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June 2017

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Megyn Kelly’s NBC Show Continues to Tank By Peter Barry Chowka

By on June 27th, 2017

The ratings for the latest episode of Megyn Kelly’s prime time Sunday night NBC program are in, and the bad news continues for the former Fox News channel star. Kelly’s June 25 show, her fourth outing on NBC, was the lowest rated one yet. The program came in third in the ratings, beaten by an ABC rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos and by CBS’s 60 Minutes. Kelly had only 400,000 viewers in the preferred demographic (viewers 18-49) while ABC and CBS each had 700,000. (On a typical night – June 22, 2016 – when she was on Fox News at 9 PM ET/PT, Kelly had almost that many viewers in the news demo – ages 25-54 – 384,000.) The total viewers of the three top broadcast channels during Kelly’s hour on June 25, 2017, 7-8 PM ET/PT, were CBS 7.2 million, ABC 3.9 million, and NBC 3.4 million.

Megyn Kelly

Kelly’s interview guest on Sunday June 25 was J. D. Vance, the author of the New York Times best-selling nonfiction book (47 weeks and counting on the list), Hillbilly Elegy. The book has put Vance, a native of Appalachia and a graduate of Yale Law School, on the trendy map for his ability to explain the beliefs of Americans in flyover country (a.k.a. Trump supporters) – who have been variously described elsewhere as “deplorables” who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” – to the cognoscenti on the coasts.

J. D. Vance on Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly

A number of mainstream media outlets increasingly appear to be lying in wait for Kelly to fail. An article in Breitbart links to a selection of them.

Kelly’s terrible ratings have led to many questions about her marketability and competence.

A network executive reportedly told CNN that NBC’s “fundamental mistake” was thinking Kelly was a “superstar” while Variety noted that Kelly’s star is ”dimmer than ever.” The Boston Globe eviscerated Kelly for being a “poseur” who lacks the “acumen” and “magnetism” to succeed at NBC News. Variety also pointed out that Kelly has pretty much alienated everyone in just three weeks at NBC.

NBC News has reportedly been “freaking out” over the“ratings disaster” that Kelly is turning out to be. Her ratings have been so terrible a New York radio host said NBC may be looking to unload Kelly and even ask Fox News to take her back.

But a high-ranking Fox News official told Breitbart News last week that there would be “no way” Kelly could crawl back to the network if such a scenario occurred and emphasized that Kelly simply would “not be welcomed back.”

“Come Hither:” Megyn Kelly Interviews Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, Russia June 2017

Kelly’s first NBC show, on June 4 with Vladimir Putin, was her highest-rated program to date, but it lost one million viewers – over 15 percent of its total audience – in its second half hour after the Putin interview ended. That episode came in second to ABC’s broadcast of an NBA Finals basketball game.

Kelly’s third show, on June 18 with Alex Jones, was also a ratings disappointment and a full-blown public relations disaster. Any positive critiques of that episode, according to Newsmax, were accountable more to the efforts of the show’s editors (to make Alex Jones look bad and salvage the show’s reputation among liberal elitists) than to “Kelly’s performance in the interview.”

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CNN deletes, retracts story linking Trump and Russia by Rob Tornoe

By on June 27th, 2017

On Thursday evening, CNN investigative reporter Thomas Frank published a potentially explosive report involving an investigation of a Russian investment fund with potential ties to several associates of President Donald Trump.But by Friday night, the story was removed from CNN’s website and all links were scrubbed from the network’s social media accounts.“That story did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted,” CNN said in an editors note posted in place of the story. “Links to the story have been disabled.”

Neither Frank or CNN immediately responded to requests for comment, and a spokesperson for the Senate Intelligence Committee wasn’t available to comment.

Frank, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2012 while at USA Today, had reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating a “$10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team four days before Trump’s inauguration.”

In addition to retracting its story, CNN also apologized to Anthony Scaramucci, an adviser to Trump during the presidential campaign and a member of his transition team’s executive committee, who was mentioned in the story as having met Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) that the network said is overseen by Vnesheconombank, a state-run bank that is currently under U.S. sanctions.

According to the report, the meeting between Scarmucci and Dmitriev could have included the issue of sanctions being lifted, but a spokesperson for the RDIF told Sputnik News, a state-run Russian news channel, that the fund is not a part of Vnesheconombank.

“RDIF always operates in full compliance with relevant regulations and legislation and its operations do not violate sanctions,” the spokesperson said.

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NYT op-ed: Trump assassination fantasies ‘a social necessity’ By David Zukerman

By on June 27th, 2017

Howard Jacobson, in his June 24 New York Times op-ed piece, “Why We Must Mock Trump,” began by referring to the anti-Trump production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in New York’s Central Park, as proof “that plays retain the power to shock and enrage.” Do productions of “Julius Caesar,” played straight, generally “shock and enrage”? I don’t think so. And this production is not straight Shakespeare – not with reference to President Trump’s apartment on “Fifth Avenue.”

At the end of his column, Jacobson asserted, “Derision is a social necessity.” Okay. Imagine, say, Kathy Griffin holding what looks like the severed head of…Hillary Clinton. Would Mr. Jacobson write a piece called “Why We Must Mock Hillary Clinton” – or would he denounce this as offensive, beyond the pale, an action to be condemned? And if the severed head resembled Barack Obama, does anyone doubt that a media firestorm would ensue, protesting this inexcusable example of wishful thinking on the part of a vicious racist who should be prosecuted for hate to the fullest extent of the law – and more?

Mr. Jacobson acknowledged the absence of humor in communist regimes. He continued: “The more monocratic the regime, the less it can bear criticism. And of all criticism, satire – with its single ambition of ridiculing vanity and delusion – is the most potent.” But where is the sense of humor among our anti-Trump leftists? Donald Trump makes a sarcastic comment about Russian hacking – suggesting that if they have emails on Democrats, why, let’s have them – and the left rushes to denounce Trump as a Putin agent. Are leftists, in giving us images of a dead Donald Trump offering satire or wishful thinking?

Mark Twain once wrote: “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.” What personality on the left, political or otherwise, would Mr. Jacobson allow us to be irreverent to? My guess is that we’d be accused of hate speech if we dared be irreverent toward a leftist.

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Germany and Islam By Mike Konrad

By on June 27th, 2017

Germany has a bizarre historical connection with Islam that lies beneath much of the present day crisis in Europe. One could argue that these connections are just the product of historical coincidences, but with Germany the coincidences seem to add up regularly.

When one studies the age of European imperialism, Germany came late to the game, almost as an afterthought. Bismarck, for all his authoritarian faults, felt that imperialism would do Germany no good, and wanted no part of it. He was overridden by public opinion, and Bismarck’s policy was later repudiated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted Germany to take her “Place in the Sun.”

Imperialism would not have destroyed Germany, per se; smaller and weaker nations such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and even backward Spain all had empires.

But what set Germany apart was a concerted love of Arabs and Islam. There was something deeper and darker to this than mere German MachtPolitik. One of his first acts, upon assuming power as Kaiser, was to visit the Ottoman Empire in 1889, He wore a fez. He offered to arm the Turks.

Sultan Mehmet V greets Kaiser Wilhelm upon his arrival in Constantinople

The Kaiser’s Islamic enthusiasm was fired by an 1889 visit to Turkey, which Bismarck opposed on the grounds that it would gratuitously alarm the Russians. Wilhelm met the murderous Sultan Abdul Hamid II and enjoyed the sinuous gyrations of the Circassian dancers in his Constantinople harem. – New York Review of Books

The Turks were astounded. The Ottoman Empire was on a death watch, and the only reason the European powers did not carve Turkey up is because they feared an intra-Christian war over the pieces. Now, the Kaiser was promising to make Islamic Turkey great again. Kaiser Wilhelm had resurrected the Islamic corpse.

It would only get worse. In 1898, during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Kaiser made the insane insinuation that were he not already Christian, he would be a Muslim.

A later visit to Jerusalem [in 1898], then under the auspices of the same flattering sultan, left the impressionable Kaiser declaring that, had he arrived agnostic, “I certainly would have turned Mahometan!” Soon the Kaiser was styling himself “Hajji Wilhelm”, the Protector of Muslims. – The Express

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Peter Smith: Knavish Stupidy of the First Degree

By on June 27th, 2017

Madness prevails. Cheered on by green zealots, governments have accepted a tenuous theory based on black-box models of no proven worth. As carpetbaggers rejoice with charlatans, those who can least afford it are bled dry for what was, until recently, cheap as chips: electricity.

It’s five o’clock on Sunday afternoon in Sydney in winter. By any reckoning Sydney doesn’t get that cold. But I have been at my computer for a couple of hours, with three layers on top and a beanie, and have been cold the whole of that time. When I was married the heater would have been on. Women sensibly don’t like putting up with cold. Me, I’m the son of my father who was always concerned about power bills.

He had reason to be concerned; big power bills seriously dented the household budget. Mind you, I can’t remember a time when a coal fire was not heating the living room on a cold afternoon. That’s progress for you; from warm to cold in the space of childhood to older age. I’ve finally just switched on my gas heater. Ah! The luxury of warmth will soon envelop the room.

Now, for a moment, imagine (if you have to) that you live in, say, Melbourne or Tasmania or Canberra and it’s a cold winter afternoon. Now imagine you are poor and must account for every dollar. Power bills matter to you.

You sit as a single mother with your young children wrapped in clothes and blankets. You’re old and clutch a hot-water bottle. You’re a coal power station worker thrown on the scrap heap, pacing the room, distraught at no longer being able to afford to keep your family warm.

Weep not at these Dickensian scenes for all is not bleak in each house. The poor find consolation in knowing they’re helping to save the planet by keeping their heaters off. An inspirational picture of Al Gore hangs over their cold mantelpieces. Big Al watches over them from his private gas-guzzling jet.

Meanwhile in Point Piper and Toorak the deeply-green Smug and Swank families are enjoying the warmth supplied by under-floor heating throughout every room. But there are no double standards here. They are renewal-energy junkies to their cores. They have taxpayer-subsidised solar panels fitted across their vast roofs, which often earn them a rebate for supplying power to the grid. True, managing this reverse flow of power increases power bills for others, but that’s not their fault.

Madness prevails. Cheered on by green zealots, governments have accepted as settled a tenuous scientific theory, based almost entirely on black-box model predictions which have been seriously astray. If that is not enough, cheered on by carpetbaggers and snake-oil merchants, intermittent, unreliable, ineffective and cripplingly costly renewal power has been foisted on working-class populations scared into compliance.

On the flimsiest basis, the world has been turned upside down. Power bills have soared. Our governments and politicians have shown themselves to be as susceptible to superstition as those in bygone ages who sought the future in the entrails of animals. And then there are those in the broader community who simply accept any old rope handed down from authority. Give them the Little Red Book and they would have been fodder for Mao.

I need to confess to an evolving mind. I entertained a small possibility that the received wisdom of catastrophic man-made global warming might be right, though the remedies being applied were totally misconceived (to some extent I was in sync with the Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lomborg positions). Now, the more I read, the more I am tending to believe that it is codswallop from start to finish.

Here, I think, is fairly persuasive scientific comment from Richard Lindzen, eminent Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT:

The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science’.
– Thoughts on the Public Discourse over Climate Change

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The Senate Saves the 10th Amendment The health-care bill would liberate states to bypass ObamaCare rules and better manage Medicaid. By Avik Roy

By on June 27th, 2017

For decades American conservatives have sought to restore meaning to the 10th Amendment, which recognizes the states’ right to manage their affairs free from Washington’s interference. Passing the Republican Senate’s health-care bill would represent historic progress toward that goal.

In nearly every state, Medicaid is either the largest or second-largest budget line, as well as the fastest-growing category. Every year state lawmakers, trying to carry Medicaid’s heavy burden, are forced to make difficult choices about what else to cut: education, roads, public safety.

Especially frustrating is that state officials have little control over how to manage their Medicaid programs. The 1965 Medicaid law contains dozens of limits on what states can do to avoid waste, fraud and abuse. In the half-century since, Washington has added to that burden with more laws and regulations.

Governors and state legislatures ask Washington every year for the right to receive their Medicaid funds in the form of a block grant, which would give them autonomy to manage the spending as they see fit. The Senate bill, for the first time, would allow that.

States that forgo the block grants would still receive additional flexibility through per capita allotments, an idea first proposed by President Clinton in 1995. The Senate bill would limit the growth of federal spending on each able-bodied enrollee to the rate of medical inflation, and on elderly and disabled enrollees to medical inflation plus 1%. After 2025, per-enrollee spending would be tied to overall inflation. The net effect would be to reduce overall federal spending on the pre-ObamaCare Medicaid program by up to 2% from projected levels over the next 10 years.

In exchange for putting Medicaid on a budget, states would gain substantial latitude to use funds more efficiently. Example: Thanks to ObamaCare, states are permitted to verify a recipient’s eligibility for Medicaid only once a year. As a result, scarce dollars continue going to people who become ineligible. Of the 10% (or more) of Medicaid spending that is improper, the majority goes to ineligible recipients, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The Senate bill would liberate states from many other ObamaCare burdens. It would oblige the Secretary of Health and Human Services to grant all state waiver requests unless they increase federal spending, and to issue a final decision on waiver applications within six months of receiving them. Under current law, waivers are at the secretary’s discretion and there is no deadline.

The new waiver process would let states reduce premiums and health-care costs by bypassing a broad array of ObamaCare provisions, including benefit mandates and requirements that all individual policies be part of a single risk pool. Waivers would last eight years, with the option to renew. CONTINUE AT SITE

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A Unanimous Rebuke to Judges on the Travel Ban The Supreme Court lets nearly all of Trump’s policy be enforced as it hears his appeal.

By on June 27th, 2017

The Supreme Court on Monday began the process of rebuking lower courts for usurping the political branches on national security. The entire Court, even the four liberals, agreed to hear the Trump Administration’s appeal of appellate-court rulings blocking its immigration travel ban, and the Justices allowed nearly all of the 90-day ban to proceed in the meantime.

This is a victory for the White House, though it is more important for the Constitution’s separation of powers. President Trump’s ban is neither wise nor necessary, but that is not an invitation for judges to become back-seat Commanders in Chief. Yet that is precisely what liberal majorities on both the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal did in blocking the travel bans, and the Supreme Court is saying those rulings will not be the last judicial word. The Court’s unsigned per curiam opinion set the case for an early hearing on the legal merits in the next term that begins in October.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, wrote a concurrence arguing that the Court should have lifted the lower-court injunctions in toto. He also added a cheeky aside that “I agree with the Court’s implicit conclusion that the Government has made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits—that is, that the judgments below will be reversed.”

Some Justices might not agree with that, but it’s notable that Chief Justice John Roberts managed to corral a unanimous Court for lifting nearly all of the injunctions. That means even the liberals understand that injunctions need to be issued with care, especially on national security where judges lack the knowledge and electoral accountability of the executive and Congress.

The High Court’s precedents are clear, especially Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972) that said courts should defer to the executive if there is a “facially legitimate and bona fide” justification on national security. Judges can’t run roughshod over the Constitution merely because an unpopular President issued the travel order.

Democrats and the media will now begin a ferocious lobbying campaign to turn five Justices against these precedents, in particular the Chief Justice and Justice Anthony Kennedy. We doubt this will succeed because this isn’t a close legal call, and it concerns the Presidency more than this particular President.

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DIANA WEST:AYAAN HIRSI ALI WARNS THE WEST…..AGAINST GEERT WILDERS !!!!!

By on June 27th, 2017

If there’s one thing that 31,065 deadly Islamic terror attacks since 9/11 teach us, it’s that there is no way to foster a fact-based discussion of Islam in the halls of Western power.

That’s right — I said fact-based discussion of Islam. After 15-plus years since our Twin Towers burned and collapsed, I am still not talking about “Islamofascism,” “Islamism,” “Islamist extremism,” or any other figleaf-word made up by blushing Westerners to cover up the embarassingly appalling facts about Islam: its defining laws which can be as revolting as they are repressive; its history of violent conquest and “radical” religious and cultural cleansing; its totalitarian goals to apply “sharia” (Islamic law) everywhere to eradicate freedom of conscience, speech, other religions, and, oh yeah, rule the world.

In other words, exactly the things the Powers That Be will not talk about since even before George W. Bush rebounded from the shock of the Islamic attacks of 9/11 to realize that Islam was a “religion of peace.” In the land of the free and the home of the brave, Islamic blasphemy law rules.

Last week’s Senate hearing — even the title of last week’s Senate hearing — was more of the same.

Co-chaired by an affable Sen Ron Wyden and an angry Sen Claire McKaskill, the hearing was called: “Ideology and Terror: Understanding the Tools, Tactics, and Techniques of Violent Extremism.”

Notice no official mention of Islam. Or, more to the point, no official interest in Islam — except to protect it. Sen. Wyden, the “good guy” of the hearing for allowing that there might possibly be some teeny tiny slightly Islamist-ic thing about jihad (not that I heard the word), actually commended the two Muslim-born witnesses on the panel for “bending over backwards” to avoid tarring Islam with a truthful brush (or words not quite to that effect).

Meanwhile, the four Democrats on Team Violent Extremism, all women, ignored the Muslim born witnesses — ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muslim reformer Asra Nomani, asking neither witness a single question. Instead, they focused obsessively on the non-sense of Mr. See-No-Islam, former NCTC director Michael Leiter (whom we last met here). Perhaps the Democrats saw the two women of Islamic heritage as impediments to the indoctrination in the “Ideology” of “Violent Extremism” that causes “Terror.”

But did the Democrat senators really have that much to fear? I ask this after having read the op-ed Hirsi Ali and Nomani wrote for the New York Times about their dismal experience; also after having then watched much of the hearing. I cannot now un-notice their obvious determination to avoid speaking forthrightly about Islam — same as the Left.

Hirsi Ali and Nomani write:

What happened that day [before the committee] was emblematic of a deeply troubling trend among progressives when it comes to confronting the brutal reality of Islamist extremism …

Here goes, one more time: This “brutal reality” they write about is a consequence of the laws of Islam. It is neither “Islamist,” nor is it a form of “extremism” within Islam. This brutal reality is all part of Islamic Normal.

The women note their own personal suffering growing up in “deeply conservative Muslim families”: genital multilation, forced marriage, death threats for their so-called apostasy.

Despite any and all “ists” or “isms,” such horrors and more are part of mainstream Islam.

Then they point out:

There is a real discomfort among progressives on the left with calling out Islamic extremism…

OK, but there is real discomfort in these two women when it comes to calling out the extremism of mainstream Islam. Just look how confused their discussion becomes on acknowledging fundamental conflicts between “universal human rights” and “Islamic law,” and on listing a series of what they call “Islamist ideas” which, nonetheless, come straight out of any authoritative Islamic law book:

The hard truth is that there are fundamental conflicts between universal human rights and the principle of Shariah, or Islamic law, which holds that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s; between freedom of religion and the Islamist idea that artists, writers, poets and bloggers should be subject to blasphemy laws; between secular governance and the Islamist goal of a caliphate; between United States law and Islamist promotion of polygamy, child marriage and marital rape; and between freedom of thought and the methods of indoctrination, or dawa, with which Islamists propagate their ideas.

In sum, whether it’s Claire McCaskill or Hirsi Ali, discussion and education about Islam is completely off limits. “Political Islam,” “Islamism,” “Medina Islam” and Violent Extremism become interchangeable threats to theworldcommunity, including the pink bunnies and buttercups that make up The Real McCoy Islam. The only problem, all agree, are those dwedful extwemists.

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Birth of a New Persian Empire: Jed Babbin

By on June 27th, 2017

Lost in the rising tensions between Russia and the U.S. over Syria are the gains Iran continues to make.spectator.org/birth-of-a-new-persian-empire/

The United States is gradually being drawn into the war in Syria. That war began as a conflict in which we had no national security interest. That changed because two of our principal adversaries, Russia and Iran, took over that war, making the conflict much larger than just a civil war against the terrorist regime of Bashar Assad.

Syria still isn’t worth — in Bismarckian terms — the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier, far less an American soldier, sailor, airman or Marine. Three have died there, so far. One was the victim of an improvised explosive device, one was killed in a truck accident, and one reportedly died of natural causes. There will be more.

One American, a journalist named Austin Tice, is reportedly being held hostage by the Syrian government.

Things have been heating up in Syria lately. Two Sundays ago, a Navy F/A-18 shot down a Syrian Su-22 after it had dropped a bomb close to the Kurdish forces allied with us in striking at ISIS. After that, Russia announced that it would have its anti-aircraft missile batteries target any U.S. aircraft that strayed west of the Euphrates River.

Shortly after that, the Russians fired several Kaliber cruise missiles at ISIS targets to demonstrate that their naval forces in the area are as powerful as ours, though they obviously aren’t. And after that, a Russian fighter flew recklessly close (reportedly within five feet) to a Navy P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic near Kaliningrad. After that, a USAF F-15 intercepted (safely) a Russian aircraft carrying Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, also flying near Kaliningrad.

Wars have a way of spreading quickly but the flybys are, like the Russian cruise missile strike, of no real consequence other than to heighten tensions between the two nations.

Lost amid the underwhelming coverage of these incidents is the very real problem of what Iran is doing and what it’s accomplishing. A new Persian Empire is being born and we are not trying to stop it.

Ever since former president Obama pulled our troops out of Iraq, Iran has turned that nation into a Shiite satrap. It is “governed” by a Shiite-friendly regime and truly ruled by Iran through its Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Shiite militia forces more-or-less controlled by the IRGC. The IRGC is under direct command of the Tehran ayatollahs.

Iran and Russia both want hegemony over the entire Middle East. Russia’s permanent air and naval bases in Syria give them a grasp of Syria that can be extended almost at will. Iran, having grasped Iraq, now wants a clear path to the Mediterranean. That path is being created through Syria to Beirut, Lebanon where the Iranian Hizb’allah terrorist force has established itself as a ruling political party as well as a terrorist network with global aspirations. (I use Hizb’allah — as the terrorist network uses it, literally “the party of god” — instead of the bowdlerized “Hezbollah” commonly used by U.S. and European media.)

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The Beguiled – A Review By Marilyn Penn

By on June 27th, 2017

Some reviewers have found fault with the erasure of important issues such as slavery from Sofia Coppola’s version of The Beguiled based on a novel about a southern girl’s school set during the Civil War. The school is on a beautiful ante-belum estate surrounded by magnificent trees and woods that let us know we are in a place where innocence will come to a reckoning far more primal than politics. In the opening scene which captures the essence of so many fairy tales, a young girl with pigtails is walking through the deep woods gathering mushrooms in her basket. Instead of a wolf, she comes upon a wounded Union soldier and out of compassion for his plight, helps him back to the school There, he is confronted with a handful of girls and women, all of whom will eventually be implicated in his fate.

Played by Colin Farrell, the soldier can’t help being a sexual turn-on to the range of young lovelies held in check by Miss Martha, the headmistress played by Nicole Kidman. Steady and steely but also open to suggestions from the girls, she asks their opinion on how to deal with the “enemy soldier.” Cool and rational, she agrees to let him remain while he convalesces from her surgery on his leg. We watch as Farrell plays each of the women with intuitive skill while they compete for his attention and affection. Coppola maintains the tension with a minimum of histrionics and some quiet scenes of the girls saying their prayers, playing music and dressing for dinner set beautifully at a candle-lit table that offers a surprising bounty during a time of war. Quite obviously, this is not a kitchen drama about wartime privation.

Ms. Coppola is painting on a larger canvas than American history – the scale is more mythic than realistic and the outside world appears only once briefly with an unexpected appearance by two confederate soldiers who are quickly dispensed with. It would be a spoiler to discuss the plot beyond this set-up but this is a movie skilfully directed, beautifully filmed and more thought-provoking than it first appears. It may take you back much than the 19th century, perhaps as far back as the Garden of Eden.

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