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In my previous post, I wrote that Elon Musk should establish a movie studio that would produce alternative cinema, to challenge the longstanding dominance of the medium by the Left. The studio’s first film could be a sequel to the Jason Bourne series, this time with the CIA plotting a coup d’état against a conservative U.S. president.
Following are some further suggestions for movies that speak truth to power. Please feel free to add your own ideas in the comments. “The Butcher of Boulder” Liam Neeson once more plays his familiar role as the estranged father (or grandfather?) who must save his children from harm. In this incarnation of the role, he is a blue-collar guy living in Providence, Rhode Island. Life is fairly normal, until his wife becomes a lesbian, obtains a divorce, cleans him out financially, and is awarded custody of their only child, an eight year-old boy. She moves with the boy to Boulder, Colorado, and before long shacks up with another woman. After being denied visiting privileges, the father sells his last possessions to fund a move to a nearby town. After doing some undercover investigation, he discovers that the ex-wife and her girlfriend are about to bring the boy in for a sex-change operation. Liam must outwit the two women, the police, social workers, and the medical butchers, in order to save his son. The ensuing chase, involving multiple modes of transportation, ends in Uruguay, where Liam and the boy attain asylum. “The Broken Broker” Denzel Washington plays a stockbroker in Cleveland who is having a mid-life crisis. He decides to move to Portland, Oregon, to start a new life. Nearly every job interview in the new city results in a job offer, even when it is obvious that he is underqualified. In every case, the phony gushing over a black candidate is all too transparent. This makes Denzel feel humiliated and depressed. He buys a house, and sets up a home office for his own independent brokerage. When potential clients (both white and black) see him, most of them take their business elsewhere, assuming that he’s not really qualified. Denzel manages to eke out a living, and finds a supportive girlfriend. He becomes involved in the local Republican Party, concentrating his efforts on fighting DEI. After a number of spicy battles with political adversaries, Antifa burns down his house. He moves back to Cleveland with the girlfriend, and soon becomes the host of a right-wing radio program. “Jab Me Once, Jab Me Twice” In the darkest days of the scamdemic, a humble airline steward (played by Jared Leto) refuses to take the jab. He defies the airline, the FAA, and almost all of his friends and family. Everyone is amazed that such a mild-mannered man could confront the world in this manner. One day, just before boarding a plane, Jared is informed that he has been fired from his job. This will be his last flight. At thirty thousand feet, somewhere over Middle America, the pilot and co-pilot are gossiping about the steward, mocking him for being a “vaccine denier.” They share a good laugh. All of a sudden, the pilot has a heart attack and keels over. The co-pilot takes control of the aircraft, declares Mayday, and requests permission to land at the nearest suitable airport. But then he also has a heart attack, with terrible convulsions before his death. The stewardess screams; Jared rushes to the cockpit. He asks, over the PA system, whether there are any pilots on board. Silence from the cabin. Despite having no experience as a pilot, Jared rips off his Covid mask and begins to fly the plane. With guidance from air traffic control, the plane descends, in a nail-biting scene, to a bumpy but successful landing in a Nebraska wheat field. Jared becomes a national hero; his testimony before a Congressional committee leads to the cancellation of the killer jabs. “Seven Days in February” High officials in the Pentagon and State Department are attempting to start a nuclear war with Russia. They manage to pull off several minor but audacious attacks while planning the “big one,” a provocation so outrageous that the Russians will have no choice but to retaliate with everything they’ve got. The secret plans are discovered by a patriotic colonel, played by Matthew McConaughey. Being severely disabled from wounds suffered in Iraq, Matthew moves slowly, and is limited in what he can accomplish. On the verge of despair, he meets a young, intrepid female reporter, and together they blow the whistle on the whole affair. Nuclear war is averted. The Secretary of Defense and several other conspirators are imprisoned, and the President is impeached.
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There is great anticipation in the land, that the incoming Trump administration will set aright the capsizing ship of state. I examined this topic in my post of 12/9/24; now I would like to expand the discussion beyond the boundaries of the merely governmental.
There is a tendency among the forces of the Right to be fixated on the political realm, particularly the Executive branch of the Federal government, as the source of salvation. I have no doubt that this domain is quite important, but it does not have primacy. The Left understands this full well. They know that fundamental change, including in the political sphere, is the end result of cultural shifts. Remember the “long march through the institutions”? That was the Left’s gradual, patient, decades-long subversion of the culture. And it worked. Let us recall the domains in which the Left overthrew the existing structures, and ousted the last vestiges of sanity: criminal justice; primary/secondary education; art; movies; academia; medical; economy/finance; race relations; to name just a few. The Obama/Biden regime is the logical outcome of this process. It could hardly be otherwise. Can it now be overturned and expunged by a change of president and other high-level government personnel? I submit that it cannot. To be sure, many emergency fixes can be made. I do not wish to downplay their importance. I will be the first to applaud if, for example, all illegal aliens are deported from the country. This is essential to national survival. It is unrealistic, however, to expect that Trump and his associates are the people who can accomplish the required deep cleaning. They are liberals (in the classic sense) who have been “mugged by reality”; who are horrified at the excesses of the Left. They can apply the emergency fixes, but they are not equipped philosophically to lead us into the promised land. That work will remain to be accomplished by others. As a case study, consider Elon Musk. His support for Donald Trump, and his purchase and decensoring of Twitter, were laudable actions. But if he were a true cultural leader and visionary, he would go much further. He would confess that Tesla is a monstrous grift based on one of the biggest lies in the Left’s pantheon of big lies: the Global Warming/Green Energy myth. Musk would then convert the Tesla operation to the production of simple, $10K internal-combustion cars, sell the company, and use the funds to set up a movie studio that is bigger than all of Hollywood combined. The first film to be produced would be a Jason Bourne sequel, this time with the CIA plotting a coup d’état against a conservative U.S. president. Next step for Musk: Become the leading benefactor at the top five art museums in the country. Use that position of power to clean out the “contemporary” filth, replace curators and executives as necessary, and restore American art to its former elevated status. MAGA: Make Art Great Again. Now back to reality: Let us not live under the illusion that this monumental task can be delegated to one individual, namely Mr. Trump, and that’s that. The responsibility for cleaning out the rot has devolved upon each of us, every man in his respective domain. We must overcome, however, the propensity of our side to non-involvement in such affairs. Folks on the Right tend to be engaged in productive economic pursuits, as well as family, religion, and other “normal” activities. They are not, by nature, political animals. The Left has a huge advantage in this area, having armies of people whose religion is Wokeism, and who are willing to devote their lives to the cause. The Right builds, the Left tears down. An ancient template. When institutions are conquered by the Left, they become platforms to pillage and ruin what came before. Educational institutions become a tool to destroy education. Artistic institutions destroy art. And so on. Now it is time for us to do some destruction of our own—creative destruction, to return those institutions to their true roles. We need smart and preferably young people to attain key positions in education, the arts, and other areas in which opinions are formed and culture is determined. Ideally, the big guns like Musk could jump-start this process. When this is in place, we can speak truth to power, and solve the dilemmas plaguing our society. Please indulge me for a moment; I need to get this off my chest. There are a few things about our everyday life that just annoy the hell out of me. Here is a list, in no particular order:
1. Sloppy/inappropriate dress. People, circulating in public, who look as if they just rolled out of bed. Colors and patterns in the most abhorrent taste. A grown man, in an upscale restaurant, wearing a football jersey and those ridiculous three-quarter-length shorts that make him look like a toddler. Women wearing tights that show every nook and cranny of their (usually) disgusting physique. Fat women with clothing that emphasizes their most unattractive characteristics. 2. Bodily mutilation. Tattoos, piercings, and Lord knows what else. I’ll be writing a separate post about this in the near future. 3. Dull faces. You know, that catatonic expression. Many years in the making; now exacerbated by (a) the scamdemic, with its extended isolation, and vax-induced brain fog; and (b) social interaction taking place increasingly on line. 4. Uptalk. Enunciating a statement as if it were a question; constant rising intonation. Especially annoying on men. Makes them sound like little girls. 5. Substitutions for “you’re welcome.” These include “of course” and “no problem.” The other day, in a shop, a young lady (with all kinds of metal protruding from her face) was helpful, and I thanked her. The response: “Of course,” said with a look of feigned surprise, and a little artificial giggle. 6. No sense of humor. In the Before Times, one could usually engage in mildly amusing banter with random strangers. This has become increasingly difficult. 7. Constant fussing with phones. Two people sitting together in a restaurant, each absorbed in his phone. Sitting with someone who shows you a photo of every object that comes up in conversation, or feels compelled to “google” every topic right there on the spot. Related to this: the annoying assumption that everybody and their grandmother has a smart phone, texts, scans, etc. etc. “Just scan your blah-blah code into the reader.” When I inform them that I don’t even have a phone, I get the catatonic look. Thank heavens I grew up without cell phones and computers. 8. After paying in cash, cashier struggles to make change. Here is yet another result of the online/electronic lifestyle, not to mention substandard education. The computer (in whatever form) does all necessary calculations. Even worse: you approach the cashier with your bag of dog food, or whatever. “Can I get a phone number?” or “Are you a discount-club member?” Good grief. Can I just pay for the goddamn dog food? 9. Awful customer service. Or lack thereof. On the phone, the ubiquitous Filipina. Endless automated prompts that lead you around in a circle. 10. Terrible quality. Nothing seems to work quite right. As commenter Mary Contrary over at Samizdata put it, “the general enshittification of everything.” 11. Loud and obnoxious music. I go to the supermarket at seven in the morning to beat the crowds, and they have some demented rap music blasting from the loudspeakers. 12. Left-turn scofflaws. I’m waiting at a red light. It turns green, but I have to wait for a succession of cars in the oncoming left-turn lane, who are all turning left despite their signal being red. Often I see a convoy of up to four cars running the red light, one after the other. Please feel free to share your own pet peeves. In my recent post on Covid (12/3/24), I remarked that a calling card of the Left has always been the redefinition of terminology, so that words are transformed into a fundamentally altered, or even opposite, meaning. Revisiting this phenomenon, I was reminded of a story.
One day during the late 1980s, I was sitting in a café in Philadelphia, discussing current affairs with a wise old gentleman who had vast experience in the world of think tanks and public policy. We were lamenting the adoption by the city of some harebrained program championed by the usual nutjob Leftist coalition. We concluded that it was well-nigh impossible to challenge the move in a public forum because all of the keywords associated with the program were ingrained in the hivemind as positive: war on poverty, anti-discrimination, equal rights, empowerment, etc. My interlocutor, with a deep sigh, then proclaimed: “The Left owns the rhetoric.” Never were truer words spoken. We face the same problem today. The components of Leftist ideology are so infused in our language that we hardly notice it, to the degree that we often are unable to formulate an adequate response in our own minds. We become paralyzed, without knowing why. Consider, for example, the controversy surrounding the bathrooms at the Capitol in Washington, DC. A few members of Congress are bravely resisting the Alphabet freak show, and I applaud their efforts. But they are hamstrung by the lexicon itself because they engage in arguments about gender. Until recently, this word was almost exclusively a linguistic term, denoting an attribute of a noun: masculine, feminine, or neuter. When the subject was people (or animals), the operative word was sex. As in male or female. If you argue over “gender,” you have already conceded half the battle. Once this linguistic battle is lost, the door is open to a torrent of twisted Orwellian doublespeak. A good example is the mind-bending term gender-affirming care to describe the genital mutilation of children. A related sleight-of-hand is the use of the third-person plural, they, in place of the grammatically correct singular form, he or she. In addition to being a linguistic atrocity, this usage serves to blur the identification of people as male or female. The language now forces us all to speak of each other as androgynous beings. Chalk up another victory for the Left. Higher culture requires the ability to identify and analyze differences, great and subtle, between people, things, and concepts. This intellectual process used to be called discrimination. We all know what happened to the word. For decades already, noticing differences between people, once obligatory in educated circles, is taboo. A final example, and this one a bit more subtle: The use of the word planet instead of world. I am hearing this more and more. “Everyone on the planet knows that…” “They have the best sausage on the planet” “No one on the planet believes that…” etc. In all cases, up until very recently, the usage would have been “in the world” instead of “on the planet.” Planet denotes a hunk of rock, an inanimate object. It is a favorite word of the Climate-Industrial Complex. In contrast, world denotes people, nations, cultures, etc. A huge difference. When we use planet, we are already sucked halfway into the Green scam, without a single argument being made. In my recent post Intellectual Decay, Bitcoin Edition (11/23/24), I discussed the problem of subjective value, first as applied to money, and then to art and culture in general. I examined this issue in depth in an article I wrote in 2007 for American Thinker, entitled “Speaking Truth to Art.” I invite you to read the piece, as relevant now as it was then.
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