We Own This City (HBO): TV Review

My Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Great cast and an important story for our troubled times.

It has been my experience that most, but not all, law enforcement professionals fall into two basic categories…bullies and blowhards.

Bullies seek out the job in search of power to try and quell their sense of inferiority, and are the types who frantically call for back up and then ruthlessly beat on an outnumbered suspect once they have the advantage.

Blowhards sign up for the job in order to impress others and gain a sense of self, and they love to talk about their police exploits to anyone within earshot, but when push comes to shove, they turtle dick and run for cover.

A wonderful example of blowhard cops are the cowards in Uvalde, Texas who did nothing as a lunatic shot and killed 19 kids in a classroom literally feet from where these allegedly rough and tumble bad ass cops impotently crouched in a hallway.

As for bully cops, their behavior is fully on display in the HBO mini-series We Own This City, produced by David Simon, the creator of The Wire. The series, which runs six episodes, is based on the true story of the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) Gun Trace Task Force and its malevolent and malignant rule over the streets of Baltimore in the 21st Century.

Simon’s series The Wire, also set in the morally murky world of the crime ridden streets of Baltimore, was a masterpiece. But his series since then, including the likes of Treme, The Deuce and The Plot Against America, were, frankly, pedantic and pretentious dogshit. So, I was intrigued prior to seeing We Own This City if Simon’s return to Baltimore would rejuvenate his work…and thankfully, it has.

Make no mistake, the six-episode We Own This City is nowhere near the marvel that The Wire was over five seasons, but it is chock full of fascinating performances and the occasional larger insight that is so often lacking in this age of supposedly prestige TV.

The series follows the exploits of rah-rah, go-getter Wayne Jenkins, a Sergeant leading the charge of the BPD’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) who has a twisted view of justice, very sticky fingers, and a delusional sense of self.  

The GTTF under Jenkins is essentially the most effective drug gang in the city, as it uses its legal authority to cover its ass and line its own pockets while padding its overtime.

Jon Bernthal, one of the better actors of our time, is astonishing as Jenkins. He opens the series with a mesmerizing monologue that features his mastery of the extremely difficult Baltimore accent. Bernthal never drops the accent throughout the show, just as his Jenkins never gives up the ghost of his good-guy delusion.

Bernthal’s committed, energetic and relentless performance as Jenkins is DeNiro-esque in the best sense as he is both alive in every moment on-screen yet in total control of the minute details of the character.

Jenkins’ minions in the GTTF learn to rob, cheat and steal under his totalitarian tutelage, and even when they try and move on or stay away from the depravity, the cancer of Jenkins’ still infects them.

Another terrific performance comes from Jamie Hector as Sean Suitor, a cop who left GTTF and went to homicide. Suitor’s a good cop in a bad department and watching him try to navigate his impossible situation is a viscerally unnerving experience.

The luminous Wunmi Mosaku plays Nicole Steele, an attorney from the civil rights division of the Justice Department tasked with imposing a federal consent decree on the BPD. Steele’s confidence and competence emanate from her every pour, but, in the final episode when she’s confronted by the Sysiphean nature of her job, Mosaku’s performance, and the show, take on a deep sense of profundity.

Equally profound is a monologue by Treat Williams playing Brian Grabler, a retired Baltimore cop turned Police Academy teacher. Williams is excellent in the small role and his radically enlightened speech about the drug war is as compelling as television gets.

Despite the remarkable performances, the show is not perfect. It struggles with coherency because it keeps jumping around in time, from past to present and back again. I understand that this choice was necessary to adequately recount the exploits of the GTTF, but it is at times poorly executed and leaves the viewer wondering what the hell is happening and when is it happening.

That said, We Own This City, which ended its run Monday May 30, is well worth the time to watch, especially now with the cavalcade of police misconduct cases, the rise (and fall?) of Black Lives Matter, the demands to defund the police and even the deplorable cowardice on display in Uvalde.

The reality regarding policing is that the drug war has infected government from law enforcement on the street level, all the way up to the shills and shams in Congress and the White House.

The drug war has turned cops into an occupying force and citizens into the enemy. The fact that the drugs at the center of the drug war, and the guns that often accompany them, are a main source of income for the black budgets of our intelligence agencies, reveals the drug war to be a piece of Kabuki theatre meant to do little but destabilize the working class and poor and enrich the authoritarian agencies across government (local law enforcement as well as DEA, FBI, ATF, CIA, DIA, NSA etc.).

The obvious issues with police are further complicated by the fact that violent crime, especially in black neighborhoods, is a scourge. And while authoritarianism and police brutality and misconduct needs to be addressed and eliminated, that doesn’t negate the fact that black people are being killed at an ungodly rate not by police but by other black people.

The truth is that even today’s more popular opposition to police misconduct, namely Black Lives Matter, is infuriating because it is a corrupt movement meant as a ruse to turn discussions about our totalitarian and authoritarian police state into nothing but a fruitless and emotionalist debate about a nebulous, all-encompassing “racism”, which creates needless enemies out of potential allies.

BLM not only misses the forest for the trees regarding law enforcement, it is equally blind to the plight of black people stuck in crime-ridden neighborhoods, who need protection from the rampant criminality that surrounds them. How can we take the statement “black lives matter” seriously when the people killing blacks are themselves black?

The only conclusion to draw that makes any sense is that BLM is an intentional agit prop action conjured by the ruling elite to keep us proles divided, separated and distracted from the real issue, namely how cops protect and serve the interests of the oligarchy and aristocrats, not the citizenry.

For example, race means nothing to the cops in Baltimore’s gun trace task force. If Baltimore were a city of poor, lily white people, the GTTF, which is a very diverse and inclusive bunch of bastards, would still run rampant with its thuggery.

Policing in America isn’t about black and white, it’s about us versus them. The police are the muscle for corporate interests and the elite, and they make sure to use violence to control the working man and keep us all on a tight leash.

If the school shooter in Uvalde had gone to a private school in Brentwood, California, or Arlington, Virginia, or in Manhattan, do you think cops would sit around with their thumbs up their asses while nine-year-old kids were being massacred? Of course not, because those children of the rich are whom the police are meant to protect, and their parents are whom they serve.

The bottom line is that honest, genuine discussions about policing in America need to happen and rarely do, but thankfully We Own This City isn’t just a worthy series but also a good starting point for those discussions.

©2022

Convergence: Courage in a Crisis - Documentary Review

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This documentary is devoid of insights and only serves up the same old insipid ideology of identity politics. The film ‘s manipulative thesis uses Covid as a cudgel to divide instead of unite and therefore reinforces the current power structure.

The Covid pandemic has been a difficult time for all of us, except of course for documentary filmmakers, who seem to be living through the most booming of boom times.

In recent months the much-hyped HBO documentaries Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenter: 9/11 – 2021 ½ and Nanfu Wang’s, In the Same Breath, have attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to tackle the tantalizing topic of the Covid pandemic.

Now Netflix is getting into the Covid documentary game with Oscar winning director Orlando von Einsiedel’s Convergence: Courage in Crisis, which began streaming on Tuesday, October 12th.

The film’s thesis is clearly stated as “While Covid-19 exacerbates vulnerabilities across the world, unsung heroes in all levels of society help turn the tide toward a brighter future.”

If you want to truly understand the intellectual impotence and manufactured manipulation of Convergence: Courage in a Crisis, one need only watch the final few minutes as it concludes with a montage of ordinary folks from across the globe singing the song “Lean on Me” in unison.

This scene sparked my PTSD and I began having ferocious flashbacks to the cringe-fest that was the bevy of self-righteous Hollywood celebrities singing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem “Imagine” back in the Spring of 2020. Yikes.

What precedes that sanguine sing-along of “Lean on Me” is just as contrived and seems just as fake as the sing-along itself.

Convergence, like seemingly every other Covid documentary, is devoid of insight because it’s incapable of actually focusing on Covid, and instead uses Covid as a delivery system for its various political, social and cultural agendas.

For example, the film follows the stories of nine different people and couples as they navigate the peril of the pandemic and selflessly help others and fight the disease. These folks live across the globe in London, Miami, Delhi, Tehran, Sao Paolo, Lima, Oxford and Wuhan and do such varied things as treat the sick, clean hospital rooms, drive doctors to clinics and ambulances into poor neighborhoods.

Apparently though, according to Convergence anyway, the only people who were both deeply affected by Covid and also who fought most valiantly against it, were people of color, as they make up eight of the nine stories.

The lone white face featured in the film is Oxford Vaccinologist, Professor Sarah Gilbert, and she gets minimal screen time as she is treated as more an inconvenience to the film’s thesis than as a story worth watching.

A strange example of the film’s political bent is found in the story of Hassan Akkad, a Syrian refugee living in London. Akkad gets a job cleaning the Covid ward in a hospital and uses social media to protest the British government’s decision to not include immigrants like him working as porters and janitorial staff in hospitals in their “bereavement scheme” - which would grant “indefinite leave to remain” status for family members of any immigrant workers who died from Covid.

According to Akkad, the Assad regime tortured him and is currently bombing hospitals, a claim which should be taken with a grain of salt considering director von Einsiedel’s documentary The White Helmets is dubious in its veracity, but even though Akkad is living a good life in London, instead of being grateful he complains that he and his girlfriend deserve better immigration “status”.  

Another example of the film’s insipid ideology is that it declares that Covid isn’t the only pandemic around, that there’s also pandemics of inequality, racism, poverty and “misguided nationalism”. How original.

Of course, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter get a good bit of attention, mostly through the story of Dr. Armen Henderson, a black physician and activist in Miami.

When Henderson gets “racially profiled” by a cop in front of his own house during the pandemic, and his daughter witnesses the event through security cameras, Henderson claims the incident “robbed his child of her innocence”. I’m no fan of the law enforcement community but if you’re concerned about the loss of innocence of black children, blaming the police is about as obtuse as it gets when you consider black on black violence and the eroding morality and ethics of the wider culture.  

Dr. Henderson dreams of a sort of utopia of equity being born out of the dystopia of Covid, a notion also favored by World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Teydros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Dr. Teydros goes so far as to proudly espouse the eye-rolling slogan “Build Back Better” and claims that “opportunities are born from crisis.”

That same sort of sentiment is how we got the War on Terror and the atrocity of Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 and got billions in bailout money to Wall Street in the wake of the financial collapse of 2007/08. If past is prologue, the idea of using Covid as a catalyst for some great change that will usher in a glorious world of wonder is a chilling proposition that will only further empower the powerful and further enrich the wealthy.

Ultimately, I found Convergence to be an infuriating and emotionally manipulative exercise that decided to use Covid as a cudgel to divide people rather than unite them, thus deceptively reinforcing the status quo.

Covid doesn’t discriminate, it affects everyone and, contrary to the propaganda of this documentary, we’d be better off looking beyond identity when it comes to solving big problems because once something becomes about identity, it stops being about anything else, most especially the truth. The insidiously manipulative and meaningless Convergence is glaring proof of that.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Karen: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars 

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This atrocity isn’t just terrible, its toxic, as it tries to make hating white women culturally cool.

When people inquire about what I do for a living and I tell them I’m a film critic, they often ask, “what’s that like?” My pat answer is “it’s better than digging ditches.”

After having suffered through the atrociously awful new Black Entertainment Television original movie Karen, I realize that statement isn’t true, as I would’ve been better off spending that hour and half digging a ditch in which to bury myself alive.

Karen tells the story of Malik and Imani, a young black couple who move into a mostly white suburb of Atlanta, and “Karen” is their white racist neighbor Karen Drexler, who’s like the creature from the white lagoon, as menacing music accompanies her every appearance on screen.

The word ‘Karen’ is a slur against busybody white women, so not surprisingly, every white woman in Karen is racist, either overtly or covertly, but Karen Drexler is really racist. If racism were sport Karen would be Muhammed Ali, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth combined.

The movie opens with a shot from above of “Black Lives Matter” written in chalk on a street, and then Karen comes in and dumps water on it and starts frantically scrubbing it out. Subtle.

If that didn’t clue you in that Karen REALLY hates black people, the pictures of confederate soldiers on her bathroom walls as well as her confederate flag soap dispenser (I kid you not) should do the trick.

Karen is a widow and stay-at-home mom to two children, a teenage boy and a third-grade girl. Somehow neither of her children are racist, in fact, her third-grade daughter is so not-racist she has a black boyfriend named Kobe…and no I’m not making any of this up.

Karen is also the president of the Homeowners Association (HOA) for the Harvey Hill Homes, named after a confederate politician, and she wields her presidential power like a true tyrant. The only resistance is from Jan, an Asian board member, who dutifully points out all of the racist assumptions of the HOA, including correcting white people that they should use the term “African-American” instead of “black”. Good to know.

Now if you think Karen is bad, wait ‘til you get a load of her brother Mike Wind (yes, there’s actually a character named Mike Wind), an Atlanta cop who belongs to a racist secret society, “The Brotherhood”, that reaches throughout law enforcement, from cops to District Attorneys to judges.

As for Malik and Imani, they’re the most laughable cardboard cutout characters imaginable, with Malik working at a “community center” and Imani a “successful blogger”. Eye roll.

The couple says things to each other like, “you are a strong, beautiful and woke black man, and that’s why I married you”, and “you’re a college-educated, socially-aware, beautiful black woman”, and finish every sentence with the word “baby”. Cringe.

Speaking of cringe, Malik and Imani are having fertility issues, which may be linked to Imani’s reluctance to “bring a baby into this messed up racist world” with its “pandemics, police killing us and racism”. I was surprised to see that MSNBC didn’t get a screenwriting credit.

Eventually Karen is caught on video doing ‘Karen’ things and it goes viral so she turns her racism up to eleven. Her brother Mike unleashes his racism too and conspiracies and more bad cinema ensue.

Trying to point out the egregious sins of this asinine movie is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500, but the turn the film takes in its final scenes is particularly egregious to the point of being insulting.

After all the flaccid drama, the movie ends with Ben Crump, the real-life lawyer for the family of George Floyd, giving a press conference with Malik and Imani standing next to him while accompanied by a trumpet player on the stage with them playing “America the Beautiful”. I shit you not.

As Crump’s shameless and very poorly-delivered speech rambles on the film cuts to the sign for the Harvey Hill Homes being changed to John Lewis Homes, thanks to new HOA president Imani. Then as Crump impotently utters the meant-to-be-profound final line “all lives can’t matter, until black lives matter too!”, we see Malik and a pregnant Imani standing at the door to their house staring deeply into the camera. Yikes.

Look, this movie is, at its very best, a ludicrous Saturday Night Live skit gone woefully awry. The script is garbage, the dialogue consistently laughable, the acting atrocious and the directing so dreadful as to be criminal.

Obviously, I loathed this steaming sack of crap, but this movie isn’t just bad, it’s toxic, because it’s marinated in the same mindless identity-based hate it allegedly claims to despise, but because that hate is directed at white women it’s deemed culturally acceptable.

If you’re one of those delusional, virtue signaling woke white women who has bought into the Black Lives Matter moral panic and believes America is in the grip of an epidemic of racism, you may consider yourself one of the ‘good ones’, but Karen disagrees, as it paints all white women as nefarious Karens at heart.

Just like the pernicious press, patronizing politicians and pandering corporations that stoke the fires of racial resentment and use emotionally manipulative misinformation to dupe sentimental simpletons, Karen is a relentlessly shallow, viciously vapid and rabidly racist movie that makes a mockery of a serious subject matter in an attempt to make money and spread anti-white animus.

If only someone would complain or call the cops on this movie and get this atrocity cancelled. Where’s a Karen when you really need one?

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Homeroom: Documentary Review

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Father and the Media's Dementia Simulation Machine

The Oscar-nominated The Father is a masterful film about living with dementia…and a reminder that the mainstream media is a dementia simulation machine.

The film immerses viewers in the confusion of dementia – the same sort of bewilderment caused by US media misinformation to disorient the public and make them easier to control and manipulate. 

The Father is a terrific movie that tells the story of an aging man struggling with dementia, and it has left me rattled as it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the delusional and disorienting nature of American life.  

The film is rightfully nominated for Best Picture at the upcoming Academy Awards as it showcases a superb performance by Anthony Hopkins who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his stellar work.

What makes The Father such a poignant and insightful film is that director Florian Zeller doesn’t just show the effects of dementia on the screen, he immerses the audience in the excruciating experience of dementia.

Watching the film and experiencing that disease-imposed confusion, I couldn’t help but think about how, here in the U.S. at least, it feels as if our entire culture is suffering from a collective dementia. The disorientation and detachment from reality that come with that dreaded disease are entirely commonplace in America, where we seem incapable of remembering the past, or of clearly seeing the present.

This rapacious American dementia is fueled first and foremost by the mainstream media’s manipulation and misinformation.

The establishment media have long distorted reality in order to manufacture consent around a desired narrative. This is why Americans always see themselves as the “good guys” on the world stage and not as the imperialist aggressors and colonialist exploiters that we are.

For proof just look at the flag-waving coverage surrounding the Iraq war and the WMD nonsense, or the egregious media assaults on Julian Assange and Edward Snowden compared to the genuflecting coverage of infamous bs artists like Chris Kyle, George W. Bush and Barrack Obama.

This duplicitous media approach can often be so blatant as to be ridiculously absurd, such as when CNN described the rioting, looting and arson last Summer as “mostly peaceful” protests.

The same is true regarding the current wave of anti-Asian violence. The media blame the attacks on the ever-expanding yet conveniently amorphous label of “white supremacy”, but the videos and statistics regarding these repugnant attacks against Asians show black people are the majority of perpetrators, a fact the media steadfastly fail to mention.

Another dementia-like distortion caused by the media is the perception that police are killing black people en-masse.

As a 2021 Skeptic Research Poll found, most Americans greatly over-estimate the number of unarmed black people killed by police.

When asked “How many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?”, 53.3 % of those self-described as “very liberal” estimated that over 1,000 unarmed black men had been killed by police, even though the actual number is believed to be between 60 – 100.

According to the same study, 24.9% of people killed by police are black, yet those self-describing as “liberal” or “very liberal” estimated the number to be 56% and 60% respectively.

This detachment from reality is no shock as according to a Gallup poll over half the country already over-estimates the size of the black population in general, believing it to be over 30% when in reality it is roughly 14%.

The over-estimation of police killings of unarmed black men is to be expected as every killing of a black person by the police or by a white person results in massive media coverage and a declaration that the only motivation for the incident is racism. In contrast the deaths of white people at the hands of police or by black perpetrators are not considered noteworthy.

The anti-Russia hysteria is another establishment media manufactured narrative that is directly at odds with reality, but that is deeply rooted in the American psyche.

Russiagate, hacking of electrical grids, using super-secret microwave weapons to attack U.S. diplomats, and putting bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, are just a few of the dominant pieces of anti-Russian disinformation devoid of fact that the media tout as gospel truth.

The immigration crisis is another bewildering story disorienting Americans. The media vehemently chanted the mantra “kids in cages” when Trump detained children at the border, but were silent when Obama did the exact same thing during his presidency. And now that Biden is doing it too, the media are back to downplaying its significance or ignoring it entirely.

And of course, the most perplexing media coverage surrounds the coronavirus. Originally the press excoriated anyone who raised the notion that the disease may have come from a lab in China, but now the truth that they aren’t sure where it initially came from is acknowledged.

The medical establishment is just as perfidious and deceitful as the media.

For example, Dr. Fauci knowingly lied early in the pandemic about the need for masks.

And last Summer a collection of medical professionals said that no large groups should gather, except for Black Lives Matter protests, making the obscene and absurd claim that the media manufactured “epidemic” of racism was just as bad as the coronavirus pandemic.  

In addition, concerns over vaccinations are broken down by race, with white concerns stigmatized and black concerns gently understood.

Just like dementia, this insidious media and medical duplicity creates stress, irritability and aggression among the populace.

In conclusion, The Father is a masterful film insightfully exploring the tragedy of dementia, and the hypocritical, pernicious, frivolous and mendacious establishment media are a relentless dementia simulation machine. The former is worth indulging, the latter is terminal and should be avoided at all costs.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

MLB Needs to Stop Playing Politics and Start Playing Better Baseball

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

This past weekend Major League Baseball announced it was pulling this season’s All-Star game from Atlanta, Georgia because it believes a new voting bill recently passed in that state’s legislature is racist.

In a rather amusing coincidence, a poll came out the same day revealing that 34.5% of fans are watching fewer sports due to political and social messaging by leagues and players.

As the saying goes “Get Woke, Go Broke”, and the poll, done by YouGov/Yahoo News, robustly reinforces that mantra.

According to the poll, nearly half of all Americans changed their viewing habits in the wake of last summer’s social justice protests at sporting events, with 34.5% watching less and 11% watching more.

Apparently performative virtue signaling like kneeling during the anthem, adorning stadiums and arenas with “Black Lives Matter”, and millionaire NBA players wearing jerseys with such inanities written on the back as “Love Us”, “See Us” and “Group Economics” is a turn off to many people, imagine that.

As the YouGov/Yahoo news poll reveals, significant numbers of fans across the political spectrum are tuning out, with 19% of Democrats, 53% of Republicans and most importantly 38.6% of Independents, decreasing their sports consumption due to social justice and political advocacy at games.  

The television ratings for sports in 2020 reflect the poll results and the frustration many feel toward the constant sloganeering and political pandering.

In 2020 the ratings for the NBA Finals were down 49%, the Stanley Cup 61%, the NFL regular season 7% and the Super Bowl 9%, and the World Series was the least watched in history, down 32% from the previous low.

These numbers are certainly not solely due to sports going woke, but the mainstream media claiming the political/social justice shift in sports has nothing to do with the decline in viewership are whistling past the graveyard.

What makes MLB’s swift decision regarding moving the All-Star game so odd is that no one within the sport was asking for it. For instance, the MLB players association weren’t demanding action and none of the league’s high-profile stars had raised a protest flag over the new Georgia law.

Adding to the oddity of MLB’s decision is that interpretations of the bill in question vary wildly. Republicans claim the bill secures elections and expands voting opportunities and believe the bill is being misconstrued and distorted by Democrats in Washington.

Meanwhile Democrats are calling the bill “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” for among other reasons that it requires voters to provide photo I.D., which is amusing in the context of MLB’s social justice preening since the league itself demands fans show photo I.D. at will call ticket booths and to purchase beer in stadiums.

Considering the disparity of opinions on the Georgia bill and the fact that MLB’s viewership and attendance was already in a steady decline you’d think that they might be more wary of alienating a good portion of their fanbase, which skews older and white, over an issue the league seems to not know enough about.

The problem for sports leagues across the board is that watching sports has already devolved into a tortuous experience regardless of all the social justice posing and pandering.

The NBA is basically unwatchable. The game has deteriorated into a carnival of entitled primadonnas hurling up thirty-footers, incessantly bitching at refs and flopping so flagrantly that it would shame the most flamboyant of Italian soccer players.

Watching the NFL is now an absurd exercise in capitalism porn as games are reduced to one endless commercial break after another with minimal on-field action.  

MLB gameplay has become unbearable too, with contests resembling monotonous marathons of swing and miss and miss and miss again. Chicks may dig the long ball but they aren’t going to sit around four boring, strikeout filled hours on the hopes of seeing one.

Baseball has been hemorrhaging fans for decades because the game is just too slow for younger viewers with shorter attention spans. Is MLB signaling a woke corporate virtue by pulling the All-Star game from Atlanta going to turn that tide? No. But maybe moving the mound back a foot, implementing a pitch clock and outlawing defensive shifts might.

The truth is I don’t care about Georgia’s voting rules…you know why? I don’t live in Georgia. If Georgians don’t like the voting rules, then they can vote to change the legislature that passed these new rules. If the new voting rules are unconstitutional, then the courts will intercede. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.

The bottom line is that I hate politics and I especially hate politics in sports. I hate the players kneeling during the national anthem just as much as I hate that they play the national anthem at games. I hate the militarization of sports with the fucking flyovers and honor guards and all that other militarized Nuremberg-esque nonsense just as much as I hate the woke preening by self-serving, millionaire morons on teams and in league offices.

Sports fans like me are simply exhausted by the endless hyper-politicization of everything in our culture and we look to sports to escape, not to be politically assaulted. MLB would be very wise to avoid playing politics any further and instead focus on fixing their ailing game and playing decent ball.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Judas and the Black Messiah: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but fantastic film that vibrates with a formidable vitality that also features two Oscar-worthy performances by Daniel Kaluuya and LaKieth Stanfield.

Judas and the Black Messiah, which opened in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max on February 12th, recounts the true story of the betrayal of Fred Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, by Bill O’Neal, an FBI informant.

The flawed but fantastic film, written and directed by Shaka King, features a fascinating story and scintillating performances from Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal, which makes it among the very best movies of this thus far cinematically calamitous year.

I have never been much impressed by Daniel Kaluuya as an actor. I thought Get Out was ridiculously overrated and thought his performance in it was too. But as Fred Hampton, Kaluuya utterly disappears into the role and creates as charismatic and compelling a character as has graced screens all year. Kaluuya’s Hampton vibrates with a natural magnetism and intensity that is glorious to behold.

As great as Kaluuya is, and he is great, LaKieth Stanfield actually has the harder job and does equally outstanding work. O’Neal is a tortured and tormented soul, and Stanfield masterfully shows us all his shades. Stanfield’s subtle, complex and detailed work is most definitely Oscar-worthy, and is a testament to his impressive skill and craftsmanship.

Other performances don’t fare quite as well as Kaluuhya and Stanfield though. Jesse Plemons, an excellent actor, does the best he can with a terribly under written role as an FBI agent, and Martin Sheen, also an excellent actor, is so dreadful as J. Edgar Hoover it is like he’s acting in a different, and much worse, movie.

The biggest issue with the film is that its secondary narratives, one which involves Hoover and the other involves Hampton’s girlfriend Deborah Johnson, lack a dramatic cohesion and power, and they distract from the main story and scuttle much needed momentum. The Hoover angle is distractingly cartoonish and the love story between Hampton and Johnson is uncomfortably lifeless, as Dominique Fishback is, to put it mildly, underwhelming in the role of Johnson.

Other issues with the film are that Shaka King’s direction was not quite as deft as I would have preferred. The script and the editing also could have been a bit tighter, but with that said, the film definitely has an undeniable energy to it and pulsates with a power that is impressive.

One final issue was the sound mixing. I watched the movie on HBO Max and the sound mix was utterly abysmal. Much of the dialogue, Daniel Kaluuya’s most of all, got lost under the music in the mix. This could be a function of HBO Max, which unfortunately is a horrible technical streaming service, or it could be I am going deaf, or it could be the sound mixing was atrocious…who knows…but it was irritating.

Predictably, most critics are using the film to connect the more recent Black Lives Matter movement with the revolutionary Black Panther movement of the 1960’s spotlighted in the film.

This is an intellectually egregious and mind-numbingly vacuous interpretation of the movie and its narrative.

The film isn’t about our current manufactured myopia regarding race, it’s about power and the great lengths those with it will go to subjugate those without it and maintain the status quo.

Infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, embarrassingly portrayed in the movie by Martin Sheen in an obscenely amateurish prosthetic nose, deemed the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” for among other reasons because their free breakfast program for kids wasn’t just for black kids but for all kids.

In response Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) and its dirty tactics on the Black Panthers just as he had done previously to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and other leftists.

As highlighted in the film, the Black Panthers/Hampton were seen as direct threats to the power structure of the U.S. because they worked to bring all poor and working class people together, be they black, Native American, Latino and even Confederate flag-waving whites, against a common enemy, the ruling class, which subjugated and abused them.

Hampton, MLK and Malcolm X weren’t targeted by COINTELPRO’s massive surveillance and infiltration operation and ultimately assassinated under extremely suspicious circumstances because they were standing up just for black people, but because they were working to bring all peoples together to fight against the corrupt and criminal political power exploiting poor and working class in America and across the globe.

In comparison to the towering revolutionaries of Hampton, King and Malcolm X, Black Lives Matter are shameless courtesans to the establishment.

The FBI obviously don’t see BLM as a threat, hell it is such a collection of useful idiots the feds probably started it in the first place. The power structure’s greatest fear is that poor and working class black and white people will stop directing their anger at each other and start directing it at Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. BLM is a critical tool to thwart that impulse and keep the proletariat separated by race…conveniently divided and conquered.

This is how something as innocuous as “All Lives Matter” is transformed into a racial slur instead of a rousing rallying cry. BLM gives away its establishment protection game by so aggressively making enemies out of potential allies, proving they’d rather separate people than bring them together for a clear common cause – stopping police brutality.

There are other signs that BLM is the establishment’s controlled opposition.

For example, when a protest by QAnon clowns at the capitol building turned riot it was immediately labeled an “insurrection” and false stories about it were propagated throughout the mainstream media and the feds hunted down the perpetrators, but these same feds and media supported the BLM “mostly peaceful protests” that attacked police stations and government buildings and took over portions of major cities like Portland and Seattle and turned other cities into looted, chaotic, burning madhouses for months.

Another example is highlighted in the film when Hampton belittles the idea of a school name change as some kind of substantial victory. BLM specializes in this sort of self-righteous symbolism, empty sloganeering (Defund the Police!) and toothless grandstanding that intentionally doesn’t address the actual conditions under which poor people suffer. It is all style over substance, as BLM would rather bring down statues than hunger, homelessness or homicide rates.

What makes Judas and the Black Messiah so poignantly tragic is that it shows that the FBI, which the left now adores, have always been the frontline workers for American fascism and their victory over genuine dissent has been spectacular.

This is why we now have vapid, race-hustling racial grievance grifters like Al Sharpton instead of intellectual giants like Malcolm X and MLK. And why we got the “hope and change” charlatanry of Barack Obama, a maintenance man for the status quo who dutifully bails out Wall Street while Main Street crumbles, instead of the revolutionary Fred Hampton. And why we are fed the lap dog of Black Lives Matter play-acting at defiance while being whole-heartedly embraced by the corporate and political power structure, instead of the bulldog of the Black Panthers putting genuine fear into the establishment.

The Black Lives Matter contingent think they’re Fred Hampton, but they’re frauds, phonies, shills and sellouts, just like Bill O’Neal. And that’s why I recommend Judas and the Black Messiah…not just for the film’s cinematic dynamism or the standout performances of Kaluuya and Stanfield but because it rightfully exposes those bourgeois BLM bullshitters.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Marliyn Manson Gets Nailed to the #MeToo Cross

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In response, Manson released a statement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The 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

No Lives Matter

Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes 46 seconds

As the not-so-civil war turns from cold to hot and the world around us burns, I find myself in the unenviable position of despising both sides in the battle.

BLUE LIVES DON’T MATTER

On one side is law enforcement, a community which I deem to be at best egregiously incompetent and at worst brutally malevolent and maliciously fascistic.

I have only ever had negative experiences with law enforcement. Every on-duty cop I’ve ever interacted with has been either lazy, entitled or a brutish and violent tyrant…and sometimes all three at once.

It is obvious to me that police in America are a government sanctioned gang, the largest organized crime apparatus in the nation.

One of the first things I ever wrote on this blog was about Ethan Saylor, a 26 year-old man with Down’s Syndrome who had three off-duty Maryland cops working as mall security kneel on his back in 2011 while trying to subdue him for breaking the rule of not promptly leaving a movie theatre after his screening of Zero Dark Thirty had ended.

Just like George Floyd seven years later, Ethan Saylor called out to his mom right before he died under the knee of those cops. While Floyd’s killer has been charged with murder, the cops who killed Ethan Saylor were never charged with any crime.

The killing of George Floyd also reminded me of the death of Kelly Thomas in Fullerton, California on 2011.

Thomas was a homeless, mentally-ill 36 year-old man who was beaten to death by six Fullerton, Ca. cops as, just like George Floyd would nine years later, he said he “couldn’t breath” while also crying out to his father, “dad, help me!”.

Thomas’s beating has been described as “one of the worst police beatings in US history”. He had brain injuries as well as rib and facial fractures so severe he choked on his own blood. Thomas’s breathing became permanently constricted because the six officers knelt on his chest as they beat him about his face and head.

All of the officers charged with beating and killing Kelly Thomas were acquitted.

While there are similarities in the Floyd and Saylor and Thomas cases, there are also differences. The biggest difference being that Floyd was black and Saylor and Thomas were white.

This difference in race translated into the media never really caring much when Ethan Saylor and Kelly Thomas were killed, and also no mobs rioting or looting in their honor either. Maybe this is why if you ask a hundred random people you run into on the street who Ethan Saylor or Kelly Thomas were, you’d get back 100 blank stares.

Which brings me to the other side of the shitshow…

BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER

On the other side is Black Lives Matter and their ilk, who I find to be at best useful idiots to the establishment and at worst insidiously deceptive and intentionally divisive tools of COINTELPRO used to provoke a race war and squelch a class war.

As the events of recent months have unfolded, I have come to believe that America is currently in the grip of a manufactured racial moral panic that is meant to trigger emotion, distort perception and destroy critical thinking capacity. This racial moral panic is a vicious cancer spreading across every sector of this country…and it is terminal.

An example of this racial moral panic is found in both the media and the public’s reaction to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

When I watched the video of Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis, I thought, “what the fuck is that cop doing?”

When I watched the video of the police incident in Kenosha with Jacob Blake I thought to myself, “what the fuck is Jacob Blake doing?”

When the cops arrived on the scene at the Blake incident, Blake scuffled with them - leading to cops twice attempting to tase him. Blake then defiantly walked away from officers, all of whom had their guns drawn, and tried to enter and/or reach into his vehicle with one of the cops literally pulling on his shirt to stop him. The cop pulling Blake’s shirt then shot him seven times in the back as he reached into his minivan.

The obvious point in watching the incident is that if Blake had complied with the cops demands than he wouldn’t have been shot. The counter argument heard over and over again from BLM people is that “not complying doesn’t mean you deserve to be shot!”. I wholeheartedly agree…but to quote Clint Eastwood in the film Unforgiven, “deserves got nothin to do with it.”

No one deserves to be shot and no one deserves to be killed. But…if you fight with cops, resist arrest, defy their commands and most importantly ignore their drawn guns and then reach into your vehicle thinking you are immune from consequences…you don’t deserve to be shot but you can sure as hell EXPECT to be shot, regardless of your race or ethnicity.

This recognition of reality is often refuted by BLM types with ridiculous comments about how cops should shoot people in the legs in these situations or some other Hollywood nonsense. Look, if a cop (or soldier) draws a gun they will aim for the chest or head in order to stop the target…which translates into shooting to kill. That is how people, law enforcement included, are trained to use guns, and to believe otherwise is willful ignorance.

This dovetails into another emotional trigger for BLM supporters and that is that Blake was shot seven times. I have heard over and over that this was excessive. If you watch the video of Blake being shot you notice something rather remarkable…during the shooting he continues to struggle. The cop kept shooting him because Blake didn’t immediately fall to the ground. Blake was shot seven times because the cop was shooting to drop him and he didn’t drop…that is what cops and soldiers are trained to do.

The other thing that BLM supporters like to do is emphasize that Blake was “shot in the back” in order to imply something nefarious. This is technically accurate, Blake was shot in the back…but he was also actively resisting a cop trying to stop him from reaching into or getting into a vehicle. There could be, and according to reports there was, a weapon (a knife) in the car, and of course the cop has no idea if Blake is reaching for a gun or not. Blake having his back turned is EXACTLY why he was a threat as the cop couldn’t see for what he was reaching.

Another important point is that even the car itself is considered a deadly weapon in this situation because if Blake got in that car he is then in control of a large movable weapon he can use to harm others, and there are three young children in the car…meaning shooting at Blake once he is inside the vehicle puts those children’s lives at much greater risk. Not to mention that at that time none of the cops knew if Blake was trying to enter the vehicle in order to hurt those children.

BLM supporters highlighting Blake being shot in the back without giving proper context are being extremely deceptive and disingenuous. This same tactic was used when Rayshard Brooks was shot in the back while fleeing cops in Atlanta in the wake of the Floyd killing in Minneapolis. The important piece of information in the Brooks case though is that as he ran he turned and fired a taser at the cop chasing him and was shot less than a second later. This taser was taken off of the officer by Brooks when they fought right before Brooks’ escape attempt. What the BLM crowd ignore is the fact that a taser is a deadly weapon when used against a cop because if a cop is rendered unconscious or immobile, then his gun is unsecure and that constitutes a grave danger to the officer and/or general public.

The Rayshard Brooks case was another one where BLMers were saying “the cops should’ve given him a ride home” instead of trying to arrest him because Brooks was literally so drunk he passed out at a drive thru. No doubt these same hypocritical fools would’ve been on the Mothers Against Drunk Driving bandwagon back in the day when drunk driving was turned from a mere nuisance into a public menace. Of course, cops aren’t going to give a drunk driver a ride home because then they would become liable for his behavior from that point forward. If Brooks hurts himself or someone else after cops drove him home then the police department would be sued beyond recognition…and rightfully so.

NBA DON’T MATTER

In the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting, L.A. Clippers coach Doc Rivers made an emotionally charged statement where he talked about how he, as a black man, has to give a “special talk” to his black children about how to interact with police. This is a common refrain heard from black people in regards to teaching their children how to interact properly with cops in order to avoid being shot. In watching both the Jacob Blake and Rayshard Brooks videos I thought to myself, well…either no one gave these guys “the talk”, or they weren’t paying attention when it was given.

And another point is, who doesn’t talk to their kids about how to safely interact with law enforcement? This is not just some special burden placed on black parents, it is a reality for all parents…all decent parents anyway.

Sadly, Doc Rivers speech was just another example of the racial moral panic in action. In his speech the weeping Rivers spoke of how black people are the ones “being hung” and “being shot” and that black people love this country but this country doesn’t love them.

What was remarkable to me about Rivers’ rant was that the media adored it so unquestionably, especially the nauseating ESPN, even though it is so absurdly inaccurate as to be laughable.

First off…no black people are being hung. None. A few have died by hanging this year but they committed suicide…they weren’t lynched no matter how badly the media wanted it to be true. There is not a plague of black people being hung in America and there hasn’t been since well before Doc Rivers was ever born. No one Doc Rivers knows or has ever known has ever been hung.

As for America not loving black people...that is so demonstrably untrue as to be absurd. Black people are so adored in American public life it is utterly astonishing. Everywhere you turn in American culture, be it music, movies, tv, sport or anywhere else, black people are vastly over-represented in relation to their population percentage.

Doc Rivers’ business, the NBA, is a perfect example. I could argue that Michael Jordan is the biggest star, sport or otherwise, to have dominated American culture in my lifetime. If it isn’t Michael Jordan, it may very well be Oprah Winfrey. At various times other black people have been the biggest stars in the country…Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Bill Cosby, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Muhammed Ali and on and on and on.

And of course, the most obvious rebuttal to Rivers’ refrain about American’s hatred of black people is that Barack Obama not only won two presidential elections in the last 12 years, but won them resoundingly. To put that into historical context…there have been as many black presidents in the 243 year history of the United States as there have been presidents who share my identity…Irish Catholic. In fact there has only ever been one Catholic president - Irish or otherwise, JFK…and if you’ll recall the Irish Catholic only served 2 years and 10 months in office while Obama served 8 years because it was the Irish Catholic president who was the victim of violence in office, not the black one.

The point being to all of this is that if America hates black people they sure as hell have a funny way of showing it.

NBA players were so shaken by the shooting of Jacob Blake they actually went on strike in protest. This protest strike was an emotionally driven piece of performative nonsense. The players weren’t so much protesting as having a tantrum. For players to be moved to such a drastic action over the Blake incident doesn’t make that incident egregious, it only makes their blind emotionalism readily apparent.

That said, I also have no time for people outraged by the NBA strike and respond to it by saying, “I’ll never watch a game again!” I obviously disagree with the NBA players regarding Jacob Blake and Black Lives Matter, but I also think that if you are going to protest then this is the way to do it. It would have been nice if the players had actually thought out their strike and the goals they actually wanted to achieve - and the fact that they don’t really have any achievable goals speaks to the vacuity of their cause. It also would have been beneficial if the players stood up for human rights in China earlier in the year - thus giving them some moral authority…but they didn’t and so they lack it. Regardless of all that…if you think players striking is an egregious form of protest there is no hope for you.

I always thought the same of Colin Kaepernick and his kneeling. I loathe the whole notion of flag fetishism and its accompanying militarism and think the anthem should not be played before any games, so I have never understood why Kaepernick’s kneeling was such a problem - it is simply a non-violent protest.

The WNBA also protested the Jacob Blake shooting by not playing their games, but no one noticed because no one gives a shit about that joke of a league and its dreadful product. What struck me about the WNBA protest was that all the players came out onto the court wearing a white t-shirt with seven painted on bloody bullet holes on the back in honor of Jacob Blake.

Think about that…WNBA players weren’t calling out police violence, they were actually honoring Jacob Blake, a guy who had an active warrant out for him for sexual assault against the woman whose call to police led to the shooting incident. So the WNBA think an alleged sexual assaulter is now a hero…good to know.

See this is the kind of thing that highlights the emotionalism, irrationality and utter madness of the entire Black Lives Matter movement and the racial moral panic gripping the nation.

Here is another example…Stephen A. Smith had a rant last week on ESPN where he called out the recent hiring of white Hall of Fame point guard Steve Nash, a two-time MVP, as the new head coach of the Brooklyn Nets as being a function of “white privilege”. Smith was incensed that Nash, who has no head coaching experience, would get hired over black coaches like Ty Lue who do have experience. Smith said that this (the hiring of an head coach with no experience) never happens for black people.

The uninformed may have been moved by Smith’s vacuous and emotionalist rant because it tells them what they want to hear, but what was most striking to me about the segment was that it was entirely factually incorrect.

I long ago stopped following the NBA very closely, and yet the second I heard Smith say that a black man has never been extended the opportunity that Nash had received, I immediately recalled that a black man HAD gotten that same opportunity FOR THAT SAME EXACT TEAM.

In 2014 the Brooklyn Nets hired Jason Kidd right after he retired from playing - in other words…Kidd had no coaching experience at all. While Kidd may “pass” for white as he is very light skinned, but just like Barrack Obama, he is black as his father was black. Let me add that it is horrifying to me that we as a society are now back in the truly ugly place of measuring a persons “blackness” to see if they qualify.

In addition, in 2014 Derek Fisher, a black man with no coaching experience who just retired from playing in the NBA, was hired by…the New York Knicks!

The fact that Stephen A. Smith, who considers himself a basketball expert and the ultimate New Yorker, either forgot or chose to forget, black players Jason Kidd and Derek Fisher having no coaching experience but getting hired as coaches in Brooklyn and New York, a fact that directly refutes his thesis of Nash’s white privilege, speaks volumes about the lack of integrity and dearth of emotionalism rampant in the media, especially around issues of race.

Which brings us back to Doc Rivers’ final point in his weepy post-game speech, which was about how “we are the ones being shot”. This sentiment fits nicely into something that LeBron James said recently in regard to the police. James said, “I know people get tired of hearing me say it, but we are scared as black people in America…black men, black women, black kids, we are terrified.”

LeBron should be scared, he should be absolutely terrified, but not of the police but of people who look like him, because Doc Rivers is right, black people are the ones being shot in America…but they are also the ones doing the shooting.

According to the CDC, homicide is the leading cause of death for black males aged 1 to 44. But of the 2,925 black people murdered in 2018, 2,600 of them, or 88%, were killed by other black people and 8% were killed by whites. Of the 3,499 whites murdered in 2018, 15.2% of them were killed by black people and 81% were killed by other whites.

In that same year, 228 black people were killed by cops…compared to 456 white people killed by cops. Cops kill more whites than blacks in raw numbers - whites are 72% of the population so that is not surprising, but when broken down not by population percentage but by percentage of police interaction, whites are still killed at a slightly higher rate than blacks.

The reason that there are so many police interactions with black people is revealed in the FBI crime statistics from 2018. The FBI stats show something else that is very disconcerting, and that is that black people commit an extraordinary amount of crimes, violent crimes in particular, especially considering that they make up a rather small percentage of the overall population.

For example, according to these 2018 FBI stats black people make up roughly 13% of the American population yet are arrested for 53.3% of homicides/non-negligent manslaughter, 28.6% of rapes, 54.2% of robberies, 33.7% of aggravated assaults, 29.4% of burglaries, 30% of larcenies, 37.4% of violent arsons and 32% of other assaults.

These statistics are extremely uncomfortable to discuss, in fact, these statistics are so uncomfortable both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have deemed referencing them to be “racist”. So, according to the ADL and SPLC, statistical reality is now racist.

When you look at the CDC and FBI statistics regarding black homicide rates and crime rates, the only logical conclusion to draw is that it would seem ‘black lives matter’ only on the rare occasion when white people or the police take them.

IDENTITY POLITICS DON’T MATTER

And this is why I abhor identity politics with a passion and believe it is killing this country. People are not representatives of some group, they are not their identities…they are individuals, each unique in their own right.

Identity politics believes that Dr. King’s dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, is, in fact, racist. Seeing people as individuals and not as identities is anathema to our current moment, and that is both tragic and frightening because all it does is dehumanize and elevates the worst among us, and diminish the best.

For instance, the black people I know are not represented on those FBI crime statistics. The black people I know are are not murderous criminals living the thug life, they are thoughtful, sensitive, kind and compassionate human beings. (It should also be mentioned that the two cops I know (one of whom is black) are not skull cracking, trigger happy, authoritarian douchebags either, they are just normal guys living normal lives.)

But if you are going to demand that people be identified solely by their race or ethnicity, then that identification comes with the burden of that race or ethnicity’s shadow. In the case of black people, that means the FBI crime statistics showing an alarming amount of criminality in the black community.

Race hustlers peddling the vapid Critical Race Theory like Barbara DiAngelo (White Fragility) and Ibram X. Kendi (How to be Anti-Racist) are having great success doing the same thing to whites, teaching everyone that not only are all whites inherently racist, but that every institution in America is as well.

Of course, this hyper-racialization dehumanizes the individual and imposes a needless barrier between whites and blacks while removing all agency from blacks and cynically exploiting white guilt for profit.

This approach does not diminish “racism” at all but instead accentuates divisions and heightens hatred.

There’s a reason that corporate America has been so quick to jump on the BLM bandwagon, and it isn’t because they are excited for monumental change in America. Corporate America embracing BLM is a dead give away that the movement is a mirage. Corporate America is using Black Lives Matter as a form of cheap grace…where it can signal its empty virtue and then merrily go on about its dirty business.

What Black Lives Matter does is take the focus off of police brutality or economic issues and put the focus on race. Once something becomes about race it stops being about anything else. BLM makes enemies out of potential allies by making everything about race instead of focusing on commonalities that cross racial and ethnic boundaries and have more to do with class.

If BLM were serious, their protests would have a very clear objective. Right now, BLM protestors say “defund the police” but then say that isn’t what they really mean. Or they hold up signs saying “no hate” or “racism sucks” or some other vacuous bumper sticker slogan.

An actual serious proposal to address police brutality would be to demand an increase in funding to police rather than a demand to defund. Police need more money to hire more officers and to do more training, as former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink recently stated, police need to spend at least 25% of their time training.

Police need to have it drilled into them how to deescalate situations and also how to be much more effective and efficient with their hands, thus reducing the need to use a weapon. It would be a very good idea for all cops to be serious martial artists heavily schooled in Judo or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Cops should also be better paid, better trained and more thoroughly vetted in order to weed out those with a nefarious personal agenda or psychological dysfunction.

If BLM proposed those things, then maybe that would be an indication that they were serious about actually addressing the issue of police brutality, but they don’t and they aren’t.

“Black Lives Matter”, just like its animating philosophy Critical Race Theory, is meant to be not only frustratingly amorphous but intentionally divisive, and that is why corporate America, the media and the establishment love it. As long as Black Lives Matter is front and center, the corruption of business as usual can continue unabated and the vast majority of Americans, who are working class and poor and who are a glorious melting pot of black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight and on and on and on, will continue to suffer at the hands of both the police and the corporate class.

What needs to happen for poor and working class people is to drop the Black Lives Matter nonsense and instead focus on things that could actually improve all of their lives…like universal health care. Universal health care would benefit poor and working class people of all races, and protests in favor of it would not be infused with the divisive and frantic emotion of the race based BLM movement, and thus be less likely to lead to rioting and looting, both of which are extraordinarily self-defeating.

The reality is that Black Lives Matter with its emotionalist, irrational hyper-racialization isn’t addressing the suffering of black Americans or any other type of Americans, it is guaranteeing it.

Until we start seriously addressing both the economic issues of poor and working class people and the inadequacies of law enforcement, then nothing of any substance will ever change.

NO LIVES MATTER

This is why I say, No Lives Matter.

No Lives Matter because the truth of our existence is that we are all completely disposable yet entirely irreplaceable. We are all flawed and fragile creatures stumbling through the dark hurtling toward our own demise.

Regardless of our race, gender, ethnicity or any other secondary characteristic, to quote JFK, “we all must inhabit this small planet, we all cherish our children’s future and we are all mortal”. The bottom line is that we all bleed when we are cut, and we all grieve when heartbroken, and we all want a better world for our children than the one we have had to endure. This is what we share…this is what brings us together…the fleetingness of the human experience and the enormous existential humility that imposes upon us.

If we can embrace that humility and recognize that all of us come from dust, and to the dust we will all inevitably return, then maybe we can stop with the incessant dehumanization in our culture that labels us black beings or white beings instead of human beings, each illuminated by the light of God or truth or love or peace that dwells deep within us all.

Until we recognize and celebrate the oceans of our commonalities as opposed to the raindrops of our differences, then no lives will ever matter…not black lives, not blue lives, not a single life.

©2020

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

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Hamilton: A Review

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

My Recommendation: 2 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now for the bad news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2020

The Tragedy of Charlottesville and the Age of Identity

Estimated Reading Time : 8 minutes 13 seconds

I attempted to write about the whole Charlottesville situation last week but found I just didn't have the heart to do it. As I am sure it does for others, the entire episode depresses me no end. My depression does not come from the knowledge that there are neo-Nazi's and racists in America, I've known that for a long time. What has depressed me so much was that I was forewarning about this exact type of conflagration for some time and no one heeded my alarm and now a young woman, Heather Heyer, is dead. 

My depression has only gotten worse since the murder Saturday, August 12, because of the strategically inept, emotionally driven, intellectually vacuous and politically self-defeating response to it by those on the left and in the media. 

Even though I know it is a fruitless endeavor, I will once again throw out some thoughts I hope people will consider if they really, truly want to succeed in overcoming the darker aspects of American politics and culture. Do I expect anyone to listen to me or heed my warnings? Of course not, but goodness knows that has never stopped me before. 

PUNCHING NAZIS AND PANDORA'S BOX

Let's start at the beginning, I have written more articles than I care to remember about the subject of violent political language leading to political violence . I have written ad nauseam about how when you give yourself the right to punch Nazi's because they are terrible people, you open a Pandora's Box of violence and self-aggrandizing righteousness that can never be shut and will ultimately be used against you. 

For one example, at the end of May I wrote a piece titled, Greg Gianforte, Punching Nazi's and the Absence of Moral Authority where I lay out the case that giving yourself permission to punch bad guys only gives the bad guys permission to punch you back, or to preemptively punch you first. Punching Nazi's may feel like a fun thing to do, but the problem with punching Nazi's is that they will definitely punch back, and last Saturday they punched back with a Dodge Charger killing Heather Heyer and wounding dozens. It is easy for liberals to scream about there being "no moral equivalency" between the Nazi's and Antifa, but that doesn't mean that Antifa, liberals and the left don't bear some responsibility for the conditions which led to Ms. Heyer's death. Here are some other examples of where I made the same argument and warned against violent language leading to violence. Link, Link, Link, Link.

THERAPEUTIC VS. STRATEGIC

This past week the New York Times ran an interesting piece by Moises Velasquez-Manoff about how to counter Nazi protestors and, not the least bit surprising to me since I've been saying this all along, the best way to do so is to not confront them physically. Confrontation is oxygen to neo-Nazi's, when you attack them you are giving teeth to their tiger. This quote from the Times piece echoes what I have been saying non-stop on the subject.  

“I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told me. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.” The problem, she said, is that violence is simply bad strategy."

As everyone's favorite Nazi, Hans Landa, would say…"That's a BINGO!!"

"Violence is bad strategy". I have said that over and over and over again but to no avail. And still in the wake of Charlottesville, the left is doubling down on this strategy and holding up Antifa as a noble resistance movement. It isn't, it is a collection of the self-indulgent having tantrums for personal reasons wrapped in the political.

More from the Times...

"Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled. It also probably helps them recruit. And more broadly, if violence against minorities is what you find repugnant in neo-Nazi rhetoric, then “you are using the very force you’re trying to overcome,” Michael Nagler, the founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, told me."

Another BINGO!! Mr. Nagler is correct, but the majority of the left and the media are in a bizarre emotionalist hysteria at the moment where reason and self-reflection are anathema. If those resisting Trump and the neo-Nazi's truly want to succeed in their endeavor, they would step back from their emotionalism and embrace a calm, cool and calculating strategic approach to do so.

More from the Times...

"Most important perhaps, violence is just not as effective as nonviolence. In their 2011 book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Dr. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth examined how struggles are won. They found that in over 320 conflicts between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance was more than twice as effective as violent resistance in achieving change. And nonviolent struggles were resolved much sooner than violent ones.

The main reason, Dr. Stephan explained to me, was that nonviolent struggles attracted more allies more quickly. Violent struggles, on the other hand, often repelled people and dragged on for years.

The broader issue, in her view, is this: Why do oppressive regimes and movements invest so much in fomenting violence? (Think of our president and his talent for dividing the country and generating chaos.) Because violence and discord help their cause. So why would you, she asks, “do what the oppressor wants you to do?”

A triple BINGO!! What frustrates me no end is that people on the left are so hysterical that they never answer the most important question of all…why are you acting emotionally and violently (including language) when that is exactly what your oppressor (Trump et al) wants you to do? The left may be too lost in their echo chamber to realize this, but Trump won Charlottesville and the aftermath. Polling from NPR/PBS clearly shows this. And Pelosi and the democrats overreach regarding the taking down of confederate statues is unpopular with a majority of Americans and Black Americans (44% -40% think confederate statues should remain), and will only empower Trump and weaken them further. And the greater problem of liberal overreach is that there has already been vandalism of and calls for removal of statues that aren't confederate, with examples being Joan of Arc, St. Junipero Serra and Christopher Columbus. As a friend of mine, an independent voter in a blue state, said to me the other day, "I hate to say it because he is such a disgusting person, but Trump is right about the statues." "Regular" people can be repulsed by neo-Nazi's and still not want statues to be removed, this nuance is lost on democrats and it is a trap they should avoid.

Regardless of statues, the larger problem is that we live in a culture, and the politics of both the left and right are reflective of this, that demands instant self-gratification. As the Times piece points out, and as I have been saying for ages, punching Nazi's may be therapeutically useful in the moment, but ultimately it is strategically asinine and self-defeating. Many on the left do not care about the long term political effects of this self-sabotaging strategy, only that it assuages their personal psychological discomfort in the moment. 

IS THERE ANY POINT TO PROTESTING?

The New Yorker ran a piece by Nathan Heller on August 21, 2017 titled "Is There Any Point To Protesting?"  that discussed the efficacy of protests. The piece pointed out that most protests simply don't work. For instance in the lead up to the Iraq war millions of Americans, myself included, marched and protested against the war, but the war happened anyway. The piece points out that the effective protests are the ones born of a strong leadership structure and precise strategic and tactical goals and objectives. The civil rights protests led by Martin Luther King, Jr. being the prime examples. 

Besides the strategic, tactical and moral genius of King, the civil rights movement also displayed what the Times piece, and I, advocate, non-violence. Civil rights protestors maintained their dignity and their righteousness by exposing the moral and ethical deviancy of their opponents. What shocked America, and white America in particular, into siding with the civil rights protestors was that the chaos, anger and violence were only emanating from those fighting for discrimination and segregation. The moral strength of the civil rights activists was what deeply moved white Americans, who chose King's spiritual strength against the physical strength wrapped in moral weakness of the segregationists.

TARGETING THE ACLU AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

The current strategic idiocy of the left is not confined to just the failure to embrace non-violence. In the wake of Charlottesville, liberals have decided to attack the ACLU. The ACLU is a crucial bulwark for the left in the battle against Trump, but liberals want to hold them accountable for daring to fight for the 1st amendment right of Nazi's to rally and march. This is the most self-defeating approach imaginable for the liberals. If liberals want to succeed, they better start understanding that the constitution is the only way they will be able to defeat Trump and Trumpism. This is something I wrote about immediately after Trump's election in my strategic guide to defeating him, but I was ignored then too. I promise you that the left will come to rue the day they failed to embrace the first amendment unabashedly because their enemies will use that as a weapon against them. 

Speaking of which, I saw the founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, on television last week and she was saying that "hate speech is not protected by the first amendment." You know who would really be shocked to hear that? The founding fathers who wrote the constitution. Of course hate speech is protected by the first amendment, and Ms. Cullors should be very happy about that. Yes, it allows Nazi's to march, but is also allows Black Lives Matter to march. What Ms. Cullors and many on the left fail to understand is that if you water down the 1st amendment, or any other constitutional rights, those weakened rights will be used as a weapon to destroy you. Lots of people out there think what Black Lives Matter advocates is hate speech, which means Black Lives Matter needs the first amendment and the ACLU in order to exist, they would be wise to act accordingly. I seriously doubt they will. 

HATING HATE AND THE HATERS WHO HATE

Which brings us to the word "hate". I've heard the word hate a lot these last few weeks, and I have to say that "hate" is a losing battle for liberals as well. Any protest that wants to be successful need not only be non-violent, it desperately needs to have a very clear objective. The civil rights protests of the 50's and 60's had an overarching objective of civil rights for Black Americans, and specific objectives to each locality, for instance the ending of segregation on buses in Montgomery etc.  The current protests have no clear cut objective. What they say they are against is "hate". They want to stamp out "hate", and carry signs saying "No hate!!". Well, the bad news is that hate is an entirely natural human condition. It has been around ever since we've had sentient beings on this planet, and it will be around when the last man breathes his final breath. You cannot stamp out hate anymore than you can stamp out love, and trying to do so is a fools errand of Quixotic proportions.  

Targeting hate sounds like something a 1st grader would wish for, right after Legos and action figures. Hate is a state of mind that you cannot police because people will just bury it in their psychological closet when in mixed company. In that psychological closet, hate doesn't diminish, it grows in strength and power so that when it does rear its head it will have grown into a very potent force indeed. On the other hand, if people are "allowed to hate" in thought, but not allowed to discriminate in action, then you are on the path to find that delicate balance where disparate people can live side by side without killing each other in a democracy. So being specifically against "discrimination" or "segregation" or whatever specific goal you choose, as opposed to against an amorphous "hate", is the way to go if you want to politically succeed in the long run. 

And just like fighting against the first amendment, fighting against "hate" will easily be used as a weapon against those trying to stamp it out. For instance, people on the left "hate" Nazi's, or "hate" Trump, so they themselves "hate" and feel comfortable doing so. You see, decrying hate is a loser's game because everyone hates something. Just because you think you hate the right things doesn't mean your hate is righteous, only that you're a hypocrite for pointing out other people's hate and being blind to your own.  

NOT-SEEING THE NEO-NOT-SEES

My friend, the inimitable Jungian Falconer, often talks to me about the psychology of Nazi's and the Nazi impulse within us all, but he makes the point that "Nazi" is really "Not-See", meaning the Nazi/Not-See does NOT SEE the humanity of the other. Obviously white supremacists and neo-Nazis and the like do not see the humanity of those different from them, but maybe not so obviously, those on the left are also guilty of this same bit of Not See-ism. These Not-Sees are not interested in searching for Truth, only in confirmation bias and the warm embrace of the echo chamber.  They adamantly avoid the hard work of  exploring and discovering anything new about the world or themselves, they just want to FEEL good and self-righteous right now.

Not See-ism is ascendant in the world right now. This is just a fact of where we are on the historical cycle/wave. To stop it we don't need marches or "pussy-hats" or righteous indignation, what we need is self-reflection, introspection and the hard work of making ourselves conscious of the demons that dwell and work inside of us all. 

THE RELIGION OF SELF AND THE CHURCH OF IDENTITY POLITICS

On the subject of historical waves, there is one large issue that most seem to be unaware of that plays a vital role in the current clash between Not-See Left and Neanderthal Right, that issue is religion. In the long arc of history, the religions of the world that have held cultural sway for the last two thousand years are in decline and collapse in the west. Just because religion is in decline does not mean that people no longer have a religious impulse. Studies show that humans are hard wired for religion, so what happens when the old religions die? New religions get born. The new religion of our time is The Religion of Self, and one of its most powerful denominations is the Church of Identity Politics. This new Religion of Self and its Church of Identity was born after the Century of the Self where advertising and public relations primed humans to respond to their personal unconscious wants and desires before contemplating community or anyone or anything else.

Identity Politics, of both the left and the right, is personal and psychological and fills an unconscious need for the faithful and feeds the narcissism of our time. On the left the identity politics movement fulfills people's need to feel of worth by valuing them based upon their individual identifying markers…race, sexual orientation, gender etc. On the right the same principle is in practice, with white power and white supremacy being the most malignant forms of right wing identity politics. What both the left and right versions of the Religion of Self and the Church of Identity Politics share is that they are both ruled by the quest for sanctity in the form of Victimhood. Victimhood is held up as the highest marker of value and worth and achievement.

The religious impulse of the current Identity era is similar to the religious impulse of the Christian era in that it gives its adherents a sense of purpose and meaning. In addition, its doctrine and dogma is based on faith and feelings, not logic and reason, and it is also infused with a heavy dose of intoxicating self-righteousness and the prestige of exclusivity, which gives the faithful a psychological release of powerful psychic and emotional energy through the use of scapegoating, shaming and exiling of those who do not conform to the dogma being preached. This is true of disciples of the Religion of Self and the Church of Identity Politics on both the left and the right.

On the right, the impulse is to brand heretics with everything from RINO, Republicans in Name Only, to Cuckservative, the clever and effective meme that at once eviscerates and emasculates any political opponents who don't adhere to the proper dogma. Shouting "Cuckservative" is to the right as crying "racists/misogynist" is to the left. Two sides of the same coin in the collection plate at the Church of Identity Politics. 

With the democrats, you see a similar thing when the members of the Clinton Cult attack, shame and exile non-compliant leftists by calling them racists and misogynists for daring to disagree with the Identity Dogma which demands people be judged by their race, gender, sexual orientation and position on the victimhood scale and not by the content of their character or their ability. 

Right before the horrors of Charlottesville there was a great example of this dogmatic impulse when centrist democrats wailed about racism from "Bernie Bros" who don't support California Senator Kamala Harris, a Black woman, for president in 2020. The centrist attack was transparently ridiculous, but it was undertaken with all of the fervor of the Inquisition. The blindness revealed by the Clinton Cult regarding Harris and her opponents alleged "racism" is staggering. Calling Bernie Sanders supporters and those who dare to question Kamala Harris "racists and misogynists", means that the multitude of people of color and women who support Bernie Sanders and question Harris are treated as if they are invisible by the centrist democrats, which is exactly what the Clinton Cult claim Sanders supporters do to women and minorities. Add to that the fact that some of the most effective spokespeople for the progressive ideology that fuels the leftist movement (and Bernie Sanders) today are Tulsi Gabbard and Nina Turner, two powerful women of color, and you can see how Clintonistas have earned the moniker of Hillary Hypocrites.

PRAY FOR YOUR ENEMIES

Speaking of church, the civil rights movement which was so very successful at protest, was grounded in Christianity, which gave it a built in moral authority and common ground with even its most ardent adversaries. As previously stated, the time of Christianity in the west has passed, but none of the new religions, The Religion of Self and the Church of Identity Politics most especially, have been able to fill that moral void or accentuate community through common experience.

I read an interview last week with the Eagles of Death Metal lead singer Jesse Hughes. To refresh your memory, Hughes and his bandmates survived the horrific Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris back in November of 2015 where 90 people were slaughtered in a concert hall. In the interview, Hughes spoke of how he reached out to Ariana Grande, the young signer whose concert in Manchester, England was targeted by Islamic terrorists in May of this year. Hughes recounted how he has tried to handle the psychological and emotional tumult brought on by his brush with death two years earlier. Hughes advice to Grande was "you've always got to pray for your enemies". I truly believe that and try to practice it, and that means praying not only for Heather Heyer, but for James Fields, the neo-Nazi who killed her, who is desperately in need of solace from  the torment in his lost soul regardless of the heinous atrocity he committed. But I am aware that to advocate for prayer now, in the wake of Charlottesville and in the Identity Age, I would only, at best, be laughed at and ridiculed. And I understand that is because calling for prayer in this day and age is in itself seen to be a divisive act in this time when the Religion of Self reigns supreme.

The reality is that this is the post-Christian western world we live in. The philosophical and psychological container of the old religions cannot hold the New Man, and the old religions have earned the public's disillusionment with corruption and hypocrisy on an epic scale. The collective is currently disoriented because they no longer have a foundational orientation to the old religions, and are struggling to re-orient to a new religion that can adequately contain the New Man in all of his complexity. 

What we need at this time are new versions of Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Thich Naht Hanh, Gandhi and Anthony DeMello, but with no viable new religion with which to re-orient ourselves, civilization is left with underserving religions, like the Religion of Self and the Church of Identity Politics and its sacred Victimhood, which are unable to contain the New Man in his entirety and therefore not fertile ground from which any new great men and women can grow and flourish. Instead, from our disorientation from the old religion and failure of the new religion, we flail about and embrace the false prophets and idols on the left like Black Lives Matter, The Clinton Cult and their emotive neo-liberal cohorts in the media, and on the right like Fox News, the Confederacy, Chris Kyle and Donald J. Trump. 

THE ROUGH BEAST IN WINTER

I wrote last June that a beast was awakened and slouching towards Bethelehem. I wrote last month that winter isn't coming, winter is here. Both of these things have been proved by the events of the last year and last month to be entirely true. There is no way to stop the historical wave we are on that is, like a tsunami, gaining strength and power every moment of the day. Delusional liberals believe removing Trump will stop it. It won't. Fighting against "hate" won't help. Protesting won't help. The dye is cast, the conclusion inevitable. Our only wise course of action now is to accept the inevitable, embrace our disorientation, and prepare for impact and the aftermath of the crash. 

This is the world we have built, these are the politics we deserve. If we cannot pray at all, never mind pray for our enemy, we are no better than our enemy, and we will be engulfed by the same flames that devour him. Our blindness is no excuse, our ignorance is no excuse, our arrogance is no excuse. We deserve Trump, for he is a mirror reflection of us and our narcissism, intellectual vacuity, self-defeating strategies and crumbling empire. The darkness is upon us, all of us, and until we realize that, we are doomed to remain without light. Know this, things are going to get much, much worse, before they get any better.

©2017