Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 24 - The Queen's Gambit

The bad boys of cinema podcasting kick off their 2021 season early by taking their first dive into the waters of television. This episode Barry and I discuss The Queen’s Gambit, the hugely popular Netflix miniseries that is the talk of the town. The topics tackled in this episode include Anya Taylor Joy’s beguiling screen presence, the artistic albatross of bad endings and Barry’s unsavory history hustling little kids at chess.

LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA: EPISODE 24 - THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT

Thanks for listening!

©2020

Chadwick Boseman Saves His Best for Last in the Middling 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which stars Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman and is based upon the August Wilson stage play of the same name, premiered this past Friday on Netflix with much fanfare.

The buzz surrounding the film, which tells the story of legendary blues singer Ma Rainey and her band as they endure a tumultuous recording session, proclaimed that Boseman, the famed star of Black Panther who died of colon cancer this past August at the age of 43, would win a Best Actor Oscar for his final film role.

I went into my viewing of Ma Rainey skeptical of the voracity of Boseman’s supposedly Oscar worthy work. In the wake of the tragic death of an artist, particularly a young one, critics often succumb to sentimentality and overlook skill. I assumed the same was true of critics praising Boseman, who plays Levee, the combustible cornet player in Ma Rainey’s band who’s blessed with prodigious talent and equal ambition.

I also brought my own personal history regarding Boseman’s past acting work to my viewing. I know it is blasphemous to say now…but I ‘ve never been impressed by Boseman as an actor. I always felt he was a safe and comfortable screen presence but lacked charisma as a movie star and depth as an artist.

After finally viewing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which currently boasts a 99% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, I can report two things… critics are right about Boseman, who gives a superb performance, but they are terribly wrong about the film itself, which is thin cinematic gruel.

In fact Boseman’s performance is all-the-more-noteworthy because it overcomes the inept direction and flimsy filmmaking that surrounds it.

Boseman’s death unquestionably brings a profundity to the film that would otherwise be lacking. It’s impossible to watch one of Boseman’s scintillating monologues as Levee where he rants and raves against God, without the uncomfortable acknowledgement that the actor was grappling with his own tenuous mortality at the time of filming, which was about a year before he died.

In the film, Boseman’s usually safe and comfortable screen presence is replaced by a pulsating existential energy that frantically emanates from his every pore. Boseman’s nice guy persona is used as a subversive weapon in Ma Rainey, as it lulls the audience into a false sense of security, and that deception adds a powerful depth and dimension to his character.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie has nowhere near as much meat on its bones as Boseman’s feast of superb acting.

The blame for the film’s failure falls squarely on director George C. Wolfe. Wolfe, a stage director with minimal and dismal film credits, is desperately out of his league on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The film feels rushed and dramatically unmoored. It has the aesthetic of a made-for-tv movie, so much so that I was half expecting, if not hoping for, commercial breaks. It also lacks any narrative rhythm and is as visually stale as it is awkwardly staged.

Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey and she too is garnering critical praise and Oscar buzz, but her performance is forced and ineffective. Davis is an actress that seems to want audiences to like her, and her Ma Rainey lacks genuine grounding because of it, or to put it another way, her Ma Rainey’s bottom isn’t big enough or black enough (in a metaphysical and symbolic sense - not a physical or racial one) to convince.

Davis’s performance, and in turn the film, also suffer greatly because her lip-syncing is so distractingly devoid of any believability or vitality.

It is terribly unfortunate that the work of August Wilson, one of America’s greatest playwrights, has yet to be successfully adapted to cinema. Wilson’s classic Fences hit the big screen in 2016 and garnered similar critical praise but that too felt undeserved and fueled by something other than honest critical assessment.

The truth is that establishment critics often critique racially themed films made by minority directors featuring minority casts using paternalistic kid gloves and on a pronounced curve. For example, critics swooned over the middling and mundane Marvel movie Black Panther.  So I have no doubt that the current critical adulation for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is due to the film’s racial politics rather than its supposed cinematic worthiness.

The reality is that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the height of middlebrow mediocrity, but it will still attract copious amounts of fawning from poseurs and pawns eager to signal their anti-racist virtue. One of the worst consequences of our current racial moral panic is that film and film criticism has become so politically correct and socially delicate as to be rendered artistically irrelevant and intellectually impotent.

Fortunately, those heaping praise and adoration on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom will only reveal themselves to be shamelessly pandering philistines rather than studiously sophisticated cinephiles.

Unfortunately, in these hopelessly woke times this sub-par film is guaranteed to garner a plethora of Oscar nominations, but none will be deserving except for Boseman’s.

The bottom line is that it’s a tragedy that Chadwick Boseman’s greatest performance came in his final role and that it had to happen in such a muddled misfire of a movie as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recoimmendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A very poorly made film, but Chadwick Boseman gives a truly terrific performance - his best ever.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The woke left are demonizing parents and want to abolish the family. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a toddler’s tantrum

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 49 seconds

Children raised in a nuclear family are safer, healthier, happier, and more successful. So, of course, woke jackasses want to abolish it and raise kids in communes, because “parents are tyrants.”

2020 has been a year of pandemics.

The most prominent of these is coronavirus, which has killed over a million people worldwide and wreaked havoc on the global economy. 

But coronavirus isn’t the only pandemic to ravage the globe in 2020 as the pandemic of woke idiocy continues to rage unabated. 

One particularly imbecilic strain of this vicious virus is the anti-family agenda that espouses eliminating the nuclear family.

As a parent and leftist, I find this assault on parents and nuclear families to be the height of self-serving and self-defeating intellectual masturbation.

A perfect example of this mindless mania is a tweet from Noah Berlatsky, a pissant provocateur and philosophical poseur who writes for The Guardian and The Atlantic magazine. Berlatsky whined “parents are tyrants. “parent” is an oppressive class, like rich people or white people. “

He followed that belch into the woke echo chamber with this equally odious one, “There are things you can try to do to minimize the abuse that’s endemic to the parent/child relationship, but it’s always there”.

Apparently someone didn’t change baby Berlatsky’s dirty diaper fast enough and now we all have to deal with the stink.

Sadly, Berlatsky’s buffoonery is not an outlier, as this anti-family mindset is rampant among the woke left. Examples of this absurd agenda being aggressively pushed abound.

Black Lives Matter, the standard bearer for woke, fact-free, emotion-fueled idiocy in 2020, has garnered establishment support and millions in corporate donations not only declaring they want to “abolish police” but also “abolish the family”.

Flagship left-wing publications like The Nation, Vice and Jacobin have all in recent months and years dedicated time and energy to the malignant anti-family cause.

In addition, Sophie Lewis, a self-described “feminist thinker”, which she proves is an oxymoron, has made a name for herself attacking the nuclear family in her book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family.

Lewis, an Oxford educated bullshit artist, uses pretentious language and provocative statements to camouflage her laughably pubescent arguments.

An example of Lewis’ utopianist jackassery is found in her article “The Coronavirus Crisis Shows It’s Time to Abolish the Family”, where her “logical” approach to combat coronavirus is revealed as, “Free all prisoners and detainees now…and dismiss all the workers with full pay so they can…pursue laziness for at least the next decade.”

Lewis likes tilting at windmills as evidenced by her desire to, “denaturalize the mother-child bond…the idea that babies belong to anyone – the idea that the product of gestational labor gets transferred as property to a set of people.”

Lewis further reveals her intellectual obtuseness and foolish anti-family fanaticism by declaring, “…even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing – the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us…It makes us believe we are ‘individuals’”.

Individuals? Perish the thought!

Of course, according to the anti-family left, the answer to the parent problem is that, like Hillary Clinton long ago taught us…it takes a village to raise a child.

While it may very well take a village to satiate Hillary’s husband’s gargantuan sexual appetite, history shows us that communes and communal parenting are never a healthy option for children or society.

For instance, a bevy of high-profile Hollywood stars have grown up in communes and cults where the nuclear family was replaced with a communal approach and it was more ordeal than ideal.

The famed Arquette family, which includes Roseanne, Patricia and David, grew up in a commune, as did Winona Ryder. None of them speak highly of the experience, which included lack of electricity and running water and rampant drug use.

Rose McGowan, as well as Joaquin and River Phoenix, grew up in the communal, ‘free love’ Children of God sect that was rife with child sexual abuse.

McGowan said of the experience, “There’s a trail of some very damaged children that were in this group….I got out by the skin of my teeth.”

Studies show that stepparents or non-biological guardians of children are astronomically more likely to harm children than biological parents.

Yes, there are certainly awful parents in the world who abuse and neglect their own biological children, but Berlatsky bemoaning parental power dynamics and Lewis lamenting gestational labor are, ironically, the intellectual equivalent of a toddler’s tantrum.

Wanting to eliminate the nuclear family because some people have had traumatic experiences is infinitely asinine and embarrassingly infantile as it is akin to demanding that the sun stop rising in the east because you got sunburn.

As any parent will tell you, raising a child is a Sisyphean task requiring a Herculean effort, but it is worth it as study after study shows, growing up in a nuclear family is, contrary to the anti-family left, not an albatross but an advantage in terms of mental, emotional, physical and social health, as well as education achievement and income level.

What all children need are parents who love, comfort, protect and guide them. What these delusional anti-family advocates need is a reality check…and a swift kick in the ass. I’d be happy to deliver both.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

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

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 39 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Documentary 'Room 2806: The Accusation' - Explores the Seedy Side of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Former Poster Boy for the Global Elite

 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes 806 seconds

The docu-mini-series showcases sex, money, power, class, race and gender as it dives deep into the fetid swamp of a controversial 2011 sex assault case in a futile search for truth.

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. An at-times interesting and entertaining exercise, but ultimately and unfortunately, it is never an insightful or truly satisfying experience.

Room 2806: The Accusation, the new four-part documentary mini-series that premiered on Netflix December 7th, tells the twisted tale of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the sexual assault claim brought against him in 2011.

In 2011, DSK was at the zenith of his career. As head of the IMF he had performed admirably during the 2008 financial crisis and now seemed poised to defeat unpopular incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy and become the president of France.

Life was good for the darling of the Socialist Party and of the socialite set, due to his career success and his marriage to the beautiful heiress Anne Sinclair, an accomplished and connected French journalist.

Then DSK went to New York on a business trip and stayed at the posh Sofitel Hotel in room 2806, the presidential suite. This is where, on May 14, 2011, the 62-year-old had a brief sexual encounter with a32-year-old housekeeper, Nafissatou Diallo, right before leaving to catch a scheduled flight.

Diallo, an illiterate immigrant from Guinea, quickly made the claim to hotel security, and then the police, that she was sexually assaulted. In response, NYPD swiftly arrested Straus-Kahn at JFK airport.

And thus begins the tumultuous journey to find out the truth of what actually happened in Room 2806.

Along the way DSK is charged with sexual assault, held in the notorious Rikers Island jail, resigns from the IMF and loses any chance of becoming the French president. In addition, both DSK and Diallo have their lives upturned, backgrounds scoured and are ultimately thoroughly humiliated in the press…and yet the truth still remains elusive.

Room 2806 is like a B-movie or dime store novel in that it is filled with a series of evermore-improbable twists and turns.

Conspiracy theories, not unfounded and not satisfactorily debunked, swirl around the case as French intelligence and their connections with Sarkozy and the Sofitel’s parent company, raise serious questions as to whether DSK was set-up.

There are also shocking revelations about both DSK and Diallo, which leave the viewer dismayed and disoriented, as neither protagonist can be trusted.

The well-paced series uses May 14, 2011, the date of the alleged sexual assault, as the epicenter of the story, but bounces forward and backward in time in an attempt to give more context.

This approach initially humanizes DSK, who, at times, comes across as an impressive and sympathetic figure in this real-life melodrama.

Despite his power and wealth, which usually protect people like him, DSK’s elite social status is instead an incentive for law enforcement and the media to be vicious towards him. As DSK’s licentious proclivities, both past and future, are exposed his friends and supporters claim he’s merely a libertine and lothario rather than a rapacious sexual predator, but that is far too generous an assessment. As the film reveals, DSK is a lecherous, licentious, lascivious and depraved degenerate who is a shameless slave to his own voracious ambitions and appetites.

Unsurprisingly, Daillo is sympathetic…at first. The narrative of the hard working, single parent immigrant preyed upon by an entitled and debauched elite is a compelling one. But there is something off about her…and those feelings of unease are backed up when she’s exposed as being a much more complicated and compromised character than originally portrayed.

As ultimately unlikeable as DSK and Diallo both are, this case attracts a collection of odious secondary characters like dung beetles to a manure pile.

Shakespeare once wrote, “first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”, and this insight is certainly applicable to the DSK case. His lawyers are, not surprisingly considering his enormous wealth and status, the very best in the business. Ben Brafman is one of the most talented and notorious lawyers in New York, and for the right price he quickly slithers to DSK’s defense with fork-tongued aplomb.

Diallo has a pair of lawyers as well, neither of which seem to have a brain between them, and they bend over backwards to aggrandize and embarrass themselves in the documentary.

Then there are the self-serving activists that use the awful case as a platform from which to shout their inanities. There is a black former NYPD officer who is now a race activist who does a cheap Al Sharpton impersonation and screams that Diallo is a victim of racism – even though that is a vacuous claim and there is explicit evidence to the contrary.

Feminists plant their protest flag on the dung heap as well. Some even suggest that the DSK case was the true beginning of the #MeToo movement. This seems a historically tenuous claim, but that is expected from vapid hysterics.

The events documented in Room 2806: The Accusation leave you feeling in despair for humanity and in need of a shower. It also leaves you believing DSK, Diallo, their lawyers, the cops and the parasitical activists, are all vile creatures that truly deserve the pronounced misery of each other’s company.

Little wonder that DSK, now an embittered 71-year-old forced into the shadows, has announced plans to release his own documentary next year, claiming the “time has come for me to speak out (something he declines to do in Room 2806), Is it likely to be more illuminating? I suspect it will simply throw another forkful or two on the steaming dung heap he created in the first place.

In the final analysis, wading through the muck and mire that is the DSK case by watching Room 2806: The Accusation, is at-times, an interesting and entertaining exercise, but ultimately and unfortunately, it is never an insightful or truly satisfying one.

 A version of this this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Mank is a Tale of Old Hollywood - and of our Corrupted Modern Age

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 42 seconds

Hollywood loves stories about Hollywood but Mank doesn’t glamorize Tinsel Town’s golden age but rather reveals the wound festering beneath the mythology…the same wound inflicting modern America.

On its surface, Mank, the new film by esteemed director David Fincher, chronicles the life and times of famed screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, most notably his struggle to write the Oscar winning screenplay for Citizen Kane.

Just below that gloriously photographed black and white surface though, a complex story of class struggle, financial control and political corruption lives, and it is that narrative that makes Mank a story for our time.

Herman Mankiewicz a.k.a Mank, brilliantly portrayed by Oscar winner Gary Oldman, is a disheveled drunkard and degenerate gambler with an undeniable roguish charm. A brilliant wordsmith, Mank’s quick and erudite wit gets him in the good graces of the media mogul William Randolph Hearst, and by extension, the Hollywood heavyweights at MGM, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg.

It is from this privileged perch at the luxurious dining tables of W.R. Hearst and in the offices of L.B. Mayer and Thalberg, that Mank is shown the diabolically deceptive practices and devious machinations of those in power. Mank’s growing discomfort and disgust at the charade of these powerful but hollow men eventually manifests in some alcohol-fueled, but extremely insightful diatribes.

But Mank, ever the slave to his own destructive impulses, is impotent to do anything about these men…until the opportunity to write a screenplay for the “boy genius” Orson Welles comes along.

With Citizen Kane, Mank uses his mighty pen to embarrass and eviscerate the all-powerful Hearst while also extending a middle finger to the repugnant Mayer.

Mank resonates in our current time because like Hearst and Mayer in the time of Citizen Kane, the new generation of decadent robber barons from Wall Street to Silicon Valley (Netflix – the film’s producer and distributor, prominent among them) wield their financial, cultural and political power to dominate and control society from their gilded castles while the rest of us scratch and claw just to stay alive.

In Mank there is a terrific scene where Louis B. Mayer tearfully speaks to a collection of MGM workers, whom he calls family, asking them to take a 50% pay cut in order to save the company. Mayer’s performance in that meeting is better than any acting he financed during his long reign at the movie studio, as he gets the workers to give up their money while he walks away giving up nothing.

That scene speaks to the nefarious political and media narrative of the last forty years since the Reagan (and Thatcher) revolution brought us the unmitigated horrors of financialization and trickle-down economics cloaked in the waving flag of an empty patriotism. It also perfectly encapsulates America since the financial collapse of 2007-08, where a plethora of too big to fail corporations with big bosses receiving huge bonuses got bailed out while working people picking up the tab got financially beaten down and will never recover.

It is the anger over that blatant economic unfairness and injustice that fueled movements as disparate as the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders and even Trump’s rise to power. But as Mank shows us, the game is rigged, as the propaganda mills promise to strangle any working class movement in its crib.

As the last two presidential elections proved, oligarchs and their media minions will relentlessly wield identity politics like a cudgel to bludgeon the working class and cease any chance at any economic change. Divide and conquer has never been so easy as in our current age of manufactured victimhood.

The character Mank embodies the impotent confusion of so many American voters. He is a compulsive contrarian and as much as he loathes the malignant management class he is also wary of labor unions. Intuitively a man of the left, Mank is still clear-eyed enough to see that both sides of the duopoly are thoroughly compromised.

The devil’s bargain Mank makes with the power structure costs him his soul, and Citizen Kane is his attempt at personal redemption and revenge for the little guy. Like the rest of us, all Mank is able to do is take pleasure in his small and ultimately inconsequential victory.

Mank’s triumph with Citizen Kane is public but completely personal, as it garners him an Oscar but leaves the power structure that so infuriates him, unbowed, unbent and unbroken…even to this day.

For proof of this one need look no further than the recent election. Americans were forced once again to choose between two vacuous avatars for the same oligarchical ruling class.

Even in the midst of a pandemic and government forced shut down resulting in an economic holocaust for working class people, both parties in Washington steadfastly refuse to consider universal healthcare, universal basic income, or even stimulus payments but are united in their insatiable desire to fellate the corporate class. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, same as every boss we’ve ever had.

As for Mank, it is a slightly flawed, but thoroughly worthwhile, art house film that boasts some A-list talent, chief among them Fincher and Oldman. For those with the patience to stick with it, Mank does what very few movies attempt to do, never mind accomplish…it tells the uncomfortable, complicated and ugly truth about America and Americans. Bravo.

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A complicated film that pulls no political punches. Gary Oldman and David Fincher flex their consider artistic muscles in this challenging but worthwhile drama.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Media Lie...Even About Peppa Pig

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

THE MALIGNANTLY MENDACIOUS MEDIA ARE SLANDERING POOR PEPPA PIG BY CLAIMING THE SHOW IS SHOCKINGLY VIOLENT

Not even kiddies’ favourite Peppa Pig is safe from media excess, with major outlets claiming that it is shockingly violent. But unraveling the details of this curious story gives clear insight into how deceptive the mainstream media can be.

The media are deliberately misrepresenting a study to stoke a panic over alleged violence in the children’s animated show Peppa Pig. Across the political spectrum the headlines have been absurdly alarming. “ASSAULT ON PEPPA: Peppa Pig and Disney’s Frozen are too violent for Children, experts claim” shrieks the right-wing The Sun, while the left-wing The Independent breathlessly declares, “Peppa Pig: Experts Find Shocking Levels of Violence in Children’s TV Show”.

According to the media it isn’t just Peppa but also Daniel Tiger, The Octonauts, Paw Patrol as well as Toy Story 3 and 4, Frozen, Finding Dory and a handful of other kid shows and movies supposedly deemed too violent.

As a vigilant and diligent parent of a young child that routinely watches Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol, The Octonauts and Daniel Tiger, I find these headlines and their revelations alarming.

The Sun’s and The Independent’s headlines had me deeply concerned that I was allowing my child to be exposed to violent and damaging material via Peppa Pig.

I myself have watched countless hours of these shows with my child and found them to be rather benign and good-hearted children’s programs, so I wanted to learn more about the ‘shocking violence’ that experts discovered of which I was apparently blissfully blind.

According to The Independent, “A new study looking into violence featured in animated series and films found that more than eight moments of pain and brutality were inflicted across a selected range of entertainment aimed at children.”

As I read The Independent story further though, a bunch of red flags popped up. For example, the thin article made a bizarre shift in its closing three paragraphs when it dropped the violence angle altogether in order to inform readers that actress Harley Bird, who voiced Peppa, recently stepped down from the role after thirteen years. I was expecting to read that Ms. Bird had been brutalized while working on the show or had turned into a violent hooligan, but no, the article just ended with that odd whimper of a factoid.

The biggest red flag of all though was that neither The Sun nor The Independent ever linked to the supposed “study of violence in children’s entertainment” they were referencing, nor did they include the name of the journal in which it was allegedly published.

Being the intrepid non-reporter that I am I did what The Sun and The Independent’s actual reporters hoped readers wouldn’t do…I searched for the report.

Upon finding the study in everybody’s favorite magazine, Pain: The Journal of the International Association of the Study of Pain, I was shocked to learn that not only are Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol and Daniel Tiger not viciously violent shows creating serial killers and sociopaths, but that the “study” in question HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH VIOLENCE.

The study is actually titled “The socio-cultural context of pediatric pain: an examination of the portrayal of pain in children’s popular media”.

The study wasn’t investigating “violence featured in animated series and films” but rather how kid’s entertainment presents pain and reactions to pain on-screen.

The banal study concluded, “A narrow depiction of pain was presented in children's popular media, with an overall underrepresentation of pain, numerous maladaptive portrayals of pain, and gender differences in both sufferer and observer responses.”

That is definitely a less sexy headline than “Assault on Peppa Pig!!”

The British and Canadian researchers behind the study were actually trying to understand how to use the power of children’s entertainment to help kids understand regular, everyday pain, and how to be empathetic.

You wouldn’t know that from The Sun or The Independent’s click-bait headline and lazily reported story, which isn’t just meant to garner ad revenue by deceiving viewers but also to gaslight parents and instill in them a growing sense of fear, as well as further undermine, confuse and conflate common language.

For example, making the terms ‘pain’ and ‘violence’ interchangeable, as both media outlets did in this case, is totally in line with the insidious woke culture that distorts language beyond recognition and brazenly and shamelessly declares that, “silence is violence”.

Trust me when I tell you that silence is not violence. Violence is violence. Only someone who has never been punched in the face will tell you that silence and violence are the same thing.

This Peppa Pig story is just another obvious example of the media’s mischievous and malicious mendacity. One can go through the list of much more egregious media lies that had, or potentially could have, much more catastrophic impact than just besmirching poor Peppa Pig.

For instance, the establishment media’s slavishly slanted coverage in the lead-up to the Iraq war, or the propaganda surrounding Syria’s supposed chemical weapons attacks, or the cavalcade of Cold War inspired disinformation regarding Russia…be it alleged interference in the 2016 election, or supposed hacking of power grids, or use of “microwave weapons”.

This manufactured Peppa Pig story is proof that the corporate media aren’t interested in uncovering facts, only in pandering for profit, and that their loyalty is always and every time to money, not to Truth.

The bottom line is this…Peppa Pig is a safe and trustworthy show for kids to watch, but the establishment news outlets of both the left and right are not a safe or trustworthy product for adults to consume.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 11 seconds

IS HILLBILLY ELEGY A TRULY TERRIBLE MOVIE OR ARE LIBERAL CRITICS BLATANTLY BIASED?

The new Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy chronicles life among a dysfunctional white working class Appalachian family and savage reviews from liberal critics has triggered another battle in the culture war.

Hillbilly Elegy, the new film from Oscar winning director Ron Howard, premiered to much fanfare and controversy on Netflix Tuesday.

The film, which stars perennial Oscar nominees Amy Adams and Glenn Close, is based on J.D. Vance’s 2016 autobiography of the same name, and tells the story of how Vance escaped his chaotic upbringing at the hands of his white-working class Appalachian family, most notably his volcanically erratic mother Bev and his hard-edged grandmother Mamaw, and became a Yale Law School graduate.

The book Hillbilly Elegy became a cause célèbre in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election victory because it gave the establishment a glimpse into the misunderstood white working class and poor folk from flyover country that had come out en masse for Trump.

Among the media elite, the shine wore off of Vance and his book pretty quickly, though, as he was labeled too conservative for consumption after having the temerity to label his hometown hillbilly culture as corrosive and self-destructive. Vance’s critique of the Appalachian white working class was just too pro-personal responsibility for the liberal establishment’s tastes.

It is in this context that Hillbilly Elegy has come out in film form and generated a great deal of vitriol and venom from mainstream movie critics.

For example, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe proclaimed it “poverty porn”. Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post called it “almost laughably bad – if it weren’t so melodramatic”. And Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times derisively decried the movie as “an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics”.

These critical eviscerations are not anomalies as the film currently has a dismal 25% critical score review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. There is some pushback though, as the film currently boasts a robust 89% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

In response to the cavalcade of critical denouncements, noted conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted about the film “I've seen "Hillbilly Elegy." Amy Adams and Glenn Close are both terrific. The movie is a well-told family drama. The reason the critics are crapping all over it is simple: the book was treated as humanizing "Trump supporters," and is now a Bad Book™. So the movie is also Bad™.”

My experience of Hillbilly Elegy began when I read and the book back in 2016. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it to be an extremely insightful and compelling account.

Hillbilly Elegy is an important book and it should have been an important movie…but having seen it I can report that it most assuredly is not. Instead it is a maudlin, dramatically obtuse, narratively incoherent, appallingly poorly made and atrociously amateurish cinematic venture.

Director Ron Howard is an artistic eunuch not exactly known for his deft cinematic touch, and he is as ham-fisted as ever on Hillbilly Elegy.  Howard clumsily creates a contrived drama and fumbles the film’s flimsy narrative to such an egregious degree as to be cinematically criminal.

Howard’s visually unimaginative, painfully trite and obscenely shallow approach reduces Vance’s dramatically potent life story into a cinematically flaccid cross between a Lifetime movie, an ABC After-School Special and an anti-drug public service announcement.

As for the acting? Amy Adams is one of the best actresses around, but her performance as the volatile Bev is forced and rings entirely false. Decked out in her oversized ‘mom jeans’, with frizzy hair and sans makeup, Adams is devoid of both subtly and humanity. Adams’ performance is such an over-the-top, one-note caricature it is actually embarrassing.

Glenn Close contrived performance as the foul-mouthed matriarch Mamaw doesn’t fare much better. Both Close and Adams are obviously angling for an Oscar with their ugly-fied, faux-gritty acting, but they end up being uncomfortably shallow and cartoonish in their roles.

Ben Shapiro claiming that Hillbilly Elegy is “well-told” and that Adams and Close are “terrific” only proves that he is either being intentionally contrarian in order to stoke the culture war or he really doesn’t know a goddamn thing about movies and acting. I promise you, Hillbilly Elegy is not the hill(billy) that Ben Shapiro should be willing to die on.

With that said, I have no doubt that liberal critics are gleefully overplaying the very bad hand that is Hillbilly Elegy. If the film were made by a minority director as opposed to a pasty white one, and dealt with black poverty as opposed to poor white people, their criticisms of it would be substantially more delicate and thoughtful.

White liberal critics have long been protective and paternalistic toward black artists and films. Examples of which can be found in the critical reception of Spike Lee’s film Da Five Bloods (2020) and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time (2018). Both movies are dreadful cinematic disasters, but critics fawned over Da Five Bloods and were wholly encouraging of DuVernay’s abysmal film because of its “diversity”.

Hillbilly Elegy could have been treated with the same kid gloves and rose-colored glasses as Lee and DuVernay’s work- but wasn’t, and one can surmise that the white working class subject matter and the conservative politics of the protagonist are a major reason why.

So is Hillbilly Elegy truly that terrible or as Ben Shapiro suggests are liberal movie critics blatantly biased against it?

The answer is definitely…YES…to both.

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Ron Howard at his worst. Just an embarrassingly terrible movie with terrible performances and terrible writing and terrible directing and everything is terrible.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Netflix's The Crown is a Mirror of American Politics

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 33 seconds

Netflix’s acclaimed drama on the British royal family is back, but it feels eerily reminiscent of the trials and tribulations of the ruling class aristocrats running and ruining America.

The Crown, Netflix’s smash hit royal drama, premiered its much anticipated fourth season last week and I dutifully binged watched the whole thing.

The high-quality historical drama, which follows the travails of Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the royals, is exquisitely produced, for the most part gloriously acted, reliably entertaining and somewhat perversely addictive.

But maybe I am suffering from presidential election PTSD, but as I watched The Crown I couldn’t help but be triggered into thinking about the horror show that is American politics….most notably because I simply had no one for which to root.

The Crown, like American politics, is populated almost entirely with villains…wicked, corrupt, cold-hearted, duplicitous, self-serving villains.

On one side we have the royal family, which reminds me of the Democrats. The show, like the establishment media here in the U.S., works hard to humanize these entitled elitists but it is a Herculean task for me to empathize with such a bunch of spoiled, self-absorbed, raging mediocrities.

This collection of modern royals is, like the decrepit and deceitful Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, well past their sell-by date.

The Queen, similar to our soon-to-be-crowned commander-in-chief Sleepy Joe Biden, is an empty vessel completely oblivious to reality, who becomes aggressively indignant when confronted with it.

The rest of the royal clan, the abrasive Prince Philip, the boozy Princess Margaret, the bitter Princess Anne and the depraved Prince Andrew, like the greedy harlots in the halls of American power, are arrogant and entitled knobs born on third base acting like they hit a triple.

Princess Diana (masterfully played by the luminous Emma Corrin), is similar to the Democratic firebrand Alexandra Ocassio-Cortez, as she is a young, pretty, dynamic breath of fresh air injected into the stuffy and stilted establishment.

As Ocassio-Cortez is thrown into the deep end of public life she will face the same existential threat as Princess Diana before her…either bend to the establishment’s will or be broken by it. The Crown shows us that Diana was broken by it, but AOC seems to be leaning more toward bending the knee, betraying her principles and kissing the right backside.

Then there is that silver-spooned sad-sack Prince Charles, who, like woke Democrats, mopes around his completely unearned luxurious lifestyle because he can’t be with the horse-faced women he loves, Camilla Parker-Bowles, but instead has to settle for the stunningly beautiful Diana. If ever there was a man who needed a punch in the face and a swift kick in the ass, it is Prince Charles.

As the indignant and self-pitying Charles gets all fussy over his love life like a baby in a wet nappy, I couldn’t help but think of Don Corleone in The Godfather slapping his weepy nephew Johnny Fontaine and telling him to “act like a man!”, something I’ve wanted to do to the whiny Democrats for the last four years.

On the other side of the ledger, at least this season, is the Iron Lady herself, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson – who is a disappointment in the role), who ruled Britannia from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher perfectly reflects the mindless, malignant and mendacious modern-day Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence.

Thatcher, and her American counterpart Ronald Reagan, were loathsome and diabolical creatures who used flag waving and soaring rhetoric to deceive the masses and lead a conservative revolution that brought about the destruction of the two things it claimed it wanted to conserve – the nation and the family unit.

Most of our major problems of today can be directly traced back to Thatcher and Reagan’s revolution, which unleashed a tsunami of financialization, free trade and muscular militarization that destroyed unions and devastated the working class.

It is symbolically significant that both Thatcher and Reagan later in life suffered from dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease, as their demented approach to governing was fueled by a rapacious myopia, historical illiteracy, selective memory and a relentless lack of any foresight or consideration of consequences.

Republicans (and corporate/Clinton/Obama Democrats) still suffer from Reagan’s dementia, as they are completely incapable of coming up with a bold, new idea or any idea at all. Even Trump, who won in 2016 running against the economic globalism and neo-conservative foreign policy of establishment Republicans, suffered Reagan’s dementia as he unimaginatively governed like the swamp creature he promised to abolish.

Season four of The Crown shows that the royals despised Thatcher, who they thought uncouth and beneath them, just as much as Thatcher despised the poor men that she gleefully sends to war, as well as the working class union men she economically castrates.

The same is true in American politics, as both the Democrats and Republicans claim to be for the workingman but do everything in their power to crush the working class in favor of the investor class.

Even though The Crown triggered my election PTSD, it is a high-quality show I thoroughly enjoyed watching. The thing I liked most about The Crown was that I had the power to turn it off whenever I wanted…unlike American politics, where I am entirely powerless to put an end to the never-ending nightmare.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Trump TV Will Be Biased and Journalistically Depraved...Just Like the Rest of the Mainstream Media

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Trump will be out of the Oval Office but may not leave the spotlight as rumors swirl of a new Trumpian television venture meant to exact revenge on Fox.

Donald Trump has apparently lost the presidential election to Joe Biden, or at least that is what the allegedly benevolent, unbiased and omniscient television networks are telling me.

Trump’s humiliation at losing to a decrepit, dementia-addled Washington war horse and Wall Street whore like Joe Biden is made more acute by the fact that Fox News, Trump’s supposedly staunch media ally, has abruptly turned their back on him. Fox even went so far as to call Arizona, a state still in dispute, for Biden early on election night despite other “liberal” networks refusing to do so.

In the wake of Fox’s treachery, Trump is no doubt thinking, “Et tu, Rupert?”

Much like Trump set his sights on winning the presidency after he was publicly humiliated by searing jokes told at his expense by President Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, rumors now swirl he will focus his fury at Rupert Murdoch and Fox for their seditious election betrayal by starting his own tv network...Trump TV.

Many will scoff at this idea, but under-estimating Trump is how he won the White House in the first place. The truth is that Trump TV is bursting with ratings potential. 

I’m sure Trump could convince his old friend, the bloviater Bill O’Reilly, to come out of forced retirement for The O’Reilly Factor 2.0, and could poach the sycophant Sean Hannity and the boozy belligerent Judge Jeanine to jump the Fox ship and join Trump TV.

But what would make Trump TV a ratings goldmine is that it would undoubtedly become TNN…the Trump Nepotism Network.

Ivanka Trump and her empty-suit husband Jared Kushner would undoubtedly be put in charge of the day-to-day operations of Trump TV and fill the network’s lineup with Trumpian news, entertainment and reality shows that would be the most electrifying line-up in cable television history.

For example, Donald Trump’s youngest son, Baron Trump, could star in a reboot of Silver Spoons, playing the role that made Ricky Schroeder famous back in the 80’s.

Baron could also dip his toe into the fetid swamp of reality tv with Livin’ in Slytherin, a show that chronicles the ups and downs of the Draco Malfoy look-a-like’s life while attending Hogwarts and living at Slytherin House.

Baron’s mom, and Trump’s current wife, the delightfully milfy Melania, could star in an Eastern European accented reboot of Desperate Housewives, and also be the main attraction on the runaway reality hit Almost Real Housewives of Mar-a-Lago.

First-born son Donald Trump Jr. and his gal pal Kimberly Guilfoyle could host The Screaming Hour - Brought to You by Meth Amphetamine, where the odd-couple incoherently shout Trumpian platitudes until they pass out from dry mouth. Another working title for the show is Crossfire on Cocaine.

Guilfoyle, the taut-faced tart who is the former wife of California Governor Gavin Newsome and a one-time Fox News firebrand who was sacked for sexual harassment, could also have her own game show titled Shameless, where she chooses moderately famous men to sleep with in order to desperately hold on to any sort of relevancy.

The intellectually challenged Eric Trump could host his own cooking show that would be a cross between The Great British Baking Show and Fear Factor, titled, Eric Trump Eats His Own Boogers, where Paul Hollywood looks on incredulously as the dim-witted Eric gobbles his own snots.

The only Trump offspring not to have a show on Trump TV will be poor Tiffany Trump, but in keeping with her least-favorite-child status she will, Cinderella style, work at the network in janitorial services.

Venturing out of the Trump family to his administration also opens up some ratings possibilities.

There could be the Kellyanne and George Conway Variety Hour, where, like Sonny and Cher on crack, America’s least favorite couple and their attention seeking teen daughter, Claudia, could bicker and have breakdowns between musical numbers and comedy sketches.

Anthony Scaramucci could host 10 Minutes with the Mooch, which would last 10 minutes - one minute for every day he worked as Trump’s Director of Communications. Scaramucci would spend the 10 minutes trying to figure out which way the political winds were blowing and then licking the proper boots.

Vice president Mike Pence could host his own art show that would be like the wild-haired Robert Norman Ross’ old PBS program The Joy of Painting, except Pence’s version would be The Joy of Ass-Kissing. Pence and his wife Karen could also star in a remake of Will and Grace.

Of course, the biggest draw of Trump TV would be The Donald himself.

Unlike Fox, CNN and MSNBC, which once upon a time gladly milked Trump’s bizarre star power to enhance their own ratings but now actually refuse to cover his speeches or cut away from them mid-sentence, Trump TV will proudly cover all of The Donald’s rabid rallies and rants in their entirety.

The funniest thing about my imagined version of Trump TV is that if this inane network ever actually comes to air it will have just as much journalistic integrity as the phony, flag-waving fools at Fox and the insidious, mendacious, sanctimonious clowns on CNN and MSNBC.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Joe Biden Has Defeated Trump - Meet the New Boss...Same as the Old Boss

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 07 seconds

Biden’s electoral victory has been met with cheers, proving that gullible Americans are eager to get fooled once again.

A few hours ago I was startled by a collective shout that went out across my neighborhood here in Los Angeles. I had no idea what all the noise was about, but people were making quite an exuberant ruckus. After checking the news I quickly realized the cheers were due to the fact that all the networks were officially calling the presidential race for Joe Biden.

I haven’t heard that much happy screaming since a few weeks ago when the Dodgers won the World Series, and before that when the Lakers won the NBA championship.  It is apropos that Angelinos would cheer Biden’s victory the same way they celebrated their sports team’s titles…as all of these events are nothing but a function of empty tribalism and vacuous emotionalism that in the long run don’t actually mean a damn thing.

For the fools here in the City of Angels celebrating Biden’s victory, nothing will fundamentally change in their lives, for good or for ill. They will still have to step over hordes of homeless people and used needles and human excrement as they navigate this sick, venal, miserable third world shithole trying, and usually failing, to scratch out a living and to make ends meet.

Biden’s rapturously received electoral victory is a vacant win for nothing but a stylistic change. The hysterically happy masses around me are overjoyed because Biden isn’t as much of a boor as Trump, not exactly a high bar. That said, Biden will certainly be more of a bore than Trump. 

On substance, Biden is, like the Orange Man liberals love to loathe, a shameless corporatist who will bend over backwards to fill the coffers of the fat cats in board rooms and on Wall Street, all while screwing over poor, working and middle-class people.

Biden’s ascension to the American throne is akin to the dreadful sitcom Two and a Half Men replacing Charlie Sheen with Ashton Kutcher. The obnoxious Sheen and his “tiger blood” were gone, but the show still really sucked…and Kutcher was annoying jerk in his own right.

As far as Biden replacing Trump goes, for people like me, things will only change on the surface and the sitcom that is American politics will still suck.

For instance, those who think public college should be tuition free for the working class and student debt cancelled, meet Joe Biden, the man who was instrumental in getting a bankruptcy bill passed that made it impossible to discharge student debt, thus damning generations to indentured servitude to pay back school loans over-inflated through government interference.

For people who think we should have universal health care, meet Joe Biden, an architect of Obamacare, that insidious bill written by insurance companies that fleeces Americans by forcing people to buy their abysmal product at exorbitant prices under force of law. Biden, similar to Trump, has even promised to veto any universal health care bill that would ever come to his desk.

For those opposed to Wall Street socializing losses while privatizing gains, meet Joe Biden, who will, like Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump before him, populate his administration with nefarious Wall Street shills and despicable devotees of the Goldman Sachs cult who will hungrily devour any taxpayer bailouts that they can get their hands on. 

For peace loving people who think America should be less militaristic, belligerent and bellicose abroad, meet Joe Biden, the man who voted for the Iraq War that killed millions, and is a poodle to the Pentagon with an itchy trigger finger to get tough with America’s adversaries, be they real or imagined, across the globe.

For those who think the drug war and criminal justice system are an abject failure, meet Joe Biden, the man who wrote the 1994 Crime Bill that has given America the dubious distinction of having the highest prison population rate in the entire world.

For working class folks that have repeatedly gotten screwed by Washington’s corporate friendly free trade policies that decimated the manufacturing base in America and eventually led to the rise of Donald Trump, meet Joe Biden, the NAFTA-loving narcissist who pretends to be a man of the people but is really the lap dog of big money interests.

For those who despised Trump for his war on the press, meet Joe Biden, who was vice president for Obama, the man who waged more than a Trumpian rhetorical war on the press, but an actual war on the press by using the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers more times than every other president in U.S. history combined.

For people outraged by Trump putting “kids in cages” as part of his crackdown on illegal immigration, meet Joe Biden, who was vice president during the Obama administration which aggressively deported more immigrants than Trump and who also put “kids in cages”.

For every emotionally triggered simpleton so gloriously giddy over Trump’s demise and Biden’s rise…meet the new boss….same as the old boss. You are all being fooled. Me…I won’t get fooled again.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Trump's Minority Support Sends Identity-Obsessed Woke Poseurs Over the Edge

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 11 seconds

As election night rages on, President Trump has once again defied expectations in Florida and looks set to win the state – fueled, apparently, by unprecedented support from Hispanic and black voters.

Liberals love to denounce Trump as a devout racist, but his potential victory in the Sunshine State (and maybe re-election) thanks to Latino and black voters, is a gloriously resounding rebuke to racial and ethnic identity politics.

The woke reaction to this stunning admonishment has been to let their diversity loving masks fall and reveal their true racist nature by questioning the bona fides of certain Latinos and chastising them for thinking on their own.

For instance, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times editor who created the controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, tweeted after Trump won Florida that she was going to “write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate”.

This was followed by a tweet from commentator Jemele Hill that stated, “If Trump wins re-election, it’s on white people. No one else.”

According to Hannah-Jones and Hill, we don’t need to follow Dr. Martin Luther King’s desire to judge people by the content of their character, instead we must only judge people by the color of their skin and their mindless dedication to the woke cause.

What Jones and Hill are really doing here is putting a twist on Joe Biden’s memorably paternalistic claim to black voters during the campaign that if they consider voting for Trump “they ain’t black!”

For Jones and Hill, if Latinos vote for Trump, they must be those evil “white Latinos”, while the ‘real’ Latinos, like the black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans, think the same way she does. Of course, she has no idea what the breakdown of the Latino vote is, but she is incapable of seeing things through any other filter than black versus white.

One can’t help but wonder what vitriol Jones and Hill privately spew towards the black voters who voted for Trump in Florida and substantially boosted his chances of victory. I assume they think they really “ain’t black”, and if they are black then they must be self-loathing Uncle Toms or some other repulsive slur.

What Trump’s solid showing with Hispanics and blacks in Florida really shows is that the vapid woke pandering on race and ethnicity resonates more with comfortable suburban white voters who want to signal their phony virtue than it does with actual minorities.

It is like the demand from Black Lives Matter in the wake of the George Floyd death for cities to “Defund the Police”. That plays well in tony suburbs where crime isn’t an issue, but in poor, crime infested, inner-city neighborhoods, that message is not going to go over so well.

Another example is Latino voters, many of whom are either immigrants or direct descendants of immigrants. They didn’t come to America thinking it was the racist hellhole that Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project make it out to be. They see America as a glorious opportunity to better themselves and their children.

These Latinos don’t watch the Black Lives Matter riots over the summer and sympathize with the looters, they empathize with the store owners who were having their life’s work destroyed.

The same disconnect is true regarding the incessant claim to victimhood by the proponents of wokeness. Social Justice Warriors demand that minorities embrace victimhood, but you know what? Most people don’t want to be victims, don’t want to be told what to think and don’t want to be seen as avatars for some soulless identity group but rather as individuals.

This is not a black, white, Latino or Asian thing… this is a human thing. Human beings, no matter their race, ethnicity or any other identifying trait, are all unique and want to be seen and treated accordingly.

One would hope that this slap in the face to Social Justice Warriors and the woke brigade would snap them out of the spell of identity politics. But I doubt that happens.

The woke will never take responsibility for their failure. There will be no introspection, no self-evaluation and re-configuration. There will only be more blame.

In fact, I am sure these Latinos who voted for Trump will no doubt become the villains of 2020, replacing Russians from the 2016 election.

In conclusion, Trump’s minority support in Florida speaks volumes about the amazing power of the melting pot of America, and the vicious, venal and vacuous nature of those who live and die by the woke sword of identity politics.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

2020 Election: The Horror Show Meets the Decadent Death Spiral

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 27 seconds

Here are some random dispatches from the shitshow that is 2020 and the turd sandwich that is the election…

SPOOKY SEASON

Halloween, my favorite holiday, has sadly come and gone with barely a whimper due to coronavirus restrictions here in the City of Angels, where Mayor Nepotism furiously banned trick or treating but shrugs when it comes to “protesting”…i.e. rioting and looting. Unfortunately, spooky season isn’t in the rear view mirror just yet though because the real horror show is on Tuesday - Election Day.

THE MONSTER MASH

This election is between two creatures. First there is Biden - Frankenstein’s monster, built in a lab in Washington over the course of a dismal forty-plus year career. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Biden hides in a basement, can’t really speak, has a malfunctioning brain and touches little girls inappropriately. Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, Biden won’t turn on his creator - Washington and Wall St., because he is as corrupt as the day is long.

I DON’T DRINK WHINE

The other creature is Trump, who is a vampire of the highest degree. Like a vampire, Trump is all about satiating his immediate desires and impulses. Like Dracula, Trump acts like low-class royalty with a crumbling real-estate empire (Carfax Abbey was a shithole - and so was Dracula’s dilapidated Castle!) and has an army of Renfieldian sycophantic minions who slavishly do his bidding. And also like Dracula, he feeds on humans…except in Trump’s case it is on human attention. Trump gorges himself on attention and has transformed the public, friend and foe alike, into slaves who react to his every act or utterance - no matter how absurd, thus injecting attention - his lifeblood, into his veins.

What is so striking to me about our current time is how thoroughly the populace has been inducted into this Vampyric Cult of Trump….and it isn’t his supporters I am talking about. The anti-Trump people…be they butt-hurt establishment Republicans or absolutely anyone on the left, are the ones who are totally under the sway of the monster they love to loathe.

It is utterly astonishing how obsessed Trump’s foes are with him. Every liberal and moderate Republican I know hates him with the fury of a thousand suns…but they never stop thinking or talking about him. Trump dominates American consciousness like no other person, president or otherwise, before him.

I know scores of liberals who are literally physically repulsed by the sight and sound of Trump but still religiously and masochistically watch every one of his speeches, debates or rallies. It is the strangest sort of masturbatorial self-harming imaginable. And accompanying this Trump addiction is TDS - Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is the most fervent pandemic ravaging the country today. Trump Derangement Syndrome has real world consequences as it turns once rational people into emotionally unstable and logic impaired lunatics. If I had a nickle for every time Trump made some statement that liberal friends of mine actually agreed with, but because Trump said it they actually change their minds to embrace the polar opposite belief, I’d be a millionaire.

UNDEAD VS RE-ANIMATED

I have stayed as far away from this election and its media coverage as I could. I have not watched a single second of any of the conventions, debates, speeches or rallies. I have not watched a second of cable news, or any other news, since coronavirus broke in the Spring. I have basically stopped reading op-eds in all of the major newspapers I peruse everyday because they are so dreadfully predictable.

The only thing I have watched is political entertainment (although all politics is entertainment, but that is a discussion for another day) like the abysmal Saturday Night Live, Bill Maher and John Oliver - and I’ve only done that because I have to for my work.

Having been in this election coverage quarantine has given me a unique perspective that is devoid of Trump triggering and fueled not by animosity but genuine curiosity. This curiosity has led me to the most basic of questions…can the nefarious Nosferatu of Trump be destroyed by the Biden Frankenstein’s monster? In other words, can the undead be defeated by the re-animated?

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE JOKER

As long time readers know, I have a wave theory…the Isaiah-McCaffrey Wave Theory (IMWT) that uses social, cultural, economic and historical data points to measure trends in order to predict public behavior.

The IMWT accurately predicted the 2016 election. In trying to use it to predict the 2020 Democratic nomination, it was wrong - or more accurately…I was wrong in interpreting the timeline. The data in 2019 and early in 2020 clearly indicated two things…that there would be tremendous civil unrest and upheaval ahead, and that an outsider candidate would be successful in 2020.

The unrest certainly happened…the outsider candidate did not…at least not in the Democratic primary.

As for the unrest….in my October 7, 2019 review of Joker, I wrote, “Joker is unnerving to mainstream media critics because it shines the spotlight on the disaffected and dissatisfied in America, who are legion, growing in numbers and getting angrier by the hour. As I have witnessed in my own life, the rage, resentment and violent mental instability among the populace in America is like a hurricane out in the Atlantic, gaining more power and force as every day passes, and inevitably heading right toward landfall and a collision with highly populated urban centers that will inevitably result in a conflagration of epic proportions.”

I ended that review by writing “Joker is a mirror, and it reflects the degeneracy, depravity and sheer madness that is engulfing America. Joker is an extremely dark film, but that is because America is an extremely dark place at the moment.”

In the light of what has happened thus far in 2020, those observations from the Fall of 2019 seem prescient.

According to the IMWT, Joker was the most important film of 2019, as it was the only film to be in the top ten in domestic box office and nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. Joker was despised by establishment critics, but that was because they hated the uncomfortable truth about what was brewing just beneath the surface of America.

Now of course, being victims of their own sub-conscious and the collective unconscious, these same elites cheer the rioting, looting and violence in the streets because they think it is righteous. The angry clowns burning down Gotham in Joker, which elite critics despised, felt the same way.

The second most important film from 2019 was Parasite. Parasite won a remarkable four Oscars, Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Parasite was the ultimate outsider. It is a Korean film, and, like Joker, directly addressed class dissatisfaction and violence as a result of that class divide.

On October 14, 2019, I wrote in my review of Parasite, “Parasite is a brilliant examination of the frustration and fury that accompanies being at the bottom of the social rung in a corrupt and rigged capitalist system. The only way to get ahead and get out of the prison of debt, and it is a prison, is to lie, scheme and cheat. If that means throwing other poor people under the bus, then so be it.”

I concluded my review by writing, “My recommendation is to go as quickly as you can to the art house and see Parasite…it is that good. And after that, head to the cineplex to see Joker…again, and then when you get home watch Shoplifters (I see it is now available on the streaming service HULU)…because they are that good too. If you want to know what is coming for America and the world, and why, go watch those three movies.”

I stand by that review…and the one of Joker. It is worth noting that the titles of those two films, Joker and Parasite, would be a perfect starter set for a collage of buzzwords to describe Trump.

THE OUTSIDER WITH THE INSIDE TRACK

As for the 2020 election, what troubles me…and has troubled me since Biden’s selection as the Democratic nominee, is that, as the success of these two films, Parasite and Joker, clearly represent, the fundamentals of the IMWT haven’t changed much, if at all. They still point, very clearly, to an outsider winning the election. But while Biden is certainly out of office, he is the consummate Washington insider, and is selling himself as such

On the other hand, Trump’s greatest political accomplishment is that he has been president for four years and has still managed to maintain his status as an outsider. The political and Washington establishment hate him. The media hate him. The elites across the board hate him. Trump, despite his residence at the White House, is the archetypal outsider…and that should be disconcerting to those who want to see him lose.

I should disclose at this point that I will not be voting for either Biden or Trump. I have never voted for any Republican or Democratic candidate, and considering the shit show on the ballot, I am not going to start this year.

With that said…the signs in the IMWT do currently point to Trump winning re-election. I know this is aggressively contrary to conventional wisdom and the polls and the media coverage. But the theory says what it says even if it isn’t saying it nearly as strongly as it did in 2016.

Maybe the theory is wrong, that is certainly a possibility as this year has been an odd one in which there is a paucity of cultural data due to the film industry essentially being shut down due to the coronavirus. It is very difficult to measure movements in public sentiment through box office receipts when people can’t go to the movies.

That said, what little data we do have for 2020 does lean towards Trump. Without getting into the weeds on all of it, just consider that the number one film at the U.S. box office this year is Bad Boys for Life. That is such a pro-Trump title it could be his campaign slogan.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of the IMWT just because it can be pretty tedious, but if Trump does win I will write a separate article detailing all of it. If Biden wins, I will eat my crow and go back to the drawing board.

ANECDOTAL

In early August I thought it was impossible for Trump to win. The pandemic was raging, the economy collapsing, the country awash in civil unrest. In addition, I knew absolutely no one who was voting for Trump, and like famed film critic Pauline Kael, I thought, how can Trump win if no one I know is voting for him?

Then I started making some calls and reaching out to people from across the country and most specifically in swing states. The anecdotal information I got from these discussions was eye-opening.

The word on the street…again entirely anecdotal…was that Trump had a large groundswell of support in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Surprisingly, I was also hearing a lot of anecdotes about Latinos being strong Trump supporters.

Of course, anecdotal evidence is not worth a damn, but I found it striking how vociferous the pro-Trump sentiment seemed to be. I definitely heard from people who were voting for Biden too, but none of them were voting FOR Biden, only against Trump - once again highlighting how Trump dominates the collective consciousness.

UNIMAGINABLE TRUMP

Trump currently being the center of the cultural universe has created a situation where it is impossible to imagine him winning while simultaneously impossible to imagine him off of center stage. This is Trump’s power and his greatest asset…he forces you to feel forcefully about him…be it love or hate. And by doing so, makes himself psychologically indispensable.

Everything that is said or done nowadays is said or done in response to Trump. He is the straw that stirs the drink, as well as the glass that contains it and the concoction within it.

Trump is like coronavirus…he is everywhere, so much so that it is impossible to remember a time before the disease descended upon us. Everyone yearns for the time before but few can remember it. The myopia brought about by both coronavirus and Trumpism (and TDS) brings with it a suffocating paranoia and ever increasing delirium.

This is another reason why I think Trump will win…and that is because the entirety of our media suffer from this Trump/coronavirus myopia, paranoia and delirium, and therefore have a totally distorted perspective on reality here in America.

The media hate Trump so much but they desperately need him. Trump is their lifeblood just like they are his.

NAME THAT COUP TUNE

I have noticed something very disconcerting in the months leading up to election day, and that is that the media have been amplifying voices and narratives that seem eerily familiar to me. The voices and narratives highlighted talk incessantly about Trump stealing the election, not leaving office if he loses, and doing all sorts of nefarious authoritarian things.

One of the most repeated claims I hear is that even if Trump wins on election night, he isn’t really the winner. That it will take weeks and maybe a month to figure out who won. This is accompanied by claims that Trump will declare himself the winner on election night as part of his plan to steal the election.

Why I find all this unnerving is because this is so blatantly taken from the CIA’s playbook when they run a coup in Latin America, South America or Eastern Europe. A brief perusal of the recent coup in Bolivia where Evo Morales was ousted is a prime example.

The intelligence community is gunning for Trump no less than they went after Kennedy, and I think they aim to steal the election from him. I know most readers, particularly the liberal ones, think the exact opposite, that Trump is going to steal the election, but that is also part of the CIA’s mind game.

The intelligence community’s fingerprints are all over multiple anti-Trump operations from the get-go…be it the farcical Russia-gate or Ukraine-gate or the multitude of other scandals plaguing this inept administration. This is not to say that Trump is some squeaky clean scapegoat, it is to say that the intelligence community is actively working to undermine and, in a 21st century way…politically assassinate/eliminate him.

I don’t like Trump…and in fact have despised him from way back in the 80’s when he first started selling his bullshit in public. But that doesn’t mean I will turn a blind eye when the intelligence community is running disinformation and destabilizing operations within its own country.

When stories driven by anonymous sources come to the forefront declaring that USPS mailboxes are being removed, and Russians are penetrating voter rolls and the winner on election night isn’t the winner, understand that this is CIA manipulation through and through.

Keep your eyes and ears open on election night and in the days and weeks following…the game is on and will be hiding in plain sight.

RIOT TIME

If Trump wins…this country will lose its mind and you can expect an unprecedented and massive amount of rioting, looting and violence in the streets of American cities both big and small. These riots will be epic and make the George Floyd riots seem like a church picnic.

If Biden wins, there will be only sporadic rioting…like after a team wins a championship. People will celebrate, it will get out of hand and shit will get looted. Whereas if Trump wins…expect volcanic and violent chaos for weeks and months on end. And expect the media and elites to endorse and support this violence and chaos just like they did over the summer.

As for Trump supporters rioting in the wake of an electoral defeat…I don’t think that will happen. Trump supporters are not in urban areas, for the most part, which makes it difficult to gather en masse to riot.

CONCLUSION

Biden is selling an image of America (and himself)…gentle, neighborly, soft-spoken…that is a lie. And ironically, Trump is selling the truth. Trump is the manifestation of the madness that has descended upon America. This is a narcissistic nation of bullies and blowhards, cowards and con-men. Trump is not what America hopes to be, or what it deludes itself into thinking it is…he is simply the embodiment of America’s reality. This is why he will win. And even if he loses, that won’t change the reality of America, only the power of its delusions.

And understand, Biden is not a “return to normal” as there is no “return to normal”…only getting used to the new normal. A Biden presidency will be America’s dementia made manifest. This election…even if Biden wins…will change absolutely nothing. The dye is cast…the worm has turned…the American experiment, the American Empire, and with it its house of cards economy…are disintegrating. This country is in a decadent death spiral and no election, and particularly not one between two elderly, mental defectives who even in their primes were sub-mediocrities, like Trump and Biden, will alter that trajectory.

This election - which like every election of my lifetime has been dubbed the most important election of all time, is nothing but a vacuous pissing contest between oblivious elites eager to see who gets to captain the Titanic.

©2020

What Killed Michael Brown? Documentary: A Review

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A must-see new documentary that eviscerates the mainstream narrative on race in America and insightfully reveals the manipulations and machinations that distort modern-day race relations.

What Killed Michael Brown? is the most important documentary of the year. The film, which is exquisitely directed by Eli Steele and gloriously written and narrated by famed conservative black intellectual Shelby Steele, takes a deep dive into the tangled web of race in America through the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014.

From the get go the movie jumps out at you, not with cinematic bombast but with a subtle brilliance. The opening title sequence uses the same distinct font as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and by so doing lets viewers know it is unabashedly challenging popular myth.

This film is a searing, scintillating and staggering examination of race in America, but make no mistake, it is not some emotionalist screed or partisan polemic, it is a thoughtful, reasoned and measured commentary.

Shelby Steele, the film’s narrator, is armed with an impressive background in civil rights, a towering intellect and a monumental mastery of language, which allows him to confidently march viewers through the maze and minefield of race without ever misplacing a step.

Steele frames the American conflict over race as a battle between “poetic truth” and “objective truth”. Poetic truth is a distorted and partisan version of truth and is used by race hustlers and charlatans like Reverend Al Sharpton and former Attorney General Eric Holder, to paint Michael Brown as an innocent victim and noble martyr for the cause.

This poetic truth conflates present with the past, which results in the tragedy of Michael Brown being transformed into a continuation of slavery’s violence and Jim Crow era lynching by depraved whites.

Through this paradigm, Michael Brown becomes all black people, and all black people become Michael Brown.George Floyd

The establishment media and racial activists embrace this poetic truth because their objective is coercion, not reason.

This version of truth does two critically destructive things, it gives blacks an identity through victimization, and it gives whites a way to assuage their racial guilt.

As Steele explains in the film, “white guilt became black power”. This dynamic set up a vicious cycle where blacks use victimhood to exploit white guilt, and whites steal agency from blacks in order to assuage said guilt. Therefore the learned helplessness of blacks feeds the self-centered, narcissistic paternalism of whites and vice versa.

As Steele insightfully declares, “humans never use race except as a means to power…never an end, always a means. “ This is contrasted by the vision of Steele’s working class, minimally educated father who grew up under Jim Crow and fervently “favored character over race as a means to power.”

As seen in Ferguson in 2014 and in recent months all across America, racial anger has become ritualized and choreographed. Grievance is claimed without evidence and protest encouraged with no good faith it will lead to anything.

Whether it be Michael Brown, George Floyd or Brianna Taylor, these deaths are seen less as tragedies and more as opportunities.

The film highlights Al Sharpton as one of the more aggressive opportunists and as the epitome of the race grievance peddler. Reverend Al’s mendacious model is now used by Black Lives Matter and their ilk, who are just as intellectually and morally dubious as their duplicitous mentor.

Unlike the extraordinarily successful and morally impeccable civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., which exposed its opponents as devoid of moral authority, BLM and Sharpton are themselves morally bankrupt.

As the film points out, none of these opportunists are interested in the development of black people or communities, but in “justice”, and their definition of “justice” is amorphous, ever expanding and rooted entirely in emotionalism and greed.

Steele uses the immigrant owned convenience store in Ferguson where the Michael Brown tragedy began, as proof of the absurdity of the demand for alleged “justice”.

The mob demands the store owners shut down for three days on the anniversary of Brown’s death as well as a whole host of other demands. The owners acquiesce, but it is never enough. Once one demand is fulfilled, a new and more egregious one sprouts up…until finally the mob is clamoring for the store owners to literally give away their store to protestors.

Besides the movie’s robust intellectualism, it is also exceedingly well made, and like its soulful and melancholy jazz soundtrack, never loses its pace or rhythm.

In a bizarre twist, considering the high quality filmmaking on display, Amazon first refused to allow What Killed Michael Brown? to run on its streaming service, claiming it “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations”.

It’s ironic that major corporations like Amazon are now emphasizing black artists but when those artists don’t toe the establishment line on race, they are told to sit at the back of the bus.

Thankfully, after much public pressure, Amazon has now relented and is allowing the film to stream for purchase on their service. But this is not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last time that mainstream gatekeepers try to silence truth tellers.

In conclusion, What Killed Michael Brown? is mandatory viewing because it is an intellectually vibrant, finely crafted piece of work that brazenly and bravely reveals the uncomfortable reality of race in America today. SEE IT NOW!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

America's Forgotten: A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. The scathing but flawed documentary is worth seeing to challenge any pre-concieved notions on the subject of illegal immigration.

New Documentary ‘America’s Forgotten’ Tells the Illegal Immigration Story the Establishment Media Ignores

America’s Forgotten is a new documentary from filmmaker Namrata Singh Gurjal that exposes the fetid swamp that is illegal immigration into the U.S.

The film has been shunned by mainstream distributors (like Netflix) but has still generated a good deal of interest because Gurjal, an Indian immigrant and registered Democrat, takes direct aim at Joe Biden and Democrats for their immigration policies which she believes lead to catastrophe for illegal immigrants and chaos in America.

The film examines the complex topic through four personal stories. These narratives focus on Gurpreet – a little Indian girl who died trying to cross the Southern border, Maria, a Mexican woman who runs a gauntlet of extortion and rape to illegally immigrate, Sabine Durden-Coulter, whose adult son Dominic – a legal immigrant from Germany- is killed by an illegal immigrant in a drunk driving accident, and Jonathan Decoster, a native born former Marine who lives on the streets of Los Angeles.

These four stories show that Americans are good people but that their “misplaced compassion” toward illegal immigrants leads to policies that actually increase illegal immigration – which is extremely dangerous for both the immigrants and America.

Politically and philosophically, the film is spot on and tells a forceful story that has been shamelessly blacklisted by the establishment media.

The movie exposes the fact that the only people who benefit from illegal immigration are coyotes, cartels and corporations. The coyotes exploit illegal immigrants for money, cartels smuggle people and drugs across the porous border and corporations gleefully profit from the immigrant’s cheap labor.

Those egregiously harmed by illegal immigration are the exploited immigrants themselves and the forgotten poor and working class in America.

The film reveals that, in contrast to common perception, illegal immigrants are often not the poor, tired and hungry running from persecution in third world nations, but rather are middle class foreigners paying $5,000 to $15,000 from Central America, $50,000 from Europe or Africa, and $50,000 - $75,000 from India, to chase the dream of a pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow.

One of the most interesting parts of the film though is about the Iraq war vet, Jonathan Decoster. The movie uses Decoster to tell the story of how immigration decimates the poor and working class here in America by diverting resources, lowering wages and eliminating opportunity. Decoster’s despair turns into opioid addiction and ironically, he heads to the Mexican border to find the lowest prices for heroin.

To the film’s credit it highlights some stunning and disturbing facts, such as at least one-third of female illegal immigrants will be sexually assaulted on their journey, and that by percentage non-citizens far outpace native citizens in terms of benefits they receive despite paying far fewer taxes.

America’s Forgotten doesn’t just expose the problem of illegal immigration but offers a solution. The film contends the blueprint for a safe and fair immigration system that works for both immigrants and natives is the Bracero Program, which was a guest worker program that thrived from the 1940’s until 1965.

That type of program seems to be a logical solution to the scourge of illegal immigration that harms American workers and immigrants alike, but emotion has long ago replaced logic on this polarizing and partisan issue.

And that leads to one of the things that bothered me about America’s Forgotten…emotionalism. The mainstream media deceives Americans by emotionally manipulating them regarding the illegal immigration issue. They tug on American heartstrings and Americans predictably react with “misplaced compassion”.

Unfortunately, America’s Forgotten uses the same tactic, exploiting the grief of Ms. Durden-Coulter, the pain of Maria and the despair of Jonathan Decoster, in order to make its points. That doesn’t mean those points are invalid, it just rubs the wrong way because whenever there is a naked appeal to emotion, there is also an appeal to discard reason.

I also struggled with the film’s participatory style, which is the same style Michael Moore uses to great affect. This results in director Gurjal being the movie’s protagonist, driving the story from her personal perspective. The problem with Gurjal is that her voice, which narrates the entire story, is grating and weak, and she simply isn’t a compelling or commanding enough presence to carry this urgent story.

Another problem is that the movie is very poorly produced. There are technical glitches throughout, most notably with the sound, that make it seem like an amateur endeavor, and frustratingly that undermines the film’s strong thesis.

At the beginning and end of America’s Forgotten, a message comes on the screen informing viewers that due to fear of political reprisals, the crew has all agreed to work anonymously. The members of the sound team certainly dodged a bullet on that one.

In truth, Gurjal and her crew are wise to fear reprisals, as the powers that be in Hollywood, including the malicious middle management class, are extremely partisan and relentlessly petty. I have no doubt that Gurjal’s Hollywood career is now essentially over before it ever really had a chance to begin.

In conclusion, if you want to see the illegal immigration story the media don’t want you to see, rent America’s Forgotten (available on Vimeo, SalemNow and iScreeningRoom). I’m not sure in our polarized political era it can change any minds, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t telling a very ugly truth.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Chris Pratt in Cancel Culture Crosshairs

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

Chris Pratt is in the cancel culture crosshairs for imaginary crimes against woke dogma

The movie star has kept silent about his political beliefs, but the wizards of wokeness think they can read his mind and believe he is an evil Trump supporter.

Chris Pratt made a name for himself getting chased by dinosaurs in the Jurassic World franchise films, but the woke are now out to get him for allegedly having what they deem to be the political and cultural beliefs of a caveman.

Pratt originally came to fame as the lovable lug Andy Dwyer on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, and went on to movie stardom as the leading man in the Jurassic World, Guardians of the Galaxy and The Lego Movie franchises. Unfortunately he is now squarely in the cancel culture crosshairs of the woke twitter mob for potentially being a secret, homophobic, Trump supporter.

This Pratt incident began when tv writer Amy Berg posted pictures of the four famous Chrises - Chris Evans, Chris Pine, Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt, on twitter and said “one has to go”.

In response, the rapacious raptors of woke twitter attacked Pratt – claiming the star’s Twitter bio  ‘radiated homophobic White Christian supremacist energy’.

Pratt’s bio that sparked that comment reads, “I Love Jesus, My wife and family! Seahawks fanatic, MMA junky!”  The horror. The horror.

This Pratt episode is funny because while he is known for dinosaur movies, it is the woke who are acting out of their lizard brains as the evidence of Pratt being homophobic and a white Christian supremacist is…well…entirely non-existent.

Last year after actress Ellen Page attacked Pratt on twitter for being a member of an “infamously” anti-LGBTQ church, Pratt responded, “It has recently been suggested that I belong to a church which ‘hates a certain group of people’ and is ‘infamously anti –LGBTQ.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. I go to a church that opens their doors to absolutely everyone.”

Of course, just because an emotionalist buffoon like Ellen Page says something doesn’t make it so, as she famously once gave a hysterical speech on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert decrying the homophobia and racism in America that led to the “attack” on Jussie Smollett. That claim that has not held up particularly well.

The lack of evidence regarding Pratt’s homophobia hasn’t deterred the twitter mob from marking Pratt for termination though, which is ironic since Pratt’s father-in-law is former Republican Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, the original Terminator.

The other thing that seems to have galled the tiny Torquemadas of twitter is Pratt’s ambiguous political beliefs.

Even though Pratt has never declared he supports Trump, the maniacal mob assumes he does because he also hasn’t said if he supports Biden. Although Pratt’s wife, Katherine Schwarenegger, has publicly stated she will be voting for Biden.

The cancel culture clan point to Pratt’s not attending an upcoming Avengers fundraiser for Biden, and that he was also once photographed by a paparazzo wearing a Gadsden Flag t-shirt that said “Don’t Tread on Me”, as iron-clad proof of the star’s evil political intentions, but this seems like a short cut to thinking.

Pratt’s lone, unambiguous statement on politics, besides his contribution of $1,000 to Obama’s campaign in 2012, was in 2017 in Men’s Journal where he said, "I really feel there's common ground out there that's missed because we focus on the things that separate us…. I don't feel represented by either side." What a monster!

The biggest issue with all of this nonsense is that people are furious not because of anything Pratt has said or done, but because he hasn’t said or done anything. Pratt isn’t going to a Biden fundraiser or a Trump fundraiser or a Groot fundraiser or a Thanos fundraiser…he isn’t going to any fundraisers at all!

The idea that the mental midget McCarthy-ites on woke twitter want to cancel Pratt because he said and did nothing…is absurd to the point of madness.

Chris Pratt has graciously kept his politics private, unlike a host of other approval-addicted actors yearning for 15 more minutes of fame, and he shouldn’t be excoriated for imagined beliefs that people project onto him. Pratt should only be judged by what he does and what he says in life.

For example, judge Pratt on his further response to Ellen Page’s baseless anti-LGBTQ claim,

“My faith is important to me but no church defines me or my life, and I am not a spokesman for any church or group of people. My values define who I am. We need less hate in this world, not more. I am a man who believes that everyone is entitled to love who they want free from the judgement of their fellow man.”

He then wrote, “Jesus said ‘I give you a new command, love one another,' This is what guides me in my life. He is a God of Love, Acceptance and Forgiveness. Hate has no place in my or this world.”

That statement speaks glorious volumes about the quality and worth of Chris Pratt as a human being.

The recent unwarranted vilification of Pratt speaks volumes too, not about him, but about the vapid, vacuous and venal villains partaking in it.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Pratt’s acting…but this whole twitter Pratt attack has left me admiring the man for his groundedness and humility.

The bottom line is Chris Pratt seems like a genuine and decent guy and his detractors seem like vile and repugnant twitter tyrants.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Disney's New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

As the insatiable woke beast runs rampant across our culture, the category of things deemed offensive becomes ever more bloated, meaning an increasing number of classics are now in danger.

If you are anything like me you have been losing copious amounts of sleep worrying that Disney’s content warning for racism that runs before some of their classic animated films like Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan, Dumbo, Jungle Book and The Aristocrats, wasn’t long-winded enough.

Well, thanks to the geniuses at everybody’s favorite frozen anti-Semite’s entertainment mega-corporation, we can all rest easy because they’ve attached a new disclaimer to these allegedly offensive films.

The old content warning was first posted last November and stated, “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”.

Disney’s updated content warning is the polar opposite of the gloriously concise and resolutely mundane original. The new disclaimer reads,

“This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.

Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe.”

I can’t remember who it was, but some jerk once wrote, “brevity is the soul of wit”…well, if brevity is the soul of anything than the Winston Smith wannabe who wrote this atrocious piece of Human Resources porn is as soulless as they are spineless and brainless.

What makes the verbosity of this woke monstrosity all the more hysterical is that the kids who might be trying to watch Disney’s talking animal cartoons either won’t be able to read it at all, and if they can, they sure as hell won’t understand it.

The other thing of note about this disclaimer is that it is absolutely unnecessary as there was no huge groundswell to update the old content warning by making it more wordy and less coherent.

What Disney is actually doing with this new content warning is shamelessly signaling its corporate virtue and trying to appease the woke beast rampaging relentlessly and maniacally across our culture. This beast has an insatiable appetite for outrage and when none appears organically, the woke manufacture some to feed it.

Like an annoying software update, Disney’s updated content warning will no doubt soon need yet another update. The slippery slope of political correctness will force Disney to expand its definition of ”offensive” material and bloat the category of films needing these self-serving content warnings.

Recent history has taught us that the road to woke perdition is never ending. No gesture or change will ever be enough for the p.c. mob. This results in content warnings needing perpetual updates to acknowledge sins of commission, then sins of omission – such as “we are sorry that Dumbo is not centered on characters of color or from the LGBTQ community”, then the sin of too many cis-gendered white characters, or too many white voice actors, and on and on and on…until finally the woke noose tightens enough to suffocate all of entertainment history.

For example, Song of the South(1946) is a controversial Disney classic that depicts a black character, Uncle Remus, as content with life in the cotton fields. Song of the South currently has no content warning or disclaimer…and that’s because Disney has flat out banned it. It isn’t on video, DVD or streaming. It is lost down the memory hole, which is where the woke slippery slope inevitably leads.

The problem for Disney is that through the lens of wokeness all things appear “problematic”, and this means Mickey Mouse may very well have to sacrifice his cash cow core film canon on the altar of political correctness to appease the woke beast. This will be “get woke, go broke” on steroids.

You may think this far-fetched, but if you doubt the woke slope is that slippery, consider the recent chilling example of the word “preference”.

In last week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings Amy Coney Barrett mentioned the term “sexual preference”. In response Senator Mazie Hirono excoriated her for that term claiming it was “offensive” to the LGBTQ community.

That morning “sexual preference” was an entirely acceptable phrase, by lunch it was deemed “homophobic”, and by sundown it was so verboten that Merriam-Webster had literally changed its definition to describe it as “offensive”.

As the speed of history increases, so will the woke over-reaction to it. It starts with content warnings on cartoons and Gone With the Wind…but how much of the entertainment we enjoy today will tomorrow get a content warning and by the end of the week get the Song of the South memory hole treatment? The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy are no doubt already on the endangered species list.

Our civilization used to rely on outrage fatigue to cool the embers of irrational and emotionally driven furies, but among the woke, outrage ossification has set in like intellectual rigor mortis. It is those of us in opposition to the vacuity of political correctness that now suffers from fatigue…and as Patton once said, “fatigue makes cowards of us all”.

My warning of discontent is this…the woke beast slouching toward Bethlehem, via Hollywood, Washington and corporate America, is relentless, consistent, deliberate and insatiable, and in our battle against it we need to screw our courage to the sticking place…because failure is too culturally catastrophic to contemplate.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Spitting Image: The Satirical British Puppet Show is Back - Here's a Review

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

After a 24-year absence the show doesn’t always hit the mark, but thankfully it also never pulls any punches.

The first two episodes of Spitting Image, which were aired on BritBox in the U.K. on October 3rd and October 10th, were funny but at times uneven as the creative’s fought to find their sea legs in the stormy waters of modern day comedy. 

Thankfully the born again show, despite its flaws, is just as relentless and ruthless in its comedy takedowns as the original. The humor isn’t always uproarious but it’s certainly biting and interesting because it’s simultaneously heady and gratuitously base.

The first episode, which featured some scathing mocking of Prince Harry, Trump, Boris Johnson and his advisor Dominic Cummings, is the better of the two, but the second episode had some notable highlights as well.

Trump and Boris Johnson are the main targets of the resurrected Spitting Image’s comedic fire, not surprisingly since they are in power and are grotesque caricatures all on their own even before ever being made into puppets.

In the first episode Trump is ridiculed for being the blowhard that he is, with a recurring theme being his arsehole, which looks like a repulsive creature out of Ridley Scott’s Alien, does all his late night tweeting for him.

The first episode also has Prince Harry literally cutting off his nose – maybe to spite his face, and lamenting his failure to succeed on his own in Los Angeles as he utters the spectacularly funny line, “I’ve tried every career there is – prince and Hitler!”

Other targets are Disney’s woke preening in the form of a black baby Yoda, Lewis Hamilton’s social justice hypocrisy and Greta Thurnburg’s shrieking and shrill environmentalism.

The second episode rakes Trump and BoJo over the comedy coals as well, the best instances being when Trump is fine after catching a case of coronavirus but coronavirus suffers greatly when it catches a case of Trump, and when Boris’s scatterbrained satellite navigation system drives a confused couple off of a cliff.

The very best scene in the second episode though is when Greta Thurnburg reluctantly goes to an English soccer match and surprises herself by getting really into it. Afterwards she becomes very Greta about it as she laments, “The referee has stolen my childhood with his reckless decisions. I must save West Ham!”

A reliably funny recurring bit in both episodes is the struggle of the distinguished Sir David Attenborough to navigate social media and technology, something that always ends in failure and a flurry of expletives.

The less successful scenes on the show are the songs, one has New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardearn as a coronavirus defeating Mary Poppins, the other has a time-traveling Elon Musk singing David Bowie’s song “Starman” except with the word “Conman”.

Remarkably, Spitting Image has yet to find a broadcast home in the U.S. According to some reports that is due to networks and streaming services being afraid of offending the Trump administration, which seems far-fetched since nearly every major news organization does the journalistic equivalent of Spitting Image to the Trump administration every day.

It is unfathomable that the show is not in America, even on Britbox. Americans can catch new episodes on Facebook for 24 hours after they originally air in the UK…but that just seems a silly, arbitrary and self-defeating approach.

The U.S. is currently saturated with political comedy, with the tiresome, predictable, relentlessly propagandic bitching and moaning from flaccid clowns like John Oliver, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah, but the nation is starving for top-notch political satire – which Spitting Image, despite its flaws, does deliver.

Saturday Night Live is the only notable political satire in America right now and it is disastrously dreadful. The biggest problem with SNL is that its humor is based on advocacy rather than comedy. The show shamelessly embraced Hillary in 2016…who could forget the cringe worthy sight of Kate McKinnon as Hillary singing an embarrassingly maudlin and melancholy version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallejulah” in the immediate aftermath of her election defeat, and this year touted Kamala Harris (played by Maya Rudolph) by having her declare to cheers the need for a WAP – Woman as President. Yikes.

Thankfully, unlike SNL and the rest of the emotionalist establishment late night court jesters like Oliver, Maher and the rest, Spitting Image doesn’t aim to advocate, only eviscerate. And while the first two episodes were somewhat hit or miss, the show at its best still comedically slices and dices with the very best of them and never chooses sides.

An example of the bi-partisan belittling is a hilarious recurring theme in episode two is Nancy Pelosi suffering from Panderititis, a disease that makes her cravenly pander to identity groups for votes. She switches between African garb, a hard hat with rainbow dildo attached, and Orthodox Jewish clothing, in order to appeal to black, LGBTQ and Jewish voters.

Another example is Biden being a dementia-addled fool, and the charisma deficient Keir Starmer getting a much-needed makeover by Elton John…excuse me…Sir Elton John.

Spitting Image‘s sense of humor is not for everyone and the show isn’t life changing, but it is at times extremely funny. There are certainly worse ways to spend half an hour…like watching the insipid John Oliver for example.

The bottom line regarding the show is this - the world needs more comedy, not less, so some courageous executive at NBC, Hulu, Netflix or Amazon should quickly grab Spitting Image and give Americans a glimpse of some solid political satire at the height of the election silly season, we sure as hell could use it. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Bill Burr Battles the Karen Dragon on SNL

Comedian Bill Burr hosted SNL this weekend and masterfully sent the woke into a fury with his brazen and insightful monologue

Saturday Night Live has became a haven for limp, politically correct comedy, but this past weekend Bill Burr burned down the house with his no-holds-barred comedic approach.

Bill Burr, a brilliant and curmudgeonly stand-up comedian who refuses to kowtow to the politically correct, went scorched earth in his SNL monologue Saturday night by taking on cancel culture, self-serving white women and their performative woke posturing and Gay Pride Month being longer than Black History Month. 

Burr’s monologue was apparently so incendiary the New York Times felt it needed a trigger warning, “Burr used his opening monologue to mock some sensitive topics — feel free to skip this section if you find that style of comedy distasteful”.

The monologue took flight when Burr ranted about people trying to cancel the long dead John Wayne for an interview he gave in 1970, which was met with a confused smattering of applause. Apparently, the SNL audience, like New York Times readers, aren’t used to comedy that isn’t entirely p.c., impotent and toothless.

Things then got really spicy when speaking of the woke movement, Burr observed, ““It should’ve been about people of color… somehow white women swung their Gucci-footed feet over the fence of oppression and stuck themselves at the front of the line.”

The studio audience met that insightful bit with cold silence while the house band behind Burr were frozen in woke shock,  never laughing, clapping or moving once throughout his monologue.

Not surprisingly Karens on twitter had a conniption in response…which of course just made Burr’s point for him. This is like the old joke, “hey, I resemble that remark!” made manifest.

One woman tweeted, “That just looks like misogyny to me. I would respect that if it came from a black woman and not a white dude…”

Another snowflake courageously tweeted, “Bill Burr's opening monologue is just obnoxious and misogynstic. It's 2020. Someone tell him calling women "bitches" isn't funny”.

Burr’s final assault on the woke brigade came when he brought up the injustice of Gay Pride Month being all of June while Black History Month, which is for people “who were actually enslaved”, is in February, the coldest and shortest month of the year.

Burr joked, “These are equator people give them the sun for 31 days. There’s gay Black people, they could celebrate from June 1, June 31… give them 61 days to celebrate”.

This was met on twitter with charges of homophobia as one dullard tweeted, “Cool so bill burr went from misogynistic to homophobic. Time to go to bed.”

Burr’s crime of whiteness arose once again when someone tweeted, “hey bill burr i don’t think you should push the racist homophobic agenda on an snl sketch coming from a straight white male it’s not funny”.

The woke poseurs claiming Burr is racist either don’t know or don’t care that Burr’s wife is black…which should maybe blunt charges of his being racist.

The type of white people who love the safe comedy of SNL and hate Burr are the kind that adore Kamala Harris because they want a black female president for no other reason than identity politics and thinking it makes them not racist, even though Kamala Harris is loathed by actual black people.

The Karens outraged by Burr’s blunt truth-telling live safe, suburban lives and use tears and tantrums to get what they want…which is a cozy cocoon of silence and obedience. They refuse to have their vapid ideology confronted and will never engage in debate, only shrieking and wailing. Burr did us all a favor by tearing down their farcical façade.

Some might say the audience and band’s dismissive reactions and the outrage on twitter mean that Burr comedically failed…I think it actually signals his unparalleled success.

Burr went into the woke lion’s den and poked the evil beast right in the eye. While he didn’t get many laughs in the studio, he got a ton of them in my living room and no doubt in other living rooms across the country.

Unfortunately, SNL has devolved from the height of its powers under the manic genius of John Belushi, the edgy brilliance of Eddie Murphy and the cartoonish buffoonery of Will Ferrell, into its current flaccid form, which is a cesspool of insipid anti-comedy that prefers to be safe and politically correct than to being daring and funny. Well, safe and politically correct is not how Bill Burr, or any great comedian, rolls.

The woke twitterati and others bemoaning Bill Burr’s bludgeoning of political correctness on SNL are the same type of people who would’ve scolded George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Billy Connolly out of existence.

One need only watch the rest of the show with its inane and unfunny sketches as well as its overly long and painfully tedious cold open, to see that Burr’s monologue was the only thing on the entire program with a pulse (Jack White’s scintillating musical performances aside).

Sadly, there is no way Bill Burr will ever be invited back on SNL, which is a shame, because his aggressive, take no prisoners, tell-it-like-it-is type of energy is exactly what makes for great comedy, is the secret ingredient that made the once iconic show successful in the first place, and is the only thing that could ever return it to prominence once again.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Trailer for Girl Power Spy Movie 'The 355' Wraps the Same Old CIA Propaganda in a Woke Feminist Cloak

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

The long running CIA-Hollywood partnership is at it again trying to fool audiences with a female driven action movie set to release in January of 2021.

Hollywood is churning out yet another feminist action flick for the cinema going public to ignore.

The 355, directed by Simon Kinberg and starring Jessica Chastain, tells the story of five female intelligence agents from different nations – U.S., U.K., Columbia, Germany and China, who come together to recover a top secret weapon.

Besides Chastain, the film stars Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, Diane Kruger and Fan Bingbing.

The trailer features such eye-rolling pieces of dialogue as “now we have a common enemy…and if we don’t stop them they’ll start World War 3” and “we put ourselves in danger, so others aren’t”.

If the final film is as dreadfully absurd as the trailer, then it’s sure to be an odious piece of cinematic garbage.

What is most interesting to me about The 355 though is that while I don’t know this for sure, it certainly appears to be just another in a long line of pro-intelligence agency Hollywood products that propagates America’s nefarious global agenda under the ruse of promoting female empowerment.

For example, in 2001, America’s sweetheart Jennifer Garner starred as CIA super-agent Sydney Bristow on the hit tv show Alias (2001-2006). Despite the show being a fawning CIA propaganda piece, Garner went the extra mile and filmed a recruitment video for the agency. The CIA’s press release announcing that video is insightful.

“Ms. Garner was excited to participate in the video after being asked by the Office of Public Affairs. The CIA’s Film Industry Liaison worked with the writers of Alias during the first season to educate them on fundamental tradecraft. Although the show Alias is fictional, the character Jennifer Garner plays embodies the integrity, patriotism, and intelligence the CIA looks for in its officers.”

Anyone who unironically claims the CIA is filled with integrity, patriotism and intelligence either is completely historically illiterate or actually works for the CIA.

Garner’s ex-husband, movie star Ben Affleck, is also no stranger to working with the CIA as evidenced by the films The Sum of All Fears and Argo. In 2012 Affleck said, “Probably Hollywood is filled with CIA agents”. I wonder if he was referencing himself or his ex-wife in that statement?

Another pro-CIA, female driven narrative was Showtime’s award-winning Homeland (2011-2020). The producers of Homeland reached out to the CIA early in the making of the show and agency hands are all over it. The CIA even had consultants on set to make sure the depictions of the agency were “realistic”.

The star and producer of The 355, Jessica Chastain, is also no stranger to collaborating with the CIA, as she starred in the infamous CIA propaganda piece Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

On that film, which claimed to show the true story of the CIA hunt for Bin Laden, the agency went to great lengths to control and falsify the narrative. The CIA granted remarkable access to the filmmakers, including classified briefings, in exchange for veto control over what went on screen. The agency took full advantage of that control and made the CIA out to be heroes and torture to be highly beneficial in finding and killing Bin Laden.

Intriguingly enough, it was Chastain herself who pitched the idea for a female James Bond – Mission Impossible type of spy movie which became The 355. Is it possible that Chastain is one of the CIA people in Hollywood that Ben Affleck mentioned? I don’t know, but it certainly seems like she is more than happy to make projects that uncritically show the CIA as the good guys as long as it garners her money and prestige.

Chastain is becoming the female version of Tom Hanks, a talented actor who, as evidenced by Saving Private Ryan, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Post and Bridge of Spies among many others, is always eagerly and reliably in the bag for the intelligence community and military industrial complex.

A damning piece of evidence against Hanks was his cringe-worthy refusal to say that Edward Snowden was not a traitor while doing press for The Post (2017) - a film about Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsburg. When directly asked if Snowden was a traitor the cowardly Hanks replied, “that’s above my pay grade”. Tom Hanks pay grade has earned him a net worth of $350 million.

As for Chastain and The 355, the CIA consistently uses Hollywood to promote the notion of intelligence agency women as American Jane Bonds and that has real-world consequences. Feminists cheer that the agency is now headed by torture enthusiast Gina Haspel, and has women leading three of its top directorates. The pussy hat brigade also proudly embraced former female CIA personnel, Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, as they ran and won congressional seats in 2018 by touting their background as CIA ‘badasses’.

Sadly, by co-opting vociferous feminist voices like Chastain and Captain Marvel star Brie Larson – as well as the feminist movement which has historically been anti-war and pro-peace (think Jane Fonda), this ensures that not only does the CIA have no opposition from famous women, but actually has their endorsement.

Progressive women, like Chastain and Larson, say they care about women’s issues, but by making a Devil’s bargain with the military and intelligence community, they are selling their souls and moral authority to promote predatory power. Their silence in the face of America’s violent militarism and imperialism, which murders and maims countless women and children worldwide, is shameful and damning.

Thankfully, from the looks of its atrocious trailer, The 355 will probably face the same box office fate as the cavalcade of recent busts like Ghostbusters (2016), Ocean’s 8, Charlie’s Angels (2019) and Birds of Prey that put feminism first and quality filmmaking second.

Sadly though, that won’t stop the CIA and Hollywood from continuing to use gullible and ambitious women to mendaciously sell the agency as a beacon of all that is patriotic and progressive – when in reality it is the antithesis of both, because as Ben Affleck once astutely observed, “Hollywood and the clandestine services both spend most of their time convincing people that something that is not true is, in fact, true.”

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020