Colin in Black and White: Miniseries Review and Commentary

Colin Kaepernick’s new Netflix autobiography ‘Colin in Black and White’ is the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism that reveals hims to be an entitled, self-absorbed jerk.  

Colin in Black and White is the new mini-series on Netflix that dramatizes Colin Kaepernick’s teenage years where he struggles against racism and to be taken seriously as a quarterback.

Kaepernick, if you’ll remember, once led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl and made a name for himself by kneeling during the national anthem at NFL games to protest against racial injustice, police brutality and systematic oppression.

I utterly loathe flag fetishism as a mindless display of vacuousness, so I never had a problem with Kaepernick’s protests. I disagree with him on some of the specifics of his stance, but I always respected his kneeling. The way I see it, if the NFL wants to turn their games into de facto celebrations of militarism, then players kneeling shouldn’t be beyond the pale.

I also think it’s obvious that Kaepernick was unjustly black-balled by the league for his protests. While I admit that Kaepernick is a very specific and unique QB talent and that his skill set isn’t a fit on every team, it’s ludicrous to think he couldn’t at least have been a back-up somewhere. Of course, that brings up the question of whether he would accept that secondary role and at a price below what he thinks he deserves.

The reason I mention my moderate stance on the controversial Kaepernick is because I want to make it clear I went into watching Colin in Black and White without an axe to grind against the man, quite the opposite actually.

Having said that, let me tell you that Colin in Black and White isn’t just an amateurish tv show so awful it would be laughable as an after school special, it also exposes Kaepernick as being quite a despicable and deplorable human being.

This show is like the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism and Kaepernick is Bart Starr, Joe Montana and Tom Brady wrapped into one.

The series opens by literally transforming the NFL combine into a slave auction. Besides the fact that the NFL combine is something so elitist most football players of any race can only ever dream about attending, and that players at the combine have worked their whole lives to get there and are competing to become draft picks and multi-millionaires with generational wealth who’ll be worshiped like gods in our culture…yeah…the combine is EXACTLY like a slave auction.

Colin Kaepernick’s ignorance about the horrors of actual slavery is to be expected though since his social justice warrior pose and victimhood addiction apparently makes him blind, deaf and dumb regarding Nike, the company he has a big endorsement deal with that uses slave labor to make its profits. Of course, Nike is immune from Kaepernick’s social justice posing because they give him a fair share of their blood money.

It’s equally absurd witnessing real-life Colin watch and comment as his teenage screen version pouts and preens like a cheap tart at a red-light street over his anger and disappointment that the best colleges in the country want to give him a baseball scholarship, and Major League Baseball wants to draft him and give him a million-dollar signing bonus, and the prettiest white girls in school throw themselves at him, while all little Colin wants is to get a scholarship to play QB and have a black girlfriend. Boo fucking hoo.

What really turned my stomach though about Colin in Black and White is that Kaepernick’s adoptive, working-class white parents, insipidly portrayed by Mary Louise Parker and Nick Offerman, are depicted as vapid racist caricatures.

The fact that Kaepernick, who co-created this series with Ava Duvernay, would belittle, demean and slander the couple (who are still alive) that raised, loved and nurtured him from infancy, and shelled out big bucks by paying for travel baseball and high-end specialized QB coaches to help him achieve his dream, is repugnant and repulsive.

In one episode where Kaepernick’s adoption is briefly explored, the show frames his soon-to-be parents as deciding to adopt Colin only after another adoption falls through. Kaepernick then chimes in with his woe-is-me wail that “since the day I was born, I’ve never been anyone’s first choice.”

Again, boo fucking hoo Kaepernick, you sad sack clown. Your parents actually chose you. They got up in the middle of the night to feed you and change you, they held you and loved you, they gave everything to you and they moved heaven and earth to make your dreams come true, and because they’re a different skin color than you, you reward them, not with gratitude, or respect, or love, but with a tv show that bends over backwards to publicly ridicule them. That says more about you, Kaepernick, than it does about your parents.

Of course, Kaepernick turns everything into racism because he’s a nitwit incapable of understanding anything else. So, when he and his parents disagree over the usual things teenagers and parents disagree over…hair styles, facial hair, wardrobe, choice in girlfriends, Colin sees this as proof of the racist conspiracy against him.

Due to Kaepernick’s desperate need for victimhood, everyone is racist in his eyes…coaches, referees, umpires, opposing fans, opponents, hotel employees, his parents. The fact that schools weren’t tripping over Kaepernick too is because of racism.

The word that kept popping into my head as I watched this self-pitying shitshow was pathetic.  There is absolutely nothing quite as egregiously pathetic as a grown man wallowing in long past perceived slights from adolescence. Nothing.

Adding to the idiocy is that Kaepernick, dressed all in black with a massive afro, looking like Morpheus from The Matrix wearing a wig as a joke, interjects various tidbits of racial knowledge throughout the show. Kaepernick is so hysterically ridiculous in these segments he seems like a character from Dave Chappelle on The Chappelle Show or Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live.

On the bright-side, Jaden Michael plays teenage Kaepernick on the show, and as bad as the show is, he’s terrific. Despite not having a lick of athleticism in his body, he’s a compelling screen presence and an actor who conveys an intriguing inner life. He’s a talent to watch.

A talent not to watch is Colin Kaepernick, whose NFL career is most certainly over, and considering his dead-eyed appearance on the self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, celebration of delusional victimhood, Colin in Black and White, which reveals his truly loathsome nature and intellectual midgetry, one can only hope he disappears from the public eye as well. The sooner the better.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Elon Musk and SNL

Elon Musk’s comedy debut crashes and burns on the SNL launch pad, but the mission was ultimately a success for him.

Musk haters were afraid his appearance on the iconic comedy show would humanize the “problematic” billionaire…and that’s exactly what happened.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk guest hosted Saturday Night Live last night and if laughs were rocket fuel, he wouldn’t make it to New Jersey never mind Mars.

To Musk’s great credit, he was totally out of his element but gave it his all and even poked fun at himself, but sadly, he was painfully unfunny. From the opening monologue, which included not only some stale O.J. jokes but an admission that he suffers from Aspergers and struggles to act human, Musk came across like some bizarre Andy Kaufman character.

To call Musk an awkward on-screen presence would be the height of understatements. His various roles on the relentlessly humorless show included a Gen Z slang speaking doctor, a horny Icelandic tv producer, a cryptocurrency expert, Wario the video game character, LeRon the genius cowboy and Elon Musk founder of SpaceX, and as game as he was, none of them actually worked.

Unfortunately, being the second richest man in the world and a genius at making cars and rockets does not translate into being funny, which was uncomfortably evident on Saturday night. On the bright side, Musk’s lack of comedic ability meant he fit right in with the rest of the SNL cast, which is a who’s who of “who’s that?”, and features some of the most talentless dopes and dullards imaginable.

It isn’t Elon Musk’s fault that last night’s show sucked. The once mighty SNL has been consistently abysmal for some time now. Long gone are the John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray glory days, and comedy powerhouses like Eddie Murphy and Will Ferrell are not walking through that door at 30 Rock anymore. Instead, the dreadfully unfunny Kate McKinnon is the big star of the current cast, which is the comedy equivalent of having a one-legged hobbit be the best player on a basketball team.

When it was announced that Musk would be the guest hosting the show it generated a tsunami of controversy on twitter and in the media.

That negative narrative was further propelled by cast members Bowen Yang, Aidy Bryant and Chris Redd when they sent out snarky tweets denigrating Musk (which were later deleted) and producer Lorne Michaels letting it be known that cast members could opt out of scenes with Musk if they chose.

Ultimately no cast members boycotted scenes with Musk on Saturday night, and the show seemed not only lame but tame as far as controversy is concerned. But that doesn’t diminish the absurdity of SNL’s being so hyper-sensitivity regarding any unorthodox thinkers or alternative, contrarian viewpoints. The pre-Musk show uproar only highlighted how far the old comedy warhorse of SNL, which used to be subversive, anti-establishment and edgy, has fallen, and shows how it is now the type of stuffy, sensitive, entitled, pampered lap dog to the establishment it used to rightfully lampoon.

Musk is definitely a polarizing figure, but I have to admit…I don’t exactly understand why. I am unquestionably no fan of the billionaire class but the goofy, bizarre, loose-cannon Musk is the version of a billionaire I prefer over the super-creepy, serial killer looking types like Zuckerberg, Gates and Bezos.

Make no mistake, Musk is an oddball and egomaniac, but unlike the narcissistic charlatans running the rigged Wall street casinos that socialize losses and privatize gains, or the self-righteous Silicon Valley overlords who exploit people while suffocating free speech and toxifying the culture, Musk isn’t predatory and actually builds tangible things, like electric cars and reusable rockets.

I assume Musk’s appearance on the show and the controversy swirling around it will probably lead to a slight bump in the ratings, which was obviously the whole point of having him on in the first place. And no doubt there will be Musk haters slamming him for his dreadful performance and cursing Lorne Michaels and SNL for giving Musk a platform.

The greatest concern of these Musk haters though was summed up by late night comedy veteran Daniel Kellison when he told the Washington Post that the problem with Musk’s appearance on SNL is that it “humanizes problematic people”. God forbid we commit the sin of “humanizing” someone deemed “problematic” by the hordes of hysterical woke inquisitors forever shouting on Twitter.

Well, I hate to tell Kellison and the other Musk haters, but as bad as Musk was on the show, and he was bad, it definitely did “humanize” him. He was so awkward and uncomfortable on screen it was surprisingly sort of endearing. Musk came across not as some slick billionaire blowhard who is too cool for school, but rather as some regular nerd who gets super anxious and nervous talking to people and being on tv.

So despite Elon Musk being terribly unfunny and the show being as devoid of laughs as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, Musk’s appearance was actually a big success for Musk. While he failed at comedy, he did succeed in exposing his haters for their pettiness and in getting me to root for him. I just hope he is better at getting humanity to Mars than he is at getting me to laugh.  

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Top Ten Virtue Signalers of 2020 - Entertainment Edition

Estimated reading Time - 3 minutes 56 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Bill Burr Battles the Karen Dragon on SNL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020