Amend: The Fight for America: Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

‘Amend: The Fight for America’, Netflix’s new painfully woke docu-series, is only interested in indoctrinating, not educating

The series is a ludicrous exercise in politically correct performance art that is allergic to intellectual seriousness or nuance.

Amend: The Fight for America, is the new Netflix docu-series hosted by Will Smith that examines the history and impact of the 14th Amendment, which addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law.

The series is broken down into six episodes. The first three episodes cover the 14th Amendment in relation to the black struggle for equality from slavery to Black Lives Matter, while episodes 4, 5 and 6 focus on the women’s movement, marriage equality/gay rights and immigrant rights respectively.

The docu-series is a high-end public service announcement featuring stars such as Pedro Pascal, Mahershala Ali and Joseph Gordon Levitt, and is obviously meant as a teaching guide for children and teenagers.

One of the big problems with Amend though, and there are many of them, is that it presents itself as a serious work of history, but is really just a blatant work of advocacy.

There is nothing wrong with advocating, but doing it under the guise of teaching history, makes Amend an insidious piece of propaganda.

As propaganda it is very slick as it has all the trappings of a serious historical documentary, but it’s violently allergic to nuance. The series’ shameless embrace of woke identity politics is never countenanced with even a rudimentary glimpse of oppositional ideas and beliefs except to label them as obviously and irredeemably evil.

For instance, in the episode about women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), anti-abortion beliefs are only seen as tools of misogyny and the patriarchy, and the potentially rich and fascinating topic of the clash of 14th Amendment rights of the unborn child versus those of the pregnant woman is never broached.

The series’ intellectual petulance is also highlighted in this episode when one of the talking heads is incapable of even saying famed ERA opposition leader Phyllis Schlafly’s name. She stumbles over it numerous times and then finally gives up only to be quickly replaced by another talking head who simply calls Ms. Schlafly, “Mean Phyllis”. Apparently in an attempt to appeal to grade school children the docu-series decided to act like a grade school child.

Preferring this slavishly woke, blindly Manichean perspective on every issue guts the project of any intellectual seriousness, and its relentlessly self-righteous snickering at opposing arguments cheapens the project and transforms it from being potentially laudable to ridiculously laughable.

Speaking of laughable, Amend’s credibility is further damaged by “comedian” Larry Wilmore. Wilmore, a producer on the series, keeps showing up to mug for the camera for no discernible reason and is so tonally out of place as to be painful. Wilmore’s “comedy” is always impotent and grating, but in Amend his shtick is even more insipidly limp and irritating due to the supposedly serious context.

The docu-series is obsessed with narratives and messaging, as it repeatedly talks about the evil of  “messages of fear and hate” from small-minded bigots used to rile the masses. Trump is repeatedly conjured in this context to accentuate the point.  This is curious since the series espouses its own message of fear and hate by continually denigrating “white men” and ringing the alarm bells over the boogey man of  “white supremacy” which is supposedly lurking under every bed and around every corner.

This anti-white attitude is evident when the over 300,000 white men who died to free the slaves in the Civil War are studiously ignored, but the black soldiers who fought are celebrated. It’s also evident when minority actors Pedro Pascal and Graham Greene play Lincoln and Ohio Senator John Bingham, the principle founder of the 14th Amendment, respectively yet white actor Joseph Gordon Leavitt plays the villainous, N-word spouting Andrew Johnson.

Another telling moment that spotlights the series’ manipulative mendacity and deceptive intentions is when activist Britney Packnett Cunningham recounts her experiences as a protestor in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the 2014 shooting of black man Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. 

Video and photos of protestors fill the screen as Ms. Cunningham states “the call on the streets was ‘hands up don’t shoot’ because what we were being told was that Michael Brown had his hands up in the air when Darren Wilson shot him”.

This is an intentionally misleading statement as Ms. Cunningham, who is featured throughout the series as some kind of expert, knows it isn’t true and that she is perpetuating the false narrative surrounding Brown’s shooting, that’s why she couches it with “we were being told”. Brown didn’t have his hands up when Wilson shot him and yet Ms. Cunningham and Amend prefer that lie because it fits their narrative instead of the truth that destroys it. (Watch an infinitely more insightful documentary, What Killed Michael Brown? for the truth.)

If you like deceptive docu-series that indoctrinate instead of educate, and enjoy watching solemn faced actors babbling about “inclusivity” while pushing so hard to conjure non-existent gravitas it seems like they could soil themselves at any moment…then Amend is definitely for you.

After suffering though all six hours of Amend: The Fight for America, my biggest takeaway is that we need a new constitutional amendment to protect me from the torture of watching the vapid Will Smith mimic sincerity while spouting woke talking points as if they’re holy decrees from God on high. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

What Killed Michael Brown? Documentary: A Review

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020