RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/emcapitol_punishmentem__the_film_every_american_must_see_.html

The inimitable actor Nick Searcy was present in DC on January 6.  He has just released a film about what he saw that day, Capitol Punishment.  For all Americans who find it hard to believe that our FBI and DOJ are now very dangerous enemies of the people, this film will be a shock.  Those two law enforcement institutions are most assuredly now enemies of all law-abiding citizens.  The phenomenon of January 6th was no insurrection; it was a carefully calculated set-up.  

The powers that be, some cabal of Trump haters within our government, successfully manipulated those present to escalate the situation with the help of an unknown number of FBI operatives and some Antifa and BLM activists.  The so-called members of alleged militia groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were very likely FBI operatives as well.  

How can that be?  Because they were there, have been identified and can be seen inciting people to breach the Capitol but have never been arrested or charged.  In the meantime, hundreds of thoroughly innocent people have been literally assaulted by the FBI, without warning, without warrants.  They’ve been thrown in jails, denied attorneys and due process. 

Darren Beattie of Revolver News and Julie Kelly at American Greatness have done yeomen’s work on the mis-reporting and judicial abuses that took place that day and in the almost year since.   It is a grim and very frightening tale of governmental abuse of power.  Searcy’s film shows just how far toward totalitarianism America has gone since Obama had his way with our federal institutions and just how perverse they have become since Donald Trump threatened to drain their swamp.   Despite everything the left threw at Trump from the moment announced his candidacy to the 2020 election failing to derail his 2016 election, they planned and plotted his political demise:  the Russia hoax, now traced directly to Hillary Clinton, two phony impeachment trials, and a host of other schemes in between.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-sex-lives-of-college-students/

Our cynical, burned-out culture

 I t seems that some college students have become so cynical about sex that they have even begun prostituting themselves. In England, Durham University Students Union noticed an “emerging trend” of students selling themselves for sex and responded by offering two courses in “sex work.” The university’s justification was that they wanted to “ensure students can be safe and make informed choices.” On that basis, should they also provide courses in drug-dealing?

Considering the cultural influences at play, this trend is hardly surprising. Just look at our coming-of-age stories, which are less about attaining maturity and character and more about conforming to ever-lower expectations of prolonged adolescence. Take, for example, the new HBO Max series The Sex Lives of College Girls, which is the tale of four female freshman roommates as they screw around at a preppy college. Forget love or character development — the show’s male characters are weak, shallow, and interested in only one thing, while the young women are spoiled, feckless, and only too happy to give the men what they want.

In episode one, we meet Bella, an 18-year-old, who introduces herself as “super sex positive and ready to smash some Ds.” Bella wants to get into the comedy club and so is thrilled at the chance to give hand jobs to the six young men on the admissions committee. We meet Whitney, a senator’s daughter, who, after ending a sexual relationship with her soccer coach on account of his being married, rebounds with a one-night stand. There’s Leighton, a secret lesbian, who uses apps for casual hook-ups and then blocks the women she’s hooked up with. And then there’s Kimberly, the comparatively innocent one, who has sex for the first time with her high-school boyfriend, only to be dumped by him the next morning.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/bill-clinton-come-clean-affair-impeachment/

What if Bill Clinton had told the truth? Would America’s sexual and political history be different? The thought occurs because of the new TV drama Impeachment about the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Somewhat unfairly to both main parties, it is part of the American Crime Story series. Previous subjects have included O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan, who killed Gianni Versace. It’s a bit rich putting Bill Clinton in the same bracket as these murder cases. Nonetheless, the result is intriguing, not just because of the magnificent acting and production — and not only because in the quarter of a century since the world’s most famous blowjob a certain axis of society seems to have turned.

Back then Monica Lewinsky was the butt of every joke. In the ancient-modern parlance she was “shamed.” Late-night comedians, like everyone else on the planet, did jokes you can still rattle off: “Girl in her class voted most likely to suck-seed” — that sort of thing. A friend was at a post-Oscars party in 2001, the year Bjork came dressed as a swan. Shortly afterwards Monica Lewinsky entered the room. “Should have come as a swallow,” my friend quipped.

Of course, in the light of #MeToo, all that has changed. Now Bill Clinton (played by Clive Owen) is a brooding menace. He literally comes out of the shadows every time they meet. He is the abuser, she the abused. Because that is how all male-female power relations have been reformulated in recent times. It doesn’t hurt that Lewinsky is a producer on the show, allowing herself to come across almost wholly as an innocent little victim. Personally this grates with me — because as well as being an obsessive and a nut, the woman playing Lewinsky looks like that actress from Hairspray who made me grind my teeth and turn off in under five minutes.

But none of this is what is interesting. What is interesting is the question that has only come up once in the show so far: what, as I say, if Bill Clinton had told the truth?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/why_is_no_one_talking_about_fxs_impeachment_series.html

Now that I am seven episodes in, I feel confident saying that “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” airing Tuesday evenings on FX, is the fairest and arguably the best real-life political drama Hollywood has ever produced.  What mystifies me is that no one on the Right appears to be talking about it.

The third in the “American Crime Story” series, this 10-part drama faithfully tracks the perjury and obstruction of justice scandal that very nearly ended the Bill Clinton presidency. While the first two in the series — “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” and “Versace” — dealt candidly with the issues of race and homosexuality, “Impeachment” takes candor a step further and deconstructs the Left’s revisionist history of Bill Clinton’s “sex” scandal.

The Bill Clinton character, served up with equal parts charm and menace by British actor Clive Owen, is something of a monster. When Paula Jones, played with minimal condescension by Annaleigh Ashford, testifies that Clinton exposed himself we believe her, not him. Her vivid description of Clinton’s royal member will not please the ex-president.

It is only in the seventh episode that the Hillary Clinton character, played — unconvincingly, alas — by Edie Falco of “Sopranos” fame emerges from the shadows. Although it is too early to tell, my guess is that Hillary will not like the portrait of herself as cold and controlling. That said, I expect the producers to pull their punches when it comes to revealing Hillary’s role in quelling the “bimbo eruptions” that threatened Clinton’s political career from the get-go.

Those “bimbos” — the Clinton term, not mine — include not just Paula Jones, but sexual assault victims such as Elizabeth Ward Gracen and Juanita Broaddrick, the latter of whom Clinton raped. (Viewers see Broaddrick briefly once in an early episode but will not see her again.)  When Bill ran for president in 1992, Hillary was instrumental in hiring private investigators to bribe and/or threaten these women into silence.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/dave_chappelles_new_show_has_some_truths_and_a_big_antisemitic_lie.html

“Chappelle has become embittered in the last year, with an ugly vein of anger behind his often flabby jokes.”

Dave Chappelle has been rightly celebrated for being willing to speak the truth about transgenderism; namely, that there are two genders and people cannot change their gender simply because they want to. But while applauding that truth and his courage in today’s world to state it, what we cannot ignore is Dave Chappelle’s Big Lie, which was his attack on Jews using the ancient anti-Semitic trope that they seek world dominance, along with the modern Muslim trope that they’re attempting genocide against Palestinians.

What most conservatives heard once Netflix released Dave Chappelle’s latest show was that he bucked the transgender crowd and stated that “gender is a fact”:

“Gender is a fact,” Chappelle says , according to a Daily Beast report of his sixth special on the streaming platform. “Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. That is a fact. Now, I am not saying that to say trans women aren’t women, I am just saying that those p*****s that they got … you know what I mean? I’m not saying it’s not p***y, but it’s Beyond P***y or Impossible P***y.”

He’s vulgar but that’s the truth, and bravo to Chappelle for stating it.

Over the years, Chappelle has won plaudits for speaking the truth about lots of things. He’s responsible for one of the best comedy sketches about race that I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t watched his skit about the Black White Supremacist (which is, of course, filled with foul language, so be warned), you’re missing an incredibly astute commentary about the true meaninglessness of race as a way of determining our values:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/sopranos_prequel_goes_squishy_on_the_sixties.html

This weekend, I went to the theater to see the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark. I watched with the kind of critical eye an astrophysicist might have brought to Star Wars.

At the time of the 1967 Newark riot, the foundational event of the movie, I was a 19-year-old living in Newark with my siblings and widowed mother. My late father had been a Newark cop, and my Uncle Bob, also a cop, was in the thick of the riot from the initial assault on the Fourth Precinct to its bloody end 26 deaths later.

Of note, too, Bob had married into a large Newark Italian family. As a kid, I spent considerable time in the family compound. I knew how that world turned. David Chase should have. An Italian American a few years older than I am, Chase created the stellar HBO series, The Sopranos, and was the creative force behind the movie. In the series, which ran from 1999-2007, there was scarcely a false note. In the movie, alas, scarcely a note rings true. 

Not surprisingly, given the times we live in, race is at the heart of the movie’s misfire. As Chase told a friendly interviewer, he was living in a Newark suburb when the riot erupted. Watching from afar, he and his suburban friends told each other, “I hope they burn that place down, those motherf**kers. Corrupt, c**k-sucking white people.” The “white people” Chase refers to here included not only my family and me, but also — to the detriment of the movie — the characters who people it, cops and gangsters alike.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/review-fauci-a-phony-big-screen-doc/

Deconstructing National Geographic’s propaganda pitch.

You might be one of those people who never want to see Anthony Fauci’s face on TV again — or not. But it’s likely that the man himself will be broadcast and rebroadcast continuously, using the power status that Fauci has attained to further the current administration’s COVID protocols. There’s no better insight into this ideological puffery than the publicity campaign for the new documentary Fauci. This fascinating aspect of film culture is crafty and demands close scrutiny.

Presented by National Geographic, the same outfit responsible for Genius, the other Aretha Franklin biopic, Fauci is being sold with similar veneration. It’s not a film about science but about “following the science” of public leadership — as when politicians assert cant such as “Don’t question my authority.” You don’t expect cant from NG. The trust built up from decades of that iconic yellow-framed print magazine, with its vivid photographs of natural phenomena, makes us susceptible. NG’s film division is now the opposite of informative and wide-ranging; its political bias now resembles NPR’s. The Fauci doc typifies the continued narrowcasting of popular media into the congealed “mainstream” perspective.

And the pitch behind Fauci shows how. NG sneaks past old presumptions about the idea of “documentary.” (Blame the genre’s degeneration on Rob Reiner’s fictitious This Is Spinal Tap, where popularizing “factoids” — familiar legends and speculations — rather than truth created that new phony genre of the “mockumentary.”)

The selling of Fauci mocks our credulousness, increased by high-pressure COVID-19 fear-mongering, another advertising phenomenon. Fauci’s press release urges viewers (and media hacks) to accept the doc on the filmmakers’ non-objective terms: “With his signature blend of scientific acumen, candor, and integrity, Dr. Anthony Fauci became America’s most unlikely cultural icon during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Gullible reviewers are unlikely to suspect this seemingly innocuous description: “A world-renowned infectious disease specialist and the longest-serving public-health leader in Washington, D.C., he has overseen the U.S. response to 40 years’ worth of outbreaks, including HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola.” The doc leans on Fauci’s role during the AIDS crisis to suggest he’s empathetic. (He’s shown reading the New York Times, quoting The Godfather, bragging about his Brooklyn roots.)

Scamming media naïfs, the release boasts the doc’s exclusivity, claiming that it’s “crafted around unprecedented access to Dr. Fauci.”

That should be the giveaway for any sharp viewer not on the NG payroll. The word “access” means collaboration from a brigade of celebrities. The lineup of their names makes for the release’s most startling clause:

The film features insights from former President George W. Bush, Bill Gates, Bono, former national-security adviser Susan Rice, National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Tom Frieden, journalists Laurie Garrett and the New York Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli.

These aristocrats affirm Fauci’s bona fides and give tribute. They’re what gossip columns call “boldface names,” and they’re also all partisan, as is the film’s tagline: “a revealing portrait of one of our most dedicated public servants.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-sudden-move-review-a-noir-with-heart-and-smarts-11625172442?mod=hp_lead_pos13

Every time “Out of Sight” turns up on TV I’m hooked once again. Whatever I’m doing must stop while I watch at least a few minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 comedy of interstate criminal behavior, with a peerlessly romantic encounter between Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney that plays out in a Detroit hotel lounge on a snowy winter night. The director’s latest, “No Sudden Move,” takes place entirely in Detroit, though romance is hardly the mode. An exceedingly convoluted crime thriller set in 1954, and streaming on HBO Max, this is pitch-black noir with so many betrayals that the characters can’t fathom the various plots they’re caught up in. Yet it’s another Soderbergh film whose allure is sure to endure. Whenever it shows or streams in years to come, I know I’ll be happily in its thrall.

At its simplest the story concerns someone looking for someone to do some reliable work, meaning a shadowy piece of business—extracting an unspecified document from an office safe—commissioned by a shadowy middleman, Brendan Fraser’s Jones, on behalf of an anonymous employer. (A quick word about those shadows. Mr. Soderbergh shot the film himself, as he has often done, and his cinematography draws ravishingly beautiful distinctions between total darkness and a palette of brooding colors that represent the participants’ plights.)

The first hire is Curt Goynes, a petty criminal with a blighted past played by Don Cheadle. Soon he’s joined by Benicio Del Toro’s charmingly devious Ronald Russo. Both men are supervised by Kieran Culkin’s Charley, who’s too sleazy to have a last name, on a surprise visit to the suburbs, where an attractive couple and their two kids live in a pleasant brick house. Every time a new set of characters is introduced, the screenplay, by Ed Solomon (“Men in Black”), ups its ante of tension. That’s true of the suburban family, particularly the brittle, cheerful mother, Mary Wertz ( Amy Seimetz ), and the father, Matt Wertz (David Harbour), a man of not-so-quiet desperation who knows someone who knows the safe’s combination.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/review-thomas-sowell-common-sense-in-a-senseless-world/

An inspiring one-hour documentary about the conservative public intellectual Thomas Sowell serves as a superb intro to his thinking.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.” Thomas Sowell, who combines a Mark Twain-level gift for apothegms with the rigor of a data scientist, said that back in 1998, but like many of his sparkling one-liners, it’s more strikingly true now than ever.

At 90, Sowell remains “one of the great minds of the past half century,” as host Jason L. Riley puts it in the one-hour PBS documentary Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, which can be viewed here, but fair warning: This film is a gateway drug. You are bound to get hooked on Sowell, just like many others interviewed in the film. These include podcaster Dave Rubin, a Silicon Valley executive with Overstock.com; a Dallas rapper named Eric July from the band Backwordz; and Sowell’s friend Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and linguist. Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist and author, makes a perfect guide because he is the Sowell whisperer: His new book Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, is about to hit shelves.

In a film written and produced by Tom Jennings, Riley takes us through how Sowell, who lost his dad before he was born and his mother when he was a small child, rose from poverty. His early years he spent in a house with no electricity in North Carolina, then an apartment in Harlem, where a family friend guided him to a love of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library when he was eight years old. At the University of Chicago, one of his professors was Milton Friedman, who proved unable to talk him out of being a Marxist. What did the trick was a government job. In the Department of Labor, Sowell found that increased minimum wages reduce employment, but this fact interested no one. “People in the government didn’t give a rip whether it worked or not. They were simply implementing the policy,” notes another black intellectual, columnist Larry Elder.