park ‘Karen’ who called the cops on Christian Cooper (no relation), a black birdwatcher who told her to leash her dog, as an example of the unbridled evil of white people.

What is interesting about the use of this clip is that Kmele Foster recently investigated the Central Park ‘Karen’ incident and came away with a much more nuanced view of the situation. Basically, Amy Cooper isn’t the entitled, one-dimensional racist villain the media portrayed her as and Christian Cooper isn’t the martyred saint they made him out to be.

But Homeroom, its protagonists and director Nicks have no interest in, or tolerance for, such nuance and complexity regarding race, only in branding scapegoats.

For example, Denilson shamelessly decries the white middle class people attending school board meetings, claiming they’re “hijacking” it, and then tells a white board member he expected her to vote against his initiative because she’s white. Other minority students in the film say that gentrification, an influx of white residents, has driven them out of their neighborhoods.

Of course, if whites didn’t attend the school board meeting, they’d be branded as aloof and not caring about the community. And demonizing white people for moving into a black neighborhood is the evil of “gentrification”, while whites moving away from a black neighborhood is racist “white flight”.

That same circular illogic will also apply to Oakland Unified School District’s police. When they are abolished, crime will undoubtedly go up in schools, and then these same activists will claim that no one is protecting minority children.

The bottom line is that Homeroom is the sort of biased racial propaganda that we need much less of in our culture. It’s rightfully unimaginable that a white teacher would ever be celebrated for lecturing his class on black on white crime, or that black school board members would be singled out for their skin color, or that “middle-class blacks” would be admonished for attending a school board meeting.

All of this racial resentment is cheered as “activism” by the filmmaker, whose sole focus is on multiple African-American, Latino and Asian students, but not a single white student, despite whites making-up the largest percentage of Oakland’s diverse population, 35%.

As someone who has worked in California schools I sympathize with the student-activists featured in Homeroom. I can also unfortunately attest that the school-to-prison pipeline is very real and that major educational reforms are desperately needed, but the hyper-racialization and intolerance showcased in Homeroom and the wave of activist indoctrination taking hold in schools across the state (and country), are not the answer and will not lead to a happy ending for anyone involved, especially minority students.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union - Documentary Review and Commentary

New HBO Obama doc is race-obsessed establishment pablum meant to distract from the nefarious nature of American governance

The dull and derivative docuseries chooses hagiography over history and style over substance as it white-washes the sins of America’s only black president.

Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is the new three-part HBO documentary that sets out to chronicle Barrack Obama’s rise from obscurity to the highest office in the land.

The roughly five-hour series, which features no new interview with Obama but rather relies on archival footage and a plethora of sycophantic talking heads, premiered on HBO on August 3rd, and on HBO Max on August 4th, the former president’s 60th birthday. What do you get the man who has everything for his birthday? If your director Peter W. Kunhardt you give the gift of a shamelessly reverential, hagiographic documentary.

Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is one of those insipid, paint-by-numbers, deferential documentaries that is steadfastly committed to never challenging either its subject or its audience that results in a banal viewing experience painfully devoid of insights.

Designed to do nothing but placate Obama true believers with some ‘no-drama’ nostalgia, the series is resolute in its decision to never give voice to any serious oppositional perspectives. Yes, there are a few talking heads, like the brilliant Cornel West, who delicately air disagreements, but even those are couched in solemn genuflection to Saint Obama.

Not once is someone who actually opposed Obama on principle interviewed or allowed to speak for themselves. The series uses this echo chamber approach in order to appease its target audience of liberals who demand all contrarians and conflicting arguments be purged from their purview, banished forever for their heresy from the kingdom of those “on the right side of history”.

Instead, the filmmakers choose to read minds and project racial animus onto those who fought Obama.

Disagree with Obamacare? Racist! Oppose the stimulus package? Racist!

Ironically, the hyper-racial lens through which the series examines Obama’s meteoric rise and rule is less a monument to America as a racist nation than it is a testament to Obama’s failure and shocking political irrelevance just five years after leaving office, as well as to the intellectual vacuity and lack of imagination on the part of elite establishment liberals.

In this way the docu-series is the perfect revisionist modernization of the Obama myth in that it’s addiction to hyper-racism causes it to be utterly blind to any other topic.

For instance, there isn’t a single mention of Obama’s prodigious use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, but there is an extended focus on black Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates being mistakenly arrested by Cambridge police.

There’s no mention of Obama’s immigration policy which resulted in massive deportations and routinely placing “kids in cages”, but there is a focus on Trump’s racist demagoguery and birtherism.

Obama’s complicity in the death and suffering in Yemen, Libya and Syria is verboten, but there is ample time spent on Obama’s love of basketball and his black-centric musical taste.

And of course, Obama’s extra-judicial assassination of American teenager Abdulrahman al-Awlaki is memory-holed but George Zimmerman’s killing of teenager Trayvon Martin is highlighted.

This hyper-racial perspective not only allows the filmmakers to ignore Obama’s egregious sins but to also roll out a cavalcade of kiss-ass clowns like Michael Eric Dyson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Charlamagne tha God, Keegan Michael Key and Jelani Cobb (an executive producer on the series) to spout vapid and impotent inanities about how white supremacy is the DNA of America. The fact that voters, the vast majority of which were not black, overwhelmingly elected a black man to the presidency, not once but twice, would seem to refute that claim.

With its maniacal focus on style over substance, Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union fits perfectly into the usual establishment approach toward all things political.

Style is how Obama got elected, as his cool, thoughtful demeanor and eloquence were in stark contrast to Bush’s cowboy buffoonery. In turn, Trump’s reality tv/wrestlemania shenanigans got him elected post no-drama Obama, and Biden’s creepy grandpa routine got him elected because he contrasted Trump’s erratic freneticism (speaking of which, Biden is shown in archival footage in the documentary but never speaks, no doubt because that would alert viewers to his steep decline since his halcyon VP days).

But regardless of which specific stylistic mask is worn and by which president, its objective is to cover the never-changing agenda of the American political establishment which is imperialism and militarism overseas and corporatism and fascism at home. No matter who or what party is in charge and no matter how they behave on the surface, that insidious reality will never be challenged or changed, and this is why Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union exists…to reinforce that duplicitous and distractionary style over substance paradigm.

Obama, the first black president, wasn’t elected to change the substance of American policy, he was elected to distract from it, and this docu-series gives ample ammunition to the gullible and mindless to continue to focus on race and identity politics instead of on the voracious malignancy of U.S. policy, most specifically the cancer of America’s rigged-casino capitalism and the insatiable beast of the military/intelligence industrial complex.

In conclusion, if you’re a “Hope and Change” sucker searching for a short-lived, rather vapid injection of Obama-era nostalgia, then Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is definitely the documentary mini-series for you. But if you’re more interested in cold, hard truths and unflinching insights about Obama, his presidency and America, then this is a five-hour waste of time.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

'They Are Us' and the Tragedy Trap

The shutting down of ‘They Are Us’, the film about the Christchurch massacre of 2019, is the right thing to do for the wrong reason

Artists and audiences need time and emotional distance from a tragedy and trauma before they can make and appreciate any worthwhile cinema about it.

Last week pre-production for the film They Are Us, which intended to dramatize Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the killing of 51 Muslim worshipers by a white supremacist in Christchurch in 2019, was shut down due to outrage from New Zealand’s Muslim community which deemed the project “insensitive” and “obscene”.

The film, which had Rose Byrne set to star as Ardern, is now “on hold” and may have a difficult time exiting its self-induced purgatory. And maybe that’s for the best, at least for the time being.

I’m conflicted when it comes to this controversy, as I don’t believe that any group of people being offended, even righteously offended, by a film should ever stifle a project, but I also think that making a movie out of a recent tragedy is a bad idea because it rarely produces worthwhile cinema.

Generally, when a movie rushes to recount a recent tragedy it’s either cynically exploiting trauma to make a quick dollar, or it’s a piece of propaganda meant to manipulate the public.

In the case of They Are Us, it may very well be a combination of the two.

It’s highly curious to make a film focusing on a politician’s reaction to a recent real-life tragedy when that politician is still active in the political arena. It seems likely that They Are Us would be cashing in on a horrific tragedy by making a two-hour campaign commercial for Jacinda Ardern, which doesn’t exactly sound very artistically compelling.

The They Are Us controversy brought to my mind Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), which told the story of Chris Kyle, a famed Navy SEAL murdered in 2013.

Kyle’s father told Eastwood “disrespect my son and I’ll unleash hell”, so the director dutifully made a hagiography that played up Kyle’s legend and ignored his fabulist tales of punching Jesse Ventura, shooting carjackers and sniping looters in New Orleans.

American Sniper was a propaganda popcorn movie and made tons of money by watering down not only Kyle’s complexity but the Iraq War’s as well. While commercially successful, artistically it was ultimately forgettable as it shamelessly promoted myth in favor of exploring truth.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion They Are Us would follow the same empty path regarding Ahearn and the massacre. Truth is that time and emotional distance are needed for artists to make noteworthy cinema about tragic events and audiences to be able to make sense of them.

For example, the bloodiest year for the U.S. in Vietnam was 1968 and it took a decade before Hollywood could adequately make a movie about that war. Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were the first to successfully ponder the Vietnam fiasco, with Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born of the Fourth of July (1989), and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) continuing the exploration nearly a decade later.

Time and emotional distance greatly aided these films, their filmmakers and the viewers who digested them, as artists and audiences simply weren’t capable of diving into the horror of Vietnam in its immediate aftermath.

Oliver Stone has often gone back to examine the unhealed wounds of the American psyche. Twenty-eight years after JFK’s assassination he made his masterpiece JFK (1991), and twenty years after Richard Nixon’s downfall he made the brilliantly astute Nixon (1995).

The previously mentioned Vietnam war films and the Oliver Stone historical dramas succeeded artistically because they were constructed on a foundation of reason, and upon that foundation emotion and drama were built, whereas films made closer to traumatic events are usually built on a flimsy foundation of heightened emotion and therefore lack all meaning and purpose besides emoting and manipulating.

Speaking of manipulation, a perfect example of a movie exploiting an event for propaganda purposes is Zero Dark Thirty, which purported to tell the tale of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Zero Dark Thirty premiered in December of 2012, a quick year and nine months after Bin Laden’s killing, and was propaganda meant to lionize the Obama administration and the intelligence community as it played up the effectiveness of torture and played down its barbarity.

Similarly, United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass, premiered four and half years after 9-11 and exploited the raw emotion of that trauma to indelibly imprint upon the public’s consciousness through drama the government’s version of that heinous event.

Greengrass also made 22 July, about the 2011 massacre in Norway. 22 July came out in 2018, and like United 93, even some time had passed from the traumatic event it recounted, the emotional trauma was still too fresh. Both films are well made but the wounds they probed were too fresh for any valuable insights to be uncovered.

In contrast, Greengrass’s greatest film, Bloody Sunday, about the Bloody Sunday massacre in the north of Ireland by British troops in 1972, came out in 2002, thirty years after the events depicted. And while that movie is viscerally jarring and emotionally unnerving, it’s also powerfully poignant and insightful in ways that United 93 and 22 July simply aren’t because it had the benefit of time, distance and perspective.  

As for They Are Us, maybe a decade from now a worthwhile movie about the Christchurch massacre could be made as both artists and audiences will have had time to process that tragic event and be open to insights and interpretations of it that they’re immune to in the current, more emotionally fraught moment. Any movie made sooner than that will most assuredly only be exploiting trauma, rather exploring it for deeper meaning.

 A version fo this article was published at RT.

©2021

Oliver Stone, JFK: Revisited and the Establishment Media

Oliver Stone’s JFK assassination documentary is being entirely ignored by the establishment media, which is a sign he might be on to something.

It’s telling that the MSM is celebrating strange, sexually charged movies at Cannes instead of even acknowledging Stone’s foray back into the troubling case of JFK’s murder.

Last week, Oliver Stone premiered his new documentary about the JFK assassination titled JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, at the Cannes Film Festival.

You’d think that Oliver Stone, the polarizing, two-time Best Director Academy Award winner, whose film JFK created such a furor it led to the US government passing the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, premiering a controversial JFK assassination documentary at Cannes would be very big news. You’d be wrong.

When JFK: Revisited premiered on Monday, July 12th, the mainstream media didn’t praise it or pan it, they pretended it didn’t exist.

The New York Times vast coverage of Cannes consisted of eleven articles, most focusing on the more salacious content, such as Benedetta, a steamy story about lesbian nuns, Annette, a musical where Adam Driver sings while performing oral sex on Marion Cotillard, and Titane, where a woman has sex with a car and lactates oil, but not once has JFK Revisited ever been mentioned in the supposed “paper of record”.

The same is true of The Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and every mainstream outlet I searched, as none of them acknowledge JFK Revisited exists at all.

The only media mention of JFK Revisited I found was in trade papers like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and in the British press in The Times and Daily Telegraph. Their reaction to the film was split, with Variety and The Times giving negative reviews and THR and the Daily Telegraph praising it.

Considering that Cuba, intelligence agency nefariousness, and conspiracy theories are making headlines, and that the small critical assessment of the documentary is split, it’s curious that the media is maintaining the status quo by endorsing sexual depravity at Cannes instead of pursuing truth by debating JFK Revisited.

I’m kidding, it’s no surprise that the American myth making media who bequeath to us the official narrative from which “respectable” people will never deviate, are tossing JFK Revisited down the memory hole and lavishing praise on horny nuns and coital Cadillacs.

You see the establishment love to distract the masses and hate conspiracies…except for the ones they love.

JFK assassination conspiracies are rejected outright as unserious despite a plethora of damning evidence because they indict the establishment itself. Half of the talking heads on cable news are former (wink-wink) intelligence community members, and the vast majority of journalists are lapdogs for the intel agencies, so they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them in service to the truth about the JFK assassination.

This same anti-conspiratorial press spent four years breathlessly belching up every half-assed Russia conspiracy story they could conjure, including Russiagate, claims of Russia using microwave weapons or hacking into power grids and voting machines, and shouted them from the rooftops 24/7 until they become presumed true despite a complete lack of evidence.

As Noam Chomsky would say, this is how deceptive propaganda is effectively disseminated and consent is manufactured, through “controlled market forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship”. “Serious” people prove their seriousness by believing those absurd officially sanctioned anti-Russia conspiracies because they are deemed “serious” and are propagated by other “serious” people, while “unserious” conspiracies like JFK, 9-11 and the lab leak theory, are ridiculed, and those believing them demeaned as “conspiracy theorists”.

This is why the establishment loathes Stone so much, because he flipped the script in ’91 by using his considerable cachet in the wake of his massive Hollywood success, to make a movie about the JFK assassination that obliterated the official myth of the Warren Commission and presented a compelling counter-myth.

To get a taste of how much the establishment despises Stone, go read Stone’s JFK: The Book of the Film, which features the movie’s 97 reactions and commentaries about the movie.

Unlike his adversaries, Stone prints those who disagree with him, as evidenced by articles featured in the book such as “Does JFK conspire against reason?”, “Hollywood Wonders if Warner Brothers Let JFK Go Too Far”, “Oliver’s Twist”, “The Paranoid Style” and “The Plot to Assassinate the Warren Commission”, to name but a few.

The hysteria that JFK triggered among the elites in ‘91 is perfectly encapsulated in a tale told by late film critic Roger Ebert, who claimed Walter Cronkite gave him a “tongue-lashing” and said he should be “ashamed” of himself for praising the movie.

Stone became more of an establishment pariah when he interviewed Fidel Castro in 2002 and Vladimir Putin in 2015-2017. Stone spoke with America’s enemies instead of just mouthing the mindless official mantra, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the media who believe there’s only one narrative, and we can’t complicate it by listening instead of yelling.

Stone’s history of being a firebrand and his loyalty to truth above the official narrative, is why JFK Revisited is being intentionally ignored. Any press is good press, even a bad review spreads awareness of the product, so hitting the ignore button is the best way for the establishment to silence Stone and maintain the JFK status quo.

And thus far the media blackout is working as intended, as JFK Revisited has yet to secure a distributor here in the American market which is desperately hungry for content.

I haven’t seen JFK Revisited so I have no idea if it tells the truth regarding the JFK’s assassination, but I do know that the establishment media is addicted to lies and allergic to truth, which makes me think Oliver Stone might be on to something.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Passion of Mel Gibson

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 44 seconds

Mel Gibson’s survived charges of sexism, racism and anti-Semitism… but it’s saluting Trump that could finally get him canceled

Woke Twitter is outraged at footage that shows the Oscar winner paying tribute to the ex-President at a UFC fight. In Hollywood’s eyes, this overshadows all his previous misdemeanors… and could deal a terminal blow to his career.

Mel Gibson, the movie star and Academy Award winning director, has long been a lightning rod for his problematic behavior and beliefs. But over the weekend he finally crossed the line and committed the most egregious of mortal sins in the New Hollywood… he saluted Donald Trump.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, let me fill you in. On Saturday, Trump attended UFC 264 in Las Vegas, and as he entered the arena Mel happened to be nearby and gave the former president a salute.

This ugly incident was caught on video and people on Twitter dissected it like it was the Zapruder film to see if that was actually Mel Gibson – star of Lethal Weapon and director of The Passion of the Christ – and not some lookalike who’d been filmed.

After much detective work by intrepid internet sleuths, it was confirmed that it was indeed Mad Max himself who had the gall to salute the former president of the United States.

A gigantic tempest in the Twitter teapot ensued, with the legions of woke bravehearts putting on their war paint and declaring that the heretic Gibson must be drawn and quartered for his heinous behavior in the name of “FREEDOM!”

Not surprisingly, since they solely seem to function to make mountains out of molehills, the establishment media responded by churning out articles bemoaning Gibson’s indecency, some with headlines even declaring the salute to be “dramatic”.

I’ve never actually been a Gibson fan, not because of his political or religious beliefs, but because I consider him a ham-handed director and cheesy actor. Others may find that ham and cheese combo delicious, but it’s never appealed to me.

So, I come to bury Mel Gibson, not to praise him, but it’s curious that of his many sins against the supposedly pure people of Hollywood, it’s saluting a former President that may finally get him to Golgotha and foisted upon the cancel cross.

In the seemingly never-ending Passion of Mel Gibson, this new station of the cross pales in comparison to other, much more brutal ones.

In 2006, during a drunk driving arrest, Mel infamously called a female cop “sugartits” and touched the third rail of Hollywood by accusing Jews of being responsible for “all the wars in the world”.

Then in 2010, Mel is alleged to have punched his girlfriend in the face and knocked out two of her teeth – the same girlfriend who he said on an answering machine looked “like a f***ng pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n***ers, it will be your fault”.

It’s completely apropos of the utterly absurd and inane culture of the woke New Hollywood, where racial, sexual and ethnic quotas reign supreme and a new de facto Hays code regarding storylines and dialogue is celebrated, that the thing that may finally get Mel Gibson cancelled is that he gave a half-hearted salute to Trump at a UFC fight.

That Gibson was able to come back from his more unsavory previous public sins, but might not survive this one, points to how Hollywood previously didn’t really care what you said or did just as long as you kept the money train rolling. But now money seems at the very least secondary to social and political demands.

In the past, Gibson’s films, particularly the ones he directed, always made money for their investors and his partners, and thus his sins were washed away. For example, Braveheart not only made $213 million at the box office but won five Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture.

The Passion of the Christ was an independent production, and Gibson put up money for the $30 million budget. And despite the fact that the dialogue was entirely in Hebrew, Latin and reconstructed Aramaic, and that there was a concerted and under-handed effort to besmirch the film as anti-Semitic, it still made an astounding $612 million worldwide. Gibson alone made nearly half a billion dollars on that movie.

Gibson’s 2006 film Apocalypto, no surefire hit since all the dialogue, was spoken in the ancient language of the Mayans, made an astounding $120 million.

The most telling sign of the recent history of Hollywood’s fluidity regarding forgiveness and Gibson’s once-Teflon ability was that his 2016 comeback film, Hacksaw Ridge, a truly dreadful cinematic venture, not only made $180 million at the box office but, in what seemed like a very generous gesture, received six Oscar nominations, including one for Gibson as Best Director. 

The adulation heaped upon Gibson and Hacksaw Ridge, his first directorial effort after the 2010 allegations, seemed to finally put the ugliness of Mel’s racist, sexist and anti-Semitic statements permanently in the past. But now in New Hollywood, where social/political standing overrides finances and forgiveness is verboten, the simple gesture of a salute to Trump may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  

Ultimately, this clash between titanic assholes will probably result in every jerk getting exactly what they want. New Hollywood will cancel Gibson, forcing him to self-finance a sequel to The Passion of the Christ, causing a Twitter firestorm and generating free publicity, thus resulting in Mad Mel getting richer and giving another giant half billion-dollar middle finger to Tinsel Town. Twitter will get to be irrationally angry, New Hollywood will get to be self righteous, and Mel Gibson will get even more ridiculously rich.

The only losers in all this will be, as always, the rest of us.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Black Widow: A Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The movie is a middling Disney money grab chock full of predictable Russophobic caricatures and #MeToo pandering that doesn’t propel the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s storyline forward.

This article contains plot points and minor spoilers for the movie Black Widow.

After a two-year, Covid-induced drought, Marvel is finally back in theatres with the much-anticipated Black Widow.

Black Widow was originally set to kick off Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe back in May of 2020, but Covid crushed those plans and Marvel fans have had to go to the streaming service Disney Plus to get their Marvel fix in the form of the series WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki.

Black Widow, in case you’ve forgotten, is actually Natasha Romanoff, the former KGB superspy turned Avenger who is portrayed by Scarlet Johansson.

The movie Black Widow, which besides being in theatres is also available to stream on Disney Plus for a hefty fee, is set right after Captain America: Civil War and five years before all the unpleasantness with Thanos in Infinity War and Endgame because, spoiler alert, Black Widow actually dies in Endgame. Consider this movie to be cinematic CPR on Natasha Romanoff.

The fear heading into Black Widow was that it would be the wokest Marvel movie yet. That fear was formed when Ms. Johansson made some pre-release noise about how she was uncomfortable with how her character was “hyper-sexualized” in earlier movies, and also that this film was going to be Marvel’s #MeToo movie.

Adding to that sentiment were tweets from various kiss-ass woke media outlets triumphantly declaring that the film “passed the Bechdel test”, which measures size and substance of female representation in a movie, and “puts men in their place and makes them “squeem”, whatever the hell that means.

It seems an odd marketing strategy to alienate half of your potential audience by having friendly media outlets tell them if they watch your film they’ll “squeem” (which sounds uncomfortably like a cross between ‘squeal’ and ‘cream’) and be put in their place…but what do I know?

After watching the movie, I can report that Black Widow is a middling, rather unremarkable and unnecessary Marvel movie that contains a heavy dose of cultural and political propaganda.

The political propaganda is pretty derivative, just some good old fashioned Cold War Russophobia. Throughout the film Russians are painted as the shallow stereotype of innately ruthless, cold-blooded, heartless killers indifferent to human suffering. In one scene Natasha watches an old Bond film, Moonraker, as a sort of knowing wink from the filmmakers about the throwback Cold War caricatures.

The cultural propaganda doesn’t come in until the final act of the movie, which not surprisingly, is also when the whole venture goes completely off the rails with megadoses of Marvel monotony.

It’s in this third act that Marvel runs the #MeToo flag up the pole and turns the movie into a metaphor for breaking the iron spell of the nefarious patriarchy that brainwashes women and takes away their freedom and choice.

The bad guy, General Dreykov, played by a terribly miscast Ray Winstone who absolutely butchers his Russian accent, is meant to embody both the misogynist patriarchy and the inherent villainy of Russians. Dreykov has stolen little girls and trained them to be killers, and if they weren’t up to snuff, killed them. Dreykov is like a Russian Jeffrey Epstein in that he controls world leaders with his army of women, except he traffics in violence, not sex, and his island is in the sky, not the Caribbean.

In a literal sense, Black Widow must defeat Dreykov so as to free his army of mind-controlled females. In a metaphorical sense, she’s fighting to free all women from the prison of the patriarchy and to exact revenge for the abuse they have suffered at its hands.

I have to say Black Widow’s painfully obvious #MeToo metaphor didn’t make me “squeem” or feel put in my place, although it did make me throw-up a little bit in my mouth. And yawn profusely.

Whether it be the insipid Russophobia or the forced MeToo stuff, the overwhelming sentiment conjured by Black Widow is one of indifference. The movie, especially in the shadow of Infinity War and Endgame, just doesn’t seem to serve any purpose at all.

That isn’t to say there’s nothing redeeming about it. Some of the performances, particularly Florence Pugh and David Harbour, are quite compelling.

Pugh, who plays Black Widow’s sister Yelena, absolutely steals the show. Watching Pugh consistently out shine her more famous scene partner Johansson was glorious to behold. Pugh is a terrific actress, but the magnetism she displays in Black Widow reveals that she’s capable of being a gigantic movie star, much bigger than Scarlett Johansson.

David Harbour, who plays Black Widow’s father, the Russian superhero Red Guardian, is also terrific. Harbour is a dynamic presence and sinks his teeth into the Marvel movie inanity with gusto.

Other performances, most notably from two usually very good actors, Rachel Weisz and the aforementioned Ray Winstone, are uncomfortably sub-par, as is Scarlet Johansson’s bland and rather diffident portrayal.

The bottom line is, if you are a devoted fan of the Marvel formula with its forgettable fights, loud chases and snarky humor, you may enjoy Black Widow even though it is meaningless in relationship to the wider MCU canon. As for me, a fair-weather Marvel fan, I found it to be a rather tepid venture, devoid of any real purpose except to line Mickey Mouse’s coffers.

If you want to avoid the vapid cultural and political propaganda that permeates Black Widow, and keep your hard-earned money from the clutches of the Disney devil, I recommend you skip the movie, you really won’t be missing anything.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Cosby and Rumsfeld - Perfect Symbols of Degenerate America

Cosby is getting out of prison and Rumsfeld is dead, but like America, they’ll never regain their veneer of moral authority.

The once beloved comedian and the once adored Secretary of Defense, are the perfect representations of America’s hypocritical, corrupt, deceptive and destructive culture.

It’s telling that American icon Bill Cosby, the comedy superstar who went from beloved tv dad to reviled convicted rapist, had his rape conviction thrown out on a technicality on the same day Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration on 9-11 and during the Iraq War, who was the ultimate Washington establishmentarian, died.

Cosby, who was accused by 53 women of drugging and raping them, and Rumsfeld, who oversaw the murder of millions in the Middle East and the U.S. torture regime, seem to have avoided being punished for their egregious crimes, when state supreme court of Pennsylvania overturned Cosby’s conviction and Rumsfeld, who never faced any charges for his litany of war crimes, died of cancer in New Mexico.

Cosby and Rumsfeld seem to me to be a perfect representation of America and its diabolically twisted culture.

The only reason Cosby was able to prey upon women, and long evaded his comeuppance, was because he had deceptively created a role for himself as the safest man in America – the nation’s dad, the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Rumsfeld painted himself as a patriot and then did everything in his power to undermine American democracy with his embrace of the “unitary executive” philosophy, and wreak havoc across the globe in the name of spreading democracy.

Cosby’s massively successful, curse-free, soft edged stand-up comedy routines of the 1960’s led him to be a spokesman for such family friendly brands as Coke and Jell-O, and to equally clean roles in film and tv, most notably as the creator and voice of the 1970’s kid’s cartoon Fat Albert, and Cliff, the ugly sweater wearing patriarch of the Huxtable family on the 1980’s smash hit tv series, The Cosby Show.

Cosby, who would be the first to tell you he had a Doctorate of Education from the University of Massachusetts, a fact highlighted every week in the credits of The Cosby Show, also wrote books with titles like “Fatherhood”, “Love and Marriage” and “Childhood” to further reinforce his persona of being a gentle, loving dad.

Rumsfeld, who never failed to remind the fawning media that he was a military pilot in his younger days, was a major player in the Nixon, Ford and first Bush administration, and brought his insidious establishment powers to bear on the hapless wonder that was George W. Bush.

Of course, while Cosby was wearing the Dr. Jekyll mask of corporate American sainthood shilling for Coke and Jell-O and mugging for the camera on The Cosby Show, he was actually Mr. Hyde drugging and raping women. And while Rumsfeld was dazzling the media with his supposed military brilliance during the Iraq War, America was systematically torturing people, gutting Iraq and losing the war.

And now Cosby is going to walk because he was wealthy, the victim was greedy, the former prosecutor was deferential to the rich and powerful and the current prosecutor was blinded by emotion amidst the panic of the #MeToo movement, and Rumsfeld is going to avoid his comeuppance because the media adore dead establishmentarians and immediately cleanse all of their bad deeds from public memory.

This is why Cosby and Rumsfeld are such perfect representations of America.

Like America, which talks incessantly of peace but only makes war and touts democracy but deplores popular movements, Cosby and Rumsfeld are voracious predators hiding behind the mask of respectability who lectured the world about their faults but were oblivious to the cancer metastasized in their own soul.

And in the most American way possible, Cosby used his great wealth and fame to avoid accountability for his heinous sins by playing the rich man’s rigged game in a desperately corrupt system, and Rumsfeld avoided being held accountable for his crimes by embedding himself in the untouchable elite of Washington.

Cosby is so American he even became the poster boy for the recent hysteria of the #MeToo era, which was emotionally satisfying to many but is now being exposed as having a legally dubious foundation. This is particularly egregious in the Cosby case considering that it was good old American greed in the form of a payout via a civil suit that derailed the criminal conviction.

Rumsfeld will no doubt have the media slobber all over him and try to exalt him as some great American hero in the next few days. His Iraq War crimes, his failure as Secretary of Defense and as a human being, whitewashed.

Rumsfeld is dead, but Cosby is 83, and like the nation he once so enraptured, is decaying and on his last legs. Cosby and Rumsfeld may never be held accountable for their crimes but, like America, they’ll never escape the stench of their foul behavior. I suppose the silver lining in this ugly situation is that we won’t ever have to watch a self-righteous Donald Rumsfeld lecture us on “known unknowns” or watch Bill Cosby sell us Jell-O ever again because Rumsfeld and Cosby, like America, have forever lost their fabricated veneer of moral authority, not death, an overturned conviction or media self-deception, is going to bring that back.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Amazon Studio's Playbook to Ruin Cinema

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 42 seconds

Amazon Studio’s new “playbook” makes it official, diversity, not talent, skill or merit, is the only thing that matters anymore in the entertainment industry

The stunning document is shameless in its disdain for artistry and individuality, and its aggressive worship of all things woke.

The entertainment industry and the art of cinema took a gargantuan step on their relentless death march into the hellscape of the woke Mordor recently when Jeff Bezos, the Sauron of Amazon Studios, released his new “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) playbook”.

Following in the footsteps of the Academy Awards, which implemented new diversity and inclusion mandates into awards eligibility criteria, and Disney, which has turned the happiest place on earth into the People’s Republic of Wokestan, Amazon Studios, the new home of James Bond and Rocky, has, like a suicide note, put in writing its demand that film and TV ignore talent, skill and merit when hiring in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion.

It’s now clear that the corporate human resources junta has successfully transformed Hollywood into nothing more than the propaganda arm for the woke Savonarolas who burn art and entertainment on the bonfire of inanities that is DEI.

Among many things Amazon’s “playbook” demands are creative roles on productions being 50% women and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups by 2024, and documentation and reporting of these diversity quotas is required both pre and post production. Unfortunately, the exact skin tone and percentage of “racial/ethnic” blood needed to qualify as belonging to an underrepresented group, and the papers you’ll need to show to the DEI gestapo to prove it, are not made clear.

The insidious “playbook” also declares its commitment to “authentic portrayals” and its intention to cast “actors in a role whose identity aligns with the identity of the character they will be playing (by gender, gender identity, nationality, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability) and in particular when the character is a member of an underrepresented group/identity.”

In other words, Amazon appears to be outlawing the art of acting as only disabled actors can play disabled characters and only LGBTQ actors can play LGBTQ roles. This is what happens when human resources deplorables take over the creative process.

One wonders how exactly Amazon will check if an actor up for a lesbian, gay or bisexual role is the real deal or not? Will actors be forced to “prove’ their lesbian, gay or bisexual bona fides by performing a sex act with an appropriately aligned producer? Maybe the casting couch can get a public relations facelift if it’s used to help Hollywood achieve the woke nirvana of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Of course, from an artistic perspective, the absurdity of Amazon’s totalitarian woke decrees is only topped by its power to suffocate and stultify creativity.

Consider this, some of the greatest performances we’ve seen in recent years would be wiped out by Amazon’s DEI manifesto, and it wouldn’t be surprising if eventually they’re retroactively cancelled for not being aligned with the new mandates.

For example, Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the greatest actors we’ve ever had, but despite not being disabled he won an Oscar for playing Christy Brown in My Left Foot, and won two Oscars for playing Americans in There Will Be Blood and Lincoln, despite being British and Irish.

In addition, Sean Penn isn’t gay but won an Oscar for playing Harvey Milk, Eddie Redmayne is able bodied but won for playing Stephen Hawking, Colin Firth won for playing King George VI but didn’t have a royal stutter and Jamie Foxx won for playing Ray Charles despite not being blind.

Even last year’s crop of movies would be affected by Amazon’s woke encyclical. Anthony Hopkins doesn’t have dementia but won the Best Actor Oscar playing a man suffering from that malady, Daniel Kaluuya won Best Supporting Actor Oscar is British but won for playing an African-American, and in Amazon Studio’s own Sound of Metal, Riz Ahmed was Oscar nominated for playing a deaf character but has perfect hearing.

Two of Amazon’s big hits from last year, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and Coming 2 America violate this new woke law too as Brit Sacha Baron Cohen played a Kazahkstani, and New Yorker Eddie Murphy is played an African King. The horror!

Amazon’s decree is so specific it even states “But if the character has a distinct ethnic background, make sure that the actor’s ethnic background doesn’t conflict with this portrayal”, using as an example of a bad approach “are you casting a person of Puerto Rican heritage to play a character who is Colombian?” Under this edict Benicio del Toro’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing a Mexican in Traffic wouldn’t happen because he is Puerto Rican.

Amazon’s “playbook” blatantly declares its repulsion at talent, skill and merit as a casting-criteria when it states that casting directors need to avoid “Relying on your “gut” or seeking “the best person for the job” as that’s an “inherently biased processes that may skew your decision making.”

If this relentless focus on hiring actors, creatives and even crew based on their gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity and nationality all sounds legally dubious if not outright discriminatory, Amazon agrees, as they throw in this playbook disclaimer to cover their backsides, “While this Playbook provides a general overview, it is not intended to provide legal advice, so it’s crucial to discuss these issues with your attorney.”

As a cinephile and lover of quality art and entertainment in movies and tv, I’m looking forward to the day when the despicable woke totalitarian philistines currently running and ruining Hollywood learn the hard way, at the box office and in the courtroom, that “get woke, go broke” is a universal law that supersedes their self-righteous, anti-merit, DEI declarations of blatant discrimination. They deserve nothing less.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

ESPN's Corrosive Race Baiting

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 31 seconds

ESPN is addicted to a false racial narrative and it blinds them to basic facts.

Like the rest of the establishment media, the sports network’s obsession with race obliterates whatever was left of their credibility.

This past week two black ESPN on-air personalities made asses of themselves when they vomited out onto the public race-based nonsense devoid of any grounding in fact, which has become commonplace at the network.

On Wednesday, after it was announced the Boston Celtics were hiring Ime Udoka, a black man, as their next head coach, black ESPN basketball analyst Jay Williams, tweeted out “The first head coach of color for the celtics…& even more importantly…he is one talented individual who has paid his dues.”

Williams no doubt thought he was being a social justice stalwart with his edgy tweet, the problem was that he was egregiously wrong. The Celtics have not only had five black head coaches prior to Udona, the franchise was the first in NBA history to hire a black head coach, the great Bill Russell in 1966. Russell, KC Jones and Doc Rivers were all black Celtic coaches who won NBA titles leading the team, with Rivers doing so just 12 years ago.

Williams was called out on twitter for his error and in response claimed that he didn’t write the tweet. Maybe the culprits are the same mysterious, elusive and imaginary Russian hackers who wrote homophobic rants on MSNBC host Joy Reid’s blog those many years ago.

The other race-based bit of jackassery came from black NBA analyst Jalen Rose, who, when it was reported that white player Kevin Love was going to be a member of the USA Olympic basketball team, called his inclusion “tokenism” and a result of USA basketball not wanting to send an all-black team to the Olympics.

Of course, this assertion is utterly absurd as four of the last five USA basketball teams have been all black, and since 1996, only two white players, John Stockton and Kevin Love, have made the USA basketball team at all.

Williams and Rose are just marching in lockstep when it comes to pushing a racial narrative. Last year, black ESPN superstar Stephen A. Smith, the most bombastic bloviating blowhard buffoon in sports television, ranted after the Brooklyn Nets hired former two-time MVP Steve Nash, a white man, to be the head coach even though Nash had no coaching experience, that it was a function of “white privilege” and that “this does not happen for a black man”.

Once again, this was a racial narrative directly at odds with facts. Not only had black players with no coaching experience been hired by teams before, but it happened in Stephen A. Smith’s hometown of New York, when in 2013 the Nets hired Jason Kidd and in 2014 the Knicks hired Derek Fisher.

A brief glimpse of ESPN’s plethora of ‘debate’ shows like Pardon the Interruption or Around the Horn too reveals a fierce commitment to NOT debate topics but rather congratulate each other on social justice bona fides.

Even the coverage of actual sporting events is now marinated in racial and political narratives. I will never forget the absurdity of watching black side line reporter Malika Andrews doing a post-game report from the NBA bubble last summer on Scott Van Pelt’s late-night show. Andrews weeping as she claims she “prided herself on being objective” but it’s so clear the “system of objectivity in journalism is so white-washed”, and then wailing the asinine assumption that she could have been Breonna Taylor – the 26 year old killed by Louisville police in a raid where Taylor’s boyfriend fired on officers. Andrews’ unprofessionally blubbering “that could have been me” while Van Pelt soothed her paranoid delusions was the lowlight of a year of journalistic lowlights on the network.

This blatant pushing of biased and baseless race-based narratives is not only tolerated but mandated at the self-proclaimed world-wide leader in sports and its parent company, Disney, the wokest place on earth.

Williams, Rose, Smith, Andrews and the rest of ESPN talking heads pushing their racial nonsense are obviously willing to trade their credibility for a bit of social status and to kiss up to their corporate overlords. This is an annoyance to sports fans but let’s be honest, sport’s journalists without credibility are like clowns without dignity.

None of this is too surprising as this is what happens in a racial moral panic – and we are definitely in a racial moral panic, where people lose their minds, feelings override facts and narrative trumps truth.

This is how a collection of medical and scientific professionals sign a letter saying gathering in large groups during Covid is deadly – unless it’s to attend a Black Lives Matter protest. And how riots were deemed “mostly peaceful protests”. And how the lab leak theory became verboten in the establishment media because it was somehow anti-Asian. And how sharp increases in black on Asian violence was deemed a result of “white supremacy”.

From the 9-11 charade to the Iraq War/WMD fiasco to the financial collapse of 2007-2008 to the Covid calamity and the current racial hysteria, the establishment in America has, across the board, worked extremely hard to eviscerate its own credibility by egregiously obfuscating the truth and blatantly pushing their preferred, but fictional, narratives.

ESPN and the rest of the establishment media may bask in their current myopic decision to push racial propaganda instead of truth, but reality has a funny way of eventually asserting itself, and when it does, the whirlwind these charlatans will reap will be brutal, and well deserved.

©2021