Netflix's The Dig is not a White Supremacy Rallying Cry

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Netflix’s The Dig is a movie about a famous archeological discovery, not a pro-Brexit, white supremacist rallying cry

Only a woke academic could find hidden villainy in this perfectly benign and mildly pleasant British film. 

The Dig is a Netflix film starring Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan and Lily James that dramatizes the 1939 excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo that transformed our understanding of the history of early medieval England.

The film, directed by Simon Stone and written by Moira Buffini, has been nominated for five BAFTAs including for Outstanding British Film.

But not everyone is so enamored of the movie, as some see it as a pro-Brexit film espousing white supremacy.

Louise D’Arcens, a Professor of English at Macquarie University in Australia, recently attacked the film because it commits the cultural sin of  “nostalgically appealing” and “romanticizing” an “imagined continuity between Anglo-Saxons and modern British people that does not speak to the complexity of Britain today.” The horror!

D’Arcens complains the film “re-animates key tropes from the persistent British and American ideology of Anglo-Saxonism”, which she claims “was vital to underwriting white racial supremacy as a mandate for Britain’s imperial power and the expansionist concept of Manifest Destiny…”

When viewed through this distorted lens, The Dig transforms from a tame historical drama/love story into a nefarious Brexit propaganda film surreptitiously waving an ‘England for the English!’ banner.

I didn’t see any white supremacy or Brexit sub-text in The Dig, but rather an utterly banal, benign and innocuous movie examining the universality of life, death and the impermanence of things.

The Dig is one of those proficiently shot, well-acted British dramas with which we’ve become so accustomed. It isn’t great and it isn’t awful. It’s fine. It’s a middlebrow piece of entertainment geared toward Anglophiles who’ve already devoured Downton Abbey and are looking to satiate their taste for all things British.

Not surprisingly, there are numerous contradictions and illogical observations in D’Arcens’ misguided analysis.

For instance, a major narrative in the film is about class struggle. Protagonist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) is a self-taught, working class excavator from Suffolk, who is hired by wealthy landowner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan). Their budding relationship must navigate the suffocating class structures of the time period.

The class narrative is also highlighted when Charles Phillips (Ken Stott), a pompous archeologist from the British Museum, invades Sutton Hoo, belittles Basil and ultimately takes credit for his tremendous discovery.

Yet D’Arcens interprets the Phillips-Basil clash as not being about class but rather “highlighting ongoing tensions between Britain’s rural counties and its metropolitan centre” with rural meaning pro-Brexit/bad and metropolitan anti-Brexit/good.

This assessment seems oddly regressive as it lionizes the elite (Phillips) and vilifies the working class (Basil).

D’Arcens also bemoans the film “drawing uncritically on a historical tropes of expansionism – despite the fact the violence of colonialism and occupation is well understood today.”

This is directly at odds with the disparaging appraisal of Basil as a bad guy avatar for Brexiteers. Basil is the victim of the colonialism of educated metropolitan Philips. Like countless British colonialist before him, Phillips comes to Basil’s “foreign” land of Suffolk, takes power, steals treasures and brings them back to London. Yet, incongruously in D’Arcens’ deconstruction Phillips is also a heroic symbol of anti-Brexit sophistication.

D’Arcens then writes,

“One of the great reckonings in the film comes when Basil’s wife, May, urges her disaffected husband to return to the dig. She tells him:

 ‘You’ve always said your work isn’t about the past or even the present. It’s for the future, so that the next generations can know where they came from. The line that joins them to their forebears.’

This appeal to the idea of genetic continuity is rousing and profound, but also exclusionary and insular. May assumes racial and cultural uniformity in Britain, and shared forebears for all.”

Good lord, this is in no way an appeal to “genetic continuity” or an assumption of “racial uniformity”.

A major storyline in the film is that WWII is about to begin and the survival of Britain is at stake. This isn’t about genetic continuity or racial uniformity because the ethnogenesis of Anglo-Saxons developed between migrant Germanic tribes that came to the island back in the 5th century and indigenous Britons, thus Germans conquering Britain is not a genetic or racial threat. Hell, the royal family has German bloodlines.

The existential crisis facing Britain in the film is not a racial or genetic one, it is a national one as it is their (multi-racial) nationality that will disappear if the Germans prevail, not their race or genetic line.

D’Arcens continues, “(May) speaks to the film’s 21st century viewers, many of whom would not see an unearthed Saxon as a forebear, and might rightly wonder what “future generations” the film has in mind for Britain.”

If multi-cultural 21st century Brits, regardless of their race or ethnicity, don’t acknowledge a centuries dead Saxon king as a forebear for their nation, that says more about their historical ignorance and ethnic arrogance than anything else.

D’Arcens closes by lamenting, “…as cinematic archeology (The Dig) looks far more to the past than to the future.”

Considering The Dig is a movie set in the past and tells the story of characters discovering an even older past, this is an incredibly inane climax to a wholly inadequate analysis.

In conclusion, The Dig is not a great movie, but it also isn’t a dangerous one. It’s a mildly pleasant film that will most definitely not turn you into a brutish Brexiteer or Anglo-Saxon supremacist…I promise.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Q: Into the Storm - Documentary Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 37 seconds

The new HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm is just like QAnon in that it is vapid entertainment selling itself as truth

The documentary mini-series seeks to uncover the identity of Q instead of asking the more intriguing question of why the QAnon conspiracy appeals to so many.

Q: Into the Storm is the new HBO documentary miniseries that explores the QAnon conspiracy theory and the collection of people mixed up in it.

The first two episodes of the six-part series, produced and directed by Cullen Hoback, premiered on HBO and HBO Max Sunday night. The final four episodes will air over the next two Sundays.

QAnon, in case you are blissfully unaware, is a conspiracy theory revolving around statements made online by an anonymous person or group of persons called “Q”. QAnon believers think Q is a high-ranking insider who is working against a cabal of deep state power players involved in all sorts of nefarious activities up to and including cannibalism and pedophilia.

According to Q, Trump was meant to bring forth the revolutionary “storm” that would round up and eliminate all the baddies in the world.

On its surface, and as Q: Into the Storm reveals - beneath its surface too, QAnon is an embarrassingly inane exercise in intellectual dwarfism and infantile emotionalism.

Although, to be fair, as both a denizen of Hollywood and a lifelong Catholic, I can attest that powerful people conspiring to sexually prey upon children and cover it up isn’t exactly far-fetched. Throw in Jeffrey Epstein, with his elite client list and the rather improbable story surrounding his supposed suicide, and the notion of a cabal of sexual deviants ruling the world is certainly much less insane than the mainstream media would have us believe.

One can simply watch the documentary Who Took Johnny or read the The Franklin Cover-up (or try to watch the documentary Conspiracy of Silence), and the scales will quickly fall from their eyes regarding the uncomfortable truth about the levels of depravity in our world.

A major problem with Q: Into the Storm though is that fails to address this obvious context when contemplating the unasked question of why would people fall for this QAnon nonsense in the first place?

Belief in Q may be ludicrous but considering the context within which it came to be, it isn’t illogical. The elite media and the political establishment lie, brazenly and constantly about subjects both big and small, so embracing a conspiracy theory that recognizes that often avoided but obvious truth has a logic to it. But Q: Into the Storm never acknowledges that context, and that ultimately erodes the documentary’s credibility.

The main narrative device of the documentary is that it follows filmmaker Hoback as he delves into a sordid and strange cast of characters in search of who the real “Q” might be.

The first two episodes are like a walking tour of the Island of Misfit Toys, as the QAnon ecosystem is riddled with delusional desperados, one more bizarre than the next.

The documentary’s deepest dives in the first two episodes are into the history and drama behind QAnon’s various internet homes and the personalities, like Fredrick Brennan and Jim and Ron Watkins, that run them.

What is so disorienting about the documentary is that it portrays QAnon as this odious and ominous entity in the world yet sets a very whimsical tone for Hoback’s goofy global jaunt to find Q.

The mainstream media refer to QAnon as a cult, and they point to the riot, or as the establishment calls it - the “insurrection”, at the Capitol January 6th as evidence of how dangerous this belief system truly is.

The elite media’s fear and loathing of QAnon is so extreme that some critics are aghast that Q: Into the Storm had the temerity to actually let QAnon believers speak on camera, believing that putting a spotlight on the movement may spread the deadly infection of QAnon disinformation further. 

In the documentary QAnon is described as “part interactive game, part religion and part international movement”, and I think that is an accurate assessment, I also think it is an apt description of more establishment approved cults like Black Lives Matter and its unfalsifiable philosophy of Critical Race Theory.

Just as the delusional religion of QAnon led to the clown convention at the Capitol on Jan. 6th, the equally delusional religion of Black Lives Matter was the reason for our summer of “mostly peaceful protests” filled with rampant violence, looting and arson.

The reality is that QAnon is certainly an absurd conspiracy, but it is no more absurd than the ridiculous conspiracies the establishment adamantly propagates.

For example, are Q’s declarations any more crazy than Rachel Maddow’s nightly cavalcade of speculative anti-Russian conspiracy rants?

Are the QAnon kooks any more idiotic than the Maddow morons, Russiagate fantasists and the BLM brigade of buffoons?

No, they’re not. The reality is that these QAnon/BLM/Russiagate dupes, dopes and dipshits are all drinking the same brew of desperation, delusion and disinformation, just from different mugs.

QAnon, BLM and Russiagate exist as wish fulfillment apparatuses that tell their slavishly clueless congregations exactly what they want to hear and then leave it to the faithful to contort themselves in spectacular ways to assiduously make those fantasies into their reality.

The reality regarding Q: Into the Storm is that it thus far fails to be a worthy documentary mini-series because just like QAnon, it is merely vapid entertainment selling itself as a vehicle to truth, and ultimately is an exercise in confirmation bias meant to distract, not enlighten.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Value of Life

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In a culture obsessed with serial killers and murder stories, it is the state-sanctioned violence we ignore that is most corrosive

The tragic death of Sarah Everard has me questioning my choices in entertainment, but it’s the brutal actions of my government over the years that have done more to create a society desensitized to the value of life.

In the wake of the grisly murder of 33 year-old Sarah Everard in London earlier this month, there has been much debate about how to make women feel safer.

For example, the rather radical idea of a 6 p.m. curfew for men has been discussed. Considering that men stuck at home will just marinate in our morally twisted media which features a plethora of programming that highlights men killing women…that might not make women feel any safer.

Having just finished watching the Yorkshire Ripper documentary on Netflix, I couldn’t help but wonder if the prevalence of such gruesome subject matter in our culture cheapens the sanctity of life and thereby inspires killers.

Our culture’s fascination with violent death can often intentionally or unintentionally transform into a celebration of people who kill. In our fame-obsessed, reality-tv world, being famous and infamous are now virtually synonymous, and it doesn’t matter how you get the spotlight, just that you do. By lavishing our attention on murdering monsters we often turn them into celebrities.

I’m not immune to the lurid appeal of a serial killer story, but it feels like a chicken and egg debate pondering if I watched the documentaries on the Night Stalker and the Yorkshire Ripper because Netflix made them or did Netflix make them because they knew I’d watch them?

The most interesting serial killer narratives are the ones that explore not so much the serial killers but our obsession with them.

For example, Zodiac is one of David Fincher’s best movies as it tells the true story of Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist who turns into an obsessive Zodiac Killer researcher. Fincher mining our fear of becoming obsessed with the Zodiac Killer rather than our fear of the Zodiac Killer is what makes the film so captivating.

Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter dives even deeper into that theme as it follows two FBI agents as they interview serial killers such as Edmund Kemper, David Berkowitz and Charles Manson in order to try and understand how they think. Ultimately, the brilliance of the show is that it mirrors its audience by being obsessed with the minds of serial killers.

But does immersing oneself in the crimes and mindset of a killer do damage to our individual or collective psyche?

It is much too simplistic to argue tv shows and movies about serial killers transform men into murderers.

It’s more accurate to say that the moral guardrails of our culture, most notably religion, have so decayed and been so diminished, that there seems no counter-balance to the darker things that naturally intrigue us. In other words in our fallen world there is no flicker of illumination to give us respite from the relentless darkness.

These serial killer narratives once felt cathartic and even psychologically healthy when contained within a culture with clear moral and ethical boundaries that acknowledged the precious nature of life. Now that these moral and ethical boundaries have blurred, and the religious foundation for them has been removed or revealed to be fraudulent, these serial killer stories now feel much less cathartic and much more toxic.

The result of this is, as killer John Doe tells us in Fincher’s iconic Seven, “We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it is common, trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon and night.”

This is true of our culture as news and entertainment are inundated with murder, mayhem and depravity morning, noon and night.

Whether it’s scenes of attacks on Asians, or cops brutalizing civilians, or “mostly peaceful” violent protests, or documentaries on The Night Stalker or Nazis, we are perpetually force-fed a toxic media stew leaving our bellies bloated with bile and barbarity.

It is unimaginable that the culture’s consistent mantra of “if it bleeds it leads” is healthy, as it destabilizes the weak-minded, desensitizes us to the value of life and dehumanizes all of us.

Nearly a decade before the flag-waving pornography of the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” bombing campaign, Oliver Stone’s under appreciated Natural Born Killers (1994) skillfully explored this idea of a violent culture creating murderers and a malignant media transforming them into celebrities.

It is not surprising that a culture that made media sensations of Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson, celebrated more “respectable” serial killers like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld when they unleashed their carnage.

It seems to me that the media’s glorification of the industrial scale, state sanctioned, military industrial complex murder machine does more to damage our collective psyche and diminish our sense of the preciousness of life than stories about lone murderers.  

I’m less worried about the psychological effects of a serial killer documentary than I am about America’s ambivalence regarding their war crimes committed in Yemen.

I’m less worried about Seven inspiring a lunatic than I am about the U.S. and U.K. killing people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

I’m less worried about Ted Bundy’s body count than I am about the body count of Bush, Blair, Obama, Trump and Biden.

The murder of Sarah Everard is a tragic symptom of the disease of indifference to the sanctity of life that ravages our culture. But the majority of blood on our collective hands is not just a result of watching too many serial killer movies but from turning a blind eye to the violence done in our name to innocent people across the globe.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Mauritanian: A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A great story but not so great movie. Not worth paying to see but its subject matter is crucially important and makes the film worthy of a watch when it becomes available on a streaming service for free.

The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin Macdonald, tells the true story of Mohamedou Salahi, who in the wake of 9-11 was tortured and held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay detention camp for 14 years without charge.

The film, which as of March 2nd is in theaters and available on Video-On-Demand, is adapted from Salahi’s memoir Guantanamo Diary, and stars Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodly and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Mauritanian is a great story, but unfortunately not a particularly great film. Despite some effective moments, particularly the torture sequences, and a solid performance from Tahar Rahim as Salahi, it’s a mediocrity that’s not nearly as good as I wanted it to be or that it needed to be. One can’t help but wonder what a better director could have done with such dramatically potent material.

The film suffers because it looks like a tv movie. This rather flat and dull aesthetic keeps the story dramatically constrained and so we are never drawn into it.

The performances are equally middling, with the lone exception being Rahim, who plays the riddle that is Sahir with a charm and humanity worthy of note.

Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe for her work as a defense attorney Nancy Hollander in the film but I found her performance to be rather banal. Shailene Woodley gives an equally lackluster performance as another lawyer Teri Duncan.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Marine Corps lawyer Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who was assigned to be the prosecutor on Sahir’s case. Cumberbatch deploys a Southern accent to his Couch (who is a real person) and it is egregiously awful. When British actors miss on American accents, particularly New York and Southern accents, it is so mannered and lifeless as to be painfully distracting, and Cumberbatch’s butchering of the dialect is gruesome to behold. As I watched Cumberbatch lose his wrestling match with the Southern drawl I couldn’t help but wonder…were there no American actors available to play this part?

That said, while the movie isn’t worth paying $20 to see On Demand, I still recommend The Mauritanian when it becomes available for free if for no other reason than it is an important story that contains some vital lessons for our current turbulent time.

As Orwell taught us, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”, and in the United States of Amnesia, our prodigiously propagandized populace is conditioned to be myopic in the moment and utterly blind to the past. This makes for a pliable citizenry that can be led around by their noses by a mainstream media designed to do just that. This is heightened by gullible Americans lacking the intellectual vim and vigor to swim against the powerful current of establishment narratives in a search for some semblance of truth.

Thankfully The Mauritanian is at least a visual aid to remind America of that which it is consistently capable, namely, brutal authoritarianism fueled by frantic emotionalism.

The film does a service by reminding viewers of a few critical things.

First that Guantanamo Bay prison is still open and people still languish there, despite Obama’s promises to close it when he became president in 2009.

Second, that al-Qeada and the U.S. were allies in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It doesn’t get into great detail or anything, but even that little bit of information might be shocking to those who’ve conveniently forgotten that fact (or never knew it in the first place) and other much more damning facts about America and al-Qaeda’s fruitful relationship, then and now.

And third, that war criminals like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Barrack Obama, and their immoral minions, have never been punished for their atrocities, which is an abomination considering those that exposed their crimes, such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, rot in prison or are forced to live in exile.

As The Mauritanian highlights, post 9-11 America went into a full-blown hysteria. The result of this hysteria was the Patriot Act, massive surveillance, rendition, torture and the mass murder and mayhem of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 America has only gotten more hysterical in the following two decades. In recent years we’ve had one mindless panic after another. There’s been the Russia panic, the #MeToo panic, and the racism/white supremacy panic…all of them delusions and illusions built on minimal evidence and fueled by irrationalism and self-righteous fanaticism.

These panics have been used to distort reality and manipulate people into fighting for draconian and totalitarian measures to combat them.

The most alarming hysteria is the new “domestic terrorism” panic that sprung up in the wake of the Q-Anon Capitol riot of January 6th.

In reaction to this Q-Anon clownshow the political establishment and media have gone full Spinal Tap and upped the hyperbole to 11…9-11 that is.

The delusional discourse that the Capitol riot was a 9-11 level event has led to politicians demanding a “9-11 Commission” type of investigation. I wonder if the new Q-Anon Commission, maybe headed by the new “Reality Czar”, will be as toothless as the contrived show trial that was the 9-11 Commission?

Watching The Mauritanian I couldn’t help but think that Washington and the mainstream media want to do to troublesome “conspiracy theorists”, traditionalists, Christians and Trumpists what Bush, Obama and company did to Mamadou Salahi…make them suffer and disappear. Unfortunately, many regular liberals who have either sold their souls or lost their minds, moral compass and way after years of being heavily propagandized and indoctrinated, wholeheartedly agree with this assessment.

This furor and frenzy over “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacy” is inversely proportional to the actual threat from these manufactured shadows dancing upon America’s cave wall. 

9-11 was a savage and heinous attack, but the U.S.’s over reaction to it brutalized innocent people and ended up transforming the brush fire of Islamic radicalism it was meant to extinguish into an inferno that engulfed the world and torched the Constitution. It seems very likely that a similar over-reaction to the Capitol Riot will result in the same counter conflagration on American soil, and the phantom threat of “right-wing radicals” and “white supremacists” will thus be made manifest.

In conclusion, The Mauritanian isn’t great but is worth watching because it serves a noble purpose, which is to remind Americans of their unquenchable thirst to demonize and dehumanize those they deem as terrorists. Though the targets are now different, America’s evil impulse is as powerful as ever, and so is its susceptibility to hysteria and rampant emotionalism…and that portends a terrifyingly dark future indeed.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Asinine and the Absurd 78th Annual Golden Globes Awards

Hollywood once again proved itself to be the moral authority of our time when a bevy of stars took to the stage Sunday night at the 78th annual Golden Globes Awards to rail against President Joe Biden’s unconstitutional, murderous air strikes in Syria, his caging of illegal immigrant kids, and his failure to fight for a $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-All and a $2,000 stimulus check during this calamitous coronavirus lockdown.

Just kidding.

With the bad orange man gone from the White House it was back to Hollywood business as usual at the painfully lackluster, socially-distanced Golden Globes where there was a lot of performative virtue signaling regarding diversity but no actual political courage on display.

The Golden Globes have long been a running joke as the Hollywood Foreign Press (HFPA), a collection of 89 “foreign entertainment journalists” who vote on the awards, notoriously care less about artistic quality than lining their pockets, corporate swag and basking in star power.

The L.A. Times recently did a searing investigation of the organization and, shock of shocks, found them to be corrupt…I think Captain Obvious was the reporter who broke the story. 

Hollywood’s big takeaway from the L.A. Times story though was that the HFPA is racist because it has no black members.

This was highlighted throughout last night’s show as flaccid comedy duo Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as well as numerous presenters, made snide comments about the racial “scandal”. This led to one of the more riotously funny moments when an Indian woman and Turkish man who are members of the HFPA had to grovel on live tv about how bad they were for not having black people in their group. Diversity!

Ironically, after all the bemoaning of HFPA racism the three of the first four awards given out went to black actors, Daniel Kaluuya for Judas and the Black Messiah and John Boyega for Small Axe, and to the first black led Pixar film Soul.

Later in the night the Best Actor and Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama awards also went to black artists, the late Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Andra Day for The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

Stupid Golden Globes can’t even stay on brand when it comes to their own racism.

One of the few bright spots in previous Golden Globes has been comedian Ricky Gervais serving as ornery host. Gervais’ scathing opening monologues at the Globes are some of the best comedy of recent years. Never one to pander or genuflect to his star-studded and empty-headed live audience, Gervais instead consistently eviscerated the cavalcade of self-satisfied and self-righteous stars luxuriously partying before him.

Unfortunately, this year Gervais wasn’t hosting so instead of his uncomfortably honest and gloriously cutting comedy we were stuck with the insipid nice girl comedy of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

Another redeeming quality of the past Golden Globes awards has been watching celebrities get drunk at the dinner party style affair. Sadly, this year’s show was “socially distanced” so random shots of sloppy drunk celebs were replaced with awkward moments on zoom. .

Sans Gervais and drunk celebs the Golden Globes were reduced to being nothing but a handing out of awards no one, even the people winning them actually care about.

Besides the endless babbling about diversity and inclusion, the political talk was pretty minimal. Sure, Borat made some stale Trump and Giuliani jokes, and Mark Ruffalo bemoaned the “hideous dark storm” of Trump “we’ve been living through” and Aaron Sorkin mentioned democracy being under siege, but that was about it.

What is so striking is there were ample opportunities for Hollywood heavyweights to speak up about current issues, but they refused.

Sean Penn, one of my favorite actors and activists, was there, and besides looking like Moe from the Three Stooges, he didn’t do much of anything except display a shocking lack of testicular fortitude. He could’ve spoken up about Biden’s illegal attack on Syria, like he had done about the Iraq War…but he didn’t.

Jodie Foster won best Supporting Actress for her work in the film The Mauritanian, a movie about the injustice of a prisoner held in Guantanamo Bay for fourteen years without charge. But Foster never mentioned Guantanamo Bay, injustice or the immorality of the War on Terror in her acceptance speech.

Famed anti-war activist Jane Fonda, who once went to North Vietnam while the U.S. was at war with them, was awarded a lifetime achievement award but never mentioned Biden’s illegal airstrikes in Syria, or his support of murderous tyrant Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, or the continuation of the “kids in cages” immigration policy. She instead just regurgitated the usual woke pablum of diversity and inclusion.

Chloe Zhao won best director and best drama for her film Nomadland, which examines those crushed under the boot of American capitalism. Yet she never once mentioned Biden’s failure to push for the $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-All or a coronavirus stimulus check which he promised, three things which would immeasurably help the suffering people featured in her film.

With Trump gone and the corpse of Joe Biden being the one obliterating Syrians and caging kids at the border, Hollywood elites are now all too happy to lose their stridently socially conscious rhetoric in favor of status quo cheerleading and social justice ass-kissing.

In 2017 in the wake of Donald Trump’s election Meryl Streep “bravely” spoke out in defense of immigrants at the Globes, which was curious since she had been completely silent during the previous 8 years when Obama set deportation records and put “kids in cages”.

It seems Hollywood is following in Queen Meryl’s faux-noble footsteps by deciding to stay quiet now when speaking up would take courage.

Everyone knows Hollywood is not exactly filled with the bravest souls that are driven purely by integrity and their commitment to principle. But the amount of self-righteousness mixed with craven cowardice on display at the Golden Globes last night was remarkable even by Hollywood’s depraved standards.

In conclusion, if the Golden Globes are any indication, awards season is going to be filled with the most venal, vacuous and vapid posing and preening imaginable, but it won’t feature any principled protests against Biden administration policies, no matter how abhorrent they may be.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Amend: The Fight for America: Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

‘Amend: The Fight for America’, Netflix’s new painfully woke docu-series, is only interested in indoctrinating, not educating

The series is a ludicrous exercise in politically correct performance art that is allergic to intellectual seriousness or nuance.

Amend: The Fight for America, is the new Netflix docu-series hosted by Will Smith that examines the history and impact of the 14th Amendment, which addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law.

The series is broken down into six episodes. The first three episodes cover the 14th Amendment in relation to the black struggle for equality from slavery to Black Lives Matter, while episodes 4, 5 and 6 focus on the women’s movement, marriage equality/gay rights and immigrant rights respectively.

The docu-series is a high-end public service announcement featuring stars such as Pedro Pascal, Mahershala Ali and Joseph Gordon Levitt, and is obviously meant as a teaching guide for children and teenagers.

One of the big problems with Amend though, and there are many of them, is that it presents itself as a serious work of history, but is really just a blatant work of advocacy.

There is nothing wrong with advocating, but doing it under the guise of teaching history, makes Amend an insidious piece of propaganda.

As propaganda it is very slick as it has all the trappings of a serious historical documentary, but it’s violently allergic to nuance. The series’ shameless embrace of woke identity politics is never countenanced with even a rudimentary glimpse of oppositional ideas and beliefs except to label them as obviously and irredeemably evil.

For instance, in the episode about women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), anti-abortion beliefs are only seen as tools of misogyny and the patriarchy, and the potentially rich and fascinating topic of the clash of 14th Amendment rights of the unborn child versus those of the pregnant woman is never broached.

The series’ intellectual petulance is also highlighted in this episode when one of the talking heads is incapable of even saying famed ERA opposition leader Phyllis Schlafly’s name. She stumbles over it numerous times and then finally gives up only to be quickly replaced by another talking head who simply calls Ms. Schlafly, “Mean Phyllis”. Apparently in an attempt to appeal to grade school children the docu-series decided to act like a grade school child.

Preferring this slavishly woke, blindly Manichean perspective on every issue guts the project of any intellectual seriousness, and its relentlessly self-righteous snickering at opposing arguments cheapens the project and transforms it from being potentially laudable to ridiculously laughable.

Speaking of laughable, Amend’s credibility is further damaged by “comedian” Larry Wilmore. Wilmore, a producer on the series, keeps showing up to mug for the camera for no discernible reason and is so tonally out of place as to be painful. Wilmore’s “comedy” is always impotent and grating, but in Amend his shtick is even more insipidly limp and irritating due to the supposedly serious context.

The docu-series is obsessed with narratives and messaging, as it repeatedly talks about the evil of  “messages of fear and hate” from small-minded bigots used to rile the masses. Trump is repeatedly conjured in this context to accentuate the point.  This is curious since the series espouses its own message of fear and hate by continually denigrating “white men” and ringing the alarm bells over the boogey man of  “white supremacy” which is supposedly lurking under every bed and around every corner.

This anti-white attitude is evident when the over 300,000 white men who died to free the slaves in the Civil War are studiously ignored, but the black soldiers who fought are celebrated. It’s also evident when minority actors Pedro Pascal and Graham Greene play Lincoln and Ohio Senator John Bingham, the principle founder of the 14th Amendment, respectively yet white actor Joseph Gordon Leavitt plays the villainous, N-word spouting Andrew Johnson.

Another telling moment that spotlights the series’ manipulative mendacity and deceptive intentions is when activist Britney Packnett Cunningham recounts her experiences as a protestor in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the 2014 shooting of black man Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. 

Video and photos of protestors fill the screen as Ms. Cunningham states “the call on the streets was ‘hands up don’t shoot’ because what we were being told was that Michael Brown had his hands up in the air when Darren Wilson shot him”.

This is an intentionally misleading statement as Ms. Cunningham, who is featured throughout the series as some kind of expert, knows it isn’t true and that she is perpetuating the false narrative surrounding Brown’s shooting, that’s why she couches it with “we were being told”. Brown didn’t have his hands up when Wilson shot him and yet Ms. Cunningham and Amend prefer that lie because it fits their narrative instead of the truth that destroys it. (Watch an infinitely more insightful documentary, What Killed Michael Brown? for the truth.)

If you like deceptive docu-series that indoctrinate instead of educate, and enjoy watching solemn faced actors babbling about “inclusivity” while pushing so hard to conjure non-existent gravitas it seems like they could soil themselves at any moment…then Amend is definitely for you.

After suffering though all six hours of Amend: The Fight for America, my biggest takeaway is that we need a new constitutional amendment to protect me from the torture of watching the vapid Will Smith mimic sincerity while spouting woke talking points as if they’re holy decrees from God on high. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

China's Totalitarian Rules for Performers are a Perfect Fit for Unrelentingly Woke Hollywood

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

In honor of China’s Orwellian rules for entertainment industry right-think, I’ve compiled a comparable list for working in equally unforgiving Hollywood

The two global gold standards when it comes to open-mindedness and tolerance for diversity of opinion have always been Hollywood and China.

Like Sauron and Saruman’s two towers in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Hollywood and China are monuments to artistic freedom and freedom of expression, at least I think that’s what the two towers stand for since I’ve never actually read the book or seen the movie because of my egregiously short attention span and intellectual laziness.

China has long had an informal list of rules and requirements, or as I prefer to call them, “right-think guidelines”, that its entertainers must follow in order to stay in the good graces of the totally non-totalitarian government.

Recently, the Chinese Association of Performing Arts made these informal rules official so that performers can better “self-regulate” and avoid punishments that could include a lifetime ban.

As a resident of the People’s Republic of La La Land, I believe that Hollywood should boldly follow this shining example and make their unofficial right-think rules official, so that the crucial cultural trait of artistic “self-regulation” becomes more efficient and effective here in America.

China’s rules, such as its demand that performers “ardently support the Communist Party’s line, principle and policies”, and that they become an “art worker for the new era…by using literature and art to serve the people and socialism” are conveniently very adaptable to Hollywood.

Hollywood already rightfully demands that performers ardently support wokeism and never deviate from the woke party line, principles and policies.

 For example, Gina Carano just got fired from The Mandalorian for allegedly equating woke cancel culture with the Holocaust, while her co-star Pedro Pascal committed the same exact crime but over Trump’s immigration policy with no consequences. Obviously, Carano is a wrong think hate criminal, and I say good riddance to her and to her free speech…oops…I mean hate speech!

And as evidenced by Hollywood’s endless cavalcade of insipidly sub-par yet gloriously diverse virtue signaling movies and tv shows, art and entertainment has thankfully already been thoroughly transformed into a conformist cultural propaganda machine, and thank god for that…or how else would we know the right thing to right-think?

China’s rules also demand that celebrities should “guide minors to establish the right kind of values and actively resist uncivilized behavior”, which is perfect for Hollywood since it has a very long and rich history of guiding and grooming minors that speaks to the industry’s uniquely affectionate and insatiable love of children.

To be blunt, some of China’s rules simply won’t translate to Hollywood…except in reverse. For instance, China bans obscenity, pornography, gambling, drugs, drunk driving and “endangering social morality” for its performers, whereas those things are basically mandatory in Hollywood.

Another Chinese rule that won’t make the cut here is the ban on lip-syncing at live performances. China deems it “deceptive”, but if America bans lip-syncing then 97% of pop stars will be unemployable except maybe as prostitutes…but I repeat myself.

The rest of the right-think rules for working in Hollywood are quite obvious but a bit different from China, so I will state them clearly here.

First off there is the ‘diversity/inclusion lack of responsibility’ rule, which states that if a female filmmaker’s movie is terrible, it’s because of misogyny, and if a black director’s movie is bad it’s due to systemic racism.

Speaking of diversity, every commercial, no matter the product, must always feature either a person of color, or a bi-racial couple, or a gay couple, or best of all a bi-racial gay couple. Every. Single. One.

Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, cis-gendered actors CANNOT play trans characters. EVER. And straight actors cannot play gay characters. Basically straight actors, particularly the white ones, aren’t allowed to act anymore. But gay actors can play straight characters and trans actors can do absolutely anything because we must honor, respect and worship them.

There’s also the Meryl Streep rule, where artists are wholly encouraged to bravely speak up but only when they know everyone in Hollywood agrees with them and it costs them absolutely nothing.

There’s also the straight white guy rule, where straight white guys are punished for the hate crime of being straight white guys. This is self-explanatory, as pale-faced skirt chasers like me deserve to rot in hell for our disgusting heterosexual masculinity, no matter how great our allyship and self-loathing.  

Some may think these right-think rules are dictatorial, totalitarian and draconian, but those people need to be silenced, cancelled and disappeared. The truth is that Hollywood is a bastion of free expression, just as long as that free expression strictly conforms to woke ideology.

For example, Hollywood proudly permits all sorts of vacant, vacuous and vapid virtue signaling around the topics of race, LGBTQ and feminism or any other wokefully acceptable issue. But if some too-smart-for-their-own-good performer dares to malign or denigrate the corporate hand that feeds, or targets American empire or militarism, or challenges the actual power structure in America, namely the military industrial complex and Israel, I promise you Hollywood will get medieval on their ass.

In conclusion, Hollywood should courageously follow in China’s noble footsteps (or is it bootsteps?) regarding enforcement of right-think, because as we all know, artistic “freedom is slavery”, and “ignorance is strength”, which means Hollywood is filled with the strongest people in the world.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Marliyn Manson Gets Nailed to the #MeToo Cross

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

The swift cancellation of Marilyn Manson proves that #MeToo is a more powerful cultural force than conservative Christianity ever was.

Only the rocker’s most ardent fans are keeping him in their demonic thoughts and Satanic prayers in the wake of serious abuse allegations.

Marilyn Manson, who rose to stardom as a self-proclaimed shock rock anti-Christ in the 1990’s, has long had a target on his back.

Ever since the minimally talented Manson hit it big with his cover of the Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” off his EP Smells Like Children in 1995, fundamentalist Christians have tried to cancel him for his devoutly anti-Christian attitudes and occult antics.

In a brilliant piece of cultural jiu-jitsu, Manson masterfully used his position as a public foil to puritanical Christians to promote himself to great wealth and fame with his smash hit follow up albums Antichrist Superstar (1996) and Mechanical Animals (1998).

It seemed back then that the more outrageously anti-Christian Manson got the more MTV and Rolling Stone and the rest of the pop culture establishment embraced him, and it drove conservative Christians absolutely crazy.

For his rather derivative Satanic rock star pose, Manson inflamed a Christian hysteria that led to him being blamed for everything from teen suicide to the Columbine Massacre. But none of those charges ever actually harmed Manson’s career, only enhanced it.

Manson’s success in the 90’s and conservative Christian’s impotence in the face of it, was a clear indicator of the religion’s waning social power and a forewarning of its precipitous demise and near disappearance from American culture.

But where conservative Christians miserably failed to bring down Manson in the 90’s, the new dominant puritanical moral force in our culture, wokeness, with its powerful feminist denomination #MeToo, has succeeded spectacularly.

This week, numerous women, including Manson’s former fiancé, actress Evan Rachel Wood, have come forward with allegations of “sexual assault, psychological abuse and/or various forms of coercion, violence and intimidation.”

Wood, who was 18 when she met the then 36 year-old Manson, said of the relationship, “He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission.”

Another former fiancé of Manson’s, actress Rose McGowan, released a statement in support of Wood and the other accusers. “I stand with Evan Rachel Wood and the other brave women who have come forward…Let the truth be revealed. Let the healing begin.”

In response to the cavalcade of allegations, Loma Vista Recordings, which distribute Manson’s albums, said they would cease promoting his current album and refused to work with him again in the future, and the powerhouse Creative Artists Agency quickly dropped him as a client.

In response, Manson released a statement.

“Obviously, my art and my life have long been magnets for controversy, but these recent claims about me are horrible distortions of reality. My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners. Regardless of how – and why – others are now choosing to misrepresent the past, that is the truth.”

Manson is right, his rather pedestrian art and performative life have been magnets for controversy, but that is because they were built upon being intentionally provocative, particularly against Christianity.

He repeatedly stuck his thumb in the eye of Christians in order to draw attention to himself, with “shocking” yet predictable actions like proclaiming himself to be a minister in the Church of Satan (inducted by none other than Anton LaVey), and quoting famed occultist Aleister Crowley’s dictum, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”.

It would seem according to his accusers that Manson actually lived that morally grotesque motto to the fullest, but the women on the unpleasant receiving end of it are now publicly exacting their revenge and ending his career.

It’s a testament to the enormous cultural power of wokeness, with its two dominant denominations, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, that its ability to cancel heretics and blasphemers far exceeds anything conservative Christians were able to accomplish over the last forty years.

That Manson thrived for so long in opposition to the old religion of Christianity, but has been utterly obliterated in no time at all by the new religion of wokeness, is revealing of the tectonic shift that has taken place in just the last four years in American culture.

Further proof of this is that the pop culture establishment, which so dutifully defended Manson when he was offending Christians back in the 90’s, will not even contemplate tolerating his alleged sins against women now.

It is also striking that puritanical Christianity has been so soundly defeated in the culture wars by the entertainment industry, but that the puritanical impulse is still alive and well and thriving…in Hollywood of all places, in the form of #MeToo feminism and Black Lives Matter.

Unfortunately for Manson, the only difference between the old irrational, hypocritical and sex-obsessed religion of Christianity that he so brazenly defined himself in opposition to, and the new irrational, hypocritical and sex-obsessed religion of #MeToo wokeness that is currently crucifying him, is that Christianity at least offers the opportunity for redemption.

The truth is that Marilyn Manson danced with the devil to great success, but, as always, the bill comes due. It’s the height of irony that it wasn’t the puritans of conservative Christianity that took him down, but rather the witches of wokeness who’ve succeeded in burning him at the pop culture stake.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Surreality of a Reality Czar in Post-Reality America

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 39 seconds

The establishment wants a Reality Czar in order to crush dissent and control people, not to unite us around a common truth.

The mainstream media and ruling elite really hate conspiracy theories and misinformation…except when they don’t.

On February 2nd, which ironically enough is Groundhog Day here in the U.S., the New York Times published an article titled, “How The Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis”.

It seems a very bad sign that America is now relying on Joe Biden, a geriatric Washington insider suffering from dementia, to solve a “reality” crisis.

In the article, writer Kevin Roose spoke with “experts” who offered suggestions about how to unify Americans around “reality” by stamping out “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation”.

One of the suggestions was that Biden should create a “Reality Czar” to oversee the dismantling of “disinformation” and the surveillance of “conspiracy theorists”.

That sounds like a great idea…I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

The problem with a “Reality Czar” is that America is a post-reality nation. Our culture has gone so far to the extreme in regards to embracing subjective experience over objective reality that some blow hard bureaucrat is not going to be able to tip the scales back towards the rational.

And of course, that is the point. The Biden administration doesn’t want to return America to objective reality, they want Americans to embrace the establishment’s reality…those are two very different things.

The establishment reality is the neo-liberal, corporate controlled, Military Industrial Complex reality that loathes being held to account for its continuous misdeeds and misinformation.

The establishment reality demands we accept the absurdly incomplete official story regarding the spate of assassinations in the 60’s (JFK, MLK, RFK) while refusing to declassify and un-redact the millions of government files on those topics it won’t let us see.

The establishment reality lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and gave us the hell of the Vietnam War.

The establishment reality lied to us about Iran-Contra and the death squads in Latin America. It also lied about its complicity in the drug trade while it the manufactured a War on Drugs.

The establishment reality refuses to declassify documents surrounding 9-11 and refused to investigate the funding for that attack. It also unleashed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s “Dark Side”, which included the War on Terror, torture, massive surveillance, Gitmo, rendition and the Patriot Act.

The establishment reality was the one that told us Iraq had WMD’s and gave us the Iraq War, and continues to give us the War in Yemen and the carnage in Libya and across the globe.

It is often said that daylight is the best disinfectant but we are continuously kept in the dark, and the establishment, regardless of which party is in power, is a gangrenous limb and their lies and disinformation are much more toxic to America and the world than anything some Q-Anon clowns can conjure in their fever dreams.

It is pretty rich that The New York Times is running this article calling for a reality czar and bemoaning disinformation as they have long aided and abetted the establishment in their concealing of truth and distorting of objective reality.

Whether it be Walter Duranty and his lies for Stalin, or Judith Miller and her lies for Bush, the Times has proven over and over again that it isn’t a news organization, but a Praetorian Guard meant to protect the tyrants, oligarchs and aristocrats from the masses.

The establishment’s hatred of conspiracy theories is particularly amusing in light of what transpired over the last four years.

Am I the only one who remembers the Russiagate hysteria? Stories of dastardly Rooskies hacking into power grids and voting booths and using microwave weapons to attack Americans have been commonplace in the Times and across the mainstream media, and yet those “conspiracy theories” were not only accepted but embraced.

Would the new Reality Czar hold the Times accountable for those idiotic stories? Would MSNBC be chastised for Rachel Maddow’s conspiratorial ramblings? Would CNN be reprimanded for their “mostly peaceful protests” disinformation?

Would the Reality Czar target the scientists and medical experts who publicly proclaimed that it was ok to gather in large groups during the pandemic to protest for Black Lives Matter but not to protest against lockdown?

How about the trans activists who distort and contort both science and reality?

Would the Reality Czar target the new White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, especially considering her laughably ridiculous press conference from 2015 where with a straight face she stated the U.S. has a “long standing” policy against backing coups?

Of course not.

Like a paranoid schizophrenic, our political and media elite of both parties are constantly trying to convince people that their own devious delusions are the one true reality.

The Reality Czar would not be meant to actually squash misinformation and conspiracy theories, only the misinformation and conspiracy theories the establishment doesn’t like.

The “reality” is that the ruling elite are pushing the notion of rampant right wing domestic terrorists and the danger of conspiracy theories in an attempt to conceal their crimes and squash dissent, not to help objective “reality” flourish.

As Orwell told us, “Who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past.” The establishment wants to control the present, the past, the future and most of all you…and a Reality Czar is just the beginning.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Musical Performances at the Biden Inauguration Highlight America's Bankrupt Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

Big music stars performed to ring in Joe Biden’s presidency, but they were just as unoriginal and underwhelming as he is.

In a grand ceremony worthy of a dementia-addled aristocrat, geriatric Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States yesterday.

America has had an inauguration for the president every four years since 1789, making yesterday’s event the 59th in U.S. history. I believe Joe Biden is the only man to have attended every single one of them.

Four years ago, Trump’s low rent inauguration celebration featured Toby Keith, Three Doors Down and Lee Greenwood, which wasn’t a murderer’s row of talent so much as a ‘makes-you-want-to-kill-yourself’ lack of it.

I think we can all agree the last thing this country ever needs to see again is Lee Greenwood serenading the masses with his flag fornicating hit from the Paleolithic era, “God Bless the U.S.A.”, a heinously malignant earworm that makes me not just ashamed to be an American, but a sentient human being.

Not surprisingly, the stars came out in full this year to salute Joe Biden, who had considerably more star power on-hand to ring him into office than Trump in 2017.

Case in point, Lady Gaga sang the national anthem at the swearing-in ceremony. The glorious Gaga, who has the voice of an angel and a face made for radio, arrived looking like she just came off The Hunger Games set. Her dress appeared to be a tribute to a venereal disease polyp designed by Oscar de la Herpes.

Gaga gave her all…but the problem was that it was just way too much. Her heartfelt performance quickly devolved into an overwrought vocal spectacle that looked and sounded like a drag queen Brunhilde wrestling an amusement park Bugs Bunny.

A short while later Jennifer Lopez strutted out to sing “This Land is Your Land” and “America the Beautiful”. If you needed any more proof that America was a vast cultural wasteland, just consider that Jennifer Lopez is now the Woody Guthrie of our era.

J-Lo also gave her all but unfortunately it wasn’t nearly enough. Unable to utilize her most valuable ‘asset’, Ms. Lopez’s lack of vocal prowess was left as exposed as her backside was covered.

Biden loved the performance though and as J-Lo walked past he quickly smelled her hair and declared, “I Love you, Charo!”

The final performer at the ceremony was Garth Brooks, who kept it country…Walmart country, by wearing jeans that were two sizes too small, a belt buckle the size of a Ford F-150 pick-up truck, a black blazer and a shirt with no tie.

Good old boy Garth sang “Amazing Grace” in his usual banal country twang and proceeded to remind viewers that only in America can a minimally gifted, chubby, cowboy poseur become a chart-topping music mega-star.

Biden was deeply moved by Garth’s song and proclaimed he was “so proud that Gene Autry could be here today at my First Communion.”

Later that night the heavy hitters came out for a made-for-tv inaugural celebration titled ”Celebrating America”.

The show opened with Bruce Springsteen doing an acoustic version of his song “Land of Hopes and Dreams” at the Lincoln Memorial. For nearly fifty years Springsteen has been the genuine voice of working class America and is such a national treasure he should be named poet laureate emeritus. His performance was solemn, soulful and stirring and perfectly encapsulated this dire yet determined moment in American history.

The show went precipitously downhill from there.

Tom Hanks, America’s everyman if everyman were a sanctimonious, self-satisfied, holier-than-thou billionaire, was the master of ceremonies.

Hanks was the perfect choice since his filmography looks like a greatest hits of Pentagon and Intelligence community propaganda, as his film’s routinely sell flag-waving revisionist history and muscular American militarism, imperialism and corporate colonialism all under the guise of honor and duty-bound niceness…just like Joe Biden.

Hanks turned the smug all the way up to 11, maybe in an attempt to stay warm, and did his best to reassure his “friends and neighbors” that all was well and life is now back to normal thanks to Biden.

The highlights of Celebrating America were easily the aforementioned Springsteen as well as the Foo Fighters – who played a striking rendition of “Times Like These”.

The lowest of lowlights was Jon Bon Jovi lip-syncing to his cover of The Beatles “Here Comes the Sun”. Bon Jovi’s performance was as odious as the rancid air in Elizabeth, NJ along the turnpike. Jovi’s nasally vocals were so abysmally, egregiously, hellaciously awful it was utterly astonishing. The fact that he was lip-syncing only made it all the more embarrassing.

Lip-syncing dominated the festivities, with Ant Clemons and Justin Timberlake, Tyler Hubbard and Tim McGraw, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry and maybe even John Legend, who Biden thought was his old friend Corn Pop from the mean streets of Wilmington, all lip-syncing or being greatly electronically aided in their vocal efforts.

Lip-syncing does make sense in this context though since the contrived performances perfectly encapsulate the charade that is our corporate-controlled democracy.

Speaking of charlatans, presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama appeared on the show, apparently from The Hall of War Criminals. They each said that despite their political differences that they were able to come together and kill people across the globe and crush the working class…and we should do the same now in the name of unity. Yay unity!!

If the inauguration ceremony and ‘Celebrating America’ - with all its insipid, manufactured performances and star-spangled sappiness honoring our elderly president who’s only capable of muttering or shouting incoherent inanities - are any indication, we are an artistically, intellectually and politically bankrupt nation…and we are truly doomed.

My solution….Springsteen/Grohl 2024!!

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

MLK/FBI: A Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Regurgitated, establishment friendly pablum that studiously avoids the bigger questions.

I’ve heard it said that Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet. I think that statement is quite accurate.

What makes the propaganda fed to Americans so insidious is that it’s so subtle that audiences, even the supposedly intellectual ones, are blissfully unaware of their indoctrination and conditioning.

A perfect example of this is MLK/FBI, the new documentary directed by Sam Pollard that premiered in theaters and video-on-demand on January 15th, that chronicles the FBI’s wiretapping and harassment of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.

A documentary dealing with intelligence community nefariousness and MLK, the greatest American strategist and tactician of the 20th century, has my attention.

Unfortunately, after watching MLK/FBI, I was left frustrated and infuriated because it was so obviously a docile and deferential piece of establishment friendly propaganda meant to distract and deceive viewers.

This movie is 104 minutes of flaccid history and impotent insights disguised as setting the record straight with revolutionary revelations. But there is no new information presented in the film and no new perspectives on the information already known.

The most interesting statement in the movie comes in the final ten minutes and is from MLK aide Andrew Young, who would go on to become a congressman, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and the Mayor of Atlanta.

Young says in regards to James Earl Ray, the man convicted of the assassination of MLK, “I don’t think James Earl Ray had anything to do with that, Dr. King’s assassination, so I can’t really comment on that.”

This should be where the movie starts, not where it ends.

What makes the FBI’s harassment of MLK noteworthy is that they were gathering salacious information on his private life in an attempt to assassinate his character and thus derail his morally authoritative movement.

The FBI actively tried to get members of the press to publish stories of King’s infidelity but none took the bait, and so the FBI was left with lots of ammunition but no one willing to fire it.

It was when King expanded his civil rights work and in 1968 began the Poor People’s Campaign, which set out to bring poor people of all colors together to fight for economic justice and against American militarism, that the FBI ratcheted up its anti-King work, and this is where the infamous “rape participation” allegation first is documented by the FBI.

The claim, that King watched and laughed as another pastor raped a woman, is dubious and is not thoroughly fleshed out in the film, but it reveals the FBI understood the greater threat King now posed to the ruling order with the Poor People’s Campaign, and that it was willing to push the envelop to stop him.

Other civil right’s groups and leaders faced similar escalation when they dared to cross color lines and work on behalf of all people instead of just black people.

It wasn’t until Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and evolved into a more racially inclusive yet no less revolutionary figure, that he got assassinated under shadowy circumstances.

The Black Panther’s free breakfast program, open to children of all races, was deemed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to be “the greatest internal threat to the United States”. The Black Panthers were quickly infiltrated and some, including Fred Hampton, were assassinated.

And so it was with King’s Poor People’s Campaign, which triggered the FBI to “up its game”. Coincidentally, just a few weeks later he was assassinated in Memphis.

MLK/FBI is much too “respectable” to investigate or challenge Andrew Young’s claim regarding Ray’s innocence in the assassination of King, even though Ray himself claimed he was innocent, the King family believes he is innocent and a civil court ruled he was innocent. It’s this desperation for respectability at the expense of truth that makes the film establishment propaganda.

The other tell-tale sign it’s propaganda is that the film acts like FBI and intel community deviousness and depravity are some remote experience from a dark, distant past instead of a pressing issue of our time.

This allows liberals, especially ones like Bill Maher and John Oliver who pose as anti-establishmentarians, to continue to fawn over and fellate the “heroes” of the intel community under the guise that malicious misdeeds only occurred in the past.

The FBI’s invasive surveillance of King pales in comparison to what the intel community is capable of now. What the FBI did to King the intel community is now able to do to everyone since we all carry cell phones, mini eavesdropping devices that track our every movement, contact and conversation.

The film’s flaccidity also allows liberals to continue to giddily cheer the intel community’s crackdown on nationalists, militias and Julian Assange just as conservatives once cheered Hoover’s targeting King, civil rights and anti-war groups and communists.

It also surreptitiously endorses the Black Lives Matter and allows woke advocates to deceive themselves into thinking they’re morally equivalent to Dr. King.

BLM is no Poor People’s Campaign meant to threaten the establishment order. It’s a contrived and manipulative movement meant to uphold the status quo, not disrupt it, which is why its been swiftly embraced by Washington, the media and corporate America.

In conclusion, by being a documentary that talks an awful lot but never really has anything useful to say, MLK/FBI is a deceptive piece of establishment propaganda not worthy of your time.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Run Hide Fight: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The movie could have been much worse. It may appeal to adolescents and those with adolescent tastes in movies, but for everyone else it isn’t worth seeing.

Run Hide Fight, written and directed by Kyle Rankin, is a new action thriller film that tells the story of Zoe Hull, a female high school student fighting back during a school shooting.

The movie, which stars Isabel May as Zoe and Thomas Jane as her father Todd, is basically Die Hard but set in a high school with a female protagonist.

Run Hide Fight has garnered some media attention due to its being the first film distributed by The Daily Wire, the conservative media outlet founded in 2015 by political commentator Ben Shapiro. The movie is available for streaming exclusively on The Daily Wire for paid subscribers beginning on Friday January 15th.

As Andrew Brietbart once said, “politics is downstream of culture” and with this in mind Shapiro is leading the charge for conservatives to make a more concerted effort to be involved in popular culture, long a bastion of liberal domination.

Conservatives have for decades railed against liberals’ control of entertainment, decrying the impact it has in shaping public sentiment. But despite all the handwringing, conservatives have never really made a serious move to compete in that arena, just complain about it.

Conservative filmmakers have traditionally lacked the talent, skill and craft to make worthwhile conservative art or entertainment, which is usually so politically heavy-handed, artistically obtuse, intellectually trite and emotionally infantile as to be ridiculously unwatchable.

Run Hide Fight sets out to reverse that trend.

As someone more arthouse than action movie, more cinema than politics and who has zero interest in Ben Shapiro, his whiny politics and his even whinier voice, my expectations going into Run Hide Fight were very low, and my assessment is as follows.

The film is most definitely derivative, formulaic and predictable as it borrows liberally from the Die Hard blueprint. The structure of the narrative and the character archetypes are almost identical to Die Hard…but not as good.

For example, one-dimensional bad guy Tristan Voy and his henchmen are pale imitations of Die Hard’s deliciously devious villain Hans Gruber and his collection of monstrous minions.

The film also suffers from some sloppy directing and flimsy storytelling as director Kyle Rankin is no master craftsman like the criminally under valued John McTiernan.

Rankin’s decision to juxtapose the realistic and viscerally unnerving school shooting violence with the action hero fantasy violence of Zoe’s John McClain-esque counter-attack is definitely tonally jarring, disorienting and off-putting.

But there are also some bright spots.

The well paced film runs an hour and forty-nine minutes and kept me engaged the whole time.

The film’s politics are pretty subtle, with conservative values just a back drop, not the main attraction.

And finally, Isabel May does a terrific job in carrying the whole movie. May is not Bruce Willis, but she is a formidable force and flashes moments of genuine brilliance in the movie.

Is Run Hide Fight a great movie? No. But it also isn’t a bad movie. To its credit, it is, like the vast majority of Hollywood’s output, just a plain old regular movie…but that is a huge first baby step for conservatives trying to get into the pop culture game.

The problem is the film is only streaming on The Daily Wire and to see it you must pay to subscribe. I understand what Shapiro is trying to do with this business plan, but I think it’s terribly flawed.

This film is definitely geared toward a teen audience and what Shapiro wants to do is bring young adults to his website to see his lone film, and then stick around to read and listen to right-wing news in the hopes of bringing them into the conservative fold.

This single film alone just isn’t good enough though for some teenager to expend enough time, mental energy and money to actually subscribe to a website they’ll only use once to watch a middling movie in a market already flooded with a cornucopia of middling movies.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or the myriad of other streaming services are teeming with a plethora of similarly mediocre, mildly entertaining films, whereas The Daily Wire only has this one.

Sure, the people who already subscribe will be happy to have access to Run Hide Fight, but by limiting who can see the film, Shapiro is just reinforcing his echo chamber and not expanding his reach, which if conservatives want to get into the pop culture war should be his ultimate goal.

If Run Hide Fight were available on video-on-demand and anybody could rent it for $5 or buy it for $15, thousands of young adults would watch it and it could maybe help The Daily Wire build a relationship with an untapped audience. If VOD services refused to carry the film, that would only generate free publicity and rebel cache for the movie.

Shapiro’s current business model loses out on the money from expanded access via video-on-demand and myopically cuts off his right-wing nose to spite his liberal-hating face by letting only true blue conservatives see it.

As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and Run Hide Fight is a decent enough teen action thriller that it would make a good impression on young adult audiences, if only they had an easy opportunity to see it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy - A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Although the film features some compelling talking heads, its thesis is too shallow and one note to compulsory viewing.

The new Netflix documentary ‘Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy’ pulls its conspiratorial punches in favor of the establishment friendly route of blaming racism

 The documentary lacks insight and profundity because it studiously avoids the hard questions in favor of easy answers.

Crack: Cocaine, corruption and conspiracy, directed by Stanley Nelson, recounts the rise of crack cocaine in the 1980’s and the calamitous War on Drugs unleashed in response to it.

Cocaine, corruption and conspiracy are three things I can’t get enough of, so when this documentary was released on Netflix January 11th, I dove right in. The movie certainly lives up to its name as it does chronicle cocaine and corruption, but when it tries to tackle conspiracy it stumbles noticeably.

The film opens strongly with a chapter titled “Greed is Good” that highlights the ties between the muscular American capitalism of the Reagan revolution of the 1980’s and the explosion of the drug trade in America’s inner cities. 

The drug dealer as a black market, underclass extension of the archetypal American entrepreneur, is a compelling idea, but unfortunately, the film quickly eschews such high-minded observations and devolves into purely race-based analysis.

The film’s thesis is that crack, the media and political response to it, and the War on Drugs, were a function of racism.

The documentary repeatedly makes this assertion and assumes it to be true but unfortunately never actually proves it. In fact, the movie is often at cross-purposes with itself over its race-based contention.

For instance, the film claims that due to racism, law enforcement originally didn’t police black neighborhoods and therefore let drugs flourish. When black communities demanded aggressive police action to combat crack and officials responded with increased policing of black neighborhoods, that’s deemed racism too.

The documentary is chock full of this sort of circular logic, confirmation bias and shirking of responsibility.

Another racial argument is that the government’s amenable response to the opioid crisis, which affects more white people, as opposed to its draconian response to the crack epidemic, which affected poor black neighborhoods, is proof of racism.

This ignores a fact that the film details extensively, that the crack epidemic was accompanied by massive gun violence, something that hasn’t occurred with heroin.

Drug gangs selling crack engaged in gun battles over territory that resulted in many deaths, but it wasn’t just drug users and dealers that were dying, it was civilians caught in the crossfire too. This led to much public outcry and government officials resolving to stop the bloodshed.

As Sam Quinones reports in his 2015 book Dreamland, Mexican heroin dealers in the U.S. use a very different approach than violent crack dealers. To avoid police attention, these dealers don’t carry guns or use violence, and target smaller cities with a customer friendly approach that includes phone orders and direct delivery. In essence, these dealers have become like the Big Pharma companies that pushed the scourge of opioids onto the American public with the blessing of the government and medical establishment in the first place.

The documentary ignores these facts in favor of reducing everything to simple racism.

As for the “conspiracy” in the film’s title, the movie raises but then refuses to answer whether the CIA smuggled cocaine into the U.S. from Central America (thus creating the crack epidemic) during the Iran-Contra affair.

This “conspiracy” is referenced numerous times but while never refuted, it’s also never endorsed. The furthest the film goes is to say that it’s understandable that black people believe in this conspiracy since they’ve been so victimized by the government and the war on drugs.

There is compelling evidence that the CIA did smuggle cocaine into the country and were responsible for the explosion of crack and guns in inner city neighborhoods.

Gary Webb famously wrote about this in 1996 for The Mercury News and in his 1998 book, Dark Alliance.  In response, the mainstream media quickly jumped to the defense of the CIA and pilloried Webb, essentially ending his career. Webb ended up “committing suicide” in 2004 by shooting himself twice in the head.

An Inspector-General’s report later verified much of what Webb claimed according to journalist and Webb biographer Nick Schou who wrote, "The CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade."

The CIA is ruthless and amoral, so their use of the drug trade as a social destabilizer and off the books income source shouldn’t be shocking.

Alexander Cockburn details the intelligence community’s history of llegal drug operations in his 2014 book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. According to Cockburn the CIA was testing LSD on unsuspecting civilians in San Francisco and smuggling heroin from Vietnam in the 60’s, running cocaine and guns from Central and South America in the 80’s, and restarted the opium trade in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The documentary dutifully ignores Webb and Cockburn’s conspiratorial context, and its cowardly agnostic approach make the film seem like controlled opposition, as it simply recycles establishment sanctioned talking points around the war on drugs and uses racism as a shield to avoid bigger questions. In other words, the movie is just another opiate for the myopic mainstream masses.

Racism and a CIA conspiracy can both be, and probably are, major contributors to the moral atrocity and social calamity that is the War on Drugs, but shouting one and tap dancing around the other turn Crack into just another documentary that would rather tell people what they want to hear, rather than tell them the whole uncomfortable truth.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Dissident: A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. If you have know nothing about the Khashoggi murder, this is a decent overview, but if you are decently informed on the subject, it is not worth your time.

The Dissident details the gruesome assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi but avoids deeper questions

The documentary dutifully exposes the tyranny of the Saudi regime but hesitates when it comes to exploring their accomplices.

The Dissident is the new documentary available on video-on-demand that chronicles the Saudi Arabian government’s infamous assassination of Washington Post journalist and Saudi reform activist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018.

The film, directed by Academy Award winning documentarian Bryan Fogel, tells an important story, and yet it never quite feels like an important film. It isn’t a bad documentary, but it also isn’t great, and could’ve been much better.

The Dissident goes into gruesome detail about Khashoggi’s heinous and brutal murder and ultimately blames Saudi Crown Prince and Deputy Prime Minister, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) for the crime, but if you follow the news you already know the majority of what the film details regarding the assassination, and that MBS is little more than Tony Soprano in a keffiyeh, the lead thug in the royal Saudi thugocracy.

The movie doesn’t break any new ground and what it does report is presented in such an overwrought manner that it detracts from its impact.

Fogel’s directing approach is too slick for the movie’s own good, as he overwhelms the substance with a needlessly glossy visual style.

Fogel tries to transform the Khashoggi assassination into a spy thriller and love story rather than keeping it a genuine piece of investigative journalism, which is disappointing and detrimental to the film.

Another example of the film’s stylistic problem is one of the film’s main subjects, Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident living in Montreal who became friends with Khashoggi and has made a name for himself as the host of an internet show about Saudi politics. Abdulaziz comes across as a little too polished to be trustworthy, so much so that when the film opens with a scene involving him, I literally thought it was a bad dramatic re-enactment. Unfortunately, Abdulaziz appears on camera to be less an earnest activist and more a dedicated self-promoter, and the documentary suffers because of it.

Another frustration was that the film seems intentionally obtuse when it comes to broader context.

For example, the film exposes Trump as being a vile and morally corrupt figure for his egregious kowtowing to the Saudi’s in the wake of the Khashoggi murder. Trump should be shamed for his disgusting behavior, but the film fails to point out that his cowardice regarding the Saudis does not make him unique among recent American presidents.

George W. Bush infamously bent over backwards to protect the Saudis after 9-11 (15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis), even going so far as to fly Saudis out of the US when all flights were grounded, and refusing to declassify the portions of the 9-11 Report that were damaging to the Saudi government.

Obama was no better, as in 2016 he vetoed a bill allowing families of 9-11 victims to sue the Saudi government (the veto was overridden by Congress).

Another contextual problem with the film was that its biggest story was neglected while hiding in plain sight. That story is Pegasus spyware, which was used to hack Abdulaziz and directly led to the murder of Khashoggi.

Pegasus was created by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms firm that claims its diabolical product is meant to target drug dealers and terrorists. But NSO sells Pegasus to tyrannical regimes in the Middle East that use it to round up dissidents and squelch dissent.

Pegasus is a crucial topic, but The Dissident only briefly touches upon it at the hour and twenty minute mark of a two-hour film and seems willfully blind to an angle of the story that demands deeper investigation. For example, why is an Israeli company aiding tyrannical Gulf States by tracking their opposition?

The film reveals that MBS himself was directly involved in the Pegasus hacking of Jeff Bezos after Khashoggi’s murder, and following this hack the National Enquirer exposed Bezos’s extra-marital affair.

If MBS could use Pegasus to hack the tech savvy owner of Amazon and The Washington Post that is one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet…who else has he hacked? Who else has Israel hacked with Pegasus? Have Trump or other American officials been hacked by the Israel and/or Saudi Arabia using Pegasus?

Could Trump’s consistent acquiescence to the Saudis and Israel be a result of their obtaining compromising information on him through Pegasus? When the UAE and Bahrain officially recognized Israel in 2020 was it quid pro quo for Israel having sold Pegasus to them and the Saudis?

These are all the questions I had that were never addressed in The Dissident. Instead the film spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on the grief of Khashoggi’s fiancé, which is heartbreaking to be sure, and not enough on the more substantial bigger picture.

It seems that Khashoggi’s assassination is the tip of the tyrannical iceberg, and The Dissident is either unable or unwilling to dip its toe into the deeper and darker waters to find out who besides the despots in the Saudi royal family are complicit in this particular crime and in more expansive crimes against humanity across the globe.

In conclusion, if you are unaware of the particulars of the Khashoggi murder, then The Dissident is a good place to get a stylized overview, but if you’ve followed the story then you’ll need to look elsewhere for relevant insights.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Top Ten Virtue Signalers of 2020 - Entertainment Edition

Estimated reading Time - 3 minutes 56 seconds

This year has been a bad one for most of us, but for the woke virtue signalers of the entertainment world, it has been the very best of times.

It is unsurprising that the entertainment industry, which naturally attracts the intellectually vapid, the emotionally insecure and the rabidly self-absorbed, boasted some of the most egregious and aggressive virtue signaling in the history of the art form in 2020.

Anyone who has ever waded through the intellectual cesspool of our narcissistic culture is all too familiar with the compulsive public expressions of moral superiority and shameless self-righteousness of entertainment industry wokeness.

In 2020 entertainment industry virtue signalers, in a desperate attempt for attention and validation, vomited such copious amounts of their odious, self-serving woke bile into the public sphere that it felt like we were all living in a giant virtue vomitorium.

In honor of the worst year in recent memory, I have put together a list of the ten worst virtue signalers in entertainment for 2020. Enjoy!

10B. New York Times Film Critics – The NYT’s list of the 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century (So Far) and the Best Actors of 2020 studiously ignored talent, skill and reality and instead went all in on virtue signaling by including a cavalcade of minority, foreign and elderly actors as well as ridiculous Tik-Tok performers. The final result is a human resources department’s wet dream and looks more like the waiting room at a casting call for a diversity and inclusion public service announcement than a collection of best actors.

10A. Berlin International Film Festival – The home of the famous Golden Bear and Silver Bear Awards announced this year that they were going gender neutral in their acting awards…how very Weimar of them. Next up - Golden and Silver Bears announce their pronouns are they/them and zi/ze.

9. HBO Max – Put a warning label on Gone With the Wind so that people knew they were bad for watching it and evil for liking it. Also put out UNpregnant, a zany, whacky, fun-loving teen abortion movie. So much virtue to signal! 

8. Kristen Bell – Bell had an All-Star caliber virtue signaling year…she quit a voice role because she is white, did the ‘I Take Responsibility’ video – the gold standard of the virtue signaling art form, then said she raises her kids anti-racist and doesn’t care about their sexual choices. The Quadruple Crown of virtue signaling! Ask not for whom the virtue signaling Bell tolls…it tolls for all of us!

7. Richard Brody, Film Critic at The New Yorker – Brody turned the virtue signaling up to eleven this year by being inappropriately amorous with the pedophile starter kit known as Cuties and by ranking Spike Lee’s abysmal and amateurish Da 5 Bloods as #2 on his ‘Best of the Year’ list. Apparently Brody doesn’t care if people think he’s a pedophile, but he REALLY doesn’t want people to think he’s racist…now that’s some quality virtue signaling!

6. Late Night Comedy – As evidenced by the insipid woke comedic stylings of Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Fallon’s impotent apology for wearing blackface 20 years ago, Stephen Colbert literally crying about Trump, and the eunuch brigade of Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver and Trevor Noah going all in on the safest, wokest, establishment-approved comedy imaginable, virtue signaling has spread like a contagion through late night comedy. These flaccid, pandering clowns make Jay Leno seem downright Carlin-esque. Yuck.

5. Disney/Hulu – Disney attached absurdly verbose content warnings to some of their classic animated films like Dumbo and Lady and the Tramp and Hulu (which Disney controls) pulled episodes of 30 Rock, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Scrubs, Golden Girls and Community for committing the sin of comedy “black face” in the past. Disney - where adults get treated like children!

4. The Oscars – The Oscars opened 2020 by virtue signaling about the environment and ended it virtue signaling about diversity.

 To paraphrase Schindler’s List, the Oscars’ new diversity and inclusion initiative isn’t just some good old fashioned hating of straight, able-bodied white men…it’s official policy now.

If the Academy Awards’ goal is to signal its virtue enough to make straight, able-bodied white men persona non grata in Hollywood, destroy cinematic quality and bankrupt the film industry, they are succeeding spectacularly. Bravo!

3. “Imagine” Video – Imagine being so self-absorbed that you think making a video of you and your wealthy friends singing the saccharine anthem ”Imagine” from your mansions during a pandemic when ordinary people are suffering unimaginable-to-you hardships such as losing their jobs, their homes and their loved ones, is a really good idea.

I ‘Imagine’ a glorious utopia with no jackass celebrities or pathetically pandering corporations and certainly no virtue signaling. I know it will never happen, but it is a pleasant dream.

2. NBA/LeBron James – This year the NBA emulated the flopping and vacant histrionics of its players by doing an extravagantly exaggerated, dramatically over-the-top embrace of “social justice”.

In the NBA bubble in Orlando – The Happiest Place on Earth,  ‘Black Lives Matter’ was painted on every court and players wore trite woke slogans on the back of their jerseys. The absurdity and obscenity of filthy rich, pampered, dim-witted athletes, safely sealed in five star hotels with all expenses paid, adored by millions of people worldwide, wearing jerseys demanding fans “See Us” and “Love Us” is so astronomical as to be immeasurable.

Then there is the MVP of Virtue Signaling, LeBron James, who should trade in his Nikes for clown shoes after he wore a Breonna Taylor “Say Her Name” t-shirt and did an egregiously adolescent and nauseatingly pretentious Wakanda salute when Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman died. Yikes.

LeBron’s won the NBA Championship in 2020 and nearly took the virtue signaling title too!!

1. “I Take Responsibility” video – A collection of imbecilic, dead-eyed actors morally preening by reading words on camera so that everyone knows they hate racism and “take responsibility” for “every not so funny joke, every unfair stereotype” is the Mona Lisa, the Hamlet, the Beethoven’s Fifth and the Citizen Kane of virtue signaling.

 This video is a pure masterpiece and the apex of the art form. It will never be equaled or topped…well at least not until the next shameless spectacle of woke virtue signaling comes along in 2021! Virtue signaling – the gift that keeps on giving.

Congratulations to all the virtue signalers of 2020. Your grating, self-serving displays of phony virtue are a towering monument to your own shamelessness and self-righteousness.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 26 - Mank

In this episode of everybody’s favorite cinema podcast, Barry and I debate David Fincher’s polarizing new film Mank. Topics discussed include Gary Oldman’s brilliance, Fincher’s frustratingly complex genius and an obscure old movie named Citizen Kane.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 26 - Mank

Thank you for listening!

©2020

Death to 2020: A Review and Commentary

In a year ripe for satire, Netflix’s predictable mockumentary ‘Death to 2020’ is proof of comedy’s calamitous demise

The film’s tepid and establishment friendly comedic takes on 2020 feel like the final nail in comedy’s coffin.

Death to 2020 is the new Netflix mockumentary that sets out to humorously sum up the nightmare that was 2020. The film, which premiered on the streaming service on December 27th, recounts the actual terrible events of the past year and has fake experts played by actors such as Samuel L. Jackson and Lisa Kudrow on as talking heads to comedically comment upon them.

The makers of Death to 2020, Charles Brooker and Anabel Jones, are best known in the U.S. for their terrifically terrifying and unnervingly prescient sci-fi horror show Black Mirror. But U.K. viewers first got to know them from their more comedy-oriented projects like the “Wipe Series”.

Death to 2020 is much more like the Wipe Series than Black Mirror as it attempts to be a comedy. Unfortunately, it fails in that endeavor.

What makes Death to 2020 so irritating is that it has nothing unique to say and it doesn’t even say the same tired old stuff uniquely.

Granted, some of the jokes are mildly amusing, and some of the performances are good, Tracey Ullman as Queen Elizabeth II, Hugh Grant as a stuffy and ornery British historian and Diane Morgan as one of the top five most average people in the world, are well done. Others, such as Leslie Jones as a behavioral psychologist and Lisa Kudrow as a conservative spokeswoman, are decidedly not.

Ultimately the film has the comedic heft, impact and staying power of a snide and snarky tweet.  At best it resembles a high-end, star-studded 2020 version of one of those silly Best of the 80’s clip shows on VH1.

The biggest problem with Death to 2020 though is the problem with most comedy nowadays, in that it is such a suffocating and stultifyingly safe and painfully predictable exercise as to be frustrating and fruitless.

If you have seen a single monologue in the past year by any of the sanctimonious, self-righteous serfs to the establishment on late night tv, such as Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher, Trevor Noah or John Oliver, then you’ve experienced the same impotent comedy of Death to 2020. 

The tired formula of the late night comedy eunuchs, where they flaccidly recite establishment-approved witticisms devoid of insight and edge, is dutifully replicated here just in mockumentary form.

The result is, not surprisingly, that there’s not an ounce of originality or profundity found in the hour and ten-minute film that is too long by roughly an hour.

Also clearly lacking from Death to 2020 is any semblance of comedic testicular fortitude as the usual safe targets are held up for ridicule. Of course Trump is pilloried because he is a walking punchline, as is clueless Joe Biden, who, amusingly, is referred to both as a “prehistoric concierge” and a ”civil war hero”, but obviously none of that is even remotely daring.

“Karens”, conservatives and anti-lockdown activists are also the butt of many jokes, but the equally golden opportunity to lambaste the illiberal left for laughs is never taken. For instance, the comedy rich environment of the Black Lives Matter movement is not mocked, and the “protestors” looting and burning businesses in the name of George Floyd don’t get taken to task either.

But most telling is that also absent from the comedy firing line are celebrities, like the highly hysterical dopes and dullards who vomited out the repugnantly self-serving “Imagine” and “I Take Responsibility“ videos.

By ignoring these subjects Death to 2020 reveals itself to be little more than just another pandering video compliantly committed to kissing the right asses and devoutly dedicated to never biting the hand that feeds it.

As George Carlin famously once said of the powerful in America, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it!” But the establishment court jesters who made Death to 2020 either are desperate to become members or are already in the club, as their resolute refusal to challenge the status quo is a perfect representation of the sad state of comedy in 2020.

Yes, there are some notable exceptions, Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr being the most prominent, but beyond that, whether it be Stephen Colbert weeping on air like one of the buffoons he used to belittle, or Jimmy Fallon castrating himself with a cowardly apology for an allegedly offensive blackface bit from twenty years ago, or John Oliver’s pathetic pandering to wokeness, or Saturday Night Live’s fierce commitment to anti-comedy or any of the other mainstream comedians who have groveled and genuflected to those who hold the power in our culture, 2020 has been the absolute nadir for contemporary comedy.

The bottom line is that 2020 has been a most brutal year that may have changed our world forever but it is also rife with profound opportunities for humor. Unfortunately for us, 2020 may also have killed comedy, and Death to 2020 is its decidedly unoriginal and unfunny death knell.

My Rating: 2 our of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Although at times mildly amusing, there is nothing original or noteworthy to see here.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Just when you thought 2020 couldn't get any worse - along comes 'Wonder Woman 1984'

 Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

Wonder Women 1984 is the horrendous, man-hating, militaristic, imperialist movie no one wanted but that 2020 deserves.

On Christmas Day the highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 (WW84) premiered in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max. The film, co-written and directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot, is the sequel to the smash hit 2017 film Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman (2017) wasn’t a perfect movie by any stretch, but it was a well-crafted, thoroughly entertaining superhero origin story. The film featured a star making performance from the gloriously gorgeous Gal Gadot and tapped into the anti-Trump feminist zeitgeist of the time and was handsomely rewarded with a hefty $822 million box office.

As for Wonder Woman 1984, it is the exact opposite of Wonder Woman as everything good about the original is bludgeoned to death in the sequel.

In Wonder Woman, Gadot’s character, Diana/Wonder Woman is forced into a fish-out-of-water scenario and must adapt to the rigid confines of feminine etiquette in 1918, a task rife with comedy for an Amazonian warrior princess. This played to Gadot’s strengths as an actress and her impassioned naivety came off as charming and magnetic.

In WW84, the fish-out-of-water is Steve (Chris Pine), Diana’s resurrected boyfriend…and that falls entirely flat and fails miserably. The predictably unclever lowlight of which is a 1980’s fashion montage that features a recurring American flag fanny pack.

Diana is no longer naïve in WW84 but the bearer of burdens, and this shift brutally exposes Gadot as being a wooden, severely limited, remarkably dead-eyed and dull actress.

As for the plot of WW84, it is so incoherent as to be inconceivable. At one point a tertiary character yells out “what the hell is going on here!” and I completely concurred with that sentiment. I had almost no clue what the hell was happening most of the time in this movie, but thankfully the characters were so poorly written and dreadfully acted that I didn’t care.

As for the film’s politics…if you like white male hating movies that feel like two and a half hour long commercials for American and Israeli militarism and imperialism...Wonder Woman 1984 is the movie for you.

Wonder Woman (2017) succeeded because it wasn’t heavy handed in its cultural politics, but no such deftness and delicacy is on display in WW84.  

The film makes perfectly clear that white guys, Steve the lone exception, are irredeemably evil and painfully one-dimensional. To prove this point there are endless scenes of both Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) and Diana being sexually harassed by 80’s guys, all of them white except for an Asian guy who is apparently white guy adjacent.

White guys are even revealed as the reason why the film’s main villain, Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal)- a Latino, is bad. A flashback shows his villainy being born when he was bullied as a child by…you guessed it…evil white guys!

Another group held up as evil are Middle Easterners. There’s an “Egyptian” Emir who’s so bad he wishes for and receives a giant wall that encircles his Caliphate-esque kingdom of Bialya. The giant wall sprouts up and cuts off water to poor people and essentially imprisons them…which sounds a lot like Israel’s West Bank wall used against Palestinians…but of course in a supreme bit of Orwellianism in action, in Wonder Woman 1984 the bad guys creating the wall aren’t Israelis but Arabs.

The film’s unsubtle and unsurprising politics are made shamelessly clear when Gadot, who as a former Miss Israel (2004) and a former soldier in the Israeli Defense Force is a walking avatar for Israel, fights a convoy of heavily armed Arabs, and saves Arab children from being killed by those same evil Arab men.

Ultimately, if you love America’s belligerent foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and in relation to Russia…you’ll definitely connect with WW84.

Repulsive politics aside, this film is just appallingly directed by Patty Jenkins, as it is humorless, tedious and devoid of any drama, tension or notable action.

Jenkins made a name for herself with Wonder Woman, and has since signed a deal to direct some Star Wars movies, but her dismal work on WW84 has exposed her, just like it did Gadot, as an extremely limited one-trick pony.

Jenkins’ inability to shoot a decent fight scene, and to exploit the 80’s for comedy and cultural relevance, are calamitous comic book cinema crimes of negligence.

Jenkins doesn’t even plumb the plethora of popular 80’s music in order to set tone and place and appease her nostalgia-craving audience, a tactic used to great success by recent tv shows like Stranger Things. Unbelievably there isn’t a single 80’s song in the entire film, and that is the most monstrous moviemaking malpractice imaginable!

WW84 saves the worst for last as in its climactic scene Gadot gives a monologue directly to the camera meant to be profound and poignant that is pretentious and patronizing…which is eerily reminiscent of Gadot’s other 2020 misfire, the “Imagine” viral video. In that disastrous effort she and her fabulously wealthy celebrity friends condescendingly sing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem in a tone-deaf show of faux solidarity with those poor little people suffering during the pandemic.

A testament to how unbelievably unbearable this year has been is the fact that the best Gal Gadot movie released in 2020 was “Imagine”. It’s entirely fitting that this awful, dreadful, no-good year should end with a movie as awful, dreadful, and no-good as Wonder Woman 1984.

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dreadfully tedious and idiotic movie that pales in comparison to the first Wonder Woman from 2017.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Midnight Sky - It's the End of George Clooney's World as We Know it...and I Feel Fine.

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The Midnight Sky is so dreadful it makes you wish the earth were uninhabitable…especially for George Clooney

Christmas season is when movie studios put out prestige films and big box office contenders. In normal times, people flock to theatres during the holidays because they’re off work and it gives them something to do with family or, in some cases, to avoid family.

This year with coronavirus closing many theatres, the studios are still using the holidays to roll out their biggest movies but now they’re using streaming services to supplement or replace theatres. For instance, on Christmas day the Pixar animated film Soul debuts on Disney + and the highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 premieres in both theatres and on HBO Max.

Not to be outdone, Netflix’s early entry into the big movie holiday sweepstakes, The Midnight Sky – a film with a $100 million budget directed by and starring George Clooney, was released on December 23rd.

I’m sure Clooney and Netflix were hoping that The Midnight Sky would be the comeback vehicle to launch him back into the pop culture stratosphere…but unfortunately it is neither a crowd-pleaser nor an art house gem, and thus this cinematic rocket crashes and burns on the launch pad.

 Set in 2049, The Midnight Sky tells the story of Augustine (Clooney), a scientist dying of cancer in an outpost at the Arctic Circle who must protect a stranded young girl after an ecological apocalypse while also trying to warn an incoming space crew to stay away from earth and to start civilization over again on a moon of Jupiter. If that sounds ridiculously convoluted or just plain ridiculous to you, you aren’t alone.

Despite boasting a top-notch cast that includes Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler and Demian Bechir, there is no genuine drama to be found in this muddled misfire of a movie.

I get what Clooney was going for with The Midnight Sky. Ever the good Hollywood liberal he wanted to make a big budget, prestige movie with a diverse cast that dramatized climate change. I’m willing to bet Clooney at least considered casting Greta Thunberg as the little girl in the movie just so he could more emphatically make his point and signal his limousine liberal virtue.

The problem is that this movie is so painfully predictable, and so full of saccharine sentimentality and maudlin melodrama that watching it makes you yearn for any disaster, ecological or otherwise, to strike as soon as possible in order to end your misery.

The film attempts to be a family drama, a space drama, an adventure story and a race-against-the-clock thriller, and it fails miserably at all of those things. Ultimately it tries so hard to be everything it ends up being a whole bunch of nothing.

It also features a dramatic climax so predictable yet cringe worthy it made me roll my eyes so hard I nearly gave myself a seizure.

I’m old enough to remember when George Clooney was at the top of the Hollywood heap and a highly respected actor, director and producer.

He was admired for being a tv and movie star but also for producing a daring live tv version of Fail Safe, directing the Oscar nominated Good Night and Good Luck, and for his Oscar winning acting in Syriana. He was also respected for starring in some ambitious movies, like Three Kings, Solaris, Michael Clayton and The American, which were notable artistic ventures for a big movie star.

But it has been quite a while since Clooney has acted in a movie that mattered, and his directing career has been on a similarly downward trajectory.

His first directorial feature was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), a quirky and somewhat endearing little movie, followed by Good Night and Good Luck (2005), which garnered him a Best Director and Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination. After that there’s been a precipitous decline.

Leatherheads (2008), The Ides of March (2011), The Monuments Men (2014) and Suburbicon (2017) are all forgettable movies rightfully condemned to the bottom of the bargain bin at a Walmart check out counter.

Sadly, The Midnight Sky might be the very worst of them all.

In my mind Clooney has always been a sort of a poor man’s Warren Beatty, a pretty faced womanizer who wanted to be taken seriously so he used partisan politics to mask his inherent frivolousness and intellectual vapidity and vacuity.

Beatty is by far the better artist, actor, director and political animal than Clooney could ever hope to be…but that hasn’t stopped gorgeous George from using the Beatty blueprint and using it well, as Clooney’s career rewards have far exceeded his limited talent. But Clooney’s recent recurring failures, The Midnight Sky included, have exposed him to be a Hollywood emperor with no clothes.

Of course, we should shed no tears for George Clooney as he is insanely rich and lives a delightfully comfortable existence…but the writing is on the wall and in the bottom line business that is Hollywood, if Clooney doesn’t churn out a hit or award winner soon, it will be his career that suffers the apocalypse instead of earth. 

The bottom line is that The Midnight Sky is a mess of a movie you shouldn’t waste one second of your time on. My Christmas gift to you is that I watched this piece of garbage so you don’t have to. Merry Christmas to everyone!

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is a disastrous disaster movie.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Only in a Nation Detached From Reality Would Tulsi Gabbard Be Denigrated and Kamala Harris Celebrated

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 39 seconds

In an age of where lies are worshiped and cowardice celebrated, Tulsi Gabbard is despised for her bravery and loyalty to truth.

Tulsi Gabbard, a four-term Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, is currently being attacked by liberals for introducing The Protect Women’s Sports Act, which seeks to protect women’s athletics by recognizing that different sexes are born with different physical abilities.

Reasonable and rational people realize that men and women are biologically different. Reasonable and rational people also realize that on average, men are bigger, stronger and faster than women, and that just because someone born a male now subjectively “identifies” as a female, that doesn’t alter the objective fact that copious amounts of testosterone were pumping through their body as it developed, thus making their competing against biological girls and women in sport not only unfair, but dangerous.

These should not be controversial statements as they are obviously factually and scientifically true. But objective truth is anathema in our age of subjective insanity. Which is why Tulsi Gabbard’s introducing of the Protect Women’s Sports Act is a brazen act of bravery.

This is why it is so perversely ironic that on the same day Tulsi Gabbard was being made a pariah for courageously speaking plain truth and supporting common sense, Time Magazine was announcing that the empty pantsuit and monument to tokenism, Kamala Harris, and her chauffeur in the corporate Democrat clown car, Joe Biden, were being honored as the Person of the Year.

If America were a sane place, Tulsi Gabbard, not Kamala Harris, would be the darling of the supposedly liberal Democratic Party.

Gabbard is an intelligent, principled and charismatic woman of color, something the devotees of diversity claim to desire.  Her progressive bona fides are unquestionable as she vociferously supports Medicare-for-All, a Universal Basic Income and wants to end the war on drugs and private prisons. She is also a courageous anti-interventionist in addition to being a respected Army Reservist and Iraq War veteran.

In contrast, Kamala Harris is a corrupt former “top cop” in California who brutalized the poor by being a proponent of the war on drugs yet let white-collar corporate criminals skate. She is also a neo-liberal militarist who opposes Medicare-for-All and a Universal Basic Income.

And yet, despite, or more likely because, of all of these things, Tulsi Gabbard is persona non grata among the dupes, dopes and dullards in the Democratic party and media, while the sellout and raging sub-mediocrity Kamala Harris is celebrated.

This is not surprising as Gabbard and her fetish for truth have long been a thorn in the establishment’s side, especially with her contrarian foreign policy beliefs, most notably regarding Syria and Bashar al-Assad.

In 2017 Gabbard committed the cardinal sin of going against establishment orthodoxy when she expressed skepticism regarding dubious claims of chemical weapons attacks by Syria in Khan Shaykhun, and, despite being right, was quickly labeled an “Assad apologist”.

She also made the egregious mistake of speaking truth when she said that the U.S. had been “waging a regime change war in Syria since 2011”. Nothing will get you a scarlet letter from the establishment faster than telling the truth regarding America’s thuggish empire.

As for compliant Kamala, speaking truth to power is not a sin with which she is intimately familiar. Kamala is more of a kiss up and kick down kind of girl. She “kissed” up to former Speaker of the California Assembly and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and kicked down by trying to jail poor parents of truant kids.

Another glaring difference between Tulsi Gabbard and Kamala Harris is that Gabbard is guided by principle and Harris is guided by blind partisanship and personal ambition.

For instance, besides the Protect Women’s Sports Act, this week Gabbard also dared to cross the aisle by introducing the Break Up Big Tech Act, that supported Trump’s initiative to repeal Section 230, which gives legal immunity to large social media companies. Gabbard did this because it is the right thing to do, even if Trump supports it.

As for Kamala, she is allergic to principles beyond personal ambition. Kamala will not take on big tech, as they are her donor base and she is a junkie for their money and a whore for corporate power. One should not expect a Biden-Harris administration to move in any way shape or form against Silicon Valley.

Another argument in favor of Gabbard’s superiority over Harris is that the one time the two women went head-to-head was in the Democratic primary debates, and Gabbard eviscerated Harris so decisively that it stopped Harris’ campaign dead in its tracks.

This week’s state of affairs proves that America is a madhouse, and the media, Time Magazine and their ridiculous and grammatically incorrect “Person of the Year” selection included, are funhouse mirrors used to further distort our already deranged sur-reality.

In these United States of the Insane, the inmates are running the asylum as American militarism and corporate power are now deemed benign, it is declared gender doesn’t exist, and Kamala Harris is worthy of celebration while Tulsi Gabbard is deserving of denigration.

America always gets the leadership it deserves, and when Joe Biden falls, or more likely gets pushed, down a flight of stairs and Queen Kamala ascends to the throne, we will get what we deserve. And that certainly isn’t a person of quality and worth like Tulsi Gabbard, that’s for damn sure.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020