RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2024/02/mrs-gates-and-mrs-jobs-make-racism-movie.html

Origin, the movie, claims to be about the origin of racism in America, but its own origin story lies with the Ford Foundation, Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, the Apple guru, and Pivotal Ventures, the nonprofit started up by Melinda French Gates after she dumped Bill Gates, which provided much of the money needed to fund the $38 million smear of the United States.

What kind of movie would two wealthy woke white women fund? A pop history take on racism.

Origin is based on Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, another one of those 2020 books about a racial reckoning of the kind that Mrs. Jobs and Mrs. Gates would have encountered in book clubs and while browsing The Atlantic (Mrs. Jobs owns it) or Slate (Bill Gates used to.)

Isabel Wilkerson, the protagonist of book and film, is another one of those critical race theory ‘public intellectuals’ with a media platform, a former New York Times bureau chief, who stars in it because it follows her deep thoughts about race which unroll with the depth and sophistication of a college freshman browsing Wikipedia while pulling an all-nighter to turn in a midterm paper.

Like Between the World and Me by Ta Nehisi Coates or Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist, Caste tried to pretend that its familiar and simplistic premise, (‘America is racist’) had some kind of depth by inappropriately linking it to other people’s historical experiences, the Holocaust and the caste system in India, while filtering it all through Wilkerson’s deep thoughts.

Trayvon Martin, Wilkerson’s personal life and Nazis goose stepping through Berlin all get mixed up in some intersectional tangle of narrative oppressions in both book and movie. Wilkerson taking plane trips to Germany or India allows her to bag up and appropriate two very different sets of histories to bolster her own feelings of oppression as a New York Times bestselling author.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/leftists-civil-war-fantasies/

I’m really confused about the new movie trailer for the leftist insurgency fantasy flick “Civil War” because it seems to think that the military guy who is hassling journalists with his M4 is the bad guy. I must have got that wrong. Clearly, whoever is opposed to the regime media is the hero, right? Maybe his weird, red Elton John glasses are supposed to signal to me that he’s evil, but I’m just not seeing it. At one point, one of the reporters tells him they are Americans and he asks, “What kind of American?” Frankly, that seems like a pretty good question.

After all, I was told by the desiccated, corrupt, old pervert who Alex Garland – the guy who made this piece of crap movie – a undoubtedly supported, there are a two kinds of Americans. There are good, upstanding, woke Americans who buy into all the communist garbage, and there are normal people who he calls “MAGA extremists” who are bad and scary insurrectionists and hate our democracy and are also racist and transphobic and everything else that is bad. They also cause inflation and climate change. These people should be shamed, persecuted and hounded from society, disenfranchised, disarmed, and, according to this movie, shot. So, the “What kind of American are you?” thing is not going to shock us because it is already happening, and here’s the punchline – if you’re reading this, you’re probably the bad kind of American, according to the Hollywood jerks and our senile, evil president.

The movie doesn’t really make clear what’s going on in its scenario, and to the extent it does, the scenario is pretty stupid. Apparently, there’s a president who likes God, so that your subtle hint that he’s the bad kind of American. He’s on his third term in office, which it meant to be an issue, which is weird because I was informed that the Constitution that bars three terms is an evil document of oppression designed by dead white male slaveholders, but apparently it’s a good thing today. Maybe I just haven’t got my daily Constitution status memo. There was nothing in the trailer about prosecuting your political enemies on trumped–up charges, but I’m assuming that’s a good thing until it stops being a good thing when applied to Democrats.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/20/netflix-and-the-erasure-of-history/

Trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people.”
– Excerpt from “Leave the World Behind,” released on Netflix December 8, 2023

If anyone thinks Netflix has abandoned the so-called woke programming that earned them sustained criticism back in the spring of 2022 and may have played a role in their cratering stock price at the time, their new movie should put that thought to rest. Woke, for lack of a better term, is alive and well at Netflix. Their cozy relationship with nouveau plutocrat power couple and White House alumni, Barack and Michelle Obama, and the blockbuster bomb of a movie they’ve produced together, epitomizes the culture of Netflix today. Such casual racism. “Don’t trust white people.” It’s ok when they do it. But don’t you dare.

To truly appreciate where Netflix is today, one must recall how they began. During the golden age of movie DVDs, in the late 1990s, Netflix arose as the mail-order alternative to renting videos from walk-in stores. But creative destruction never ends. Just as Netflix movies by mail drove corner movie rental stores out of business, streaming made DVDs delivered by mail obsolete.

On September 29, Netflix shipped their last DVD to subscribers and cancelled the service. And with that, one of the last, best windows into nearly a century of American culture was closed forever. At its peak around 2019, more than 100,000 movie titles were available on DVD, arriving in the familiar red envelopes. But as the subscriber base for DVDs shrank and competition from other streaming services grew, Netflix management decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

This is a rational business decision. Netflix, a content behemoth with an enterprise value that has soared to more than $170 billion, doesn’t need the headache of managing 17 DVD distribution centers tasked with shipping and receiving actual physical media. Netflix owns server farms that dispatch movies electronically, and their investment in physical assets must now prioritize production studios where the company invests literally billions in generating original content. With more than 50 percent of all video consumption in the U.S. now consisting of user generated content at zero cost to platforms like YouTube and TikTok, Netflix’s challenge is keeping their 240 million streaming subscribers, not hanging on to a dwindling cadre of 1.2 million DVD clients.

Nonetheless, losing public access to what was, by far, the greatest collection of movies ever compiled is a tragedy.

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/366431/in-israels-time-of-need-jewish-hollywood-has-failed-the-audition/

For a people that purportedly invented, and now control, Hollywood, Jews are awful at making demands—as Jews. There’s a reason why those early nickelodeons featured silent cowboy-westerns and scant Jewish immigrants. Jewish invisibility continued into the talkie era—more cowboys, wicked witches, tap dancers in gowns and tuxedos, a gin joint in Casablanca, and, yes, one Jewish jazz singer. Jewish characters didn’t only find themselves left out of the picture, they weren’t even on the cutting room floor. And as for silence, well, . . . that’s a Jewish specialty when it comes to standing up for their own people.

Antisemitism has overtaken America in ways not seen since the 1930s, when Hitler was ascending in Europe and the Depression caused pernicious divisions within the United States. The Jewish influence in Hollywood was never greater among studio chieftains and writers back then, but the motion picture industry had nothing to say about Hitler’s plan for European Jewry.

Some studio heads still had families in Europe. And they were at the helm of the ultimate megaphones and spotlights. But there was no golden hour for the Holocaust. Hollywood’s cameras were dark. The Third Reich was the second largest market for movies in the world—and foreign sales, in industry speak, is the Golden Calf. It wasn’t until Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940), as Auschwitz was beginning to burn, that Hollywood realized that the number of Jewish actors and extras in the world was rapidly shrinking.

And Chaplin wasn’t Jewish!

There’s a sequel to this sad story playing out all over again, an even more inexplicable example of how La La Land goes all blah blah rather raise the red flag for Jews. In the aftermath of the October 7th massacre in Southern Israel, which included the most gruesome and unimaginable of all horror flicks—the beheading and baking of Jewish babies, and the gang raping and mutilation of Israeli teenagers—sympathy for Israel evaporated before it even started. Instead, there was the surreal solidarity with Hamas. The victims were thrust into the woke paradigm as oppressors; and the terrorists were reincarnated as the resistance.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/anti-racism-is-a-religion-and-nearing-cult-status/

How much wrong is Ibram X. Kendi willing to do to prove he’s on the right side of history?
Linguist John McWhorter hit absolute paydirt in 2015 when he argued that 21st-century anti-racism is far more religious than political. “The Antiracism religion has clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin,” McWhorter wrote. “It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.”

Having grown up in religious circles, I don’t find it hard to look at the modern anti-racist movement and see the parallels. Racial division may not be quite as prominent a topic right now as it was in, say, 2014 and the summer of 2020, as it takes a backseat to matters such as elections, the future of our political parties, and whether Thomas Jefferson actually invented the swivel chair. But this backgrounding can help us to see what the anti-racist true believers are really up to, and where the movement is currently placing its evangelistic — yes, that is the right word — focus.

Unsurprisingly, as with many actual religions, there’s a lot of lying and manipulation going on. Ibram X. Kendi, the high priest of the American anti-racist religion, has released his newest ‘sermon’ via Netflix: Stamped from the Beginning, an adaptation of his 2016 tome by the same name. The documentary is like virtual church for anti-racists, except without . . . well, there are very few positives to virtual church, so the analogy holds. It’s exceptionally well-produced and well-told. And it’s a 92-minute tour de force in advancing the profoundly dishonest and overbroad rhetoric of the anti-racist religion promising to liberate us from America’s original sin.

“What is wrong with black people?” Such is the hopeful note that the film kicks off with. It makes the dichotomy of Kendi’s visual sermon apparent from the get-go: disagree with the story that’s about to be told, or the applications made from it, and you’re part of the group that thinks there’s something wrong with black people. And quite possibly, you’re complicit in the prejudice that has marked American history. “Often we assume that race is only about the color of one’s skin,” says presenter Angela Davis. But no: “It is about slavery.” This is when Kendi starts doing the thing he, and thousands of faith-healers before him, might be best at: telling stories that are very compelling — so long as you don’t think too hard about the bill of goods that’s actually being sold to you.

https://quillette.com/2023/11/30/black-progress-and-black-rage/

Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X, two enormously important figures in black history, were each the subject of a major cultural event in November. The biopic Rustin, produced by Michelle and Barack Obama, opened in movie theaters and was released on Netflix. Meanwhile, New York’s Metropolitan Opera raised the curtain on X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a decades-old production that has at last reached opera’s biggest stage. 

The simultaneity is a coincidence, but the contrast between the two men brings into unusually sharp relief a fundamental divide in the struggle of black people for equality. Aside from Martin Luther King, almost no one contributed more to the victory of civil rights in America than Rustin. The only other figure who deserves to be placed ahead of him is A. Philip Randolph, who organized the first predominantly black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—a substantial base that enabled him to play the role of patriarch to the movement. 

Randolph was also something of a father figure to Rustin, who was born to a young single mother and raised among Pennsylvania Quakers by his grandparents. The two men first collaborated in 1941, when Rustin, then in his late twenties, assisted Randolph in organizing a march to demand an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industries. President Roosevelt yielded, and the march was called off. At the war’s end, Randolph and Rustin reprised that scenario, securing an order from President Truman to integrate the armed forces. 

Then, in 1947, Rustin and a few other pacificists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation undertook the first “freedom ride,” which aimed to secure enforcement of a ruling against discrimination in interstate transport. In North Carolina, he was beaten by police, arrested, and sentenced to work on a chain gang. From his cell he sent dispatches to the New York Post, generating such an outcry that North Carolina abolished chain gangs. 

In 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott propelled King into national prominence. Rustin had traveled to India to study Gandhi’s techniques and he mentored King in the strategy of nonviolent protest. Then, together with Randolph and a few others, Rustin organized the first civil-rights mass marches, the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools. The movement gained momentum with the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960 and the “freedom rides” of 1961, reenacting the 1947 effort of Rustin and his pacifist colleagues but this time into the murderous deep south. The gathering momentum led to the movement’s culmination in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the most important protest in US history.

The 1963 march was orchestrated by Rustin, who bore the misleading title Deputy Director (the other civil-rights leaders were afraid that his homosexuality and brief youthful membership in the Young Communist League made him too controversial to be called the Director), and it provided the venue for King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Even more importantly, it decisively tilted Washington’s political scales in favor of civil rights. There followed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. This trifecta of legislation put paid to a century of overt racial discrimination.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/golda/

Golda is a biopic about Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War. The film was released in the US on August 25, 2023. Golda Meir was Israel’s fourth prime minister, its first and only woman prime minister, and the third woman prime minister in the world. Her tenure was from 1969 to 1974. She resigned after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Golda Meir was not only exceptional because she was a woman and a leader, and not only because she rose to power without being the wife or daughter of a male leader. World leaders typically cultivate as glamorous an image as they can; attractiveness is a form of power. Golda Meir, in her youth, looked like a studious, serious young lady, more interested in books and service than primping in front of a mirror. In her maturity, Meir looked like a grandmother. Pulling back her long, graying, frizzy hair into a bun and keeping it in place with barrettes was her one obvious grooming choice. Her suits were in neutral colors, conservative and unadorned. She wore sensible shoes that came to be known as “Golda shoes.” Eschewing obvious appeals to glamour, Golda Meir, counterintuitively, became an icon.

Meir lived a life on the front lines of historic events that affect us today. She was born in 1898 in Kiev, what is now Ukraine, and what was then part of the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire was not a safe place for Jews for much of the early twentieth century. Anti-Semitic violence was increasing significantly. “Between 1918 and 1921, over 1,000 anti-Jewish riots and military actions … were documented in about 500 different locales throughout what is now Ukraine … a conservative estimate is that 40,000 Jews were killed and another 70,000 subsequently perished from their wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure … About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed,” writes historian Jeffrey Veidlinger.

A photograph of the child Golda Mabovitch is a portrait of sadness. Five of her siblings died in childhood. “I can’t recall anything good or happy. I remember the strife at home, a real … shortage of food. And I remember the fear of pogroms,” Meir would later say. Among this little girl’s earliest memories was one of her father boarding up the house to protect his family from a rumored pogrom.

The Mabovitch family escaped to America. Little Golda watched the store when her mother had to buy supplies. Meir made aliyah to Israel with her husband in 1921, and quickly took on leadership positions. She signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948. She would go on to be the first Israeli prime minister to meet with a pope, and she hosted West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s visit to Israel.

Several feature films and documentaries have covered Meir’s life. Anne Bancroft, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Davis, Tovah Feldshuh, Valerie Harper, and Colleen Dewhurst have all played Meir on either stage or screen. Golda 2023, rather than presenting Meir’s entire life story, focuses on the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Director Guy Nattiv and screenwriter Nicholas Martin dramatize what they call new revelations about that war that will significantly alter received interpretations of Meir’s role, and the role of other key figures. Nattiv is one of two Israeli directors who has won an Academy Award. Nicholas Martin’s previous project was writing the script for the 2016 Meryl Streep – Hugh Grant biopic, Florence Foster Jenkins.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-equalizer-hero-in-a-world-without-knights/

Action flicks these days aren’t dominated anymore by square-jawed, one-note actors like Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, and Statham (they aren’t even mostly the domain anymore of men, but that’s an article for another day). In recent years, the leading men of the best “actioners,” as they’re known in Variety-speak, are heavy-hitting thespians like Liam Neeson and Denzel Washington, whose acting chops elevate the genre to a whole new level. In The Equalizer movies, for example, Denzel brings compelling depth to a character that would be one-dimensional in a lesser talent: a chivalric hero in a world without knights.

The Equalizer 3 opened in theaters last week, and I was in one of them to check out the latest installment of the franchise, happily contributing a few dollars toward the $42 million the film raked in domestically over the long Labor Day weekend.

If you’re unfamiliar with the movies, in the first Equalizer outing in 2014, Denzel (and let’s face it, he has reached the stratosphere of one-name celebrity, like Sting or Madonna) plays Robert McCall, a quiet, mysterious loner whose unassuming demeanor belies his lethal special ops training. Living like a monk, as one baffled character puts it, while working nine-to-five at a Home Depot-type store, the widowed McCall, a retired assassin from “the Agency,” flies under everyone’s radar.

McCall confesses in that film that he had once done things that he wasn’t proud of, but that he had promised his now-deceased wife that “I would never go back to being that person.” And indeed, he now lives by such an honorable code that he chides acquaintances about character failings like swearing and eating junk food. But he is supportive and inspiring as well: he helps coach a hapless coworker to prepare for a better-paying job as a security guard, for example, and he encourages the dream of a singing career for a young Russian call girl he has befriended at the local coffee shop, where he hangs out and reads during sleepless nights. Coming to the aid of this damsel in distress brings down the wrath of ruthless Russian sex traffickers – but they, like everyone else, underestimate McCall.

McCall is also a big reader, working his way through a list of the 100 Best Books. At one point the call girl sees him with a new book and asks what it’s about. “It is about a guy who is a knight in shining armor,” McCall replies, “except he lives in a world where knights don’t exist anymore.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/21/the-oppenheimer-file-missing-cast-and-forgotten-back-stories/

In the early going of this marathon film, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) tells a hostile government committee that his testimony should be understood in the context of his life and work. Context also is important for movies, but Oppenheimer keeps key back stories off the screen.

Viewers see the “Hitler Invades Poland” headline from September 1, 1939, but do not see or hear anything about Josef Stalin’s Communist forces invading Poland on September 17, 1939. This joint invasion started WWII and came about because of the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 23, 1939. Viewers see nothing about the Pact, and no headline such as “Stalin Invades Finland,” marks November 30, 1939.

While the Pact was in operation, Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis) invaded Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and took over France by the summer of 1940. Under the Pact, the Nazi and Soviet intelligence forces collaborated and Stalin handed hundreds of Jewish Communists over to the Gestapo. Jewish scientists in America would have been well aware of that deadly exchange, but not a word in Oppenheimer.

Viewers never learn that for nearly the first two years of the war, Stalin and Hitler were allies. The Communist Party USA collaborated with pro-Nazi groups in America and did everything in its power to keep the United States out of the conflict. In Oppenheimer, no Communist is asked to account for what he or she did during the Pact, and why they stayed in the Party after many others left, never to return.

The Communist Party USA was founded, funded and controlled by the USSR and members pledged loyalty to the Soviet regime. Oppenheimer portrays Party members as misguided liberals concerned about the conflict in Spain. Viewers hear about “the brigades” but no character explains that the Abraham Lincoln Brigades were a Communist Party militia that opposed anti-Franco groups such as the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. The POUM fighters included George Orwell, author of 1984, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia. See also Cecil Eby’s Between the Bullet and the Lie.

Inquiries about Oppenheimer’s “left wing” associations fail to note that the Party had an open and secret membership, as Whittaker Chambers detailed in Witness. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr cite evidence that Oppenheimer was a member of a secret Party unit at UC Berkeley, where his friend Haakon Chevalier, a professor of French literature, was an active Communist. In the movie, Jefferson Hall plays Chevalier, and Oppenheimer resists his request to pass on information to the Soviets.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2023/08/03/fbi-finds-hundreds-of-sex-trafficking-victims-in-major

The FBI located 200 victims of sex trafficking in a nationwide enforcement campaign, the agency said Tuesday, which included dozens of minors.  

The two-week operation, dubbed “Operation Cross Country,” also led to the identification or arrest of 126 suspects of child sexual exploitation and human trafficking and 68 suspects of trafficking, according to a press release. 

“Sex traffickers exploit and endanger some of the most vulnerable members of our society and cause their victims unimaginable harm,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “This operation, which located 59 actively missing children, builds on the tremendous work the FBI has undertaken over many years to rescue minor victims and arrest those responsible for these unspeakable crimes. We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners across the country to prevent human trafficking; increase detection, investigation, and prosecution of human trafficking crimes; and expand support and services to protect and empower survivors.”

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children praised the FBI and their law enforcement partners for their efforts to protect children.

“Behind every statistic, there is a person with dreams, aspirations, and the right to live a life free from child sex trafficking and exploitation. As a society we must work together to ensure the protection, support, and empowerment of those impacted by this heinous crime,” said the group’s president and CEO, Michelle DeLaune. “Their tireless efforts in combatting crimes against children sends a powerful message that child sexual exploitation will not be tolerated.”

The operation’s success comes after the media’s criticism of anti-child trafficking film “Sound of Freedom,” which was smeared as a conspiracy theory promoted by MAGA Republicans.