Joker: Folie a Deux - A Review: It’s a Mad, Mad World

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. But be forewarned, this is an aggressively arthouse movie that will be very unappealing to those seeking comic book entertainment.  

 Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Philips’ sequel to his controversial, billion-dollar blockbuster Joker (2019), and features Joaquin Phoenix reprising his iconic, Oscar-winning role as Arthur Fleck aka Joker, but this time he’s joined by Lady Gaga as his love interest Harley Quinn.

Joker was, and still is, an extraordinarily polarizing film. Back in the hyper-politicized year of 2019, Joker was instantly reviled by weak-kneed critics who labeled Phoenix’s Fleck/Joker as the “patron saint of incels”, and the film vile and potentially violence inducing because it captured the anger and resentment boiling just under the surface of America.

Despite the cavalcade of establishment media fear and loathing of Joker, the film still managed to make gobs of money and garner eleven Academy Award nominations and two wins (Best Actor and Best Original Score).

Unfortunately, no one need fear Joker: Folie a Deux becoming a blockbuster or hording trophies at the Academy Awards. Joker: Folie a Deux is going to be a certified box office bomb and is despised by critics and fans alike.

I try to quarantine myself from reviews and criticisms of a film before seeing it, but with Joker Folie a Deux it was impossible to avoid the overwhelming hate the film was receiving. Some of the most animated vitriol toward the film was coming from people who, like me, loved the original movie.

So when I strolled into an empty Sunday afternoon screening of Joker: Folie a Deux, I was mentally sharpening my knives in order to be able to properly and precisely eviscerate the shitshow I was about to watch.

But then I watched it…and maybe it was because I went in with such low expectations, but not only did I like Joker: Folie a Deux, I thought it was, in a way, much like the first film, bleak but utterly and absolutely brilliant.

The film opens with a Looney Tunes style cartoon which features Arthur Fleck and his literal and figurative shadow, Joker. This opening gives the perfect psychological backdrop for Fleck/Joker and buttresses my Jungian shadow thesis regarding Joker where Arthur Fleck is a Christ-figure and Joker is the anti-Christ/Satan figure.

The film then goes to live action and the story begins where Joker left off, with the now famous Arthur Fleck sitting in Arkham Asylum awaiting his trial for murder.

Over time the film descends into the madness of Arthur Fleck…and uses the genre of a jukebox musical as a manifestation of that madness. So as reality and fantasy blend together in Arthur’s mind, he and his friend Lee Quinzel – aka Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, sing a bevy of American Standards…it’s sort of like a grotesque fever dream/nightmare version of La La Land.

But make absolutely no mistake, Joker: Folie a Deux is not, and is not meant to be, “entertaining”, not in the traditional sense, but it is most certainly enlightening and insightful, something which is exceedingly rare in cinema nowadays, most especially in Hollywood films in general, and franchise movies in particular.  

Joker: Folie a Deux is a work of art, which is a jarring and frustrating thing for viewers to experience when they head into the cinema expecting a franchise film piece of pop entertainment. This subverting of expectation, signified in the film with the recurring theme of “That’s Entertainment!”, is no doubt responsible for the film’s very poor reception among audiences and critics that have been conditioned by Marvel’s mindless money-making machine movies over the last 16 years…and to a lesser extent DC’s too, to expect a certain kind of pre-teen drivel as comic book cinema.

Joker: Folie a Deux is not that, instead it is a relentlessly bleak and brutal film. It is grungy, gruesome and glorious. It may make you angry, it may make you anxious, it may make you bored. But whatever your reaction to it is, that says infinitely more about you than about it, because this movie is a mirror held up to our insane, inane, indecent cancer of a culture and the vicious and vacuous world we all inhabit. Your reaction to Joker: Folkie a Deux, is your reaction to the madness of our broken and fallen world.

It seems obvious to me that Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Phillips’ giant middle-finger to the people who hated the first movie…and to those that loved it too. I never would’ve guessed that Todd Phillips of all people – the guy who made the Hangover trilogy, would be the auteur with balls the size of Hindenbergs who morphs into his main character, lights the match and watches the whole shithouse go up in flames. But here we are…and I’m glad to be here.

The animating characteristic of Joker: Folie a Deux is despair. Phillips’ Gotham is a hellscape…literally. For not only is it filled with vile, venal and loathsome creatures, but it is entirely devoid of any love. In a world devoid of love, despair rules the day because hope is replaced by delusion.

Arthur Fleck is, as a Christ figure, an open wound, a raw nerve, and it isn’t the hate of this world that affects him so greatly, but rather the complete absence of love.

Joker, on the other hand, as the devil, thrives in this hell for the exact reason that it cripples Arthur.

Many critics and hipsters hated the first Joker movie because Arthur Fleck was a white guy. This sort of shallow, identity driven thinking is all too common in our current age, and it reduces otherwise smart people into myopic fools unable to see the forest for the trees.

Arthur Fleck isn’t a symbol of white disenfrachisement…he is a symbol of the forgotten, the downtrodden, the outcast, and the loser of all colors, creeds and genders.

Arthur Fleck is the shaking, orphaned child in Gaza surviving in the rubble. He is the Palestinian prisoner gang-raped by his Israeli guards. He is the gay man thrown from a roof in Saudi Arabia. He is the teenage girl in Kabul beaten for showing her face. He is the black boy abused and neglected by an overwhelmed foster care system. He is Kelly Thomas, the mentally ill homeless man beaten to death by police in California. He is Ethan Saylor, the young man with Down’s Syndrome who died when Maryland cops kneeled on his neck in a movie theatre. Arthur Fleck is the helpless and the hopeless, the weak, the sick and the old…and critics and audiences who see him as a threat or a symbol of the oppressor simply due to the color of his skin and his gender are the ones who make this world the cruel, inhumane and uninhabitable shithole that it is.  

Joker is Arthur’s shadow…he is his vengeance and justice. Joker is the Hamas member slaughtering Israeli men, women and children at a desert rave. Joker is the Israeli soldier executing Palestinian men, women and children in cold blood. Joker is the cop killing pets in front of children. Joker is the school-shooter settling scores for social slights. Joker is the mayhem, murder and madness unleashed by those who feel fueled by righteousness.

Joker is the king of this fallen world…and Arthur Fleck is its victim.

Joaquin Phoenix is once again fantastic as Arthur and the Joker. Phoenix is a fragile yet forceful screen presence. His transformations throughout Joker: Folie a Deux are subtle and simply spectacular. I doubt Phoenix will be considered for any awards since Joker: Folie a Deux is so hated, but he is more than worthy of accolades.

Lady Gaga is an actress I have never been able to tolerate. I despised the trite and treacly A Star is Born and found her distractingly bad in House of Gucci.  But here in Joker: Folie a Deux I finally got to understand her appeal. There really is just something about her that is magnetic and undeniable, at least in this movie. I found her character arc to be somewhat poorly executed, but I thought her performance was quite good.

Brendan Gleeson plays a prison guard and is an ominous presence whenever he graces the screen, most particularly when he isn’t being menacing. Gleeson is, like Phoenix, one of the best actors on the planet, and he never fails to elevate any scene he inhabits.

And finally, Leigh Gill, who plays Gary Puddles, is fantastic in his lone scene. This scene, which features Puddles being questioned on the stand in court, is extraordinarily moving, and exquisitely captures the deeper meaning and purpose of the film.

Cinematographer Lawrence Sher, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Joker, once again does phenomenal work on Joker: Folie a Deux. Sher shoots the film with a distinct 1970’s grittiness and grime. He turns multiple musical numbers into uncomfortable flashbacks to Sonny and Cher episodes or other seventies type showcases and does so with a cinematic aplomb.

Hildur Guonadottir, who won an Oscar for her original score on Joker, is back on this film and once again sets the scene with an uncomfortably menacing and ominous score that drives the emotional narrative.

As for Todd Phillips, as I previously said, it’s astonishing the balls on this guy. He is basically saying “fuck you” to critics and fans alike. It’s tough to imagine him bouncing back and being allowed to do a worthwhile film after having a critical and commercial flop like this. That’s a shame though because he has proven his worth as an artist with Joker and Joker: Folie a Deux.

Phillips is a lot of things, some of them good and some of them bad, but one thing that he has been in recent years…is right.

It’s always struck me that no one (except me) seemed to notice that Joker accurately diagnosed the incandescent anger and fury that was boiling just beneath the surface of America back in 2019. I wrote about this profoundly disturbing anger prior to Joker, but Joker showed it to mainstream audiences, and elite coastal critics were so horrified by it that they blamed the film rather than the country and culture it revealed.

Joker was proven right though as less than nine months after its release that volcano of anger erupted in Joker-esque fashion with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots and chaotic violence in the streets of American cities…just like in Joker.

The Joker was every BLM rioter, and every opportunistic looter and arsonist in America’s summer of rage in 2020…just like he was every flag-waving MAGA moron on January 7th, 2021, who stormed the Capitol looking to “Save Democracy”.

That Joker was correct has never been admitted by the coastal elites who hated the movie. That Joker: Folie a Deux is also correct in diagnosing the unremitting cruelty, malignant madness and incessant insanity of our culture and country will also go unnoticed by those who are too offended, or bored or angry or inhumane to care or notice.

Joker: Folie a Deux is not a polarizing film like Joker. The consensus is that it is awful to the point of being an abomination. But I am here to tell you that Joker: Folie a Deux is a brutal, ballsy and brilliant film. It is, like Oliver Stone’s manic and maniacal 1994 masterpiece Natural Born Killers, well ahead of the curve, and will only get its due when the history of this era is written and the ugly truth of our current time fully revealed.

If you have the fortitude for it, and the philosophical, political and psychological mind for it, and the ability to tolerate the arthouse in your comic book cinema, then Joker: Folie a Deux is not the steaming pile of shit that critics and audiences claim it to be, but rather a startling revelation. And like most revelations it is reviled in its own time because it tells the unvarnished and unabashedly ugly truth that no one wants to see or hear because it’s too painful to ever acknowledge.

©2024

November 2023 Propaganda Report: 60 Minutes Strikes Again...and Again...and Again!

Now that I’ve begun to dip my toes back into the cesspool of propaganda, I’m once again coming to the grim realization that I don’t have to walk far to find those putrid waters.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I stumbled upon an episode of the CBS dinosaur 60 Minutes and was shocked/amused at how shamelessly it peddled propaganda against Russia, China and Iran, no doubt in the hopes of convincing gullible Americans into believing some Manichean ideal about us being the good guys, and them being the bad guys, and how we must righteously annihilate them in a world war.

In the weeks that followed, 60 Minutes has kept up its relentless propaganda pace with astounding consistency. In fact, since 60 Minutes started its 56th season on September 17, 2023, over the course of eleven episodes the show has run an astonishing twelve segments either directly or tangentially accusing Russia, China and/or Iran of various evils and nefariousness. This relentless cavalcade of propaganda pieces has been entirely devoid of nuance or journalistic integrity, filled with false assumptions, decidedly one-sided, egregiously vacuous and transparently contrived.

The 60 Minutes episode from November 12th is a perfect example of the type of vapid-to-the-point-of-inane propaganda now common place in American media. The topic on this episode was…shock of shocks…the evil of those nefarious Iranians and Russians!! How original.

The first segment was about an alleged Iranian government program to kill or kidnap American officials, citizens and Iranian dissidents on U.S. soil, which is a nmcie companion piece to the 60 Minutes segment I previously wrote about which dealt with an Iranian-American arrested for espionage in Iran, who was eventually part of a recent prisoner swap.

Leslie Stahl, sporting her trademark physics-defying hairstyle that is best described as Andy Warhol run through a nuclear Cuisinart and a turbo wind tunnel, started off the festivities by reading a list of U.S. officials allegedly targeted. The list included such world-class asshats as Mike Esper, Mike Pompeo and to top it all off, John fucking Bolton.

Bolton and Stahl sat down for one of the more contrived sequences in 60 Minutes history, which is quite an accomplishment, and Bolton, as is his wont, talked tough while looking like a constipated Seussian character. Bolton is one of the more blood-thirsty and maniacal hawks in recent U.S. history, again…quite an accomplishment, and he is completely devoid of any credibility on issues revolving around Iran, Russia, China, the Middle East, Europe, Asia or anywhere else in the world, but Stahl, of course, lapped up his braggadocio bullshit and never once pushed back against his false bravado or his claims…nor did she…you know…show any actual evidence to back up the FBI’s claims of an Iranian kidnap/assassination program.

Stahl then interviewed Masi Alinejad, an Iranian dissident woman living in Brooklyn whom the FBI claims was targeted by this Iranian kidnapping/assassination plot.

Alinejad came to the U.S. fourteen years ago and has been an outspoken advocate for women in Iran, and routinely confers with women in Iran and posts videos online of them not wearing a headscarf in defiance of Iranian religious law.

To be kind, Alinejad comes across as absolutely batshit crazy. She is hyper emotional and seems like the type of person you’d see wandering the streets of Brooklyn talking to neighborhood squirrels while wearing an ornate Kentucky Derby hat and a vintage wedding dress.

Alinejad shared her story of how Iran hired an Azerbaijani man in New York to buy a gun and track down Alinejad, then kidnap her and take her to Iran for trial.

Stahl’s reaction to this story is as revealing as it is pretty funny, as she says it “sounds implausible”. No shit Leslie…maybe it “sounds implausible” because it is, in fact, implausible.

Apparently, the kidnap plot against Alinejad crumbles and so the Iranians pivoted and told this criminal from Azerbaijan to skip the kidnapping and just kill her. The criminal allegedly stalks her, then goes up to her front door and “tries to get in” her house.

What’s weird about this claim of this guy trying to break in to Alinejad’s house is that 60 Minutes shows door cam footage of him on her porch meant to prove the claim, but the video doesn’t show him actually trying to get in to her house at all…in fact he never touches the door. He wanders back on forth on the porch looking at his phone, like a delivery man wondering if he has the wrong address. If there was footage of him actually trying to break in, which would be pretty damning…60 Minutes would’ve shown it. But apparently, they don’t because they didn’t.

According to the story, the alleged assassin then leaves…apparently because he couldn’t get in the house – no doubt held back by the fact that he never touched the door, and then is pulled over by cops for “running a stop sign”, and the police find a rifle in the trunk of his car.

Let’s unpack this shall we…the guy has a weapon, which the FBI alleges he was going to use to kill Alinejad at the behest of Iran, but for some inexplicable reason he decides not to take the weapon with him when he goes to kill her and ends up just standing around like a dope on her porch. What was he going to do, meet her, introduce himself and then tell her to hold on while he runs to his car and gets his rifle?

Also, never believe coincidences in cases like this. This guy wasn’t pulled over by the cops by happenstance…he was marked and everyone knew what he was doing. A strong indicator of this is that if you or I run a stop sign, the police are not going to search the trunk of our car. They will give you a ticket and that will be that. This is why I assume that this alleged assassin from Azerbaijan was actually either an intelligence agency asset or an informant of some kind, and that the entire plot was manufactured by the feds.

Now why would I assert such a crazy thing? Well because this 60 Minutes story also reveals that the man who allegedly wanted to kidnap or kill John Bolton hired a hitman online (yeah…ok) and that hitman wasn’t really a hitman…he was…you guessed it…an FBI informant.

The FBI has lots of informants and they get up to lots of nefarious stuff for their fed paymasters. For example, that 2020 kidnap plot against Michigan governor Whitmer…the vast majority of people involved were actually working for the FBI. If you look at many big-name cases, particularly in the wake of 9-11, the same is true. Hell, at the very least two of the 9-11 hijackers were living with an FBI informant in San Diego right before the attacks.

So, take all of this nonsense from the FBI and 60 Minutes about a vast Iranian assassination/kidnap plot with a gigantic grain of salt.

That said, governments and their intelligence agencies do kidnap and kill citizens of other countries. You know how I know that? Because 60 Minutes unironically shows a video in this segment where an Iranian citizen confesses to assisting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard with their kidnapping and assassination program. The Iranian man, a smuggler who was allegedly given carte blanch in his illegal business if he cooperated with the Revolutionary Guard, confesses in a video MADE BY ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS IN THE BACK OF A CAR AFTER THESE SAME ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS KIDNAPPED AND FORCEFULLY INTERROGATED THE GUY. Ms. Stahl fails to recognize the irony of using a confession video obtained through an Israeli kidnapping plot to prove the villainy of Iranians for their kidnapping plots.

Speaking of other governments kidnapping people…that sounds sort of like…I don’t know… the U.S. government rendition program under the Bush regime.

And speaking of assassinations of other country’s government officials…that sounds a lot like the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Not to mention the cavalcade of scientists assassinated in Iran by Israeli intelligence in the last decade.

Stahl does bring up the Soleimani assassination but fails to see any similarities as the Iranian General was a “terrorism mastermind”. As always, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder, as U.S. foreign policy over the last 75 years has killed and terrorized infinitely more people, especially Iranian people, than the “terrorist” Soleimani could ever dream of matching. Bolton, Pompeo and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration are at a minimum, equals to Soleimani on the terrorism chart.

Speaking of dead Iranians…does anybody remember the 290 Iranian murdered by the U.S. in 1988 when the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iranian Air flight 655 over Iranian airspace? Well…I’m sure Iranians do, and they probably think of it as a terror attack. The George H.W. Bush was president at the time and he refused to apologize to Iran because America never apologizes….typical terrorists behavior.

Stahl goes on to recount the FBI allegations against Iran saying that in order to keep a legal distance, Iran uses “proxies” from the criminal world to do their dirty work.

This sounds quite similar to how the U.S. intelligence community uses criminals to run guns and drugs into the U.S. from Central and South America in order to fund their black budget projects…like, ironically enough, Iran-Contra.

It is also similar to how prior to the war in Afghanistan, poppy production in that country under Taliban rule had fallen to nearly zero…but after we went on the hunt for Bin Laden by starting a war there, poppy production skyrocketed, followed by a flood of heroin into the U.S. and Europe. The same thing happened during Vietnam, when the CIA would run heroin from Thailand through Vietnam and into the U.S. Not surprisingly, Leslie Stahl didn’t bring any of this uncomfortableness up.

Also not surprisingly, when Stahl spoke of Iran using proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah to fight their wars and foment dissent in other countries, she failed to mention how the U.S. has famously used such stand-up good guys as Al Qaeda and ISIS as proxies in the Middle East against various enemies, such as the old Soviet Union and modern-day Syria.

60 Minutes’ allergy to the truth and addiction to establishment propaganda didn’t stop with the inane Iranian kidnapping story. Up next on the same episode was even more WWIII drum banging in the form of a story about Russia’s “cultural genocide” in Ukraine.

In a previous episode, 60 Minutes did a segment about Russia’s “quiet invasion” in Georgia and now they’re doing a segment on Russia’s “cultural genocide”…how sneaky of those Russians to do “quiet” invasions and “cultural” genocides, instead of those noisy invasions and actual genocides like Israel is doing in Gaza.

The main thrust of this segment was that Russia is targeting Ukrainian churches, libraries and museums in order to wipe out Ukrainian culture and identity.

The specifics of the charges against Russia in this case are…well…almost irrelevant considering the dubious sources with incentive to manufacture any story they want with no journalistic resistance to it. That said, I don't doubt in the least that churches, libraries and museums have been destroyed in Ukraine.

What I find fascinating though is that as this story aired another war is raging…this time in Gaza, and lots of churches, including the third oldest Christian church in the world, St. Porphyrius, and hospitals too, have been deliberately targeted, as have civilians.

You can bet your ass that 60 Minutes will not run a story on the cultural genocide of Christians by Israel…and that’s because when Israel commits cultural genocide, or any other kind of genocide, it’s good, but when Russia does it, it’s bad.

To be fair, it isn’t just Israel that gets a free pass…we give a free pass to ourselves as well. Remember when the Iraqi museum under U.S. military control was looted during the Iraq War, and Donald Rumsfeld’s response was to scoff at the charges and then to declare that “stuff happens”?

I certainly do not condone Russia’s military destroying Ukrainian churches, museums and libraries, nor do I condone their alleged looting. But I must say that these charges would be more impactful if western media outlets hadn’t already run with vacuous accusations of Russian rape camps and massacres, both of which have been shown to be scurrilous charges and empty propaganda talking points.

What I find so deplorable about establishment media’s modern war coverage is, whether it be in Ukraine, Syria, or Israel, the manufacturing and hyping of false atrocity stories.

War is bad enough as it is that you don’t need to gin up phony furor over fake rape camps or beheaded babies and the like. War is an atrocity all its own, it doesn’t need any help. And frankly, these stories only further to coarsen and dehumanize the public…which is already pretty coarse and inhumane.

The following Sunday, November 19th, 60 Minutes kept the propaganda train rolling with a segment titled “The Disappeared”, which was a shameless appeal to emotion that was so devoid of journalistic integrity as to be egregious.

The segment told the story of how Russia is “abducting” Ukrainian children from Ukraine and taking them into Russia. 60 Minutes reports that according to the Ukrainian government, the “official” number of children “abducted” by Russia is 19,000 but that they think the “real” number is 300,000…that’s quite a range…one might even say it is “highly improbable”. Just so everyone knows, 60 Minutes makes abundantly clear throughout the segment that all of this “abducting” is a “war crime”.

The story follows a “brave” Ukrainian grandmother, named Paulina, as she “rescues” her nine-year-old grandson Nikita who was “abducted” by the Russians. This story is…ummm…complicated to say the least.

So, Paulina’s grandson Nikita has special needs and was attending a boarding school for disabled students in Ukraine. His parents are completely out of the picture, but why that is, is never revealed in the story, we only learn that the grandmother is “in the process of filing for guardianship of her grandson”. Curious considering that Nikita was “abducted” nearly 8 months ago…which indicates he had no family member as his guardian prior to the “abduction”.  

Also curious is that Paulina lives far away (in Poland) from Nikita, as she works and has to pay for the boarding school….or so 60 Minutes tells us. The reality is that Paulina hasn’t seen Nikita in a long time and it has nothing to do with the Russians. In fact, she is in such close contact with Nikita that she only finds out he has been “abducted” by the Russians, when his picture is posted on social media by a Ukrainian activist group.

The host of the segment, Cecilia Vega, then informs us that over the seven months Nikita was “held captive”, the Russians played a “cruel game of hide and seek”, moving the child three times in eight months.

In an attempt to expose the villainy of the Russians, a digital map is used to show the long journey Nikita was taken on “post-abduction”. First, he is taken out of Ukraine to Crimea, then to Russia proper – but still close to the border, and then…astonishingly…he is taken back to Ukraine not all that far from where he was originally “abducted”. Cecilia Vega’s voice-over sums up this journey by simply declaring that the child was taken “deep into Russian-held territory”.

Paulina then works with an activist group in Ukraine dedicated to “rescuing” the children “abducted” by Russia, and they hatch a plot to get Paulina to Nikita.

We are told by a former Ukrainian politician who now runs the non-profit activist organization that “rescues” these children, that each child who returns to Ukraine is :a witness to a war crime”…which is a strange thing to say since it will just signal to Russia not to release any more children…right? Ms. Vega never asks that question because it would complicate the shallow sound-bite she is so eager to get and the Manichean narrative she has pledged to uphold and propagate.

Then we hear about Vlad, a 16-year-old Ukrainian boy, who recounts his tale of being taken from his home in Ukraine by Russian soldiers and put in a “camp”, which sounds an awful lot like a school. Among the tortures he endures are that he has to say the Russian national anthem every morning (the horror!!).

Vlad also tells us that speaking Ukrainian was forbidden in the “camp”, which means he got to experience exactly what every ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizen experienced after the U.S.-led coup in 2014 in Ukraine. The post-coup government banned the Russian language, Russian media outlets, opposition political parties and even Russian Orthodox Churches…and some Ukrainian ones too.

Vlad, being a teenager, lashes out at these ridiculous restrictions and tears down a Russian flag in anger. He is then put in the detention facility part of the “camp” and is held in “isolation”. 60 Minutes acts like this is the most barbaric thing to have ever occurred, and I concur, that children, even 16-year-olds, should not be put in isolation. Unfortunately, in the U.S. 35% of all prisoners held in youth detention facility are held in isolation at one point during their incarceration. Celia Vega never mentions that fact.

Vega did mention that the Russians were “indoctrinating” children in these “camps” by telling them “repeated lies” like “Ukraine lost the war”. By all observable metrics, Ukraine has lost the war though, and the indoctrination charge is pretty rich coming from 60 Minutes – which does nothing more than indoctrinate its viewers with the most pernicious of propaganda.

As for Vlad, his story is a sad one, but he did get back home, so Russia’s “abduction” campaign seems very, very ineffective. Considering that the Ukrainian military routinely “abducts” teens and old men off the street and uses them as forced conscripts, which they then throw into the meat grinder at the front line to be slaughtered, it’s safe to say that Vlad was lucky to be in a Russian school instead.

And that is really the point of all this. The notion that Russia is moving children out of a war zone for the safety of the children is only absurd and ridiculous if you have a cartoonish and comic book understanding of Russia and Russians. You don’t have to think Russians are the good guys to believe that they don’t want to massacre children.

And considering the fact that Israel has slaughtered more civilians and children in just over a month of war in Gaza, than Russia has in two years in Ukraine, speaks to this reality.

Another piece of evidence backing this notion is that Paulina makes it to the school where Nikita is living under Russian control. Despite the fact that she has no legal guardianship of Nikita, Russian officials, including Maria Mlova-Balova – the woman who is “accused of war crimes” by Ukraine (and 60 Minutes) for her work running Russia’s Child Services, Paulina is allowed to leave with Nikita.

Mlova-Belova, or as 60 Minutes identifies her “the accused war criminal”, tears up with joy at the reunion of Paulina and Nikita. Mlova-Belova – “the accused war criminal”, then gives gifts to Nikita and says to Paulina, “would like you like to stay in the Russian Federation with us maybe? We can give you some money, maybe a car?”

Paulina declines, as Mlova-Belova calls the reunion a “joy” and wishes Paulina and Nikita a “happy life”. Paulina and Nikita then leave for the long journey back to Poland.

Just think about this for a moment…Mlova-Belova –“the accused war criminal”, greets a Ukrainian grandmother with gifts and an offer of citizenship and financial aid, and then allows her to come take her grandson and leave, despite the fact that the Ukrainian government official running the rescue operation says every returned child is a witness to a war crime, and this “war criminal” woman puts the entire interaction on video and shares it with the world.

Does this sound like some nefarious, child-stealing enterprise being run by a “war criminal”? Does Maria Mlova-Belova sound like a monster who wants to harm Ukrainian children? In addition to that, is a nine-year-old boy with special needs some great prized possession or piece of war booty the Russians covet? Or is the more likely scenario that Mlova-Belova is a Russian bureaucrat doing her best to find a safe place or safe home for children in great peril in a very complex and difficult situation? We know what 60 Minutes wants you to think, but the facts of this scenario speak to a much more nuanced and complicated situation.

(This is not to even mention the fact that as this story ran, Israel is waging war in Gaza and making no effort to avoid killing many, many children – according to some reports, over 5,500. It would seem Russia is doing a much more humane thing by removing children from an active war zone. I’ll let you decide.)

On Sunday, November 26th, 60 Minutes ran yet another propaganda segment titled “Rise”, which was about a former American Marine Corps officer who runs a program which brings Ukrainian war widows and their children to the Swiss Alps for a week in order to climb mountains and confront their psychological trauma of having lost a husband/father.

The segment was hosted by a weepy, teary-eyed Scott Pelley, who introduced us to Nathan Schmidt, the former Marine who served three brutal tours in Iraq and has the psychological scars to prove it.

Pelley repeats the terms “Putin’s invasion” and “Putin’s unprovoked invasion” like mindless mantras throughout the segment, just so everyone knows that subtlety and nuance are not welcome on 60 Minutes, despite those declarative condemnations being, at best, disputed. To state aloud that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is to prove yourself uninformed to the point of illiteracy in the recent history of Ukraine and America’s involvement.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Schmidt, who is so obviously torn up about what he witnessed and experienced in Iraq, helping Ukrainians heal from the psychological wounds of war, when the Iraqis, whose country he invaded, are apparently left to fend for themselves when it comes to dealing with the immense trauma, he and his nation inflicted upon them.

When hearing the very sad stories of the Ukrainian war widows and their children, I couldn’t help but wonder…where are the ethnic Russian Ukrainians who lived in the Donbas who were left widowed and orphaned by the Ukrainian government’s bombardment of thei towns and villages post the 2014 coup – a coup which was instigated and sponsored by the U.S.? Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in the Donbas…so there are lots of war widows and orphans to choose from for a healing mountain climb. Why weren’t they invited?

And where is the healing mountain climbing for the relatives of the 48 ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens who were burned alive in the union house in Odessa in 2014 by Ukrainians and backed by the U.S. installed Ukrainian government? I’m sure they’d like to climb a mountain and forget their troubles too.

This 60 Minutes segment is the heartstrings portion of the propaganda program, similar to the previous segment on the “disappeared” children. It is meant to overwhelm you with raw emotion, which will short circuit your brain and your critical thinking ability. Facts? We don‘t need facts! We need feelings!!

The thing that bothers me the most about this wave of 60 Minutes propaganda pieces is not the shamelessness, but the obvious venality, vacuity and malignant intent of it all.

This 60 Minutes anti-Russian/China/Iran propaganda isn’t meant to inform, it is meant to inflame. Its goal is to misinform, disinform and blind the populace to reality and dull their ability to think critically while aggravating their emotions, all in the hopes of ginning up support for a massive war against the new Axis of Evil.

War is undoubtedly a racket, and 60 Minutes is a critical part of that racket’s infrastructure. The dupes and dopes who buy into the bullshit that 60 Minutes and the neo-con American government are peddling, will ride the wave of their incuriosity and righteousness, and flag-wave us into a world war and our own annihilation.

I know Quixotically waving my red warning flags will make no difference in the long run and will do nothing to stop the inevitable, but at least it gives me something to do while the dogs of war howl louder and louder and 60 Minutes keeps the beat by incessantly banging their war drums.

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