James Gunn's Shockingly Unwoke 'Peacemaker' Finale

After demeaning and berating white men for the first seven episodes, in the season one conclusion, James Gunn flips the script.

This article contains spoilers for the season one finale of ‘Peacemaker’!!

The first season of James Gunn’s ‘Peacemaker’, the HBO Max series which follows the travails of the flag-waving, meat-headed DC superhero Peacemaker, played by John Cena, came to a somewhat surprising conclusion.

After the series spent the first seven, and the majority of the eighth and final episode, painting all white-men as, at best, adolescent buffoons, and at worst, unrepentantly racist and psychopathic Nazis, and all minorities and women as smart, savvy and tough, the show’s climax was downright shocking.

In the final episode, Peacemaker and his band of misfit special agents head to a farm to try and stop a giant alien caterpillar, which is the lone food source for a large population of alien butterflies that are embedding themselves in powerful people on earth, from being teleported to a safe location, thus ensuring that these butterflies take over the planet.

After a long battle scene, Peacemaker and the lead butterfly named Goff, which has embedded itself in an Asian-American female police officer Sophie (Annie Chang), stop fighting and talk.

Goff pleads with Peacemaker to help the aliens because they left their planet due to global warming, and have come to earth not seeking conquest but to save the planet from the same environmental calamity.

In Goff’s passionate monologue she rails against climate change deniers and those who “ignore science”, as well as the plethora of Neanderthals that see “minor inconveniences as assaults on their freedom” instead of as a way to save the planet. In our current age of Covid, this harangue by Goff sounds very familiar.

Peacemaker ponders Goff’s appeal, and it certainly seems like he’s going to be won over. As a viewer, I was rolling my eyes as I fully expected Peacemaker to follow the Hollywood blueprint and be fully redeemed through embracing the fight against climate change, a staple in storytelling in recent years.

But then, much to my surprise, Peacemaker shoots and kills Goff and uses a voice-controlled Peacemaker helmet being worn by Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), a black lesbian woman on his team, to use her as a missile that he launches into the giant caterpillar, killing it and ending the alien butterfly threat.

In the aftermath, Peacemaker helps Adebayo out of the caterpillar corpse, then picks up and carries his wounded, hard-nosed feminist compatriot Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) and carries her to the hospital, but not before cursing out the Justice League.

At the hospital, as Peacemaker awaits word on Harcourt’s condition, he second-guesses himself and asks Adebayo, “Did I just kill the world?”

Adebayo responds, “Maybe you just gave us a chance to make our own choices instead of our bug overlords.”

She then asks him, “Why did you choose not to help? Because of your proto-fascist, libertarian idea of freedom?”

Peacemaker replies, “Because I knew they’d hurt you and the others if I did (help them).”

In the context of the show, which I often found amusing despite its incessant woke preening regarding the evils of white men and the glories of everybody else, Peacemaker’s ultimate heroism was a stunner.

Equally stunning was the inherent admission from creator James Gunn that all the woke preaching in the previous seven episodes was a pose. Peacemaker may have a “proto-fascist, libertarian idea of freedom”, but he wasn’t a bad guy or a racist or misogynist, it was the bevy of snarky minorities and women around him that projected racism and misogyny onto his buffoonish and brutish personality.

The bottom line was that it was Peacemaker, the questionable white guy, who not only saved the day, but revealed himself to be considerably stronger mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically, than all of the women and minorities who berated him for his barbarity throughout. And these women, like Adebayo and Harcourt, grew to love Peacemaker for who he is, and no longer hated him for what he wasn’t, and for the reflexive wokeness that he lacked.

In a way, this conclusion paints Peacemaker as the embodiment of the famous Jack Nicholson speech from the film ‘A Few Good Men’, where his Colonel Jessup declares, “You can’t handle the truth!...we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You?...You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know…and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall.”

Peacemaker may be an idiot and a jackass, but the woke brigade on the show need him on that wall, as he is not only able, but willing, to do what needs to be done, and those that ridicule him for his prehistoric cultural politics are ultimately grateful for him because only he can keep them safe.

The irony of it all is that it’s uncouth, brutal men like Peacemaker, with their “libertarian ideas of freedom”, who do the nasty, dirty work that create the protected, safe spaces where the decadence of racial and feminist wokeness can be born and thrive.

‘Peacemaker’ isn’t a perfect series, and James Gunn’s writing and directing style can be grating at times, but to his and the show’s credit, Gunn cleverly turned the usual woke politics of entertainment on its head with ‘Peacemaker’s’ conclusion, which was a refreshing change in the suffocatingly uniform cultural politics of Hollywood.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2022

Is TV Too Woke?

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

Is TV too woke?

As someone who works with a lot of producers, writers and directors who all privately tell me that if their TV project isn’t woke in conception and rigidly diverse in execution, then it won’t ever move forward, the answer is eye-rollingly obvious.

Unsurprisingly, the epidemic of wokeness is just as virulent across the pond in the UK TV world as it is in Hollywood and New York.

Proof of this was evident at the Edinburgh TV Festival panel discussion of TV professionals unironically titled “Diversity of Thought: Is TV Too Woke?”

At the discussion, Ash Atella, the producer of The Office and The IT Crowd, admitted, “I’m in a lot of meetings now where people tell me, ‘This will never get on because it’s not woke enough.”

The reality is that any sentient being with eyes to see, ears to hear and a brain to think, can tell you that TV is so awash in wokeness as to be hysterical.

Whether it be ideologically biased, identity-obsessed news coverage, or entertainment featuring the performative absurdity of a black Anne Boleyn, the obscenity of white male erasure in Marvel’s What If?, or incessant LGBTQ cheerleading, the trend is clear, the woke revolution is most certainly being televised.

What’s interesting about TV’s woke affliction is that while it’s obvious to regular people, many industry insiders are either afraid to speak publicly about it or blind to it.

A specially commissioned Ipsos Mori survey supports this notion, and shows that the TV industry in the UK is wildly out of step regarding wokeness compared to the viewing public. The survey found that 62% of British TV viewers believe political correctness on TV has gone too far, while only 19% of TV industry professionals agreed. It also revealed that 40% of viewers were proud of the UK, as opposed to 20% of TV professionals, and that 23% of viewers were ashamed of the British Empire while 63% of TV insiders shared that sentiment.

Obviously, TV professionals live in an alternate universe to audience members, and that is reflected in the lack of ideological diversity we see on our screens. But TV doesn’t care about ideological diversity, only in the surface diversity of identity.

The Egyptian-born Atella, who is a big proponent of diversity in TV, gave voice to the reality of the pro-diversity agenda and its effect when he told the panel, “I’m amazed how fast the white people have thought, ‘We can’t get on television’, that’s come in hard and fast in the last two years, and it’s a bewildering experience to be in those meetings after 15 years of the opposite. Now white people think there’s no place for them.”

Well, “the white people” think there’s no place for them in the culture because news channels consistently label them evil and entertainment endlessly denigrates them.

The corporate behemoths that run Hollywood have made it very clear too that white people, straight white men in particular, are not welcome in the industry.

For example, Disney and Amazon have made their worship of all things “diverse and inclusive” official company doctrine with insidiously specific identity quotas that above all target reducing straight white males from the creative and production process.

The same is true of the Academy Awards, which have made racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation box-ticking, as well as straight white male exclusion, mandatory, in order to be eligible for awards contention.

The woke bias of other panelists in Edinburgh, such as Louisa Compton, Head of News, Current Affairs and Sport at Channel 4, was also exposed, as was a shocking level of contempt for the audience.

Compton first claimed that being woke is benign as it literally means, “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone, which seem like fairly important principles.”

Compton heads a news division and the fact that her fidelity is to the subjective principles of “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone” as opposed to searching for the objective truth, is alarming but illuminating.

Compton did admit that wokeness can “alienate some audiences who feel that the world is moving on faster and leaving them behind” and also claimed, “I don’t think anyone in TV would be surprised to hear that a lot of the people who work [in the industry] think differently to the audiences we’re making progress for.”

Broadcast journalist Mobeen Azhar shared a similar holier-than-thou attitude when speaking of the type of shows needed to “move forward the people who think PC’s gone mad, because it hasn’t.”

To Compton, Azhar and their ilk, wokeness is the proper religion populated by the evolved and the pious, and they and their fellow TV professionals are working hard to make “progress for” and “move forward” those knuckle-dragging barbarians in the audience who feel left ”behind”.

Wokeness is now the state religion and entertainment and news its propaganda wings, brimming with missionaries like Compton and Azhar, filled with self-righteous superiority and evangelical zeal.

To these people TV is just an indoctrination machine used to do the public service of spreading the good news of the woke gospel to help spur evolution among the filthy, backwards proles.

So, is TV too woke? If you don’t think so then either you don’t watch TV or you’re a self-involved, delusional TV executive suffering from a severe case of stage 5 wokeness. Hopefully it’s the former and not the latter, as that’s the decidedly healthier and more enlightened choice.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Woke Wet Dream of Marvel's New Series 'What If...?'

The new Marvel series ‘What If…?’ is a woke wet dream where white male superheroes are replaced by women and minorities

The Disney+ show presents itself as innocent entertainment. But its woke agenda is red meat to rabid race hustlers and the identity obsessed desperate to disappear the scourge of white men from popular culture.

‘What If…?’, the new animated Marvel series, follows in the footsteps of the recent live-action Marvel series ‘WandaVision’, ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’, and ‘Loki’ in expanding the storyline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The series consists of nine narrative-bending episodes, the first of which premiered on August 11, followed by the second on August 18, with new episodes available every following Wednesday.

If the first two episodes are any indication, ‘What If…?’ will devoutly pander to the newfound politically correct religious faith of Disney (Marvel’s parent company), as the show’s premise can basically be summed up as ‘What if the woke had a time machine and used it to destroy the Marvel universe?’

The first episode examines an alternative time-line where, during World War II, white guy Steve Rogers doesn’t turn into super soldier Captain America. Instead Agent Carter, a British woman, gets injected with the super soldier serum and becomes the superhero Captain Carter.

Captain Carter not only battles Hydra, Red Skull and the Nazis, but also the greatest villain of all… the patriarchy. She shows her true girl power by overcoming sexism and misogyny from condescending white males in the military power structure. You go, girl!

In the second episode, based on the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ storyline, the Ravagers are sent to earth in 1988 by the Celestial Ego to capture his child, Peter Quill, but they mistakenly take T’Challa, Wakanda’s child prince instead.

Unlike the selfish, stupid and white Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) from the movies, the black T’Challa/Star-Lord (voiced by Chadwick Boseman in his final performance) is so good, selfless and wonderful, he actually convinces Thanos to abandon his genocidal plans and join him on his noble Robin Hood-esque adventures.

The message is clear in ‘What If…?’: if Thanos’ genocidal plan killed just white men, all of whom are awful, then the woke would happily go along with it in the Marvel universe and our own too.

Episode two of ‘What If…?’ so inspired Dr. Jason Johnson, a black talking head on MSNBC, he wrote an article titled, “Disney +’s ‘What if T’Challa became a star-lord?’ is a repudiation of mediocre white men”.

Johnson declares the episode is “a total repudiation of the mediocre white men who’ve been centered in most of the Marvel movie’s blockbuster films.” This is a curious take as Tony Stark was a child prodigy scientific genius before he became Iron Man, Bruce Banner was a renowned physicist before he became the Hulk, Stephen Strange was a brilliant surgeon before he became Dr. Strange, and Thor is a Norse god for goodness sake. There’s not a whole lot of mediocrity on that list of white guys centered in Marvel movies.

Johnson then rants that he doesn’t like movies or TV shows “about selfish, privileged mediocre white men who stumble through life, making costly mistakes that invariably hurt others along the way, but somehow in the end they get to be the hero…”  And yet he was a big fan of President Obama, a selfish, privileged black man who made costly mistakes, like siding with Wall Street instead of Main Street, that invariably hurt others, like working class people, but somehow ended up being a hero in mainstream culture. 

Johnson adores ‘What If…?’ because it shows “what real heroism, through Black guy magic, can actually look like”, which raises the question: what the hell is ‘black guy magic?’ God willing it’s better than the cheesy white guy magic of David Copperfield.

Johnson’s inanity continues with, “White men are bombarded with messages every day telling them they’re special no matter what they have or have not done or earned.”

Are those messages subliminal? I certainly haven’t seen them in the cavalcade of commercials and TV shows where all white guys are punchlines, because they’re the one group that can be ridiculed without fear of cancellation.

As a white male who aspires to the impossible dream of mediocrity, I’ve never experienced this alleged relentless messaging about being “special” regardless of what I “have or have not done or earned”, and neither have any of the other white guys I know.

The irony of all this “mediocre white man” hating is that Johnson is the poster boy for mediocrity himself. He’s an unoriginal mid-wit who has carved out a career on TV and in academia through the sheer force of his kiss-assery and corporate leg-up programs desperate to put a black face on establishment talking points.

He shamelessly belches out mendacious and mindless talking points meant to protect the powerful and maintain the status quo, so that he can keep sucking on the corporate media teat. For example, he once argued with a straight face that billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the oligarch’s oligarch, was “not an oligarch”.

He also got suspended by MSNBC and fired by The Root for calling the black women working on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign the “island of misfit black girls”.

It’s amusing that the Bloomberg oligarch defense and the egregious “black girls” statement sound an awful lot like something one of those mediocre white guys Johnson hates so much would say. To Dr. Johnson, physician of mediocrity, I say, “heal thyself”.

As for ‘What If…?’, I’d love to live on a timeline where corporate media clowns and race hustling hacks like Jason Johnson didn’t exist, and where wokeness didn’t ruin everything it touches. Unfortunately, that timeline doesn’t exist, and I won’t even get to see it imagined on some corny animated show either – it’s just too unbelievable.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Disney's Hostile Woke Work Environment

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

Insider documents reveal woke barbarians have breached the gates of the Disney Empire and transformed the ‘happiest place on earth’ into a totalitarian hellscape

Disney is going to find out the hard way that wokeness destroys everything that it touches.

In November 2019, Disney slapped a content warning on some of its classic animated movies. The warning read simply, “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”

If you give the woke an inch, they’ll take a mile, and this was proven when less than a year later in October of 2020 when that concise and mundane warning was updated to state, “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe.”

As I wrote at the time regarding the absurd verbosity of the updated warning, “…if brevity is the soul of anything than the Winston Smith wannabe who wrote this atrocious piece of human resources porn is as soulless as they are spineless and brainless.”

Thanks to journalist/filmmaker Christopher Rufo, who is the Woodward and Bernstein of all things woke-gate, we now know what sort of corporate cultural conditioning went into making the type of individual that would write such a woke monstrosity as that updated “content warning”.

In an article titled “The Wokest Place on Earth”, Rufo uses documents from whistleblowers inside Disney to reveal the woke racist hellscape that is the Walt Disney Corporation.

According to Rufo’s documents and statements from anonymous sources, Disney’s “diversity and inclusion” program “Reimagine Tomorrow” aggressively indoctrinates employees in woke politics and appears to create a hostile work environment for white employees.

The company has “launched racially segregated affinity groups” for minority employees such as Asians, Hispanics and blacks, but white employees are singled out for indoctrination and must fill out “white privilege” checklists and be grilled on their “white fragility”.

“Anti-racism”, which is little more than anti-white racism wrapped in intentionally vague and impenetrable academic language, has become the center of the company’s agenda, with “almost daily memos, suggested readings, panels, and seminars that [are] all centered around antiracism”.

Disney’s “white fragility” and “anti-racism” agenda is about “pivoting” from “white dominant culture”, which Disney describes as one that emphasizes “competition”, “power hoarding”, “predominantly white leadership”, “individualism”, “timeliness” and “comprehensiveness”.

 It’s pretty rich that Disney, which controls 40% of the U.S. box office after spending $83 billion buying up Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox in recent years, is lecturing low-level employees on the evils of “power hoarding” and “competition”.

As Rufo points out, it is equally rich that Disney’s four top executives, Bob Iger, Bob Chapek, Alan Bergman and Alan Braverman - white males with over a billion dollars of net worth, feel it appropriate to badger their hourly-wage employees to complete “white privilege” checklists and “work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness about their whiteness.”

Speaking of these Disney executives, if they were really interested in “pivoting” from “white dominant culture”, they’d start by addressing “predominantly white leadership” by getting their pasty white asses out of the seats of Disney power.

These pale-faced bastards could also eradicate “competition” and “timeliness” by letting people pay what they want and stay as long as they like at Disney theme parks resorts. This way Disney theme parks would be “inclusive” to homeless, poor and low-income people, including many people of color, who currently cannot afford the exorbitant prices.

They could also renounce all of Disney’s copyright claims on their vast resources of intellectual property, allowing anyone to use them for gain. Of course, they would never do any of those things.

Disney’s diversity and inclusion push is hypocritical nonsense too, as like all woke totalitarians, Disney actually has no interest in diversity of opinion or the inclusion of differing viewpoints, only in enforcing conformity, just ask Gina Carano.

Examples abound of how the malignancy of wokeness has spread and radically transformed Disney.

The Pixar movie Soul is a perfect example. Instead of letting two-time Oscar winning director Pete Doktor make the best movie possible, Disney went to hysterical heights to appease the woke gods of diversity in making its first Pixar movie with a black protagonist. This included using a corporate “inclusion strategies” department, creating a “cultural trust” of black employees, hiring outside consultants and black organizations, and hiring a black co-director.

Disney’s walk to wokeness looks like a Bataan death march for artistry and entertainment when you see the radical transformation of the Marvel properties. The rollicking, insightful yet fun-loving action movie sentiment of pre-Disney Iron Man (2008) has morphed into the lifeless, soul-sucking woke propaganda of Captain Marvel (2019) and the relentlessly preachiness of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021).

The all-powerful Disney is the Roman Empire of the entertainment industry, and the woke barbarians aren’t at the gate, they’re well inside the walls and sitting at the seat of power. These woke parasites don’t build things, they only destroy them by draining them of vitality and driving out talent. This is why Disney’s business model shifted from making its own original content to gobbling up content creators like Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox, and slowly sucking the life out of them.

Disney is going to learn that wokeness destroys everything it touches. It may take years or decades, but it’s just a matter of time before “get woke, go broke” becomes Disney’s reality and Mickey Mouse’s whole shit house goes up in flames. Good riddance.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Disney's New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Crown Just Cast an Australian to Play Princess Diana and I am in a Woke-Fueled Rage!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 39 seconds

If wokeness is going to survive, the scourge of actors portraying characters that are in any way different from themselves must end now.

I consider myself a devout crusader for the Church of Wokeness, a brave Knight of the Woke Table if you will.

Whenever an injustice is committed here in Hollywood I am the one who fiercely follows the crowd and does the most courageous thing imaginable…write a scathingly pithy article about it.

My specialty is scouring the trade papers searching for violations of the new woke Hollywood commandment that “Actors shall not portray characters that aren’t exactly identical to them in real life”. I call this the “No Acting Allowed” rule.

This noble calling of mine isn’t an easy one, there are so many micro-aggressions and so little time to cancel all who commit them, but still I soldier on.

The newest and most heinous of injustices that I unearthed occurred the other day and was so horrifying it literally left me shaking.

*Trigger Warning for the sensitive – a story of brutal casting violence follows.

The injustice of which I speak is that Netflix just announced that on their hit show The Crown, Princess Diana – the most iconic of British Royals, will be played by Elizabeth Debicki who is…gasp…Australian!

I know, I know, it is an awful and tone-deaf maneuver, especially considering the history of it all. I mean, Australia really only exists because the British wanted their riff raff out of sight and mind, and they certainly didn’t want them portraying their most beloved of royals on some binge-worthy tabloid drama. An Australian portraying Princess Diana only highlights how far the once mighty British Empire has fallen.

Think of it this way…imagine if you will, an Aussie women worthy of having a tv show or movie made about them…I know it is far-fetched but just try…and then imagine a non-Australian actress playing that woman…talk about a dingo stealing your baby!

Now, some people may be thinking that since Elizabeth Debicki is a gloriously gifted actress blessed with exquisite skill and talent that it is just fine for her, despite the black mark of her Aussie background, to play Princess Diana. That is blasphemy…wokeness never considers ability!

Oscar winning actress Octavia Spencer concurs as she recently declared in regards to casting, “Nothing can replace lived experience and authentic representation…it’s imperative that we cast the appropriate actor for the appropriate role…”

What Spencer was actually talking about was the woke sin of able-bodied actors playing disabled characters, but if we follow her ideology to its logical conclusion, we end up crucifying the Aussie interloper Debecki for daring to play the very English Princess Diana. 

I wish there was a woke time machine so we could see who Octavia Spencer would cast instead of Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and Oscar-nominee Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

Those able-bodied bastards are acting abominations. Their crimes are almost as bad as cis-gendered actors playing trans characters.

Halle Berry recently said she was contemplating playing a trans character but after being shouted down by my woke comrades, Halle apologized, and the world was once again made safe from acting.

I wish someone stopped Felicity Huffman from playing a trans character and scoring an Oscar nomination for her work in the dreadful 2005 movie Transamerica.

Thankfully we woke got revenge on Huffman when she was sent to prison for that blasphemy! She actually went to prison for trying to bribe a college into admitting her daughter…but that’s beside the point…the important thing is she was ultimately punished! I don’t think that punishment went far enough though. If it were up to me Felicity Huffman would have the scarlet letter of a penis sewn onto her forehead, so that with every step she took her forehead penis would swing before her eyes and forcefully remind her of the unforgivable trans-phobic sin she committed.

Another transgressor of woke trans dogma is Scarlett Johansson. ScarJo was set to play a trans man in the film Rub and Tug, but woke warriors fired up the outrage machine and forced her to back out.

In addition, the monstrously white ScarJo had previously earned woke ire when she starred in Ghost in the Shell as a character that was Asian in the original source material. Oh the humanity!

Of course, even if an actor is the same race or ethnicity as a character they aren’t safe from the righteous sword of wokeness.

Zoe Saldana thought she could play Nina Simone in a bio-pic about the legendary singer. Not without woke outrage she couldn’t! Saldana’s crime was that she is light-skinned and Simone was dark-skinned…in other words Zoe Saldana wasn’t black enough. Saldana has since apologized for her heinous hate crime.

A similar thing happened with Ruby Rose, a lesbian actress cast in the role of lesbian superhero Batwoman. Rose was excoriated by the woke brigade on social media because apparently she wasn’t lesbian enough.

To avoid this woke backlash and the cancel culture mob, white actresses Jenny Slate and Kristen Bell quit their roles voicing black characters on cartoons.

Slate stated, “black characters should be played by black people” and that her portrayal was “an act of erasure of black people.”

Bell said, “ This is a time to acknowledge our acts of complicity.”

If only that Aussie Elizabeth Debicki would do her part and acknowledge that playing Princess Diana on The Crown makes her complicit in the erasure of English people and declare that English characters should only be portrayed by English people, then we could be one step closer to eradicating the art of acting and finally living in the glorious utopia of talentlessness we woke are obviously so desperate to manifest.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Monty Python Classic 'The Life of Brian' Relentlessly Mocked Christianity Forty Years Ago, Comedy Needs to Do the Same Thing to the Church of Wokeness Today

Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes 33 seconds

The woke are winning the culture war and comedy needs to step up and expose these ludicrous fools for their fanaticism before it’s too late.

The Life of Brian, Monty Python’s classic cinematic mocking of Christianity, was so scandalous for its blasphemy back when it was released in 1979, that it was actually banned by some British theatre owners, while others gave it the scarlet letter of an X-rating.

An X-rating in those days was the movie rating equivalent of being stoned to death for saying “Jehovah!”

As a sign of how dramatically the culture has shifted in the last forty years, the BBFC now rates The Life of Brian a very warm and fuzzy 12A – suitable for viewers 12 and up.

The film isn’t considered dangerous for its blasphemy anymore because Christianity doesn’t much matter anymore…and I say that as a practicing Catholic.

Christianity with its endemic corruption, devout fanatics and exuberant magical thinking has been usurped in our culture by a newly ascendant religious force even more severe in nature.

That force is wokeness, which is accompanied by its own inquisition and enforcement wing – cancel culture.

If you doubt that wokeness is the new dominant cultural religion, consider this…in most places in the U.S. you aren’t allowed to go to church because of coronavirus but are wholly encouraged to attend Black Lives Matter protests - which apparently confer some magical and mystical powers of immunity upon attendees.

Meet the new religion…same as the old religion.

Monty Python were such a brilliant comedic force they not only obliterated the old religion in The Life of Brian, but also ridiculed the new one too, forty years before it rose to power.

In the film there is a scene - which would never get made in today’s stultifying p.c. environment - that deals with transgenderism.

Set in the Coliseum of Jerusalem, the scene shows the People’s Front of Judea…not to be confused with the Judean People’s Front…comprised of Stan (Eric Idle), Reg (John Cleese), Francis (Michael Palin) and Judith (Sue Jones-Davies), meeting to discuss their goals.

When Stan keeps interjecting feminine pronouns into the proposed language…he is asked by Francis why he keeps bringing up women?

Stan -  “I want to be one….I want to be a woman….from now on I want you all to call me Loretta…It’s my right as a man.”

Judith – “Why would you want to be Loretta, Stan?

Stan – “I want to have babies…It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants.”

Reg - “You can’t have babies!”

Stan - “Don’t oppress me!”

Reg - “I’m not oppressing you Stan, you haven’t got a womb! Where’s the fetus gonna gestate? You gonna keep it in a box?”

After some hemming and hawing, Francis chimes in with a solution.

Francis (to Stan) - “We shall fight our oppressors for your right to have a baby, brother…ooops…sister, sorry.”

Reg - “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies if he can’t have babies?”

Francis – “It’s symbolic of our struggle against oppression!”

Reg – “It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.”

It is impossible to imagine any comedy of today having the testicular fortitude to do a scene as brutally honest and savagely insightful as that.

“Symbolic struggle against reality” is the perfect definition of wokeness and this is why we need a new Monty Python-esque group to make a film eviscerating wokeness as exquisitely and relentlessly as the The Life of Brian did Christianity…maybe call it The Life of Karen.

Wokeness, with its incessant self-righteousness, aggressive illogic, absurd preferred pronouns and ridiculously insufferable p.c. jargon, is a gloriously target rich comedy environment.

Sadly, there’s no Monty Python equivalent in our times comically capable of dismantling the new Church of Wokeness. The most prominent sketch comedy show today is Saturday Night Live, and they’re shameless, politically correct lap dogs.

In stark contrast to the ballsy comedy bravado displayed by Monty Python forty years ago, watching SNL’s impotent, flaccid, woke-approved humor is like getting a scolding from a Methodist temperance movement a hundred years ago.

SNL is so neutered by wokeness, in 2019 they actually fired comedian Shane Gillis before he ever appeared on the show because he offended the Cancel Culture Centurions and Tiny Torquemadas of Twitter…the horror!

Besides suffocating the comedy of today, the woke are actively scouring tv and film history searching for retroactive blasphemers to silence.

The Office, Community, 30 Rock, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Scrubs and Fawlty Towers, among others, have all had episodes scrubbed from streaming services for their past politically incorrect sins.

Let us pray to our Lord and Savior Brian and his Sacred Shoe and Holy Gourd, that Monty Python’s glorious canon is not next on the cancel culture crucifixion list.

By today’s woke standards they’d certainly deserve it for their insightful dismantling of transgenderism, their mockery of speech impediments in the form of ‘pwonouncements’ by Pilate and his ‘fwiend’ Biggus Dickus, and for the crime of having men play female roles!!

“On the bright side”…if Monty Python does get crucified at least they’ll go out singing!

The bottom line is this…wokeness must be stopped and I believe the best way to stop it is to mock it. Sadly though, the Church of Wokeness is winning the culture war because unlike Monty Python forty years ago, today’s comedy hasn’t found the courage to tell the unvarnished, hysterical truth…and we are all worse off because of it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Horny Women of the World Unite! Don't Let Woke Puritans Cancel the Steamy Netflix Movie 365 Days!

Estimated Reading Time: 69 seconds

A vocal minority of totalitarian busybodies is taking on the lustful populist majority in trying to censor the racy fan favorite. While it’s a terrible movie, pulling it would be a very bad day for film.

The controversial erotic romance 365 Days has been among the most watched movies on Netflix since it premiered last month, and may very well end up being the most popular film of the year on the streaming service.

Some passionate fans have been so enamored with the steamy Polish movie, which chronicles the decidedly unorthodox relationship between studly Italian mob boss Massimo, and Laura, the gorgeous Polish woman he kidnaps, that they are clamoring for a sequel.

Despite its lascivious appeal to millions of mostly female viewers, there is a vociferous minority demanding Netflix pull the movie from its service because it allegedly glorifies kidnapping and rape.

This brigade of uptight scolds has even launched a petition at Change.org calling for the film’s removal from Netflix, and as of this writing, it has garnered an anemic 6,300 signatures.

My advice to these 6,300 fragile woke puritans is that 365 Days is not the hill to die on…and they will die on it because the hordes of hellaciously horny lady philistines that need some escapist release will not take losing their harmless cinematic guilty pleasure lying down.

Thankfully, Netflix has thus far resisted the mob’s demand to pull the film…but the damage may already be done. Under politically correct pressure the media messaging around 365 Days has quickly turned from a knowing wink to a judgmental scowl.

For instance, on June 17th The Daily Mail ran a story highlighting fans desperation for a sequel to the sex filled movie. On June 19th columnist Amanda Platell wrote an article stating she was seduced by the film, which she described as a “guilty pleasure” for women stuck in coronavirus lockdown, and that she saw “no harm in it”.

But by July 2nd the worm had turned after the vocal minority made their displeasure known, and so The Daily Mail began running headlines like “Is this the most degrading, sexist show Netflix has ever aired?”

This type of flip in media messaging used to take years to achieve but it now takes mere days for the establishment press to quickly move to alter the public narrative to appease the woke mob.

One can’t help but wonder if all of this negative media noise about 365 Days will succeed in scuttling the planned production of the sequel or will make Netflix choose to either dump the original or not run the sequel, thus leaving the movie’s ravenously libidinous fanatics high and dry.

I support Netflix’s decision to ignore the calls to pull 365 Days not because I think it is a good movie…it sure as hell isn’t – it is so bad it makes 50 Shades of Grey look like Citizen Kane…but because audiences should have the right to watch, or not watch, whatever the hell they want no matter how terrible it is.

As for the charges that 365 Days, which I found more neurotic than erotic, promotes kidnapping or rape…that is just ludicrous. The movie is so absurd as to be ridiculous, as it more resembles a raunchy live action cartoon than reality.

Consider the intricately incoherent details of the plot. The wealthy and impossibly handsome Massimo kidnaps the impossibly beautiful Laura because she perfectly matches the vision of an angelic woman that appeared to him right after he momentarily died during a mob hit. Massimo then gives Laura 365 days to fall in love with him while in his custody.

That plot isn’t a handbook for wannabe sexual predators, it is escapist soft-core porn for concupiscent middle-aged women who want to curl up on the couch with a bottle of wine and a “neck massager” and indulge in some secret “guilty pleasuring”.

Even Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O says of the film, that it is among many erotic movies that are "guilty pleasures"—though why feel bad about what you like?” Exactly.

I would go a step further and ask not only why feel bad about what you like, but also, why demand others not be allowed to like the things that you don’t like?

This is the main problem with the manic religious fervor of wokeness as it promotes the tyranny of the fragile and the thin-skinned over the popular opinion of…in this case…the horny majority.

If the ever-expanding politically correct bonfire of the vanities does engulf 365 Days, it would not exactly be a major crime against the art of cinema, but it would be a very bad sign for our culture.

This exceedingly cheesy movie has become an unlikely canary in the entertainment coalmine. If Netflix does cave to the small but vocal woke mob regarding 365 Days (or its planned sequel) as decisively as the news media has, then it portends a very dark, yet ironically vanilla, future for choice in film.

The healthiest outcome for all of us is for the horny majority to reign supreme in the Battle of 365 Days. For in movies as in sexual attraction, there is no accounting for taste, or in this case - lack thereof…but it is imperative that we as a culture suppress our totalitarian impulses and grant each other the freedom to indulge our bad taste.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie's Angels Box Office Bomb

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 28 seconds

WOKE HOLLYWOOD GETS BURNED BY CHARLIE’S ANGELS BOX OFFICE BOMB

The new Charlie’s Angels movie is more proof that woke feminist films are box office poison.

Charlie’s Angels, a reboot of the old 70’s tv show and the early 2000’s movies that stars Kristen Stewart, of Twilight fame, along with relative unknowns Naomi Scott and Ella Balinski, hit theaters last weekend with blockbuster ambitions and a defiant “girl power” message. Not surprisingly, the film opened with a resounding thud and fell decidedly flat as evidenced by its paltry $8.6 million box office.

Elizabeth Banks, who wrote and directed the movie, unabashedly declared it to be a feminist enterprise filled with “sneaky feminist ideas”. 

Banks says of Charlie’s Angels,

“One of the statements this movie makes is that you should probably believe women.”

The films star, Kristen Stewart, said of the movie, “It’s kind of like a ‘woke’ version.”

Charlie’s Angels’ failure is just the most recent evidence that woke feminist films are box office poison. The film’s financial floundering comes on the heels of the cataclysmic, franchise-destroying performance of another big budget piece of pro-feminist propaganda, Terminator: Dark Fate, which sank at the box office like an Austrian-accented cybernetic android into a vat of molten steel. Hasta la vista, woke baby.

There have been a plethora of like-minded girl power movies released in 2019 that have produced similarly dismal results at the box office.

One issue with many of these ill-fated woke films is that, like previous feminist flops Ghostbusters(2016) and Ocean’s 8, they are little more than remakes of male movies with females swapped in. These derivative films are the product of a craven corporatism entirely devoid of any originality or creative thought.

For example, the social justice geniuses in Hollywood decided this year it would be a good idea to remake two movies that no one wanted remade, Mel Gibson’s What Women Want (2000) and Steve Martin and Michael Caine’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1998), except this time with female leads. To the shock of no one with half a brain in their head, What Men Want with Taraji P. Henson, and The Hustle, with Rebel Wilson And Ann Hathaway, resoundingly flopped.

This year’s Book Smart, directed by Olivia Wilde, was little more than a rehash of the 2007 Jonah Hill and Micheal Cera smash-hit Superbad. Replacing Hill and Cera with two teenage girls as the protagonists in the formulaic film did not inspire audiences, as indicated by the film’s anemic domestic box office of $22 million.

Original movies with feminist themes fared no better than their re-engineered woke cinematic sisters. Late Night, a feminist comedy/drama starring Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling, made a paltry $15 million domestically, while the painfully politically correct Charlize Theron vehicle, Long Shot, raked in a flaccid $30 million.

As evidenced by these failures, audiences of both sexes are obviously turned off by Hollywood’s ham-handed attempts at woke preaching and social justice pandering. The movie-going public is keenly aware that these woke films are not about entertainment or even artistic expressions, but rather virtue signaling and posing within the Hollywood bubble.

The female stars involved in these failing feminist projects, in front of and behind the camera, have a built in delusional defense though that immunizes them from their cinematic failures…they can always blame misogyny!

The woke in Hollywood are forever on the search for a scapegoat to relieve them of accountability, as it is never their fault that their movies fail. In the case of these female-led movies, the women involved never have to own their failures because they reflexively point their fingers in horror at the angry, knuckle-dragging men, who out of misogynist spite don’t shell out beaucoup bucks to go see their abysmally awful girl power movies.

Elizabeth Banks got an early start in the men-blaming game even before Charlie’s Angels came out when she told Australia’s Herald Sun,

“Look, people have to buy tickets to this movie, too. This movie has to make money. If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.”

Of course, men will go see women in action movies, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel being two prime examples of highly successful female action movies, but fear not, Elizabeth Banks dropped some feminist knowledge to counter that uncomfortable fact when she said,  

“They (men) will go and see a comic book movie with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel because that’s a male genre.”

So even when men go see a female led action film, they are only doing so because it is a “male genre”, got that?  What a convenient way to avoid responsibility…with Elizabeth Banks it is heads, she wins, and tails, men lose.

Banks preemptively blaming men for not being interested in seeing Charlie’s Angels is also odd because she has also openly stated that “women…are the audience for this film” and that she wanted to “make something that felt important to women and especially young girls”. And yet it isn’t just men staying away from Charlie’s Angels in droves, but everybody…including women!

What the feminists in woke Hollywood need to understand is that men and women will go see quality female-led movies, but they need to be good movies first and feminist movies a very distant second.

The problem with Charlie’s Angels, and the rest of these feminist films, is that their woke politics is their only priority, and entertainment value and artistic merit are at best just an after thought, if a thought at all.

My hope is that Hollywood will learn from the critical and financial failure of Charlie’s Angels and the rest of 2019’s feminist flops and in the future will refrain from making vacuous and vapid woke films and instead focus more on quality and originality and less on political correctness and pandering. Considering the continuous cavalcade of Hollywood’s atrociously dreadful girl power movies this year, I am not optimistic.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2019

Joker: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW.

Joker, directed by Todd Phillips and written by Phillips and Scott Silver, is the story of Arthur Fleck, a mentally-ill, down on his luck clown-for-hire and stand up comedian, who transforms into Batman’s arch-nemesis, the super-villain Joker. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Fleck, with supporting turns from Robert DeNiro, Frances Conroy and Zazie Beetz.

Early Thursday night I put my life in my hands and made the dangerous trek to the local art house to see Joker in 70mm. Thankfully, no angry white incels were laying in wait for me, so I lived to tell the tale of my Joker cinematic experience…here it is.

I went to Joker with very high hopes, but paradoxically, because I had such high hopes, I assumed I’d be disappointed by the film. My bottom line regarding Joker is this…it is a brilliant film of remarkable depth and insight, a gritty masterpiece that is a total game-changer for the comic book genre, and a staggering cinematic achievement for director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix.

Joker is the cinematic bastard son of Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece of 1970’s New Hollywood, Taxi Driver. Beyond being an homage, it is more an updated bookend to that classic, engineered for the corporatized Hollywood of the 21st century.

The film’s Taxi Driver lineage is hiding in plain sight, as it has similar music, shots, camera angles and even re-purposes the famed finger gun to the head move. Joker’s Gotham, is eerily reminiscent of Taxi Driver’s New York City of the 1970’s, which Travis Bickle aptly describes as “sick and venal”. I couldn’t help but think of my Los Angeles neighborhood when seeing Joker’s dilapidated Gotham, with its garbage piled high on every sidewalk and a layer of filth covering the city. In “sick and venal” Los Angeles, we are much too evolved to have garbage piled high on our sidewalks, no, out here in La La Land, even in million dollar neighborhoods, people are disposable and so we we have them piled high on the sidewalks instead, as homelessness is epidemic. Joker’s Gotham, Bickle’s New York and my Los Angeles also share a deep coating of grime as well as a thriving rat population that is disease-ridden and increasingly bold, both in and out of public office.

Joker’s depiction of Gotham as a Bickle-esque New York is fascinating bit of sub-text, as it is a throwback to a time before Manhattan was Disney-fied and Times Square turned from degenerate porn hub to hub of capitalism porn. Joker is also a throwback to a time before cinema was corporatized/Disney-fied, a pre-Heaven’s Gate age, when filmmakers like Scorsese could flourish and make movies like Taxi Driver, unhindered by suits blind to everything but the bottom line.

Joker ‘s genius is also because it is a “real movie”, a Taxi Driver/The King of Comedy covertly wrapped in the corporate cloak of superhero intellectual property. Unlike the sterile Marvel movie behemoths, which Scorsese himself recently described as “not cinema" and which are more akin to amusement park rides than movies, Joker is, at its heart, a down and dirty 1970’s dramatic character study, for this reason alone the film is brilliantly subversive and a stake into the heart of the Disney Goliath.

It is astonishing that Todd Phillips, whose previous films are the comedies Old School and The Hangover trilogies, was able to conceive of, and execute, Joker with such artistic precision and commitment. Phillip’s success with Joker is reminiscent of Adam McKay’s astounding direction of The Big Short (2015). Previous to The Big Short, McKay had basically been Will Ferrell’s caddie, making silly movies well, but they were still silly movies. McKay’s long term film making prowess is still in question, as is Phillip’s, but that does not diminish their mastery on The Big Short and Joker.

Phillip’s direction really is fantastic, but he is also greatly benefited by having the greatest actor working in cinema as his leading man. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Arthur Fleck/Joker is an astonishing feat. Phoenix famously (or infamously depending on your perspective) lost a great deal of weight to play the role, and his wiry, sinewy frame at times seems like a marionette possessed by a demon outcast from American bandstand or Soul Train. Fleck/Joker’s madness is seemingly chaotic, but Phoenix gives it an internal logic and order, that makes it emotionally coherent.

Phoenix is a master at connecting to a volatile emotionality within his characters, and of giving his character’s a distinct and very specific physicality. What is often overlooked with Phoenix is his level of meticulousness and superior craftsmanship in his work. Joker is no exception as his exquisite skill is on full display right alongside his compellingly volcanic unpredictability. Phoenix’s subtle use of breath, his hands, as well as his attention and focus are miraculous.

Phoenix is a revolutionary actor. He is so good, so skilled, so talented, that he is reinventing the art form. His work as Freddie Quell in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) was a landmark in the art form, and his performance in Joker is equally earth shattering. If he does not win an Best Actor Oscar for Joker, whoever does win the award should be ashamed of themselves for stealing the statuette from its rightful recipient.

Contrary to establishment media critical opinion, Phoenix does not make Arthur a sympathetic character, but he does make him an empathetic one, and one with which we empathize. We don’t feel sorry for Arthur, we feel kinship with him as he struggles to maintain some semblance of dignity in a society allergic to compassion.

Joker was described by its detractors as being “dangerous”, and I can attest that the film is indeed dangerous, but not for the reasons laid out by its critics. Joker is dangerous because it dares to do something that corporate controlled art has long since deemed anathema…it tells the very ugly truth.

Joker has the artistic audacity to peel back the scab of modern America and reveal the maggot infested, infected wound pulsating in agony just beneath our civilized veneer. Joker’s chaotic madness is a perfect reflection of the sickness of our time. Think Joker is too “nihilistic” or “negative”? Turn on a television, read a newspaper or take a cross-country flight, and you’ll see that the nihilism and negativity of Joker are nothing compared to the madhouse in which we currently live.

Arthur Fleck is America, as the country, populated by narcissists, neanderthals and ne’er do wells, has devolved and self-destructed, rotting from the inside out after decades of decadence, delusion and depravity. America is rapidly degrading and devolving, and that devolution is mirrored by Arthur Fleck has he transforms into Joker.

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

Joker, the consummate trickster, is devoid of politics and ideology and exists only to feed and satiate his own voracious madness. Fleck is an empty vessel and the Joker archetype co-opts and animates him. Fleck, born again as Joker, is adopted as a symbol for the struggles of the angry and the desperate, in other words, Joker is the archetype of our times, a Trumpian figure, who unintentionally inspires others, friend and foe alike, to release their inhibitions and unleash their inner demons. Joker is dangerous because he is an avatar for the rage, resentment and desperation of millions upon millions of Americans who have been forgotten and left behind and are utterly despised by the elite. Joker is both apolitical and all political. The populist Joker is both Antifa and the Alt-Right. Joker is everything and nothing to everyone and nobody all at once. The media in the movie, and in real life, make Joker into a monster, an icon and an iconic monster for the dispossessed, elevating him in the eyes of those desperately seeking a savior.

In a perverted and brilliant way, Phillips and Phoenix make Fleck into a Jesus figure, who as he transforms into Joker, becomes an unwitting Christ/anti-Christ. The line between messiah and madman is a thin one, and depends almost entirely on projection and perspective.

Arthur Fleck, like Jesus, is literally someone who is repeatedly kicked when he is down. Like Jesus, society ignores and despises him. Like Jesus he is berated, belittled and beaten…and yet all he wants to do is make people smile. Like Jesus, Fleck’s birth story is convoluted and lacks coherence.

What makes Phoenix’s portrayal so chilling is that his Fleck earnestly desires to bring joy to the world just like Jesus…and just as Jesus is actually a good magician/miracle worker, Fleck is actually a good clown, filled with energy and purpose. But Arthur soon realizes that there are two jokes at play in the universe…the one where he is the punchline, and the one in his head, of which he is self-aware enough to realize regular people “won’t get it”. Jesus makes the same sort of discovery during his temptations, he hears a “joke” in his head too, but it is the voice of God, and he comes to realize no one else will “get it” either. Fleck and Jesus are presented the same two paths, Jesus takes the one of self-sacrifice and becomes the Christ, and Fleck takes the road of human sacrifice, and becomes The Joker/Satan.

At its core Joker is a character study, and so there is not a lot of heavy lifting among the cast besides Joaquin Phoenix. That said, Frances Conroy, Robert DeNiro and Zazie Beets all do solid work with the material they have.

The film is shot with an exquisite grittiness by Lawrence Sher. Sher pays adoring homage to Taxi Driver by using certain specific camera shots and angles throughout the film. Sher also uses shadow and light really well to convey Fleck’s/Joker’s perspective and his tenuous grasp on reality. Sher, like Phillips, does not have a resume that would make you think he was capable of doing such substantial work, but in the case of these two men past was not prologue.

Joker is one of those movies that reminds you why cinema matters, as it uses the tired and worn comic book genre to draw viewers in, and then sticks the knife of brutal cultural commentary deep into their chests.

Joker has been at the center of of a cultural storm ever since it premiered to a raucous ovation at the Venice Film Festival in September. The film won the Golden Lion (Best Picture) at Venice and was quickly catapulted into the Oscar discussion, which created a fierce backlash against the film from certain American critics and woke twitter. The common refrain from those critics who saw it at Venice, and those who hadn’t, was that the film was “dangerous” because it would incite disaffected white men to become violent. In researching an article I recently wrote about the controversy, I came across a stunning number of articles with the imploring and weak-kneed headline, “Joker is Not the Movie We Need Right Now”. Of course, the converse is true because Joker is exactly the movie we need right now.

The critical opinion of Joker, especially among the critics at influential media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Time, is aggressively negative and dismissive, riddled with a belittling and condescending commentary. The criticisms leveled at the film from these effete establishment critics are obviously contrived, petty, personal, political and entirely predetermined. The amount of intentional obtuseness on display about Joker, its cinematic sophistication and its artistic merits, by these supposed important critics is stunning and revealing.

The critical malevolence toward Joker is undoubtedly fueled by a need to virtue signal and pander to woke culture, and is born out of personal contempt for the filmmaker (who dared defend himself against “woke culture”) and manufactured anger at the subject matter. The poor reviews of Joker by these American critics says considerably more about those critics, their dishonesty and lack of integrity, than it does about Joker. Make no mistake, Joker is a masterpiece in its own depraved way, and the critics who succumb to the myopic social pressure and cultural politics of the moment by reflexively trashing the movie as immoral and artistically and cinematically unworthy, will be judged extremely harshly by history.

In looking at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Joker currently has a critical score of 69 and an audience score of 91. The disconnect between critics and audience on Joker is similar to the disconnect on display regarding Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix stand up special Sticks and Stones. Chappelle’s show was pilloried by critics who were horrified by the comedian’s “unwoke” and decidedly politically incorrect take on the world, as the critical score is currently at 35, while the audience score is a resounding 99. It would seem that in our current age, bubble-dwelling, group-thinking critics in the mainstream media, are no longer interested in artistic merit, cinematic worthiness, skill, craftsmanship or talent, but rather in personal politics, woke ideology, political correctness and conformity, and are dishonest brokers when it comes to judging art and entertainment.

Joker is a watershed for the comic book genre. In the future film historians will look back on this time and say that there comic book films pre-Joker and comic book films post-Joker. There is no going back for the genre. That does not mean that Marvel will immediately crumble and fall into the sea, but it does mean that the genie is out of the bottle, and there is no getting it back in. Jason Concepcion and Sean Fennessy at The Ringer recently pondered if Joker is to the superhero genre what The Wild Bunch was to westerns back in 1969. They are not so sure, but I certainly think is as genre redefining or killing as The Wild Bunch. The Disney/Marvel model, post-Endgame and post-Joker, will only see diminishing cultural resonance and relevance, as well as financial returns, from this point forward. The superhero genre will not disappear overnight, but it has begun its long retreat from its apex, and God only knows what will eventually replace it.

In conclusion, Joker is a mirror, and it reflects the degeneracy, depravity and sheer madness that is engulfing America. Joker is an extremely dark film, but that is because America is an extremely dark place at the moment. Joker is unquestionably one of the very best films of the year and should be, but probably won’t be, an Oscar front-runner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay. I highly recommend you go see Joker in theatres as soon as you possibly can, as it is must-see viewing for anyone interested in cinema, art or in understanding what is rapidly coming for America.

©2019

'Patron Saint of Incels'? Woke Outrage over Joker is a Bad Joke

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

Critics and woke people are up in arms over Joker because they think “evil” white men will like it and be inspired to kill.

It used to be that it was right-wingers who would get outraged over movies they deemed “dangerous” because they offended their delicate sensibilities, Last Temptation of Christ and Brokeback Mountain being prime examples. Now it is left-wing scolds who reflexively denounce movies they find “problematic”, with the highly anticipated Joker having raised their self-righteous ire.

Joker opens on October 4th and is directed by Todd Phillips and stars Joaquin Phoenix. The highly anticipated movie is inspired by Martin Scorsese’s films Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy and is thought to be a breath of fresh air in the comic book genre and the antithesis of the corporate Marvel movies. Joker tells the story of Arthur Fleck, a disaffected white man who eventually becomes Batman’s nemesis, the super villain Joker.

Fleck being white has ignited a moral panic over Joker, because according to woke twitter, white men are inherently violent, and so Joker is dangerous as it will act as a pied piper leading lonely white men to commit Joker-esque mass shootings.

The criticisms of Joker on twitter are stunning for the shameless level of scorn and hatred brazenly heaped upon white men.

Tweets saying “I don’t want to be around any of the lonely white boys who relate to it”, and “Joker movie is starting to look like a sympathetic tale of a ‘wronged by society’ white dude and their entitlement to violence” and “in a time of increasing violence perpetrated by disaffected white men, is it really the best thing to keep making movies that portray disaffected white men doing violence as sympathetic?”, highlight the racial animus animating the Joker moral panic. It is inconceivable that such venom would be acceptable against any other racial group, such as African-Americans or Muslims.

The Joker panic has spread like a contagion from twitter to the real world, where police have vowed to increase their presence at theatres, and some cinemas are banning ticket holders who wear costumes.

The US Army and the FBI have issued a warning that some “incels” or involuntary celibates, may violently target screenings of Joker.

Family members of victims of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theatre shooting, have even written a letter to Warner Brothers, conveying their concerns over Joker and imploring the studio to support anti-gun causes. This is puzzling as the Aurora tragedy was during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, which didn’t feature the Joker, and while some early reports claimed the shooter dressed like the Joker and declared,  “I am the Joker”, those reports have been thoroughly debunked. This conflating of Joker with Aurora reveals the vacuity of the frenzy.

The hysteria around Joker has infected American film critics as well. When Joker premiered at the prestigious Venice Film Festival it received a twenty-minute ovation and won the coveted Golden Lion for best picture. The last two Golden Lion winners, Roma and The Shape of Water, went on to be nominated for twenty-three Oscars combined, winning seven. Joker’s reception at Venice would seem to be indicative of the film’s artistic bona fides, but American critics, who are more interested in pretentious pandering and virtue signaling, strongly disagree.

Stephanie Zacharek of Time, said of Joker, “the aggressive and possibly irresponsible idiocy of Joker is his (director Phillips) alone to answer for”.

Zacharek goes on to state that Arthur Fleck, “could easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels.”

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker opined, “I happen to dislike the film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in the past decade…”

David Edelstein of Vulture, described the film as “morally blech”, then went full on Godwin’s law in his review when he declared, “As Hannah Arendt saw banality in the supposed evil of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, I see in Joker an attempt to elevate nerdy revenge to the plane of myth.”

Film critics getting the vapors over a movie is nothing new, as cinema history is riddled with fraught hyperbole over “dangerous” movies.

In 1955 New York Times critic Bosley Crowther bemoaned Rebel Without a Cause because “it is a violent, brutal and disturbing picture.”

In 1971 esteemed critic Pauline Kael decried A Clockwork Orange, denouncing the film as “corrupt” and describing director Stanley Kubrick as “a pornographer”.

In 1989, Joe Klein, a critic for New York wrote an infamous piece on Spike Lee’s iconic film Do the Right Thing. Klein wrote, “If Lee does hook large black audiences, there’s a good chance the message they take from the film will increase racial tensions…if they react violently – which can’t be ruled out…”

Klein went on to write that the sole message black teens would take from the film was “The police are your enemy” and “White people are your enemy”.

In a great example of the intoxicating power of the Joker moral panic, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr wrote an article about Joker where he references Klein’s historically embarrassing take on Do the Right Thing, but instead of using Klein’s egregiously myopic article as a cautionary tale, Burr instead embraces the reflexive emotionalism of the Joker moral panic.

Burr declares of Joker, ““Is it “reckless”? Honestly, in my opinion, yeah, and if that makes me this year’s Joe Klein, so be it. To release into this America at this time a power fantasy that celebrates — that’s right, Warner Bros., celebrates — a mocked loner turned locked-and-loaded avenging angel is an act of willful corporate naivete at best, complicity at worst, and blindness in the middle”

As Burr concedes in his article, there is no causal link between violent movies or video games and mass shootings, and yet because Burr “feels” uneasy, he deems Joker guilty of being “dangerous”.

The bottom line is this, there have been shootings before Joker, and unfortunately, there will certainly be shootings after Joker, but Joker will not “cause” anyone to kill people. Human beings will be violent not because of movies but because they are human beings. As Kubrick so eloquently showed us in 2001: A Space Odyssey, evolution has not removed our violent impulse, only given us better weapons.

The purpose of art is to, sometimes uncomfortably, examine humanity and reflect the world in which it exists, and by examining and reflecting, hopefully give the audience a deeper insight and understanding of themselves, their fellow humans and the world in which they inhabit. I have not seen Joker, so I don’t know if it does those things well, but from the plethora of negative reviews I’ve read from American critics, their problem with Joker is that it does those things all too well.

These critics, both professional and amateur, prefer not to examine the origins of the isolation, alienation and rage felt by disaffected white working class males who are inundated with messages from the media and the education system that stigmatize and/or criminalize whiteness and traditional masculinity.

They want to ignore or malign these men, particularly those in middle age, even though they are dying from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose or alcoholism) at alarming rates that have more than doubled over the last twenty years.

Joker is not a clarion call to white male violence, it is a desperate attempt at a diagnosis of the pandemic that is killing white men and will eventually kill America.

Joker’s effete and effeminate critics, the eunuchs sprawled on fainting couches at the thought of having to bear a cinematic meditation on the heart of darkness at the center of an iconic super villain, are a bad joke. Their insidiously overwrought outrage and moral panic over Joker exposes their egregious unworthiness as thinkers and critics, and frankly, the vapid unseriousness of our culture.

 A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCTOBER 1, 2019 AT RT.

© 2019

Propaganda and the Delusion of Wokeness

Estimated Reading Time: 6-2, 6-2

On the weekend of July 13th, as Serena Williams was being trounced in the Wimbledon Ladies Final by Simona Halep, a story about a YouGov poll that asked participants “Do you think if you were playing your best tennis, you could win a point off Serena Williams?”, was making the rounds. The poll was of 1742 adults in the U.K., and besides the poorly worded Serena question, asked some equally deep and thoughtful questions like, “do you think you look better naked or with clothes on?”. The inane poll was obviously meant to stir up trouble and publicity, which it promptly did because 7% of respondents had the temerity to say that they could score on Serena.

The big news from the poll, or at least the part that was most widely reported, was that 12% of men answered “yes" to the question. The internet and media went ballistic over the misogyny and delusion of 1 in 8 men thinking they could score on Serena, “the greatest female tennis player of all-time”. There was no mention of the delusional status of the 3% of women who responded “yes”…maybe they got a GrrlPower exemption from harsh judgement.

In the aftermath of the poll people went on twitter to claim that these guys were deluded and that they would shit themselves if they played Serena. Some men on twitter went the extra virtue signaling mile and declared that Serena would literally kill them with a tennis ball if they played her or they might be able to score on Serena only because she was laughing so hard them. As Dan Rather would say…”courage!"

When I googled “Serena YouGov poll” the top story that came up was from Stylist Magazine and the headline read, “Serena Williams: A message for the ‘deluded’ men who believe they could beat her at tennis”. Other headlines from outlets like Metro UK and The Cut declared “Men ridiculed after one in eight say they can beat Serena Williams” and “Poll Shows One in 8 Men Think They Can Beat Serena Williams”. What struck me about those headlines was that…not surprisingly…they were a total fabrication. The poll question never asked if people thought they could beat Serena, only “score a point against her while playing their best tennis", and those are two vastly different things.

In the Stylist piece, which was obviously written by someone who knows absolutely nothing about sports in general, or tennis in particular, states that Serena Williams is “one of the greatest athletes of all-time”. of course, what that statement should say is that Serena is “one of the greatest FEMALE athletes of all-time”, which is not a distinction without a difference.

Let’s be clear, not one of the people polled, unless they are one of the top 10,000 male tennis players in the world, or one of the top 100 women’s tennis players in the world, are going to beat Serena Williams at tennis. No way, no how. Serena is, unquestionably, one of the very best female tennis players to ever play the game and she is not going to lose one set, nevermind two, to someone who isn’t a professional level, quality player.

But once again the question in question, is not about beating Serena, it is about scoring a point on her when you play your best. If the match were played under the rules of women’s tennis, that would mean the winner would have to win two out of three sets. In reality that would mean just two sets of six games, because it is highly improbable that anyone off the street is stealing a game from Serena. Twelve games would encompass 48 points in total if Serena won all the points, which is what the geniuses at Style Magazine and on twitter were claiming. Twenty-four of those points would be on Serena’s serve…which would be very, very difficult for an amateur to handle.

That said, it is also possible, not likely, but possible, that Serena double-faults, which would be a point won by the amateur and thus a “yes” answer to the poll question. This is a vital point to make, that tennis is not just about you hitting a better shot than the other person, it is about the other person not making an error. So what the Style Magazine and twitter fools think is that Serena would be completely flawless in playing these polled amateurs…which is unlikely regardless of her opposition’s unworthiness.

If Serena just hit one ball too hard or didn’t bend her knees enough or slightly miss-hit a ball, then the amateur gets a point and the poll answer is “yes”. Watch tennis players warm up and you see even when their opponent is trying to give them balls to hit they will occasionally hit one into the net or long or wide. This is the nature of sport, humans are not robots, and even the greatest at certain sports are not perfect all the time.

Think of it this way, if I were in a shooting contest with Michael Jordan, best out of 48, Jordan would win that competition, but odds are he might miss at least one shot…which in terms of the poll means I would answer “yes” when relating it to Serena Williams. The same is true if I played one on one against LeBron James. He would destroy me, but if he took a pull-up jumper, or went up for a lay-up…it is not inconceivable he could miss…it would have nothing to do with me and my stellar defense (which really is stellar!), it would have to do with the imperfection of humans and the nature of sport. I would never beat Michael Jordan or LeBron James in a shooting contest or in one-on-one, but that doesn’t mean they would never miss, in fact, the odds that they would miss 1 shot out of 48 is pretty good.

It needs to be said that playing tennis against Serena would be infinitely easier than playing one-on-one against LeBron because his size, strength and speed advantage would be highlighted due to the fact that he would be physically imposing his will on me due to proximity, in basketball you are right next to each other, as opposed to tennis where your opponent is across the net and that distance can reduce the direct physical advantage.

Another thing about the twitter and media reaction to the poll is that everyone assumes that every person answering is a fat-slob, couch potato. While there are plenty of fat-slobs and couch potatoes in the U.K., I think it is safe to say that there are, at a bare minimum, 12% of men in the U.K. who have a life committed to fitness and health. I would say that 12% of U.K. men work out with a modicum of intensity on a regular basis. In fact, a Kantar UK study from 2018 claims that 17% of Britons are members of health clubs and 13% say they exercise regularly.

The numbers of the Serena poll aren’t clear, but let’s assume that half of the 1742 respondents are male, which gives us 871 men. Of those 871, a total of 104 answered yes to the question. Is it insane to think that 104 men out of 871 are fit and highly active and athletic and maybe even compete in sports on a regular basis? I saw a survey that said that there are nearly 840,000 people in the UK that play tennis at least twice a month. Another study says that 500,000 Brits play tennis twice a week. That seems like a lot of tennis players. Is it so absurd to think that these athletic and fit people, playing their very best tennis, could score a single point on Serena when scoring a point also includes her making an error of some sort? The answer is…OF COURSE NOT!

This poll and this story are absolutely idiotic…so why am I writing about it? I am writing about it because it is emblematic not of the “delusion” of the men responding yes to the question, but rather of woke propaganda meant to reinforce the delusional ideology and insipid woke cosmology that fuels the media and twitter mobs. Those doing their two minute hate routine over “delusional men”, make Serena Williams out to be some demi-god or superhero simply because she is a women and black, and they reflexively believe that anything or anyone that dare question her superiority is acting out of misogyny and racism.

The Stylist Magazine piece is a perfect example of propaganda as it distorts the reality of the poll by conflating scoring a point against Serena with beating her, and then says the men who think they can beat her are delusional but ignore the women who say could beat her.

Further proof of Stylist’s propaganda is when they state that “The fact that a significant number of men believe they could win a point against a female tennis legend speaks volumes about the patriarchy”. Is 12% a significant number? If 12% of the population supported Donald Trump would Stylist think that was a “significant” number of supporters?

Stylist continues by declaring “these guys have a delusional confidence that’s ignorant to a women’s talent, achievements and lifelong passion.” Or maybe, like I stated above, these men simply did the math and figured out it is not impossible to score a point on Serena if they are playing their best tennis. My favorite part of that Stylist sentence is “lifelong passions”…if I have a lifelong passion for classical music does that make me Yo-Yo Ma? What does “lifelong passions” have to do with anything?

In making the case of why Serena is so unbeatable, Stylist highlights not only her career accomplishments, which are extraordinarily impressive, but also that she is “an advocate of women’s rights, an influencer of fashion and an important voice in challenging stereotypes around women at work and sport”. What difference does that make? Does that mean that these “delusional men” couldn’t score a point in tennis against Gloria Steinem and Donatella Versace?

In our current cultural and political climate this type of propaganda, that distorts reality and conflates facts, is par for the course. This story is an example of what people do when they want to make a political point and then twist the facts to fit their ideology. The establishment media’s coverage of all things Russia is another glaring example of this tainted “journalistic” approach. Remember the “Russian Microwave Weapon Attack” story? Or the Russians hacking power grids story? Or the whole Russigate hoax fiasco?

The media distort facts just enough to appease the insatiable anger and outrage of those who already agree with them in order to feed the base the red meat they crave. In this case the media conflate scoring a point against Serena with beating her in order to reinforce the notion that men are “deluded” and irrationally confident which angers yet delights pussy hat wearing women and woke posing men who want to signal their virtue. The media does this same thing in regards to Russia, Iran and Syria all in an attempt to give the people what they want as opposed to tell them the truth. This level of deception and distortion is Trumpian in its insidiousness, and it exposes the complete lack of a rational and intellectual foundation to the majority of opinion and thought in this country. The foundation of most opinion in this country is emotion…not logic or reason…and the media stoke this empty headed emotionalism for their own means.

The woke and their acolytes in the mainstream media are, like the Trump cult, immune to logic and reason, and they live in a perpetual delusion and dark fantasy. These people have such a contorted and distorted perception of reality they are incapable of seeing that they are a vital part of the intractable evil they claim they want to destroy. They think men, white men in particular, are malevolent misogynists and destructively delusional…yet many, if not most, claiming this are mothers, daughters, sisters or wives to white men. The funniest part is that a great deal of the woke are white or male or both. The same men who self-flagellated themselves on twitter claiming they’d poop their pants if they played Serena, are no doubt the same mealy-mouthed twats who loudly proclaim that white people are the root of all evil even though they are white. Most of these allegedly woke self-loathing white people will vociferously proclaim their devout belief in diversity but then make sure their kids don’t go to the more “diverse” and more dangerous schools in their city, but rather send them to pricey private school or move to more upscale and whiter neighborhoods in order to avoid the diversity they supposedly so adore.

I have more bad news for hypocritical woke white people…when you condemn white men, you condemn your father, brother, sons and husbands. Since the woke, just like Trump, paint with the broad brush of stereotypes, the “good” white men don’t get a “good white guy” pass. When the shit hits the fan and people are judged by the paradigm the woke have embraced, namely judging people by the color of their skin and not the content of their character, they are going to find out that being an “ally" is a one-way street….and it leads right to the gallows. The reality is that these woke phonies already know this…which is why they send their kids to predominantly white schools in order to avoid the racial animus of minorities.

In conclusion, this poll and the stories about this poll are so ridiculous as to be absurd, and yet, here I am writing about it. The poll, the stories about the poll and my article about the stories about the poll are all prime evidence of how totally insane our world has become and how fucked we are as a society…and make no mistake…we are totally insane and totally fucked.

©2019

Undead Army of the Woke Will Make Sure Game of Thrones is the Last Show of Its Kind

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 04 seconds

****WARNING: This article contains some information about Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame that might be considered minor spoilers if you haven’t watched the series or seen the movie yet. You’ve been warned.****

The surge of political correctness in recent years all but assures that in the future, edgy shows like Game of Thrones will be strangled in their creative cradle.

In 2011, Game of Thrones premiered on HBO as an exceedingly well-acted and beautifully photographed fantasy-drama of swords and sex, chock full of palace intrigue, familial rivalry and violent conquest. The show flouted Hollywood storytelling conventions and quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Sadly, we will never be able to enjoy anything like Game of Thrones ever again.

The reason that we’ll never see anything like Game of Thrones again is because in the eight years since the television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels first hit the small screen, much has changed, and not just in the mythical land of Westeros. In the real world, and the unreal one of social media, political correctness has taken the throne and vanquished all contenders, leaving the bloody head of rational thought on the end of a spike as a warning to anyone who dare speak up against the zeitgeist of neo-feminism, inclusivity and a coddling sensitivity.

In the past few years, movements like #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo have dramatically changed the landscape of Hollywood by weaponizing diversity and victimhood and using them to bludgeon opponents and silence dissent. The “woke”, whom Merriam-Websters defines as those being “aware of and actively attentive to…issues of racial and social justice”, have taken over the entertainment industry. Just like the Night King’s Army of the Dead broke through The Northern Wall to attempt to destroy all of humanity in Westeros, the Army of the Woke now march on our popular culture intent on obliterating all worthwhile entertainment.

A wonderful example of the vacuity of wokeness came in the form of a Game of Thrones outrage tweet from actress and high-priestess of political correctness, Jessica Chastain, where she slammed the show for the character Sansa’s claim that having survived a plethora of traumas, including rape, transformed her into a strong woman.

Chastain tweeted,

“Rape is not a tool to make a character stronger. A woman doesn’t need to be victimized in order to become a butterfly. The #littlebird was always a Phoenix. Her prevailing strength is solely because of her. And her alone.”

Chastain’s tweet is not only an advertisement for her intellectual dwarfism, not to be confused with the intellect of a dwarf, which Tyrion proves can be formidable, but also an actual advertisement. “Phoenix” is a reference to Chastain’s new X-Men movie, Dark Phoenix, which also happens to star Sophie Turner who plays Sansa on Game of Thrones. It appears Jessica Chastain’s superpowers include self-promotion and shamelessness.

Like Chastain, the pc brigade turns everything, including popular entertainment, into a referendum on social justice issues and their own self-worth. The woke spend their time not enjoying arts and entertainment but rather policing them in search of offense or wrong-think in the hopes that they will get the joyous opportunity to vent their self-righteous rage.

Evidence of this is found in articles from major publications with headlines such as, “Game of Thrones Treatment of Women Will Tarnish Its Legacy”, “On Game of Thrones Daenerys Targaryen faces a sexist double bind – like so many women leaders”, “Game of Thrones Keeps Killing Off Entire Immigrant Populations, And It’s a Problem”, “’There are no black people on Game of Thrones’: why is fantasy TV so white?”, “Racist or just bad writing? What Game of Thrones latest shocking death says about the show”, “Game of Thrones: too much racism and sexism – so I stopped watching”, and finally “My Feminist Opinions Ruined Game of Thrones for My Boyfriend”. These stories are emblematic of the fact that the woke are social media Savanarolas perpetually in search of works of art or entertainment to throw onto their bonfire of the vanities. These people don’t just want their politically correct opinions to “ruin Game of Thrones for their boyfriend”, but to ruin all of popular culture for everybody.

The feminist criticisms of Game of Thrones are particularly vapid because they are so demonstrably wrong, as women are the most pivotal and powerful characters on the show. The most formidable and effective rulers on Game of Thrones have been Queen Cersei and her nemesis Daenerys, Mother of Dragons. Arya Stark has gone from a little girl to the deadliest warrior in all of Westeros, who became a legend when she killed the Night King. Ser Brienne of Tarth, the first women to ever become a knight, is the most noble and honorable knight in all the Seven Kingdoms. And last but not least is Sansa Stark, who has suffered brutally but whose resilience has allowed her to become the ruler of the North and, who knows, maybe even sit on the Iron Throne when all is said and done.

All of these women have faced great difficulties and horrendous challenges, but they have prevailed not only in spite of them but because of them. In Game of Thrones as in life, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, but the woke warriors either lack the interest or ability to interpret the show in any other way than to see women and minorities as victims.

If you want to see the future of popular entertainment in the wake of Game of Thrones, look no further than the corporate behemoth Disney and their Marvel and Star Wars franchises. The first phase of the twenty-two film Marvel Cinematic Universe just concluded with Avengers: Endgame, and the woke contingent’s victory is obvious with Captain America now a black man and Iron Man replaced as the center of the story by an all-powerful female character, Captain Marvel.

The Star Wars films too have devolved into a politically correct mess where diversity and inclusivity trump narrative cohesion and dramatic coherence. And if you publicly voice displeasure about the direction of Marvel or Star Wars…you are labeled a misogynist and racist troll.

Game of Thrones warned us for years that “Winter is Coming”…well, winter is now here, and hordes of woke zombies have descended upon us to suffocate all but the most sterile of entertainment. Just like Varys and The Unsullied were castrated on Game of Thrones, so our popular entertainment is being neutered, except this time with the dull blade of politically correct utopianism.

A version of this article was originally published on May 17, 2019 at RT.com.

©2019