The Monty Python Classic 'The Life of Brian' Relentlessly Mocked Christianity Forty Years Ago, Comedy Needs to Do the Same Thing to the Church of Wokeness Today

Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes 33 seconds

The woke are winning the culture war and comedy needs to step up and expose these ludicrous fools for their fanaticism before it’s too late.

The Life of Brian, Monty Python’s classic cinematic mocking of Christianity, was so scandalous for its blasphemy back when it was released in 1979, that it was actually banned by some British theatre owners, while others gave it the scarlet letter of an X-rating.

An X-rating in those days was the movie rating equivalent of being stoned to death for saying “Jehovah!”

As a sign of how dramatically the culture has shifted in the last forty years, the BBFC now rates The Life of Brian a very warm and fuzzy 12A – suitable for viewers 12 and up.

The film isn’t considered dangerous for its blasphemy anymore because Christianity doesn’t much matter anymore…and I say that as a practicing Catholic.

Christianity with its endemic corruption, devout fanatics and exuberant magical thinking has been usurped in our culture by a newly ascendant religious force even more severe in nature.

That force is wokeness, which is accompanied by its own inquisition and enforcement wing – cancel culture.

If you doubt that wokeness is the new dominant cultural religion, consider this…in most places in the U.S. you aren’t allowed to go to church because of coronavirus but are wholly encouraged to attend Black Lives Matter protests - which apparently confer some magical and mystical powers of immunity upon attendees.

Meet the new religion…same as the old religion.

Monty Python were such a brilliant comedic force they not only obliterated the old religion in The Life of Brian, but also ridiculed the new one too, forty years before it rose to power.

In the film there is a scene - which would never get made in today’s stultifying p.c. environment - that deals with transgenderism.

Set in the Coliseum of Jerusalem, the scene shows the People’s Front of Judea…not to be confused with the Judean People’s Front…comprised of Stan (Eric Idle), Reg (John Cleese), Francis (Michael Palin) and Judith (Sue Jones-Davies), meeting to discuss their goals.

When Stan keeps interjecting feminine pronouns into the proposed language…he is asked by Francis why he keeps bringing up women?

Stan -  “I want to be one….I want to be a woman….from now on I want you all to call me Loretta…It’s my right as a man.”

Judith – “Why would you want to be Loretta, Stan?

Stan – “I want to have babies…It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants.”

Reg - “You can’t have babies!”

Stan - “Don’t oppress me!”

Reg - “I’m not oppressing you Stan, you haven’t got a womb! Where’s the fetus gonna gestate? You gonna keep it in a box?”

After some hemming and hawing, Francis chimes in with a solution.

Francis (to Stan) - “We shall fight our oppressors for your right to have a baby, brother…ooops…sister, sorry.”

Reg - “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies if he can’t have babies?”

Francis – “It’s symbolic of our struggle against oppression!”

Reg – “It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.”

It is impossible to imagine any comedy of today having the testicular fortitude to do a scene as brutally honest and savagely insightful as that.

“Symbolic struggle against reality” is the perfect definition of wokeness and this is why we need a new Monty Python-esque group to make a film eviscerating wokeness as exquisitely and relentlessly as the The Life of Brian did Christianity…maybe call it The Life of Karen.

Wokeness, with its incessant self-righteousness, aggressive illogic, absurd preferred pronouns and ridiculously insufferable p.c. jargon, is a gloriously target rich comedy environment.

Sadly, there’s no Monty Python equivalent in our times comically capable of dismantling the new Church of Wokeness. The most prominent sketch comedy show today is Saturday Night Live, and they’re shameless, politically correct lap dogs.

In stark contrast to the ballsy comedy bravado displayed by Monty Python forty years ago, watching SNL’s impotent, flaccid, woke-approved humor is like getting a scolding from a Methodist temperance movement a hundred years ago.

SNL is so neutered by wokeness, in 2019 they actually fired comedian Shane Gillis before he ever appeared on the show because he offended the Cancel Culture Centurions and Tiny Torquemadas of Twitter…the horror!

Besides suffocating the comedy of today, the woke are actively scouring tv and film history searching for retroactive blasphemers to silence.

The Office, Community, 30 Rock, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Scrubs and Fawlty Towers, among others, have all had episodes scrubbed from streaming services for their past politically incorrect sins.

Let us pray to our Lord and Savior Brian and his Sacred Shoe and Holy Gourd, that Monty Python’s glorious canon is not next on the cancel culture crucifixion list.

By today’s woke standards they’d certainly deserve it for their insightful dismantling of transgenderism, their mockery of speech impediments in the form of ‘pwonouncements’ by Pilate and his ‘fwiend’ Biggus Dickus, and for the crime of having men play female roles!!

“On the bright side”…if Monty Python does get crucified at least they’ll go out singing!

The bottom line is this…wokeness must be stopped and I believe the best way to stop it is to mock it. Sadly though, the Church of Wokeness is winning the culture war because unlike Monty Python forty years ago, today’s comedy hasn’t found the courage to tell the unvarnished, hysterical truth…and we are all worse off because of it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Woke Philistines Taking Over Hollywood Hate White Men Considerably More Than They Love Cinema

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

Hollywood’s suffocating new wave of identity politics is targeting white men and movies and tv will suffer significantly because of it.

Hollywood, despite its reputation as a liberal bastion, has long been a hothouse of vicious reactionary sentiments.

For example, the anti-communist mania of the late 1940’s and 50’s was a particularly shameful time in Hollywood’s history. It was during this Red Scare that Hollywood studios created a blacklist where any person thought to be a communist or associated with communists, regardless of their ability, was barred from working in the industry.

Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee used the threat of the Hollywood Blacklist to force many artists to become informers on their colleagues in order to maintain their livelihoods.

Not surprisingly, as the Black Lives Matter panic now rages, Hollywood is once again succumbing to the hideous Siren’s call of dehumanization and discrimination. Except this time the accusation isn’t about communism, but rather, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a white man?”

The Red Scare is now the White Male Scare. In Hollywood’s current climate of rabid, politically correct, social-justice hysteria, the message is clear…group identity trumps individual talent, skill and artistry, always and every time.

The black dye has been cast, and the end result of adhering to this devout dogma of diversity is that white men need not apply...and any white men who raise issues with this mandate are racist and will, along with any one that openly associates with them, be cancelled.

A recent example of this was when black filmmaker Ri-Karlo Handy put out a call on a Facebook group of film professionals for “black Union editors”. When white editors took offense at this rank racialization, they were called racist, and one even lost his job over it.

Black filmmaker Ava DuVernay responded by tweeting “to the white men…if you don't get that job you were up for, kindly remember… bias can go both ways. This is 2020 speaking.”

This is reminiscent of black filmmaker Jordan Peele saying, “I don’t see myself casting a white dude as the lead in my movie”. Imagine if someone said either of those things about black or Jewish people instead of “white men”.

Apparently DuVernay and Peele feel the best way to fight past racism is with more racism. How ethically and morally repugnant of them.

This whole anti-white male identity politics revolution began in the wake of the #MeToo movement, where studios, in their typical reactionary style, became adamant about telling female centric stories, regardless of their quality, and hiring women to either write, direct, star in or produce them, regardless of their talent level or ability.

This approach resulted in the murderer’s row of cinematic garbage that was Charlie’s Angels, Birds of Prey, Ocean’s 8, What Men Want, The Hustle, Late Night and Mary Queen of Scots.

Now, with Black Lives Matter the movement du jour, Hollywood is even more ferociously committed to disregarding individual talent, skill, experience and artistry (of white men in particular) in their hiring practices in favor of identity politics.

There are many who’ll cheer this anti-white male racism and say that white men have discriminated for years and they deserve the backlash. That may, or may not, be true, but regardless, these folks are cutting off their cinematic noses to spite their white-man-hating face.

The dark secret people working within the industry know, but are too scared to say publicly, is that this aggressive identity politics not only will destroy the careers and lives of completely innocent, ordinary working class folks in front of and behind the camera, but will be catastrophic for the art of cinema and the entertainment business.

Despite what the uninitiated think, making movies and tv shows is extremely difficult, making good ones is even more difficult, and making great ones is nearly impossible.

Industry professionals understand that talent and skill must be the absolute top priority when hiring or the end product will ultimately suffer greatly.

No one would dare say this publicly of course, at least not while the Woke Inquisition rages and cancel culture reigns supreme, but just like the vast majority of talented and skilled people in the NBA are black (despite black men making up only 6.5% of the population), the cold, hard truth is that not all, but the vast majority of skilled people in Hollywood are white men. That is not racist. That is reality.

Unlike the woke cultists, I’m not interested in sacrificing quality on the altar of identity. I don’t care about identity. I only care about cinema.

Like all true cinephiles, I want the most talented individuals to get hired, regardless of their group identity, in order to ensure the best movies get made.

Recently, black actor Anthony Mackie, the star of Marvel’s Falcon and the Winter Soldier, unintentionally admitted he felt the same way while, ironically, complaining about Marvel’s lack of diversity.

“My big push with Marvel is hire the best person for the job. Even if it means we are going to get the best two women, we’re going to get the best two men. Fine.”

I’d like to think that when Mr. Mackie says “we”, he means the human race and not the black race, and that he would be ”fine” if the “best person for the job” were a white man…but considering the sentiment in Hollywood right now…I sincerely doubt it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

A Not-So-Very "Expert" Opinion on our Future with the Coronavirus

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

Even though I am currently a student at the Hollywood Upstairs Medical College School of Epidemiology, I have, despite the status and privilege conferred upon me by my incomplete (and entirely inadequate) education, refused to indulge the urge to make pronouncements regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

That ends today.

In the last few months I have noticed a major shift in the public’s psychology and attitude regarding coronavirus. This shift began in May, about two months into the lockdown, when I perceived that people were pretty much done with all this bullshit.

At first the shift was subtle and took the form of whispered doubts and frustrations, but then as time progressed this sentiment became much more pronounced and went from talk to action.

For instance, there are a plethora of people I know who were all in on being lockdown good citizens in April, who then questioned the validity of it all in May, and by June were throwing caution to the wind and going out to restaurants and traveling for vacation.

These folks, who all happen to be liberals of varying stripes, still “believed” in coronavirus and would say that it was happening and was serious, but that “belief” was almost entirely more politically driven rather than driven by sober, rational thought, and was most definitely betrayed by their actions.

I totally empathize with these folks as the desolation of our current cultural Manichean paradigm of good v evil forces us into binary labels and thus encourages and enables cognitive dissonance to thrive in the absence of nuance. For instance, the media has repeated over and over again that only “bad people” don’t believe in coronaviruas or the lockdown, so right thinking “good people” couldn’t say that too even if they had doubts about the efficacy of the lock down or the dangers of the disease. This results in many “good people” (liberals) acting, mask wearing aside, almost identically oblivious to the danger of coronavirus as the “bad people” (Trumpers), but just labeling their actions and intentions differently.

The thing that stood out to me about this shift of thinking and behavior among these “good people” was that it was almost entirely a function of emotional and mental fatigue as opposed to the animating principle of the “bad people”, defiance. The “good people” who dutifully obeyed the lock down in April grew fed up, sick and tired and wanted coronavirus to be over in May, and by the time June rolled around they simply acted as if coronavirus was over, even though it wasn’t. Yes, these “good people” were certainly conscious and conscientious enough, to wear masks out in public…but also unconscious enough to consistently go out in public when it wasn’t even remotely necessary.

I understand the feeling, as the mental and emotional pressure of living in lockdown is something that most people, regardless of the supposed comfort of their gilded cage, simply cannot handle.

Luckily for me, despite my decidedly ungilded cage, I am a monk at heart and in practice, so isolation is less of a burden. That said, even I have felt the sting of lockdown and the pang of yearning for normal to return. I can only imagine the intensity of that feeling for normal people who want to get out and interact and socialize and “live”…of course the irony of that is that getting out and “living” in the age of Covid 19 can lead to dying.

This blatantly obvious spike in cognitive dissonance regarding the coronavirus by the general public over the last two months was mirrored by health officials. The greatest example of this was the collection of “health officials” that signed an open letter stating that coronavirus is a deadly serious pandemic but that people should ignore lockdown protocols and get out and protest against racism, but that going out or protesting for any other reason was a function of white supremacy.

This is, of course, absurdly insane, as the virus does not recognize the righteousness of whatever cause someone is protesting for or against…it just wants to propagate itself.

The fact that these "health officials” would so quickly and willingly sell their professional integrity for politically correct social status is a stunning thing, and glaring evidence of a powerful cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias at work.

The New York Times did an article on these “health officials” a month after their letter was released and it is simply remarkable to behold, not just for the “health officials” abject denial of reality and lack of any self-reflection, but also for the Times utter dishonesty and blatant bias.

The result of these “health officials” selling their integrity will only result in the public not believing what health officials tell them…not a good thing during a pandemic. This distrust is only accentuated by the fact that both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx lied to Americans at the beginning of the pandemic when they told them that they didn’t need facemasks. This lie was told in order to avoid a run on facemasks…which is not a reason that will bolster confidence in the pronouncements of Dr. Fauci and Birx. At this point, why would anyone believe anything any health professional ever said?

The media is equally to blame in all of this as they have long hyped the dangers of coronavirus but totally ignored the health danger of mass protests in the wake of the George Floyd killing because that didn’t fit their narrative. Just another of many reasons to distrust the long ago discredited news media.

This recent spate of decadent madness among the establishment and the hoi pollloi, where social justice trumps science and where emotionalism trumps logic and reason, is a symptom of an empire in very steep decline….and it is only going to get much, much worse at an accelerated pace.

Which brings us to where we are today.

In the coming days, weeks and months and years coronavirus cases are going to spike…then fall off…then spike again. Deaths are going to spike…then fall off…then spike again.

People are going to lose their minds because the normal they so crave is not coming back anytime soon, if ever.

And as people lose their minds, their will be more and more civil unrest…which in turn will lead to more and more spreading of the disease. Eventually there will be a very strident, dare I say, tyrannical lockdown to try and stop the spread…but that is a bit farther in the future.

As for the here and now…this is what I think is on our doorstep.

It bums me out to say this but…sports is not coming back. The NBA, NHL and MLB are trying to re-start and start their seasons but this won’t last very long. The coronavirus situation will become too untenable and all three leagues will have to shut down their seasons for good.

The NFL and college football will suffer the same exact fate. They may try and start things up in the fall but that attempt will pretty quickly fail.

You may think that sports don’t matter…but I beg to differ. I think the lack of sports was a major contributing factor in the intensity of the civil unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Sports are a psychologically and culturally necessary vehicle for catharsis. Sport is contained and controlled tribal violence…and without it and its cathartic effects on the population, that violent instinct gets released through uncontained and uncontrolled violence…hence the rioting and looting and large spikes in crime in the last few months.

Of course, if the sports leagues would listen to my expert advice and simply fill every arena and stadium with fans holding Black Lives Matter signs, which according to “health officials” and the mainstream media apparently confer immunity to coronavirus onto the sign holder and anyone in their vicinity, then sports could flourish once again and I could get my well-deserved Nobel Prize in Medicinery.

Another big problem in the coming weeks and months is that, as much as parents want it to happen, schools are not going to open in the fall, or if they do open, they wont stay open for long. Kids may not get very sick with coronavirus, but they spread it, and parents and teachers can and will get sick as a result.

Kids not going to school is a major issue as this puts an enormous amount of stress on parents, who are already stressed out. The pressures of trying to either work, or being unemployed, while not just raising but teaching a child full time, is a really bad combination that will only further increase the emotional and mental pressure cooker.

As stated, that pressure will not be released through watching sports…it also won’t be released through going to the movies, or concerts or to bars or out to restaurants. None of those businesses will re-open, and if they do it won’t be for long.

The economic situation will also continue to spiral out of control too as businesses will be unable to open. The cascading effects of this will be a tidal wave of bankruptcies and commercial and residential real estate evictions followed by foreclosures. It will be like 2008…only much worse because it will be happening across the country and with no end in sight.

Here in Los Angeles…things will be really bad, as film and tv production will not be coming back any time soon. This means that large swaths of the city will be unemployed for great periods of time, leading to evictions and foreclosures and a general economic and personal depression.

The lack of new movies and tv shows will also contribute to the general anger and fury growing in America, as a population used to being distracted by sports and entertainment, will have little or none of either.

This means that the election in November, whether it happens or not, is going to be extremely volatile…and no matter who wins…there will be either spasms or volcanic eruptions of violence as a result. I actually think there will be less violence if Biden wins, but there won’t be no violence, as Trump supporters, denied their choice for president and their football, will be extremely on edge.

On the other hand if Trump wins (by vote count or by other means)…God help us all. This country…or at least large swaths of it…will explode and will make the George Floyd protests, riots and looting look like a church picnic. There will be massive amounts of civil unrest in the wake of a Trump victory…probably followed by strong arm totalitarian tactics to quell it.

Maybe I am wrong. Hopefully I am wrong. But I can’t help but notice a less than subtle shift taking place now where the wishful thinking of those who were “done” with coronavirus back in May and June is running head first into the brick wall that is the coronavirus reality…and that is causing a tremendous amount agitation and anxiety that is building up to dangerous levels.

Look, I get it, people are tired, emotionally spent…but the virus doesn’t care about your feelings. It doesn’t care about anything but spreading, and all we need to care about is surviving.

Sadly, we as a people have no leadership…anywhere. Not in our federal, state or local government. And when we need each other the most, when we need community…we have none. We are all on our own and that isolation will break a lot of people and will cause others to try and break what is left of our civilization.

The bottom line is this…that the normal so many are yearning for is not coming back anytime soon….and we all need to get used to the new normal of no normal at all.

©2020

Hamilton: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!1 THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Recommendation: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Might be worth seeing just to get it out of your system, but truly, it is not worth the two hours and forty minutes.

Hamilton, written by Lin Manuel Miranda and directed by Thomas Kail, is a live recording of a 2016 performance of the stage musical of the same name. The show tells the story of Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, and stars Lin Manuel Miranda in the lead role, with supporting turns from Leslie Odom Jr., Renee Elise Goldsberry, Phillipa Soo, Daveed Diggs and Jonathon Groff among many others.

Hamilton hit Broadway back in 2015 and was met with universal adoration, which included eleven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book and Best Original Score and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The mainstream media fawned all over the show and deified its creator and star, Lin Manuel Miranda, to a striking degree…he even won a MacArthur Grant for his alleged genius. Similar to Rent, which debuted twenty years before it, Hamilton became an unabashed pop culture phenomenon and was the hottest, and priciest, ticket in any town in which it appeared.

I think the slavish adoration of Hamilton (and Miranda) by the media was a function of their aggressive affection for President Obama…as the show, with its diverse cast and devout optimism in America and its ideals, is a sort of a theatrical manifestation of Obama-ism.

The establishment’s instantaneous exalting of Hamilton was stunning to behold and raised very serious propaganda red flags for me. For that reason, and the fact that tickets were exorbitantly expensive and exclusive, I have never seen the musical on stage.

I was curious to check Hamilton out though when, thanks to Mickey Mouse shelling out a record $75 million to Mr. Miranda for the privilege of showing his work, it premiered on the Disney Plus streaming service.

In my appraisal of the show, let’s start with the good first.

Among the cast the highlights begin with Tony winner Renee Elyse Goldsberry…who absolutely crushes her songs with a vocal dexterity, ferocity and power. Even though she plays Angelica Schuyler, a somewhat secondary character in the bigger picture of things, Ms. Goldsberry is the beating, and at times bleeding, heart of the show.

Tony winner Daveed Diggs plays Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson and delivers with a palpable charisma, comedic sense and charm that lights up the stage whenever he’s on it.

Okieriete Onaodowan plays Hercules Mulligan and James Madison and brings a subtly powerful presence and striking rap style to his role, which could easily have been lost in the shuffle in the hands of a lesser actor.

Christopher Jackson’s robust voice and dramatic skills animate the role of George Washington and in the second half he nearly steals the whole damn show.

And finally, Jonathon Groff actually does steal the show in the minimal role of King George. Groff may very well be the best singer in this ridiculously talented bunch, and he belts out his songs “You’ll Be Back/What Comes Next?I Know Him” with such a delirious vigor and aplomb that it is simply intoxicating. (Groff is also excellent in Netflix’s Mindhunter!)

Now for the bad news.

By far the biggest problem with Hamilton is that the show is populated by a plethora of very talented people…but its lead, Lin Manuel Miranda, is definitely not one of them.

A musical simply cannot be worthwhile if its lead is uncharismatic, a dreadful singer, an embarrassment as a rapper and a truly atrocious actor.

I cannot tell you how shocking it was for me to behold Miranda’s severe limitations as a performer after having heard for four straight years that he was a once-in-a-generation genius. Miranda really is a stark naked emperor and it seems no one wants to admit that obvious but uncomfortable truth.

Let’s start with his singing. It is always going to be a problem when the lead of a musical can’t sing, and so it is with Miranda and Hamilton. Miranda has an extremely limited vocal range, and his voice is…and I am being extremely generous here…weak and pedestrian. The fact that Miranda is surrounded by a cast of ridiculously talented singers only accentuates his vocal impotence.

Hamilton’s big claim to fame is that it is, in its own way, a hip-hop musical, so maybe you’d think Miranda’s numerous short comings as a singer wouldn’t be that big of a deal…you’d be dead wrong. Miranda’s rapping is, unbelievably, even worse than his singing. Miranda raps with a whiny, nasally voice and comes across like a nerdy history teacher trying to be “hip” for the young people in his classroom. Watching him rap is like watching a grandparent dirty dance at a wedding…it is just a viscerally uncomfortable embarrassment.

Add to this the fact that Alexander Hamilton is supposed to be this dude that the ladies adore, and yet he is played by the ultra-anti-masculine, doughy dullard Miranda. Whenever one of the female characters are professing their love or attraction for Hamilton it made me cringe.

The funniest thing of all was in the second half of the play watching Miranda try and cover his really abysmal singing by pretending to act. Miranda repeatedly forced a fake cry in order to disguise the glaring weakness of his flaccid voice. What made this so amusing is that Miranda is just a staggeringly terrible actor…I mean he is pulling some junior high school drama class level stuff on stage.

I couldn’t help but think of Christopher Guest’s fantastic 1996 comedy Waiting for Guffman while watching Hamilton. In that film the brilliant Christopher Guest plays Corky St. Clair…the writer/director and eventual star of a play he puts on in Blaine, Missouri.

Go watch Waiting for Guffman to see Corky’s dance moves, and his stunning duet, A Penny For Your Thoughts, and you’ll see Lin Manuel Miranda in Hamilton in a nutshell.

Despite Corky being hysterically untalented, he is still adored by the rural rubes who don’t know any better. Lin Manuel Miranda is the Corky St. Clair of Broadway.

Of course, the media, like the know-nothings in Blaine, give Miranda a pass for his weakness as a performer because they think he is some sort of musical theatre genius. I obviously disagree. But even if that is true, the bigger problem to me is that the only reason Miranda stars in the play is due to his obviously over-sized ego. Even Miranda fans must admit that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of Broadway performers who could do a better job in Hamilton than he did. Hell there are a handful in this actual production who could do the part better than him…like Leslie Odom Jr.…or Daveed Diggs…or Anthony Ramos…or Christopher Jackson and on and on.

Also, in terms of Miranda’s ego…Steven Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Weber didn’t star in their musicals…so what kind of ego must Miranda have to think he needs to star in his, especially when he lacks the requisite skills to pull it off?

In regards to the music in the show…well…there is not a single memorable song to be found in Hamilton despite the fact that there are numerous performers giving memorable renditions of the material. Not one. Part of that, but not all of it, can be written off to the use of rap, which is an art form that generally does not age even remotely well. (Here is another comedy that I thought of while watching Hamilton - The Simpsons Planet of the Apes Musical, which uses rap music about as effectively as Hamilton…so Lin Manuel Miranda is both Corky St. Clair AND Troy McClure!)

As for Miranda’s creative genius…I don’t get it. I mean, I guess it is clever to adapt Ron Chernow’s book Alexander Hamilton into a musical…but it feels like he just put history to rhymes. Does that rise to the level of amazing? Count me unimpressed.

So basically, everything wrong with Hamilton falls on Miranda’s shoulders and boils down to an egotistical, self-reverential and underwhelming songwriter trying to carry a pop-music/rap musical despite being an insipid and abysmal performer.

But besides that…how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? (See I can use historical references too! Where’s my MacArthur Grant!)

Hamilton has been praised for its color conscious casting…in other words, its decision to cast of actors of color in the roles of white people of history. This is obviously a grand symbolic gesture…but of what? Diversity? Sure. Inclusion? Ok. But this soft gesture of inclusion and diversity, which won over rich, white, Obama-ite neo-liberals, also has a shadow to it, as the only white actors with prominent roles in the show play the villains, King George and the cowardly and incompetent Charles Lee. Both King George and Lee aren’t just villainous, but also clownishly effeminate…much in contrast to the actors of color surrounding them who are robustly masculine. One can’t help but conclude from the evidence presented that Hamilton is not only pro-diversity and inclusion, but insidiously anti-white, particularly anti-white masculinity (not to mention that no white woman at all appears in any roles but the ensemble).

Hamilton has not aged well in its five years of existence, and as previously mentioned that could be a function of using rap and popular music as its backbone. This is heightened by the fact that even politically the show has gone from darling to doubted among the media, which now has seconds thoughts about Hamilton, which is likely a result of the media’s succumbing to the cult of wokeism.

You see, it is difficult to cheer the tearing down of statues of Washington and Jefferson for being slave owners, and then celebrate them in a musical even if they are played by black actors. In this way, Hamilton is, like Obama himself, painfully outdated for the era of rabid social justice and, ironically, Black Lives Matter.

Also outdated is the notion of celebrating the founding fathers and their accomplishments which include quaint ideas such as freedom of speech, which were radical in their day and have, incredibly, become radical once again in our own. In the era of cancel culture, BLM and SJW’s, free speech is anathema, and the founding fathers are criminals to be posthumously punished, not heroes to be celebrated and humanized.

After sitting through the seemingly endless two hour and forty minute run time my conclusion is this…I found Hamilton to be little more than Sesame Street social studies for rich, self-loathing white neo-liberals who want to bask in the warmth of their own self-righteousness and self-deluded coolness. It is a sterile, vanilla, Disney-fied piece of dramatic preening that poses at intellectual depth but is as shallow as a kiddie pool.

In terms of its cinematic worthiness, the staging of the play does seem impressive in a sort of “wow the drama club did a really nice job this year” sort of way, but it, like nearly every stageplay ever photographed, does not translate well to film.

The bottom line is this, I am glad I finally got see Hamilton if for no other reason than I now know I do not need to see Hamilton. I am also glad that I never got suckered into the Hamilton hype and got fleeced for a ticket, and instead only had to pay $4.99 for my Disney Plus subscription to find out that the show is a glittering piece of musical theatre fool’s gold. For all the folks who fell for its alleged, in the moment, 2016 charms…the joke is on them, as history once again has the last laugh.

©2020

Horny Women of the World Unite! Don't Let Woke Puritans Cancel the Steamy Netflix Movie 365 Days!

Estimated Reading Time: 69 seconds

A vocal minority of totalitarian busybodies is taking on the lustful populist majority in trying to censor the racy fan favorite. While it’s a terrible movie, pulling it would be a very bad day for film.

The controversial erotic romance 365 Days has been among the most watched movies on Netflix since it premiered last month, and may very well end up being the most popular film of the year on the streaming service.

Some passionate fans have been so enamored with the steamy Polish movie, which chronicles the decidedly unorthodox relationship between studly Italian mob boss Massimo, and Laura, the gorgeous Polish woman he kidnaps, that they are clamoring for a sequel.

Despite its lascivious appeal to millions of mostly female viewers, there is a vociferous minority demanding Netflix pull the movie from its service because it allegedly glorifies kidnapping and rape.

This brigade of uptight scolds has even launched a petition at Change.org calling for the film’s removal from Netflix, and as of this writing, it has garnered an anemic 6,300 signatures.

My advice to these 6,300 fragile woke puritans is that 365 Days is not the hill to die on…and they will die on it because the hordes of hellaciously horny lady philistines that need some escapist release will not take losing their harmless cinematic guilty pleasure lying down.

Thankfully, Netflix has thus far resisted the mob’s demand to pull the film…but the damage may already be done. Under politically correct pressure the media messaging around 365 Days has quickly turned from a knowing wink to a judgmental scowl.

For instance, on June 17th The Daily Mail ran a story highlighting fans desperation for a sequel to the sex filled movie. On June 19th columnist Amanda Platell wrote an article stating she was seduced by the film, which she described as a “guilty pleasure” for women stuck in coronavirus lockdown, and that she saw “no harm in it”.

But by July 2nd the worm had turned after the vocal minority made their displeasure known, and so The Daily Mail began running headlines like “Is this the most degrading, sexist show Netflix has ever aired?”

This type of flip in media messaging used to take years to achieve but it now takes mere days for the establishment press to quickly move to alter the public narrative to appease the woke mob.

One can’t help but wonder if all of this negative media noise about 365 Days will succeed in scuttling the planned production of the sequel or will make Netflix choose to either dump the original or not run the sequel, thus leaving the movie’s ravenously libidinous fanatics high and dry.

I support Netflix’s decision to ignore the calls to pull 365 Days not because I think it is a good movie…it sure as hell isn’t – it is so bad it makes 50 Shades of Grey look like Citizen Kane…but because audiences should have the right to watch, or not watch, whatever the hell they want no matter how terrible it is.

As for the charges that 365 Days, which I found more neurotic than erotic, promotes kidnapping or rape…that is just ludicrous. The movie is so absurd as to be ridiculous, as it more resembles a raunchy live action cartoon than reality.

Consider the intricately incoherent details of the plot. The wealthy and impossibly handsome Massimo kidnaps the impossibly beautiful Laura because she perfectly matches the vision of an angelic woman that appeared to him right after he momentarily died during a mob hit. Massimo then gives Laura 365 days to fall in love with him while in his custody.

That plot isn’t a handbook for wannabe sexual predators, it is escapist soft-core porn for concupiscent middle-aged women who want to curl up on the couch with a bottle of wine and a “neck massager” and indulge in some secret “guilty pleasuring”.

Even Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O says of the film, that it is among many erotic movies that are "guilty pleasures"—though why feel bad about what you like?” Exactly.

I would go a step further and ask not only why feel bad about what you like, but also, why demand others not be allowed to like the things that you don’t like?

This is the main problem with the manic religious fervor of wokeness as it promotes the tyranny of the fragile and the thin-skinned over the popular opinion of…in this case…the horny majority.

If the ever-expanding politically correct bonfire of the vanities does engulf 365 Days, it would not exactly be a major crime against the art of cinema, but it would be a very bad sign for our culture.

This exceedingly cheesy movie has become an unlikely canary in the entertainment coalmine. If Netflix does cave to the small but vocal woke mob regarding 365 Days (or its planned sequel) as decisively as the news media has, then it portends a very dark, yet ironically vanilla, future for choice in film.

The healthiest outcome for all of us is for the horny majority to reign supreme in the Battle of 365 Days. For in movies as in sexual attraction, there is no accounting for taste, or in this case - lack thereof…but it is imperative that we as a culture suppress our totalitarian impulses and grant each other the freedom to indulge our bad taste.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

365 Days: A Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Holy shit this is a bad movie. It deserves zero stars on the merits, but I gave it one star because it has a pretty naked lady in it…and it goes against every fiber of my being to give a pretty naked lady zero stars…so on principle alone I refuse to do it.

Language: English, Italian (subtitled) and Polish (subtitled)

365 Days, directed by Barbara Bialowas and Tomasz Mandes, is the steamy saga of the unorthodox relationship between mob boss Massimo and Laura, the Polish woman who captures his attention. The film stars Michele Morrone as Massimo and Anna-Maria Sieklucka as Laura.

Watching movies for a living can be a strange experience. Sometimes you are tasked with watching a movie that you would never in a million years consider watching on your own accord. Thus was the case with 365 Days…a Polish erotic romance movie that has been among the most popular on Netflix since it was added to the service in June.

I knew next to nothing about 365 Days before I watched it except that it was “controversial” because of its explicit sex scenes which may or may not be endorsing rape. As someone who can appreciate sexually explicit material in a film, I fall closer to pervert than prude when it comes to this sort of thing, I was intrigued to see what the kerfluffle was all about.

Then I saw the movie.

Jesus Titty Fucking Christ.

This thing is a cinematic abomination. Just absurdly, abysmally atrocious.

Imagine a Twilight Zone episode where you are stuck in an incoherent Italian fashion advertisement that is placed deep inside a Penthouse magazine which has been thrown into a hot dumpster filled with week old egg salad, all accompanied by a pop music holocaust of a soundtrack…and you can scratch the surface of what it is like to endure 365 Days.

The plot of this film is so ludicrous that I actually had to restart the movie to make sure I wasn’t missing something. Sadly, I wasn’t…but the filmmakers definitely were. I won’t even try and explain what the plot is as I think I would actually do irreparable harm to my self by attempting to do so.

Character development was not exactly a top priority for the filmmakers either as the only thing I learned about the characters throughout the movie is that Massimo aggressively enjoys receiving oral sex…I mean he REALLY, REALLY enjoys it…and that Laura is prettier as a brunette than a blonde.

The film is basically an exercise in watching two impossibly beautiful people in various stages of undress engage in sexual simulation. There are worse things to capture on film I suppose. But the sex scenes are so ridiculous as to be laughable. The big sex scene takes place, predictably enough, on a giant yacht, and it is so off the charts on the unintentional comedy scale that it easily outdoes Tommy Wiseau’s unintentional comedy classic The Room.

Between the soft core Skinemax level porn scenes, the movie sprinkles in some other porn…like capitalism porn. There are so many derivative shopping montages where Laura tries on sexy outfits in front of mirrors at luxury shops that I literally lost count…and I was not going to go back and re-watch to keep a tally.

Of course, after trying on clothes, there are the montages of her security guards following her from shop to shop, burly arms filled with bags of high end merchandise. Oh…there is also this really clever montage of two gay guys giving Laura a make-over! So many montages!!

Matching the repeated shopping montages are the numerous scenes of Massimo angrily grabbing Laura and demanding satisfaction and Laura, in turn, being sexy and defiant toward him. These two types of scenes, shopping and faux fighting, are repetitiously repeated repetitively in a redundant fashion…over and over and over again.

The movie also has other scenes…like the erotic scene in a night club, the erotic scene in a different nightclub, the erotic scene at a formal ball and the erotic scene on a private jet…among many other erotic scenes in erotic locations. In case you were wondering, yes there is a lot of eroticism in the movie as it is very erotic and filled with erotic things that are highly eroticized in an erotic fashion. So erotic!

The film is not buoyed by great performances either. While both Morrone and Sieklucka are easy on the eyes, English is not their strong suit…and neither is acting. They aren’t helped by the Gouda level of cheese that is the dialogue either. Yikes! Beaucoup stinky.

It isn’t just the dialogue that smells, as the script is so dramatically, cinematically, emotionally and sexually baffling it actually made my head ache.

The film also boasts the worst soundtrack in recent cinematic history. The soundtrack is filled to the brim with one pop music disaster after another and is so cloying and saccharine it actually gave me multiple cavities.

As for the the bottom line of the film…its titillation factor…well…I guess that is an individual thing. For me the movie seemed to be an escapist fantasy geared toward horny middle-aged women (which are definitely my favorite category of horny woman!). Since I am not a horny middle-aged woman, the sex appeal of it all escaped me entirely. Of course, your mileage may vary.

On the bright side, Anna-Maria Sieklucka really is gorgeous. I also assume from the success of the movie that women and gay men are big fans of Michele Morrone…so at least there is that.

In conclusion, watching two hours of 365 Days felt longer than spending 365 actual days in a cardboard box in a remote storage facility. Unless you are being held hostage and are literally forced to watch this movie, I recommend you skip it. Even if you are in a hostage situation, you may very well be better off decapitating yourself, lighting your detached head on firer and then throwing it into the ocean rather than watching this steaming pile of stylized excrement. Except, of course, if you’re a super horny middle-aged woman…then you should definitely check it out and unabashedly embrace your guilty pleasure.

©2020

Mr. Jones: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Not worth paying to see, but the striking and unnerving scenes of the Holomodor are worthy of your time to watch when it comes out on Netflix or cable.

Mr. Jones, directed by Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa, is the true story of British journalist Gareth Jones as he discovers and then reveals the horrors of Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine in 1933. The film stars James Norton as Jones, with supporting turns from Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard.

Agnieszka Holland is an interesting cinematic figure. In 1990 she wrote and directed Europa, Europa, a staggeringly brilliant film about the remarkable life of Solomon Perel during World War II for which Holland garnered a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Ever since Europa, Europa though, Holland has churned out absolutely nothing of note.

The tepid mediocrity of Ms. Holland’s filmography from 1991 to present day may explain why I had never even heard of Mr. Jones until I was assigned to watch it and write about it.

That said, as a big fan of Europa, Europa, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, as well as being a Russophile and an admirer of good journalism, I thought Mr. Jones might just hit my sweet spot and be a new cinematic feast amidst the current coronavirus movie famine.

Sadly…while there were certainly some powerful sequences, overall the lackluster direction and script left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

The biggest problem with Mr. Jones is that it is wildly uneven, with a devastatingly poor narrative structure.

The first half of the film plays out like a PBS melodrama…and not a very good one. Holland attempts to give a stylized view of the suffocating conformity of the British establishment, and then the debased debauchery of Walter Duranty’s Moscow, but is never quite able to adequately pull it off.

Another major structural issue is Holland’s choice to weave George Orwell’s writing of Animal Farm into the story. Shockingly, Orwell actually opens the movie and is used as a landmark throughout the narrative. The snippets of Orwell are at best frivolous and do nothing more than distract from the main dramatic thrust of the story.

The second half of the film is much, much better than the first. Midway through the film shifts to the devastation in Ukraine, and this is where Holland finds her footing. The scenes of starvation and desperation are exceedingly well-done and uncomfortable to watch. There is one sequence that is so brutal it left me unnerved for days. Holland’s use of the bleak and foreboding Ukrainian winter exquisitely conveys the existential depth and expanse of the ocean of suffering that was the Holomodor.

The problem though is that Holland failed to adequately build a dramatic foundation upon which to lay the tragedy of the Holomodor. I think the film actually would’ve been better served if it started with the trip to Ukraine, as that approach would have emphasized the brutal nature of the topic at hand from the get go. It also would have given context to Jones’ struggle and maybe even better fleshed out his character, which is remarkably paper-thin in the film.

Make no mistake though that Gareth Jones’ story is compelling and definitely worthy of a major movie, just that Ms. Holland is unable to tell the story with enough dramatic vigor or cinematic verve to do it justice. I couldn’t help but think that Gareth Jones life was worthy of an HBO or Netflix mini-series, as there is awful lot of meaningful story to tell.

In terms of the acting, the cast all do solid, if unspectacular, work.

James Norton brings an every man sort of energy to his Gareth Jones, which makes sense, but he definitely suffers from a charisma deficit, makes is a hindrance to his carrying the entirety of the movie. Norton never commands the screen or demands the audience’s attention, which at times undermines the film’s dramatic power.

The luminous Vanessa Kirby plays Ada Brooks, a sort of love interest to Jones. Kirby is an alluring and at times intoxicating screen presence, but is vastly misused and under utilized in Mr. Jones. Kirby is blessed with a striking screen magnetism but never gets to put meat on the bones of her character, which is a terrible waste of her prodigious talents.

Peter Sarsgaard is always an intriguing and emotionally complicated actor, and his morally compromised and diseased Walter Duranty is no exception. Sarsgaard has minimal screen time but makes the most of it as he limps and slithers through the scenery like the devil with whom Duranty made his deal.

Mr. Jones premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival back in 2019, and debuted for British audiences in February of 2020 and was scheduled to be released in the U.S. in April of 2020…but coronavirus rudely intervened.

The film was then released for purchase (but not for rent!) on streaming services in mid-June…and since I was hired to write about it, I reached into my expense account cookie jar and bought the movie for $14.99. Maybe it is my coronavirus budget talking but even though $14.99 is basically the price of a movie ticket here in the City of Angels, I found that price to be excessive.

My recommendation regarding Mr. Jones is not to purchase it…the cost is too high and it simply isn’t worth it. But I do think it might be worth watching for free on Netflix or cable when it comes out. The scenes of the Holomodor alone are worth the investment of time.

The bottom line is this…Mr. Jones is a great story (and Gareth Jones was a great man) but not a great film.

©2020

The New Movie Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of our Current Press

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In 1933, British journalist Gareth Jones risked life and limb in service to the truth, while in comparison, the journalists of today only care about access to power and towing the elite’s ideological line.

Mr. Jones, a new film by esteemed director Agnieszka Holland, tells the true story of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who travels to the Soviet Union in 1933 and uncovers the Holomodor, Stalin’s genocidal famine of Ukrainians.

Sadly, Mr. Jones, which boasts a fantastic cast of James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, is a terrific story wrapped in a bad, dramatically unfocused and meandering film.

But thankfully, despite its cinematic unworthiness, the movie still contains important insights very relevant to our current time.

What makes Mr. Jones noteworthy is that the film’s noble protagonist is, unlike our current corrupt press corps, a dogged journalist more loyal to truth than to ideology, and more interested in maintaining his integrity than gaining access to power and wealth.

The film opens with Jones fresh off his 1933 interview with Hitler that leaves him convinced that war is ultimately inevitable. This belief gets him ridiculed for being naïve and hysterical by the stodgy and comfortable old guard of the British press.

Jones then sets his sights on the Soviet Union and tries to figure out how Stalin has been able to pull off his economic boom while the rest of the world is mired in depression, so he goes to Moscow in search of answers.

Upon arrival he finds not the worker’s paradise that fellow journalists, like the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning reporter in Moscow, Walter Duranty, have been deceptively portraying to the world, but instead discovers firsthand the repressive and totalitarian nature of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Jones then follows a lead and risks his life by sneaking off a train and going to Ukraine, where he is thrust into the horrors of the Holomodor, which are brutally and effectively depicted in the film.

When Jones exposes this calamity to the western world, political expediency causes it to be met with either skepticism or indifference. Unlike other journalists of his, or our, age, Jones refuses to tell people in power what they want to hear, instead telling them the truth, and is essentially blackballed and exiled because of it.

No doubt the same would happen today to any reporter brave enough to go against the officially approved narrative.

Our current press corps is inhabited by truth-disdaining, sycophantic stenographers more akin to the villainous Walter Duranty, a propagandist for the cause who sold his journalistic soul in exchange for a decadent and depraved lifestyle, than the truth-seeking Gareth Jones.

It is ironic that journalists of yesteryear, like Duranty, were complicit in positive falsehoods about Stalin’s Soviet Union, while journalists of today are complicit in negative falsehoods about Russia.

The cavalcade of journalistic failures and fiascos directly or tangentially related to Russia in recent years include, but are not limited to, the distortion of truth about the Maidan uprising, the supposed Syrian chemical weapons attacks, the ridiculous Cuba microwave weapons story, and of course, Russiagate, the biggest journalistic fraud perpetrated upon the American public since the Iraq War. And just this week we have added to this cornucopia of corporate media crap the ‘Russians pay bounty to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan’ nonsense. All of these stories are vapid, thin, propagandistic gruel, devoid of any depth, insight or actual reporting.

One glimpse at the ever-growing list of recurring journalistic farces involving Russia and it becomes glaringly obvious that Operation Mockingbird, the Cold War CIA program that planted stories and journalists in newsrooms across the media, is alive and well in practice, if not in name.

It is readily apparent that just as Walter Duranty was getting his marching orders from Moscow, reporters of today get their marching orders from Langely.

Of course, the truth-averse, ideologically driven journalism of the corporate media isn’t restricted to just Russia stories, as evidenced by the slavish and slanted coverage of Black Lives Matter and other woke endeavors.

The thing that I find most grating about the reliably deceptive establishment media is their incessant complaining about Trump’s alleged war on the press.

These same news outlets were conspicuously silent when Obama prosecuted whistleblowers nine times, which is three times more than all of his predecessors combined.

There was also nary a word of dissension from the intrepid souls in the media when Obama’s Department of Justice and FBI spied on reporters and tried to coerce them to expose their sources.

The most glaring example of the ideological cancer in journalism is the cheering by the establishment media of the prosecution and persecution of Julian Assange, who has done more to inform the public of the truth than any corporate-controlled reporter at any news outlet in the world, and may very well die in prison for it. 

The current crop of subservient sycophants play-acting as journalists in the corporate media are an utter disgrace to their profession, and they dishonor the staggering sacrifice that people like Gareth Jones made in service to truth.

Mr. Jones is not a great movie, but it does chronicle the great struggles of a noble man. If only we had many, many more like him today, maybe truth would be revered and the powerful held accountable. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

We Need a New, Anti-Woke TV Channel To Stave Off Comedy’s Impending EXTINCTION at the Hands of Cancel Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

We Need a New, Anti-Woke TV Channel To Stave Off Comedy’s Impending EXTINCTION at the Hands of Cancel Culture

With political correctness running roughshod over Hollywood, now is the perfect time for a billionaire to invest in a streaming service that prioritizes entertainment over wokeness.

We now live in an age where the Cancel Culture Clan routinely don their white robes of self-righteous totalitarianism and roam the comedy landscape of today and yesteryear searching for any heretics who have violated the ever changing rules of the Church of Wokeness.

It was either Sir Isaac Newton, Huey P. Newton or Fig Newton, I can’t remember which, who once famously said, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”…and so it is with the politically correct panic of our time. 

This is why I believe that anti-wokeness is poised to be a major growth sector in the entertainment industry in the coming years.

My idea to cash in on the current woke hysteria is to start a comedy streaming service dedicated to being resolutely anti-woke.

I call this streaming service…F.U.T.V.

Instead of the fear of offending the delicate sensibilities of the most fragile among us being our guiding principle, F.U.T.V. will make the unorthodox decision to actually treat viewers like adults and let them decide for themselves whether they choose to watch whatever “offensive” comedy has been targeted by the snowflake Savanarolas looking to fuel their bonfire of inanities.

We just need a rich bastard with enough testicular and fiscal fortitude to fund this noble venture. There has to be some billionaire entrepreneur out there who realizes that as the corporate behemoths of Hollywood cave to the incessant bitching of the p.c. mob by casting aside controversial comedians, shows and movies, a gaping void is being opened, and an anti-woke streaming service can profitably fill it.

For instance, in recent years a cavalcade of wildly popular sitcoms such as Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park have all been branded with the scarlet letter of “P” for problematic, due to various woke infractions regarding insensitivity towards race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference and diversity.

“Problematic” is always and every time the first step on the journey down the very slippery slope that inevitably ends with crucifixion by the centurions of corporate cancel culture.

These tv shows are huge money-making properties but in short order they will be available for pennies on the dollar because the weak-kneed buffoons in corporate Hollywood, who are scared to death of the tiny Torquemadas of the Woke Inquisition, will gladly sacrifice their comedy golden gooses on the altar of political correctness in order to appease the angry gods of social justice.

Stand up comedy will fare no better as venues such as Netflix, which have branded themselves the home to comedy, have already begun to cower to the Robespierres of the Woke Revolution and pulled a variety of “racially offensive” comedy shows.

The thing to understand about the woke mob is this… their greatest fear isn’t that someone, somewhere is being offended, it is that someone, somewhere is actually enjoying themselves.

No matter what you do to appease these dour and depraved scolds, it will never be enough, for they are voracious and insatiable in their appetite to destroy anyone and anything that makes them feel uncomfortable.

Netflix has given an inch, and I guarantee you these totalitarian tools will take a mile, and won’t relent until Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais’ heads are on a platter.

Comedy history too will be raped and pillaged by these woke barbarians as they inevitably push for greats like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks and Billy Connolly to be purged from cultural memory for the crimes of wrong-think and political incorrectness.

The goal of comedy fans everywhere should be to extend a giant middle finger to all these repugnant woke simpletons by supporting comedians doing what comedians are supposed to do…rebelling against the small, closed minds in the culture that are trying to censure, censor and suffocate them.

In conclusion…here is a top six ranking of some of the comedians and their routines that are no doubt on the endangered species list in this toxic age of wokeness. Let’s hope F.U.T.V. can get funding and stave off the incessant waves of woke whiners and bring to a halt comedy’s impending extinction.

6. Bill Burr

Burr stomps on the toes of political correctness and jokes about sexual assault…both hanging offenses in the People’s Republic of Wokestan.

Sexual Assault

PC Culture

5. Richard Pryor

One of the greatest stand up comedians of all-time would have a woke bulls-eye squarely on his back if he were around today. This penitentiary routine would certainly have raised the ire of the social justice Bolsheviks and their demand to “abolish the police”.

Penitentiary

4. George Carlin

It is a tragedy Carlin isn’t around to obliterate the insipid vacuity of the woke brigade. There is no doubt that in 2020 the p.c. police would vastly alter his iconic routine of “words you can never say on television” by expanding it to be more “socially conscious” and applying it to every day life.

“Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”

3. Chris Rock

Speaking of words you’re not allowed to say…the electrifying Chris Rock and his blistering take on racial issues from 1996 sure as hell wouldn’t fly in 2020.

Bring the Pain

2. Louis C.K.

If Louis C.K. hadn’t already been cancelled back in 2017, he certainly would’ve been if he tried these routines in 2020.

The “N” word

Child Molesting

1. Dave Chappelle

I’ll give the last word to Chappelle, who is public enemy number one of the woke because he is so brilliant at eviscerating their vapid, emotionalist drivel. In 2019 his Sticks and Stones wowed audiences but P.C. critics deemed it “regressive”, which must be another term for “honest and funny”…I’ll let you decide.

Chinese

Women Equality

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Revisiting 'Orlando and the Rough Beast'

Estimated Reading Time : 7 Minutes

Four years ago on June 23, 2016, in the wake of three horrific tragedies in Orlando, Florida, I wrote an article titled “Orlando and the Rough Beast”. The article seems somewhat prescient now in light of current events as the center is fraying and most certainly cannot hold, and the ravenous Rough Beast is lustily slouching unhindered through our world, our nation and our hearts.

What follows is that article in its entirety. Please read it, and as you do, understand that our most recent cultural, social and political conflagration definitely isn’t the beginning of the end of the Rough Beast’s rampage…hell… it isn’t even the end of the beginning of its ferocious frenzy.

ORLANDO AND THE ROUGH BEAST

On the night of Friday, June 10th, singer Christina Grimmie, a 22 year old former contestant on the NBC show The Voice, was shot and killed by a deranged fan after a performance in Orlando, Florida. The next night, June 11th, Omar Mateen, a 29 year old American man of Afghan descent, walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida and shot over a hundred people, killing 49 of them, in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. The following Tuesday, June 14, Lane Graves, a two year old boy visiting Disney World from Nebraska with his parents and four year old sister, was snatched and killed by an alligator while wading in shallow water in a lake in Orlando, Florida.

These three stories share much in common, violence, tragedy, grief, frustration, heartbreak and, oddly enough, geographic location. From a human perspective, these stories illicit a great deal of emotion, as we are all able to project ourselves or our loved ones into their horrific circumstances. From a mythological/psychological perspective, these stories reveal something much deeper and much darker about us, our collective unconscious, our time and what lies ahead for us all.

The Religion of Fame and Celebrity

The Jungian psychological symbolism of these three attacks are relatively obvious, and strikingly ominous, for anyone looking for them.

The incident that kicked off this horrific four days in Orlando was the senseless murder of Christina Grimmie. Grimmie had obtained a modicum of fame being a contestant on the show The Voice. Grimmie is symbolic of one of the new and powerful American religions…the religion of fame and celebrity. The talented and ambitious Grimmie was trying to climb up the ladder of success to become one of those people who are the Greek gods (immortal myths) of our time…the famous. All religions sell and profess "the light", but that light brings with it the shadow.  That which is demonized by a culture or religion, becomes the shadow of that culture or religion. The shadow of the old religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, is usually sex. See the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church as a prime example of the repressed shadow asserting itself in distorted ways. The shadow of the new American religion of celebrity is desperation and delusions of grandeur.

The fan who shot and killed Christina Grimmie was the vehicle for the shadow of the religion of fame and celebrity to assert itself. He stalked and then killed Grimmie, and then himself, as a sacrifice to this new religion. Without that level of crazed fanaticism, which is a toxic combination of desperation and delusion, the new religion of celebrity would hold no psychological power over the masses. Good can only function in opposition to evil…the famous can only be famous if there are masses of anonymous people yearning to be just like them. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow, and in this case, the darker the shadow the brighter the light. Christina Grimmie was, like more and more people in our culture, consciously acting upon the siren call of fame and celebrity, her killer, like many of the unwashed and un-famous masses, was unconsciously acting upon the siren call of fame and celebrity's shadow. In terms of the new religion of fame and celebrity and its psychology…meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The Old vs The New

Which brings us to Omar Mateen, the man who slaughtered 49 people at the gay nightclub Pulse on June 11. Mateen, like Grimmie's killer, was playing a part in a much wider mythological struggle than just his own psychological torment. Mateen, by all accounts a closeted homosexual, was a foot soldier in the battle between the old religion and the new. The old religion, in this case Islam, which like Christianity and Judaism before it has sex as its shadow, is not going quietly into the goodnight of its evolutionary oblivion. The religion it is battling was born of its own shadow, that religion is the religion of Libertinism. Mateen was a man torn between the new religion, Libertinism, and the old religion, Islam. Mateen's biology, sexuality and western culture pulled him to the church of Libertinism, and yet his family, tradition and heritage pulled him towards Islam. The poor people slaughtered in Orlando by Mateen are just collateral damage in the war raging between the new and old religions and in his own psyche. Mateen was unconsciously mugged by not only the shadow of one religion but two. The psychological shadow of Libertinism caused him to yearn for the clarity and moral purity being offered by the old religion of Islam, while the the shadow of Islam caused him to act out his repressed sexuality and deem it "deviant", which made him hate himself for his biological urges, and then project that hate on to others who seemingly had no internal struggle over their choice of Libertinism.

Mateen's psychological (and sexual) struggle is the same struggle as the entire culture and its old religions of Islam/Judaism/Christianity. The old religion of Islam/Judaism/Christianity is trying to hold back the tide of human biological urges as well as the new religion, Libertinism, which celebrates them. All the laws, violence and intimidation in the world cannot stop what has started, namely, the decay and collapse of the old order and its religions and the rise of the new order and its religions. There is no moral judgement to be made for or against either side, only the admission of this psychological reality.

The Leviathan

And then there is the horrific tragedy of Lane Graves, the little boy snatched by a gator and killed in a Disney resort lake. Graves is symbolic of the innocent, the pure and the good. The little boy joyously playing in shallow waters with his father and then a beast rises up from the depths to snuff out his life. 

An innocent little boy killed by a beast from the depths is symbolic of the entire series of killings in Orlando that week. From the depths of the collective unconscious and the individual unconscious of the killers, a Leviathan, like that shown to Job in a vision in the Book of Job, born of the shadow of God, rose up to snuff out innocent life in an attempt to make its unconscious aspects conscious. In Jungian psychology, water is symbolic of the unconscious, and this story is about more than the Graves family tragedy, but about the beast lurking in our collective unconscious that is desperate to be made conscious and which will kill as many innocents as it can in order to bring about that consciousness. This primal, primitive unconscious energy is fighting for its survival and will do anything to stay alive (become conscious).

As a friend of mine (and a Jungian analyst) The Big Falconer, said to me recently, "the unconscious, the Self, the dark side of the God-image, doesn't care how many millions of people or how much of life is killed in the quest to become conscious…." And the horrors of Orlando are proof of that.

The Happiest Place on Earth

The fact that this horrific drama played out in Orlando, the theme park capital of the world, otherwise known as "The Happiest Place on Earth" is also of great symbolic meaning. Disney is a religion unto itself. The religion of Disney, is a uniquely American religion that sells an eternal childhood and all the innocence that comes with it. This Disney religion is puritanical, and like its sister religion of Celebrity and Fame, is also delusional and grandiose. The Disney religion ignores the darker parts of reality, namely, the impulses and instincts toward sex, violence and death. Those things, sex, violence, and death, were what came out of the shadows and into the light that bloody weekend in Orlando. The shadow will not be denied. You ignore it at your own peril. As the saying goes, "Do you believe in the Devil? You should, he believes in you."

Like Disney, the American culture has turned into an adolescent theme park and maintains the delusion of being the "happiest place on earth". Disney is as American as it gets, and to have this bloodshed on its doorstep is no "coincidence". The veil of Disney (childhood)/American (adolescence) delusion and illusion is not just being pulled back, it is being violently shredded. The scales won't gently fall from our eyes, but will be forcibly torn away. An innocent little boy, a perfect symbol for the religion of Disney (childhood), was devoured by what that delusional and illusional religion ignores, namely death, which took the form of a primitive shadow beast (reptilian instincts/alligator).

"Many miles away something crawls from the slime, at the bottom of a dark, Scottish Lake" - The Police, lyrics from the song Synchronicity II, off of the album Synchronicity

The fact that the alligator, the symbol of the lizard/reptilian brain, the most archaic part of the psyche, the home of the unconscious drives of sex, violence and fear, was lurking just below the surface of the delusional Disney (childhood)/American (adolescence) waters is striking. This primal beast, this alligator/dragon/Grendel is lurking in the depths and the darkness of America and the world, and it is hungry. The beast's hunger is for life, for consciousness, for survival. It devoured an innocent little boy (childhood) that night, but it also slaughtered an aspiring singer and 49 other people (eternal adolescence) the previous two nights. This Leviathan has crawled out of the primordial ooze of our collective unconscious and is determined to make itself known and to be made wholly conscious. 

The news is currently filled with stories of the primitive, the primal and the wild lashing out at mankind. In Florida, Gators found with human bodies in their jaws, or taking bites out of unsuspecting people. Bears, awaking from their hibernation to devour humans in Japan or attack runners in New Mexico. Mountain lions attacking young children as they play in their back yard. While on the surface these stories reek of the vacuousness of our media, mythologically, psychologically and symbolically they are harbingers of the darkness, like a bear awoken from its slumber, that is dwelling in our collective unconscious, lurking just beneath the surface of our consciousness. These stories are reminiscent of the plethora of shark attack stories in the summer before the 9-11 attack. That summer was deemed the summer of the shark, and if anyone had been paying attention, those shark stories forewarned us not of more shark attacks, but of something much more sinister stalking humanity from the depths and the shadows of our collective unconscious.

The death and destruction played out over those four days on the stage of Orlando, the "Happiest Place on Earth", is like a mini-drama of all mankind and the collective unconscious. The attacks in the "Happiest Place on Earth" are the eyes and nostrils of a gator/dragon/Grendel just breaking above the surface waters of our consciousness, that portends an ominous and powerful  dark force just beneath the surface of our awareness, that is ascending from the depths to descend upon our world.

What Rough Beast?

As W.B. Yeats wrote in his poem "The Second Coming"...

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere", even, as we recently learned, at the "Happiest Place on Earth". "The Ceremony of innocence is drowned" like the innocent Lane Graves drowned underneath those blood dimmed tides of the Leviathan's lair. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity", does this line not speak prophetically to the time in which we live today?

The rest of Yeat's poem is as follows...

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats asks the question, "what rough beast, it's hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" That Rough Beast is now born, risen to life in the bloody waters of Orlando, and now, with its hour upon us, slouches its way to prominence and power in our world. This Leviathan is loosed upon us, and will gorge itself upon our ignorance and unconsciousness. There is a very dark age quickly descending upon us all and it will obliterate man's world and try men's souls. The Beast has been unchained…and it is desperate to feed, and we are all on the menu. This is just the beginning of the long descent into darkness…and we are not all going to survive to make it into the light.

Related Article - The Way of the Gun : Meditations on America and Guns

Recommended Reading for anyone interested in learning more about Jungian psychology and the Shadow -  Answer to Job by C.G. Jung, Archetype of the Apocalypse by Edward Edinger, Owning Your Own Shadow : Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche by Robert A. Johnson.

©2016

Da 5 Bloods: A Review

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A terribly disappointing movie not worthy of anyone’s time.

Da 5 Bloods, directed by Spike Lee and written by Lee, Kevin Wilmott, Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, tells the story of four black Vietnam veterans who return to that country as old men to search for the remains of their fallen comrade and to search for buried treasure. The ensemble cast includes Delroy Lindo, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, Jonathan Majors and Chadwick Boseman.

It is difficult to remember now, but at one point in time, Spike Lee was arguably the most important filmmaker in the world, and certainly one of the most interesting. Blessed with a Scorsese-esque cinematic confidence and an artistic defiance reminiscent of Oliver Stone, Spike Lee was a director who demanded attention back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

Lee’s Do the Right Thing had exploded onto screens in 1989 and revealed its director to be an innovative artist and daring provocateur.

Lee’s follow-ups to Do the Right Thing, Mo Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991), weren’t as combustible as his noteworthy first hit, but they were solid films that showcased Lee’s deft craftsmanship.

All of these films led up to Lee’s crowning achievement, Malcolm X, which hit theatres in 1992. Malcolm X is an extraordinary cinematic achievement and is an absolute masterpiece that capped Lee’s remarkable artistic run from ‘89 to ‘92.

After that though, the wheels started to come off the Spike Lee wagon, as his movies became less and less relevant as his mastery of craft diminished rapidly. From this point on Lee became famous for being famous and was more identifiable as a Knicks fan than as a filmmaker.

For all intents and purposes, Spike Lee’s movie making had been on a very precipitous decline from 1994 until 2018…then BlackKklansman came out.

BlackKklansman was not a perfect movie, but it did crackle with a vibrancy and vitality which had been notably absent from Lee’s films in the preceding two and half decades following Malcolm X.

It was due to the return of Lee’s trademark cinematic dynamism in BlackKklansman that the sense that maybe, just maybe, we were going to be treated to a late stage artistic renaissance from Spike Lee, gathered momentum.

It was with all of this in mind that I watched Lee’s newest film, Da 5 Bloods when it premiered on Netflix last Friday.

To say I was disappointed would be a dramatic understatement. Whatever artistic momentum Lee garnered post BlackKklansman has quickly bogged itself down in a foolish quagmire north of Ho Chi Minh City in the dramatic mistake that is Da 5 Bloods.

Lee indulges his very worst instincts on Da 5 Bloods, and produces a bloated, boring, derivative, meandering mess of a movie that pulsates with an amateurism that is shocking to behold coming from someone with Lee’s past success.

There are so many things wrong with Da 5 Bloods it is difficult to narrow it down to just a few…but I will try.

The script is absolute garbage, as the narrative and the dialogue all feel like they were stolen from a high school freshman’s drama diary. There are so many narrative threads wandering aimlessly through this movie it seems like a dramatic daycare center…and absolutely none of them work…none of them!

The dialogue is only remarkable because it is so disingenuous, inhuman, pretentious and mannered.

Matching the on-the-nose, cringe-worthy dialogue, are the over-the-top performances.

I think Delroy Lindo is a terrific actor, as is Jonathan Majors, but even their talent cannot overcome Lee’s preference for posturing over acting, and theatricality over subtlety.

The entire cast gives performances that feel out of rhythm and forced. Lindo is given the heaviest load to bear, and he definitely strains under it, as his work feels contrived and empty.

As for the filmmaking, Da 5 Bloods contains action sequences, which is something Lee has never really delved into in his previous films…and it shows. The battle scenes in this movie are not just bad, but an embarrassment, like something out of an old tv show.

Lee also made the decision to use his 60 year old actors to play themselves as young men, and while I understand what he was trying to do with that, it ended up reducing the action scenes to pure farce.

The battles are also devoid of all realism and cinematic ingenuity. I watched the movie wondering how the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese won the war but were so damn easy to shoot, especially when they would continuously just run straight at their adversaries.

The technical aspects of the movie are equally amateurish, as it is visually dull and stale, lacking all vibrancy and vitality.

There is one scene, which contains a pivotal plot point, that occurs at the hour and a half mark, that is so poorly executed and so ham-handed in its telegraphing that I was left groaning in disgust. What the hell happened to the director who made the masterpiece Malcolm X? Where is the Do the Right Thing Spike Lee who was an absolute master of his craft? Sadly, that Spike Lee is long gone, and we are left with a director and writer who simply does not remember how to make a worthwhile movie.

Added to those woes is Terence Blanchard’s relentlessly bombastic score, that is so distractingly awful it boggled my mind. Blanchard’s swelling music intrudes anywhere and everywhere it can, suffocating the movie with a monstrosity of musical plushness.

The film does have some bright spots in the form of documentary montages that are sprinkled throughout the film and crackle with insight and intensity, but they are so few and far between they are an afterthought.

In conclusion, the promise and the prowess Spike Lee showed decades ago and ever so briefly in BlackKklansman, seem a very distant memory when watching the abysmal Da 5 Bloods. I simply cannot recommend this movie for any reason, but would encourage you to revisit Spike Lee’s earlier works, most notably Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, as well as Blackkklansman, in order to see what used to be, and what might have been.

©2020

Spike Lee's 'Da 5 Bloods' is a Dreadful Disappointment, but Virtue-Signaling Establishment Critics Lack the Courage to Tell the Truth About It

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 17 seconds

There’s only one good thing about this film: it exposes mainstream film critics for their self-serving racial paternalism and their pandering to fellow woke elites.

Spike Lee’s new movie, Da 5 Bloods, starring Delroy Lindo, Chadwick Boseman and Jonathan Majors, tells the story of four black Vietnam veterans who return to Vietnam as old men in order to retrieve the body of their long lost comrade and search for buried treasure, premiered this past Friday on Netflix to much fanfare.

Lee has long been an artistic provocateur on issues of race, so as the U.S. once again struggles with civil unrest and social upheaval over racial injustice, you would think now would be a perfect time for a new movie from the Academy Award winner who brought us Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman.

You would be wrong.

While Da 5 Bloods does have some intriguing moments, particularly the documentary montages interspersed throughout the film, the majority of the movie is a sloppy, bloated, decadent, incoherent, endlessly meandering, melodramatic mess.

Sadly, the movie, which features a trite and derivative script, a relentlessly bombastic score and painfully amateurish action sequences, is too cinematically inept to be of any socially conscious value.

Ironically, the film’s lone insight into race relations in America is entirely unintentional as it exposes liberal film critics for their self-serving racial paternalism and their complete lack of professional integrity.

It is inconceivable to me that any cinematically literate person could conclude Da 5 Bloods is anything but a pronounced disappointment but, remarkably, critics have been falling all over themselves to praise the film, some even claim it is an Oscar favorite.

On the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, critics have given it a staggering 92% score.

What was striking to me about the critical fawning over the movie was that in contrast, audiences at Rotten Tomatoes scored the film a much more reasonable 62%.

A look at the Rotten Tomatoes scores of other prominent films directed by black artists in recent years reveals a similarly suspicious divide between critics and audiences.

For example, in 2015 another Spike Lee film, the abysmal Chi-Raq, garnered an 82% critical score and a 50% audience score.

In 2015, Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ compelling but flawed Best Picture winner received a blistering 98% critical score compared to a more rational audience score of 79%.

In 2018, the middling Black Panther somehow overcame its notable faults to become a box office smash and a Best Picture nominee while receiving an extraordinary 97% critical score compared to its more accurate audience score of 79%. The 97% critical score makes it the highest rated superhero movie of all time.

Black Panther’s negative18-point disparity between critical score and audience score is three times larger than any other superhero movie in history. 

In 2019 critics adored Barry Jenkins’ film If Beale Street Could Talk at a rate of 95% while audiences gave it a discerningly tepid 70%.

Also in 2019, critics slobbered over Jordan Peele’s confounding horror hit, Us, with a 93% score while audiences recoiled from it with a 59% rating.

The social justice warrior contingent will no doubt deduce from these numbers that the significantly lower audience scores are a result of hordes of incorrigible racists intentionally under rating a movie purely out of racial animus.

The facts betray that argument though, as other unquestionably brilliant black films, such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (92 critical/90 audience) and Malcolm X (88 critical/91 audience) as well as John Singleton’s iconic Boyz n the Hood (96 critical/93 audience), have received universal praise and are devoid of such large differences in rating.

It seems obvious to me that mainstream critics are judging current black films not on their merits but on a politically correct curve.

Maybe this biased perspective is born out of fear of being labeled a racist or a heretic in the church of wokeness if they criticize a black film, or maybe it is some sort of pandering paternalism, which in and of itself is its own pernicious form of racism.

Sadly, these critics, just like those public health officials who recently went against their own expert opinions and declared that people needed to get out and protest racism despite the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic, are frighteningly quick to trade their professional and personal integrity in order to satiate the woke mob and be seen as politically correct “allies”.

Critics that judge films on a racial curve in order to signal their virtue and moral superiority are doing a great disservice to both cinema and artists of color, as neither is well served by their blatant disregard of their professionalism and their pathetic woke posturing and pandering.

In conclusion, Da 5 Bloods is an awful film but it has done a service by exposing the untrustworthy critics in the establishment media for only caring about their social status among woke elites and not giving a damn about the art of cinema.

Now, if you want to watch a worthy Spike Lee film pertinent to this tumultuous time, go watch his unadulterated masterpiece Malcolm X, or the dynamically brilliant Do the Right Thing or the uneven but insightful BlacKkKlansman…but definitely avoid the dismal Da 5 Bloods.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Just When You Thought Celebrities Couldn't Get Any Worse, the "I Take Responsibility" Video Comes Out

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 21 seconds

In response to America’s racial unrest, Hollywood celebrities once again feel the need to flex their virtue signaling muscles with a nauseating, self-serving video.

Unfortunately for us, Hollywood never lets a good crisis go to waste.

First there was the coronavirus pandemic.

Hollywood bravely responded to that calamity with Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, and a cavalcade of her clueless celebrity friends putting out a video of themselves “singing” John Lennon’s saccharine anthem Imagine.

The world responded by collectively throwing up in its mouth.

With Imagine, Gadot and company appeared to have the Cringe-Worthy Video of the Year Award all wrapped up.

But then there was the police murder of George Floyd, an unarmed and handcuffed black man in Minneapolis, followed by protests, riots and looting across the country.

A new collection of entertainment industry nitwits has responded to that catastrophe with an anti-racism video titled ‘I Take Responsibility’.

Ladies and gentleman, the race for the Cringe-Worthy Video Crown has a new front-runner.

‘I Take Responsibility’ features Sarah Paulson, Aaron Paul, Kesha, Bethany Joy Lenz, Kristen Bell, Justin Theroux, Debra Messing, Mark Duplass, Bryce Dallas Howard, Julianne Moore, Piper Perabo, Stanley Tucci, Ilana Glazer, and Aly Raisman telling us they “take responsibility” and “stand against hate”.

The unintentional comedy of the video is absolutely off the charts, as it is littered with sub-textual ironies like the fact that it is shot in black and white (apparently it doesn’t see color!) and is entirely devoid of any racial or ethnic diversity.

One of the more hysterical moments is when these Hollywood dopes repeatedly tell us that they “take responsibility” for “every not so funny joke, every unfair stereotype”.

What about the funny jokes and the fair stereotypes? Who is going to take responsibility for those? Wouldn’t a video made by the people taking responsibility for the funny jokes and fair stereotypes be much more enlightening and entertaining than this dour diatribe?

Other lowlights of ‘I Take Responsibility’ are the egregiously brutal performances.

Aaron Paul, who is one of the worst actors of his, or any other, generation, strains so hard to be credible he appears to be actually moving his bowels on camera. And if you listen closely enough when he speaks, you can actually hear the wind whistle through the vacant and cavernous void where his brain should be.

Debra Messing only makes a brief appearance and seems to have been abruptly awoken from a nap to record her lines. I understand why she is so tired, as she looks like she was up all night haunting houses. Yikes.

The talented Sarah Paulson brings much-needed gravitas to the festivities in the form of ridiculously oversized glasses. As everyone knows, it is a scientifically proven fact that people who wear oversized glasses are both serious and incapable of racism…especially when they have an adorable lisp.

Academy Award winner Julianne Moore appears in the video and nobly casts hyperbole aside and tells the unvarnished truth when she adamantly declares “black people are being slaughtered in the streets!”

I’d be willing to bet that not only are the streets where Ms. Moore lives devoid of slaughtered black people, they are most likely devoid of all black people.

Stanley Tucci and Justin Theroux get in on the act by not acting at all. They are so flat and dead eyed they could’ve, and should’ve, been reading from the phone book.

Speaking of reading…by far my favorite part of the video is the fact that these actors and actresses, who literally memorize dialogue for a living (and they make a very good living), apparently care so little about “taking responsibility” and “standing against hate” that they cannot be bothered to put in the least amount of effort and memorize their idiotic mini-monologue.

This cornucopia of clowns may have set out to highlight how “not racist” they are, but instead, by obviously reading their lines, they only proved how entitled and lazy they truly are.

As I watched this train wreck I couldn’t help but wonder…who is the target audience for this thing?

The answer is self-evident, as the video is made solely for the people in it and their fellow privileged Hollywood elites who enjoy watching masturbatory displays of faux, me-first moralism.

As a not-so-proud resident of Los Angeles and an active member of both the entertainment business and the creative community, I do hereby declare that I do NOT take responsibility for anything these mindless morons vomit out onto the world.

They claim to stand against hate…how impotently and insipidly trite of them.

In contrast…I stand against virtue signaling. I stand against moral preening. I stand against the vain, vacuous and vapid pandering of elitist prigs. I stand against the shameless self-indulgence and self-righteousness of Hollywood narcissists too enthralled by their own sense of superiority to see that they are utterly and ridiculously absurd.

In conclusion, I think I speak for every sentient being in the universe when I take a knee and plead with these imbecilic celebrities to pretty, pretty please…from now on, just…Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Thanks to the Courage of HBO Max, Racism is Now Gone With the Wind...and Frankly My Dear, I DO Give a Damn

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

 HBO Max has deemed Gone With the Wind racist and has pulled it from its service because viewers are apparently too fragile and too stupid to be allowed to watch it.

In recent weeks, as protestors carrying Black Lives Matter signs filled the streets, I have often heard it said that, “racism is a virus”. If that is true, then the new streaming service HBO Max just found the cure.

HBO Max’s simple and brutally effective treatment to eradicate racism from the world is to pull the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind from its service…for now…at least until it can bring the film back “with a discussion of its historical context”. Take that racism!!

Gone With the Wind, which is based on the novel of the same name by Margaret Mitchell, won 10 Academy Awards, including, ironically enough, the first ever for an African American – Hattie McDaniel for Best Supporting Actress. The movie is also the highest grossing film of all-time (adjusted for inflation) and is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all-time.

The film’s unforgivable sin though is that it is set in the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction and depicts black slaves as a happy, content and well-treated bunch that adored their benevolent white masters.

Thankfully, HBO Max’s swift action will put an end to that highly popular theory, that seems to be everywhere nowadays, which states that African-Americans were much better off during the happy-go-lucky slavery era than today.

My fervent hope is that the geniuses at HBO Max and across Hollywood will now set their sights on other famous films from the past that cross the line of wokeness and offend the delicate sensibilities of us all.

For instance, all of the Star Wars films need to be tossed onto the woke bonfire immediately for their disgusting homophobia, which manifests itself in the C3PO character, an offensive stereotype of all closeted gay robots.

And how do you think members of the Sasquatch community feel when they see Chewbacca denying his obvious Sasquatch heritage and calling himself a “Wookie”, all while speaking some guttural, primitive language and carrying a laser-shooting crossbow? Won’t someone think of the Sasquatch?

Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List has got to go too, as while it may be historically accurate that doesn’t matter because you just know that anti-Semites watch that thing like its Nazi porn, which is just gross, and I simply cannot abide anybody enjoying anything for the wrong reasons…or the right reasons for that matter.

While we are on the subject of Nazis, The Sound of Music feels really Nazi friendly to me too, especially since its filled with all those smiling singing white people…so into the delete bin it goes.

As a student of history I can tell you that Dr. Zhivago is about Russia…I think… and the mainstream media and Hollywood have made it clear to me that Russians and Nazis are the same thing…so torch that damn movie!

Speaking of my vast knowledge of history, the 1956 classic, The Ten Commandments, needs to be exorcised from American screens immediately. Have you seen how negatively it portrays Egyptians? That seems really Islamophobic to me!

Titanic needs to be erased, not just because it has only white people in it, but because it sheds a bad light on the cruise ship industry and come on guys, corporations are people too.

Same thing goes for the Terminator franchise, which really slanders the tech industry with its negative portrayal of SkyNet. How do you think the folks in Silicon Valley feel when tech is seen as a malevolent force?

Speaking of the tech industry…in order to spare the feelings of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, if he is even capable of feeling, The Social Network needs to be banned forever and ever.

Boogie Nights really offended me personally because of its negative depiction of people with extremely large appendages, so it has got to go too!

And what about Citizen Kane? Yes, it does highlight the unconventional love between a boy and his sled, but on the other hand it really belittles the media-owning billionaire class (of which HBO Max is a member) and I just can’t abide by that…onto the bonfire it goes!

In fact, I think every film that makes anyone, anywhere, even slightly uncomfortable for any reason at all, needs to be not only banned, but all copies destroyed and the ashes then scattered to the winds. That way all hatred and prejudice of any kind will be permanently eradicated from the universe forever and ever…amen.

As for HBO Max, I think we should all take a knee in honor of their brave decision to save us from our own fragility and stupidity, and from the burden of freedom of choice, by not allowing us to watch Gone With the Wind without “context”.

The bottom line is this: where Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela all failed, HBO Max has gloriously succeeded. Racism is now definitively and irreversibly Gone With the Wind!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Comedians Must Never Apologized if Comedy is to Surivive in the Age of Cancel Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Jimmy Fallon, Leigh Francis and other feckless comedians cowering to appease cancel culture are committing artistic suicide. They should look to comic masters for inspiration and courage.

As America and the U.K. have devolved to become little more than a diabolically sensitive human resources department devoted to cancel culture, comedy has become a decidedly tricky proposition.

It is within this stifling comedy climate that the question has often been raised…should a comedian ever apologize for offending someone?

None of the greats, such as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle, have ever, or would ever, apologize.

It would seem to me that if a comedian isn’t offending somebody, they probably aren’t doing it right, and being unapologetic about that is a basic requirement to achieve comedy greatness.

For instance, in a recent interview on the BBC, legendary Scottish comedian Billy Connolly weighed in on this topic in regards to his allegedly controversial anti-religious routines back in the 1970’s. Connolly declared, “I refused to apologise and I refuse to this day to apologise.”

In contrast, this week comedian Leigh Francis and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon both bent the knee and tearfully apologized for offending with past comedy bits.

Francis apologized for having worn latex facemasks in 2002 to portray black celebrities like Michael Jackson, Craig David and Trisha Goddard, while Fallon apologized for having worn blackface while imitating fellow comedian Chris Rock in a short skit on Saturday Night Live…TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Performative Groveling

One can think blackface is a bad idea while also being repulsed by both Leigh and Fallon’s performative groveling in order to desperately avoid being canceled by time-traveling P.C. police retroactively enforcing the woke doctrine of today on comedy bits of yesteryear.

Fallon’s apologizing is like a dog neutering itself, leaving it sans testicles and, although it still has teeth, consistently lacking the instinct to bite.  

Fallon has long been a comedy lap dog though, so it was no shock he put his tail between his legs and whimpered out a mea culpa for having made a mess on the comedy carpet twenty years ago.

Unlike the greats, who are fueled by the need to be respected, Fallon is desperate to be liked – a poison pill for any comedian. Fallon’s overwhelming need to be liked is what compelled him not only to apologize, but don blackface in the first place.

Another albatross around Fallon’s and other vulnerable comedian’s necks are the big corporate dollars upon which they have become addicted.

In recent years TV hosts Bill Maher and Samantha Bee have also genuflected in apology to the cancel culture clan in hopes of avoiding financial decapitation at the hands of their corporate overlords.

Fallon, Maher and Bee kept their cushy jobs, but apologizing never guarantees you avoid cancel culture’s axe.

For example, arguably the most successful comedian in the world right now, Kevin Hart, lost his gig hosting the 2018 Oscars even after he apologized for homophobic tweets he wrote back in 2009.

D-List hack Kathy Griffin apologized for the photo of her holding a bloody, decapitated Trump head in 2017, but she still lost her job hosting CNN’s New Years Eve celebration.

Loss of Integrity

For any comedian, apologizing is like committing seppuku, it may seem like an honorable thing to do, but it only ends with their integrity in a pool of blood with a knife sticking in the belly of their artistry.

The biggest reason not to apologize is that the apology strips the comedian of their edge, defiant power and artistic bravado, and only reinforces the conventions, norms, boundaries and limitations that comedians are supposed to be pushing back against.

The admission of error is a submission to the constrictions created by the perpetually indignant captains of cancel culture and will inevitably lead to self-censorship and a stifling of the comedian’s creative impulse.

All is not lost though, as the suffocating self-righteousness of cancel culture may snuff out the less hearty of comedic talent, it also makes for the perfect foil for those with the courage and skill to navigate the minefield.

For example, last year the P.C. police came for the scalp of Dave Chappelle after his controversial stand up special Sticks and Stones hit Netflix.

In the special, Chappelle insightfully eviscerates all sorts of woke dogma…and socially conscious critics loathed him for it, sticking the show with a 35% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences though, couldn’t get enough and rated the show a blistering 99%.

Comedy unafraid to offend

Chappelle’s success is proof that intelligent and unapologetically cutting comedy that isn’t afraid to push, probe and offend is something audiences appreciate even when the hypersensitive scolds don’t.

As evidenced by Chappelle’s and also Bill Burr’s recent success at hysterically breaching the woke barricades in their Netflix specials, the more rigid the boundaries and delicate the sensibilities of a society, the more target rich an environment it becomes for comedians with the talent and testicular fortitude to exploit it.

Unlike Chappelle, Burr and their great comedy forefathers, the apologetic comedian, like Fallon, is the comedian who gives audiences what they want instead of giving them all that they have, who gives rote answers instead of raising unruly questions, and who spoon-feeds audiences instead of challenging them.

The apologetic comedian is the worst thing any comedian can ever be…safe. And safe comedy is bad comedy.

As Ricky Gervais explained last year, “as a comedian you can’t please everyone. If you try you’ll end up pleasing no one and saying nothing.” Sounds like an apt description of the feckless Jimmy Fallon.

The bottom line is this, apologizing may make a comedian a good person, but it will definitely make them a very bad comedian.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast: Episode 20 - The Last Samurai

This week things get combative on the pod as Barry and I do battle over his newest choice for a quarantine watch, 2003’s The Last Samurai, which stars Tom Cruise and is directed by Edward Zwick. We also play another round of everybody’s favorite games - Hollywood Mogul. The stakes are high as the loser of the game and the debate must commit seppuku at the end of the podcast!

LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA: EPISODE 20 - THE LAST SAMURAI

Thanks for listening and stay safe out there!

©2020

Space Force Crashes on the Comedy Launch Pad, but Still Manages to Accomplish Its Propaganda Mission

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 33 seconds

Space Force, the new Netflix comedy from Steve Carell and the creators of The Office, fails miserably as a comedy but is a smashing success as a piece of soft propaganda for the expansion of American militarism into space.

I am a rabid fan of the American version of The Office and have been re-watching the series during the coronavirus lockdown as a way to escape the relentless bad news.

The show doesn’t always work as distraction, as its impetuous, erratic and dim-witted lead character Michael Scott (Steve Carell) is often frighteningly reminiscent of President Trump during his inadvertently hilarious coronavirus press conferences, but even then the show consistently makes me laugh.

When I saw that the creator of The Office, Greg Daniels, and Steve Carell were launching a new sitcom on Netflix titled Space Force, which stars Carell as General Mark Naird, first commander of Trump’s newly formed wing of the U.S. military - Space Force…I was thrilled.

Then I watched it. 

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster had more laughs.

Space Force, which aspires to be Dr. Strangelove but feels like Dr. Doolittle, is a comedic marvel in that it boasts an absolute murderer’s row of comedy talent that includes Carell, Lisa Kudrow, John Malkovich, Fred Willard, Jane Lynch, Patrick Warburton, Kaitlin Olson, Michael Hitchcock (who is one of the most under-rated and best comedy actors of our time) and Don Lake, but miraculously fails to ever actually be funny.

The show fails as a comedy for a variety of reasons, the most glaring of which is that instead of being a mockumentary like The Office, a style that would have greatly enhanced the off-beat humor, it uses a conventional and rather stale single camera set-up.

The show’s flaccid funny bone was very disappointing but understandable, as comedy is a hard thing to pull off (THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!). But what was most striking to me was that the show’s impotent humor cloaked a slick, subtle and very effective piece of soft propaganda promoting American militarism.

The entire premise of Space Force is based upon the notion that American militarization of space is a benign endeavor…and anyone with half a brain in their head and a passing familiarity with history can understand that American militarism, be it on earth or anywhere else, is most definitely not a benign endeavor.

The show even admits that the militarization of space is a malignant and malevolent move…but of course, only when China does it.

John Malkovich’s character Dr. Adrian Mallory clearly articulates this philosophy when he explains why America needs its military in space because, “not every country in space believes in good for all”. That gem was unintentionally the funniest line in the whole show.

You see in the world of Space Force, Americans in general, and the American military in particular, are certainly a little bit goofy, but ultimately, at their heart, are a good and deeply humane people who are unquestionably moral and ethical.

Sure, the show takes some shots at American politicians, including it’s unnamed and unseen Trumpian president, who is an impulsive twitter addict who would gladly start a war just for the clicks, but its adoration of the American military and its leadership, who are seen as rational, reasonable, moral bastions who are, believe it or not, opposed to war, is relentless.

A perfect example of the show’s insipidly slick pro-military American bias is when love interest Kelly King un-ironically explains to General Naird how inherently good he is by saying, “you literally couldn’t do the wrong thing”.

On the show China is seen as the world’s nefariously aggressive, deceptive and expansionist power that repeatedly makes provocative maneuvers meant to bully and intimidate those poor, honest and heartfelt Americans. Thankfully what Space Force lacks in laughs it makes up for with cringe-worthy level historical amnesia and China hating.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a piece of American propaganda if there weren’t some anti-Russian sentiment thrown into the red, white and blue stew too.

The lone Russian character on the show, Yuri, is, like all Russians in American entertainment, a conniving and manipulative schemer who is “on Putin’s payroll”.

Yuri’s insidious plan to destroy America involves dating General Naird’s teenage daughter and plying her with vodka so he can get inside information on the general…how Russian of him!

I can understand that some may think it absurd that some mindless sitcom like Space Force is an insidious piece of propaganda, but that is why it is so effective.

Beyond the flag-waving and saber rattling, the power of the show’s propaganda is found in its seemingly mild assumptions, such as the U.S. military and the militarizing of space being noble and worthy ventures. Space Force normalizes these notions and conditions Americans to unconsciously accept them without challenge.

It also conditions them to put their blind trust and faith in American military leaders at the expense of elected officials. Like me, you may loathe Trump, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi, all targets of the show’s comedy, but at least in theory they are held accountable by elections.

The bottom line is that Space Force turns America’s military expansion into space, an abhorrently grotesque idea, into a sort of soft-edged farce, and in doing so, tacitly endorses it.

If history is any guide, future generations are going to learn the hard way that American militarization of space is, like the show Space Force, no laughing matter.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Media Hates Lance Armstrong for Being a Liar and a Cheat, and Conveniently Forget They Enabled his Lying and Cheating

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

Lance, the fantastically compelling two-part ESPN documentary on disgraced American cyclist Lance Armstrong that concludes Sunday night, makes up for years of sports media coddling by finally holding its subject’s feet to the fire.

Lance Armstrong is a proven fraud and the adversarial attitude animating this documentary is exactly what was missing in the coverage of Armstrong during his deceitful heyday. 

Even at the height of his popularity, I was never a Lance Armstrong fan. I was always dubious of his success and the manufactured narrative within which the media gently cloaked him.

The reason I like the documentary is because it not only exposes Armstrong’s duplicitous nature, but also unintentionally reinforces my long held belief regarding the American media’s malignant malfeasance.

For years Lance was able to pedal through the journalistic raindrops, and due to the establishment media’s starry-eyed compliance and Armstrong’s near sociopathic ability to lie, he never got wet.

The media swooning over Lance in the wake of his meteoric rise from the ashes of near-death from cancer to the podium of the Tour de France, was absurd to the point of journalistic travesty.

The press consistently chose to tell the story they wanted about Armstrong, instead of the story that was actually there. As a result, they shamelessly enabled Lance’s diabolical duplicity.

For instance, the media made Armstrong into an American inspiration for surviving testicular cancer in 1997 while completely ignoring the possibility, if not the probability, that Lance’s cancer was a direct result of the use of performance-enhancing drugs, a notion that Lance himself does not discount in the documentary.

The press also set aside all skepticism and made Lance into an American icon when he “miraculously” won the Tour de France seven consecutive times from 1999-2005.

The American media then wrapped Lance in the flag and relentlessly marketed him to the public as the perfect symbol of America - a resilient, ambitious, determined and courageous underdog that overcame the odds and dominated the competition. This flag waving idiocy made him extremely desirable to corporate America and very wealthy.

Even now after Lance has been exposed as an unadulterated fraud, the media still use him as an avatar upon which they can project whatever fantasies they need in order to tell the story they want, as opposed to the story that is actually there. 

For example, Aaron Timms of The Guardian, who apparently watched the documentary with his woke goggles on, sees Armstrong as a malevolent symbol of toxic male rage who, “was practically marinating in insensitivity from the womb.”

Timms contorts the documentary beyond recognition and concludes that it shows that Armstrong is not just a liar, cheat and bully, but the poster child for “men in general: their incurable ambition and violence, the fragility of their morals.”

I guess when you’re a woke media hammer, the whole world looks like a toxically masculine nail.

What is so fascinating to me in regards to the media’s response to Lance, is that they couldn’t get enough of Armstrong when he was telling them what they wanted to hear while lying through his teeth, but now that he is speaking some semblance of the truth, they want him to shut up.

For instance, in reaction to Lance USA Today writer Christine Brennan wrote an article titled, “enough is enough, let this be the end of the Lance Armstrong story.”

Brennan declares, “Armstrong never was just another rider, or athlete. He was far more than a sports hero. After beating testicular cancer, he transcended sports and became the world’s most famous cancer survivor.”

What Brennan fails to acknowledge is that it wasn’t Armstrong who made himself more than another “rider, athlete or sports hero”…it was the mainstream media. Armstrong certainly exploited the endlessly deferential coverage of him, but he didn’t create it.

Brennan continues, “He was an international icon, bringing his too-good-to-be-true story of survival and triumph to schools and banquets and hospitals, where patients read his books for inspiration as chemo dripped into their arms….This was a ruse for the ages”.

Let’s be clear, Lance Armstrong is entirely to blame for all of his numerous misdeeds, but when Brennan says his story was “too good to be true” she unintentionally indicts her entire profession. If something is “too good to be true”…which Lance’s narrative certainly was… then that is exactly when reporters should sink their teeth into a story to find the truth instead of journalistically genuflecting before their new American hero.

And Brennan is correct, this was a “ruse for the ages”, but she leaves out that the negligent and gullible media were directly complicit in that ruse and shamelessly aided and abetted Lance’s despicable deception.

Brennan concludes by stating, “Armstrong is the worst of us; a lying, cheating, vindictive scoundrel.”

This is also true, but another truth is that by choosing to elevate and exult the scoundrel Lance Armstrong, instead of say…Greg LeMond, an equally compelling figure and an even better cyclist of impeccable moral character, the media made themselves just as guilty as the man they now love to hate. (Watch the ESPN documentary Slaying the Badger to learn more on LeMond).

 In conclusion, Lance has revealed its infamous subject to be a petulant, bitter, defiant, angry and self-pitying man entirely incapable of any self-reflection…which ironically, makes him exactly like the media that catapulted him to stardom in the first place.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

'Hoaxed' Exposes the Mainstream Media's Relentless Bias…and Its Own

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Mike Cernovich’s documentary about the media’s disregard for truth is a missed opportunity due to its inability to fully break free from the heavy chains of partisan politics.

Hoaxed, the movie about the fake news phenomena in the mainstream media, produced by right-wing firebrand Mike Cernovich, has not generated much heat since it was released nearly a year and a half ago in January of 2019.

The establishment press, the target of the film’s ire, has not responded to it with the usual tactics of belittling or obliterating the film with scathing reviews…in fact, they haven’t reviewed it at all.

Cernovich believes that the media ignored Hoaxed, directed by Scooter Downey and Jon du Toit, because it is “high art”. I personally would assign more malevolent motives to the media’s maneuvers, because I can assure you that Hoaxed may be a lot of things, but high art is not one of them.

Sadly, Hoaxed, despite its compelling theory regarding the corporate media’s nefariousness and disregard for the truth, stumbles in its execution, as it is a rather uneven and scattered polemic dramatically weakened by its lack of thematic focus.

As a cinematic exercise, the movie is not quite slick enough to generate gravitas, but a little too slick to take seriously.

Hoaxed makes the case that the mainstream media are not meant to inform the masses but to keep them uninformed and in conflict. As someone who writes often about media manipulation and propaganda, I wholly concur with the film’s thesis.

The problem though is that the movie cannot maintain its focus on that premise alone and ends up wasting too much time wandering down side streets and alleyways wallowing in its own partisan and ideological bias.

In this way, Hoaxed, which boasts a who’s who of media outsiders such as Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, Luke Rudkowski and James O’Keefe, often feels like fan service for those already in Cernovich’s camp, which is a shame, as the movie’s message about the mendacity of the media needs to be heard across the political spectrum.

That said the film definitely has some insightful sequences, most notably those featuring feminist director Cassie Jaye, and Hank Newsom, a Black Lives Matter activist who does not fit easily into stereotypes.

The Newsom sequence comes in the last twenty minutes and makes the extremely compelling case that the corporate media do not care about black lives or white lives, just about “the show” and generating ratings through manufactured conflict.

Other notable sections deal with both the media’s flexible ethics when deciding to use photographs of dead children as propaganda tools, the perils of Antifa and the imperative of free speech, topics I have written about at length.

These sequences are factually damning, and due to their simplicity, elegant in their execution, which should’ve been the blueprint for the entire film.

Unfortunately, the movie does not stick to that approach, as evidenced by the awkward “Pizzagate” section, which is irritatingly incoherent and frustratingly muddled.

Another stumble comes in the form of a rambling case against communism by Stefan Molyneux. The validity of his arguments aside, conjuring the boogeyman of communism has nothing to do with the topic at the heart of Hoaxed, and thus distracts and dilutes the narrative.

The biggest negative is the conflating of the actions of the mainstream media just with Democrats, instead of simply with the depraved elite of both parties.

At times the film is at cross-purposes with itself, such as when it highlights the media complicity in deceiving the public to support both of the Republican led Iraq Wars, a fact which flies in the face of the film’s common refrain that the media solely push a liberal/Democratic agenda. I think it would have been wiser, and more accurate, if the film stated that the media are not just cheerleaders for the Democratic agenda, but for the establishment agenda.  

Prior to watching Hoaxed I knew little about Cernovich, having never read or watched his work. I believe my ignorance on the controversies surrounding Cernovich was actually an asset as it helped me to simply review Hoaxed, as opposed to reviewing Cernovich.

All I knew going in was Cernovich was considered an alt-right firebrand and provocateur. The film taught me that Cernovich has disavowed that alt-right label, and rejects any white supremacy and neo-Nazism supposedly associated with it, but also that he really is a firebrand and provocateur, and relishes the role.

In my opinion Cernovich’s provocative and self-promoting nature, an example of which is his being both producer and de facto star of Hoaxed, does diminish the film and its thesis to a great degree, even as it elevates him…a problem common to performative and participatory style documentaries.

Ultimately, like the corporate media it rightfully despises, Hoaxed all too often trades fidelity to truth for the glory of its own ego and the familiarity of the partisan swamp, much to its detriment and to my disappointment.

If you really want to break the chains of your mind and exit the cave of media manipulation and propaganda, I recommend you skip Hoaxed, which is just another set of illusory shadows dancing on the wall, in favor of reading Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s seminal work on the subject.

Manufacturing Consent will arm you with intellectual tools that will empower you to crack the code of the corporate media, unlike Hoaxed, which does little more than mimic the media’s dishonest framing and distortions of the truth for its own purposes. 

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Mike Tyson’s Comeback is a Perfect Example of America's Delusional Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Like America in the thrall of its contrived American Dream fairy tale, middle-aged Mike Tyson has deluded himself into believing his own hype, while forgetting the reality of his past.

In recent weeks, 53 year-old former Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson has released a series of seconds-long boxing videos that show him slimmed down and throwing crisp punch combinations into the mitts and body protector of his trainer and hinting at a comeback. In typical over-reaction, some Americans immediately responded by declaring that Iron Mike could win the title.

The hysteria surrounding Tyson’s mini-videos is par for the course in the land of the American Dream, where people live in a diabolically delusional culture that loves manufactured “reality shows” but is impervious to reality.

The fact that Tyson hitting pads for ten seconds is not proof of his ring worthiness should be self-evident since, unlike real boxing opponents, the pads aren’t actively trying to avoid getting hit or, more importantly, attempting to render Tyson unconscious.

It also takes a willful ignorance of boxing history and biology to ignore the fact that at the age of 38, Tyson got brutalized in his final fight by journeyman Kevin McBride, and he is not going to be a better boxer at 53 than he was at 38.

America’s magical thinking regarding Tyson is fueled by its pernicious addiction to the narcotic of nostalgia.

The rose colored glass of the rear view mirror has distorted American’s perception of who Tyson really was as a fighter.

Tyson was, unquestionably, one of the most talented boxers and dynamic athletes to ever be heavyweight champ, but the cold, hard truth is that he was never, ever a great fighter.

Tyson became “The Baddest Man on the Planet” and the youngest champion in Heavyweight history, by intimidating and destroying a series of tomato cans in spectacular fashion. But Iron Mike shrunk and withered whenever he went up against any worthy opponent, like Evander Holyfield or Lennox Lewis or even just less talented fighters who weren’t afraid of him, like Buster Douglas.

Tyson was a Wizard of Oz fighter, like the Tin Man, he had no heart, like the Lion he was a coward, and if he does go through with this comeback, he’ll score the hat trick by being as brainless as the Scarecrow.

The current Tyson renaissance reminds me of the recent nostalgia-fueled rehabilitation of George W. Bush by the mainstream media.

Like Tyson and the little gesture of his short videos, all Bush had to do was give candy to Michelle Obama at a public event and he was transformed into a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi, as the media assiduously wiped clean from the American consciousness of all his grievous misdeeds.

The narcotic of nostalgia has forced Americans to forget a plethora of both Tyson’s and Bush’s failings. Like the fact that Iron Mike didn’t take Buster Douglas seriously and got summarily knocked out because of it, just like the lightweight Bush didn’t take seriously warnings about Bin Laden, which resulted in the catastrophe of 9-11 and 2,996 dead.

Or that Tyson bit off more than he could chew…including an ear…in his two humiliating defeats to the lion-hearted Evander Holyfield, which was similar to Bush’s emotionally fueled imperial fever dreams that killed millions in his egregious Iraq War fiasco.

Or that Lennox Lewis badly exposed Tyson’s boxing malfeasance in their lopsided match-up, much like Hurricane Katrina exposed Bush’s true governing incompetence at the cost of 1,833 lives.

Or the humiliation of the last days of their careers, when Tyson fell to the forgettable Danny Williams and Kevin McBride and Bush drove the American economy off the cliff with the housing collapse.

The power of America’s nostalgia induced amnesia is so great that even the moral and ethical atrocities of Tyson’s rape conviction and Bush’s torture and spying programs seem forever lost down the collective memory hole.

Crisis always reveals character, and both Tyson and Bush repeatedly showed their utter lack of it when they needed it most. Meanwhile, intentionally obtuse or cognitively dissonant Americans who deny that fact reveal their own deranged character.

Tyson fanboys on the internet, and Bush cheerleaders in the media, do nothing but reveal their own sycophancy, depravity and lack of integrity when they give voice to their hallucinations and wax nostalgic regarding the alleged halcyon days when Iron Mike ruled the ring and Dubya commanded the West Wing.

The truth is that Americans, in general, and Tyson and Bush fans in particular, can never, and will never, wake up from the delusional, nostalgia-addled, manufactured reality show that is the current American Dream.

The actual reality, that the aging Tyson, a rapist and bully who even at his greatest wasn’t that great, is the perfect symbol of America, a decadent and decrepit empire in steep decline, is much too painful a truth to confront and bear.

On the bright side, if Tyson does come back to fight a real heavyweight and not some fellow geriatric pugilist, he will get knocked out in short order. So, at least he’ll still be able to believe in the contrived fantasy of the American Dream…because as George Carlin once said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you got to be asleep to believe it.”

 A version of this story was originally published at RT.

©2020