Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

“Confederate”: Both HBO and its doubters double down on racial canards (Edited w/the addition of Part II)

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HBO is in trouble for producing “Confederate,” an alternate history in which the South won the war. The irony is that HBO and its foes are both wrong.

Confederate slave man and a brother

(Only half of this essay was posted initially.  My mistake.  I have added the second half below the line.  My apologies. [Bookworm here: Wolf Howling is too kind. It was my mistake. Or we’re both to blame. In any event, the whole post is as brilliant as is true for everything WH writes.])

If you study early America, you will find that racism did not pop up overnight during the colonial era.  It was a slow process when it came to white racism directed against blacks, one that grew in direct proportion to the moral challenges made against the institution of slavery.

Slavery was the norm throughout history in agricultural societies.  In the world before the Enlightenment, slaveholders did not need to justify their acts.  There was no moral issue with slavery.  That ended with the preachers in the First Great Awakening and the Quakers, the two of whom combined to make slavery a moral issue.  As that took hold, those who wanted to maintain slavery for their own profit had to justify their actions.  What you will see is the language of racism becoming ever more vile and the tone ever louder and more discordant over the decades as the moral case was built against slavery.

What we are seeing today is that pattern playing out in reverse.  We live in a nation where institutionalized racism no longer exists and where racism is not tolerated in the mainstream of this nation.  We also live in a nation where slightly more than half of our black population lives in or near poverty.  The problems of poverty, single parent families, lack of education, and crime are cyclical in that half of the population and, in 21st century America, that is obscene.

The causes behind these systemic problems are myriad, but not one of them is racism.  Yet the Progressive left needs to maintain blacks seeing themselves as permanent victims, so they shout ever louder that the problems in black society are the result of overt white racism, a deep-rooted hatred cooked into our DNA that can never be destroyed, and systemic institutional racism. As that dark fantasy becomes ever more detached from reality, the Progs scream ever louder and their voices grow ever more discordant.

It is ironic indeed that Martin Luther King Jr. issued a clarion call nearly half a century ago for America to become the society promised in the Declaration of Independence, a society where “all men are created equal” and people are judged “by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”  The Progs have taken his civil rights movement and transformed it into one in which the only thing that matters is the color of one’s skin.

Regardless, with that introduction, let’s take a look at a story from The Hollywood Reporter, HBO’s Slavery Drama ‘Confederate’ Faces Minefield of “Fundamentally Problematic” Issues. This was the first I had even heard of the show. [Read more…]

Abstinence — still the safest form of birth control for all living things

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Recent news stories reaffirm that, if you’re a woman who cares about the environment, your preferred form of birth control should be abstinence.

birth control pill the pill estrogen abstinenceI was cleaning out the files on my computer when I came across a poster I put together three years ago. Looking it over, I realized that today’s news stories make it a very current poster.

The first apropos story is the report revealing that male sperm counts are plummeting, raising the possibility that the human race will die out (if it doesn’t first bake, freeze, or get immolated by a super volcano, of course).  One thoughtful commentator wonders if the problem could be all the estrogen in Western waterways.

It’s not just men. Fish are also showing signs of estrogen, resulting in intersex fish. One wonders if that explains the uptick in men who believe they’re women. The problem is that it doesn’t explain the uptick in women who think they’re men.

With those two news stories in mind, it’s obvious that I have to resurrect my abstinence = environmentalism poster:

Abstinence birth control intersex infertility estrogen

[Click image to enlarge,]

A gun: Not just the great equalizer but also the great civilizer

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A gun, by making people equal in a conflict, removes the bully’s inherent advantage in size and youth, and therefore encourages civilized discourse.

Gun Smith & WessonProgressives like to castigate guns as the great evil. To the Progressive mind, those who hide behind the Second Amendment are the antithesis of everything that is civilized and decent. Ten years ago, however, Marko Kloos argued that the gun is the engine of civilization precisely because it is the great equalizer. His short essay was reprinted at Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, which encourages the article’s wider dissemination. I therefore present it here, in its entirety:

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation … and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

The gay lifestyle is an unhealthy one. Does that affect military service?

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A question that no one is asking, but someone should, is whether the peculiar excesses of the gay lifestyle affect the military’s readiness to serve.

Gay Lifestyle Gays in the Military[Content warning: Of necessity, this post talks about sex, especially gay sex. Some of it is graphic, some not.]

It seems, lately, as if the only news that the media sees fit to print has to do with people on the alt-sexuality spectrum. The latest outrage amongst Progressives is Trump order barring transgenders from serving in the military. This outrage, of course, is a bait-and-switch. You see, to this day, transgender troops are officially barred from the military.

Throughout the entirety of Obama’s presidency, transgender troops were officially barred. Then, in July 2016, Obama signed an order changing the policy. But he didn’t change it instantly. Instead, he ordered that the change be implemented one year from his order, so that it would happen on his successor’s watch. In other words, all the screaming and shouting and anger is because Trump has announced he’s going to retain the Obama era status quo. See? Bait-and-switch.

Obama’s transgender decision followed on the heels of his overnight conversion, once elected, to the belief that gay people ought to be able to serve openly in the military. I was opposed to allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

Despite my opposition, I don’t think I’m a homophobe. Instead, I believe that openly gay relationships, especially in frontline service, are dangerous for unit cohesion. I’m blindingly aware of the fact that the military exists to take young people who are physically and mentally fit and then to prepare them to fight. If two men in a combat unit are in an open relationship, that puts at issue the question of whether their loyalty is to each other or their unit.

Incidentally, I don’t believe women and men should be serving together when that service involves close quarters. Someone once described Navy ships as floating brothels. I know that’s an exaggeration, but the fact is that sexual relationships on ships are a huge problem:

Unintended pregnancy is a significant problem across the general population, but the Navy’s rate is higher.

In 2006, about 49 percent of all pregnancies in the United States were classified as unplanned, according to 2011 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Up to 65 percent of pregnancies in the military are self-reported as unplanned, according to a December report by The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Health Care for Underserved Women.

Nearly three-fourths of all Navy pregnancies were unplanned, according to a recent parenthood survey conducted by the service. Of those, only 31 percent of the couples were using birth control at the time they conceived. With pregnancies involving enlisted servicewomen, 70 percent of the fathers were also in the military.

Youth, proximity, and stress = bad sexual decisions. And when life and death are at stake, the last thing you need is the volatility of sexual relationships, especially foolish ones.

My other problem is that the gay lifestyle is an unhealthy one. It’s a different kind of unhealthy from that associated with transgenderism. The latter sees extraordinarily high suicide rates, staggeringly expensive surgical procedures, and a lifetime commitment to dangerous hormonal medications. Take away the magic word “transgender,” and no person with these physical requirements would ever be a candidate for service in the military. An actively lived homosexual lifestyle has a different kind of unhealthiness, one that may also be antithetical to creating a tip-top fighting machine.

Since Obama’s executive order about openly gay service, both the military and the media have been mum about whether that policy has affected the military and, if so, what the effect is. One of the things that I’ve especially wondered is whether the excess that typically characterizes gay men’s sex has made an appearance in the military. [Read more…]

How we got here, what Trump must do, and why we forgive Trump his sins

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Although academia has been seeding American Leftism for 70 years, Trump, despite his many foibles, is the weapon that will destroy that system.

Donald Trump at CPAC 2016This is going to be a slightly more discursive post than usual, simply because I’m trying to tie together three disparate thoughts. Thought One is how we got here, by which I really mean how the Left got where it is and managed to completely cow conservatives, especially those ostensible conservatives elected to Congress. Thought Two is to remind you to read a stellar post telling Trump how to handle Mueller. And Thought Three is another stellar post explaining precisely why Trump’s support is unwavering, no matter the hue and cry from the Left.

How we got here

We got here because of academia. When Marxism first hit America, it hit at the worker and union level. In America, at least, the workers of the world really were trying to unite. Unfortunately for their initial success, their unity took forms that were antithetical to most Americans.

To begin with, many of the workers were foreign, highlighting the fact that Marxism too was foreign. To Americans who still read the Constitution, Marxism was scarily alien. It’s values were too unlike ours and they resisted it strenuously.

Another problem with early Marxism in America was that many of its early supporters openly espoused violence, which most Americans found frightening. Back in pre-WWII America, nobody on the Marxist side of the equation had the wits to come up with something called Marxophobia and then to try to make Americans feel guilty about it. Americans felt no guilt when they feared the violence and totalitarianism that Marxism promised.

Lastly, Marxists back in the day insisted on talking like Marxists, with all sorts of ridiculous words and phrases such as “dialectic” and “come the Revolution,” and an insistence on talking about the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie.” It was, quite simply, off-putting.

What the Marxists figured out during WWII, thanks in no small part to the Left’s huge push to bring America to the aid of the Soviet Union once Hitler invaded Russia, was that, while Americans were not amenable to hard Marxism, they could be totally swayed by soft Marxism. This idea landed hardest and best in America’s colleges and universities. There, mild-mannered professors in rumpled, tweedy suits carefully indoctrinated their students in a whole new way of thinking about America’s liberties.

Mostly, these academics inculcated in their middle-class students a sense of guilt about America’s bounty — never mind that the bounty resulted from hard work and innovation. To the Leftists, America’s wealth, no matter that it was earned, not inherited, was evil, and young people had to pay for their countries’ sins. Moreover, when students protested against this indoctrination (and yes, back in the day, some did), the same Marxists hid behind the Constitution’s protections.

This was a brilliant strategy. If you’ve got the college students, you’ve got the next generation of elementary and high school teachers, and the next generation of news people, and the next generation of screenwriters, and the next generation of women’s magazine writers, and the next generation of college professors. And with each iteration, with each generation that passes through, you can dig in the message harder and deeper, until you end up with the insanity of intersectionality, cultural appropriation, safe spaces, triggers, political correctness, and all the other tropes that work as vehicles for intellectual tyranny.

If you read Helen MacInnes, who wrote during the height of the Cold War, you see everything already spelled out in her books. She had the number of that first generation of indoctrinators. This is most apparent in one of her lesser known books, Neither Five Nor Three, which she published in 1951. [Read more…]

When one blogger is not enough, check out the group at WOW! Magazine

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Watcher's Council WOW! MagazineSometimes, a single blogger just can’t write enough about the political, social, and foreign policy insanity in the world today. That’s especially true when one of those bloggers needs a break from the crazy, as I have the past couple of days. But fear not if you want more. The Watcher’s Council is hard at work at WOW! Magazine, their collaborative blog that addresses all of the most scintillating topics in the news today. Don’t believe me? Well, check these out:

Justine Damond: Political Allegiance

Anthony Scaramucci fires suspected WH leaker and Priebus ally. [UPDATED]

Federal Court – Trump Commission On Voter Fraud Request For State Data Lawful
Just Whose Side is Robert Mueller on?–Two Schools

The Day The Press Lost Its Power

WoW! Forum: How Would You Rate Trump’s Performance After Six Months?

There was no switch in the 1960s making Republicans the racist party

A Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoon that’s an Obamacare Rorschach test

A Conversation About Race [Read more…]

On race and gender, Democrats have always embraced the Big Lie

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For 150 years, Democrats used the Big Lie about race to justify slavery and Jim Crow, and now they’re using the Big Lie technique to challenge gender norms.

Big Lie Caitlyn Jenner Transgender Gender Delusions

Ce n’est pas une femme

I want to share a thought with you that starts with slavery and ends with transsexuals. To get from one to the other, I have to start with one of the few decent classes I had when I was at UC Berkeley. That senior seminar looked at the history of race relations in America versus those in Brazil.

When I took the class, I had no interest whatsoever in the history of race relations. I was an English history major — the English isle, to be precise — and everything else was a distant second. Still, it became apparent to me very quickly that I was not alone and that I would not get into my preferred seminar. You see, back in the day, when it came time for enrollment in senior seminars, the history teachers would seat themselves at random intervals in the big lecture room at Dwinelle Hall. Students would then approach the teachers as supplicants, begging to get into this or that seminar.

As soon as I walked in the room, I saw that the professors teaching the seminars in which I was interested were besieged. I had no desire to hurl myself into that scrum. Instead, I checked out the teachers who were not surrounded by adoring students.

Only one of the other teachers caught my interest because he was so darn handsome. After I ascertained that he had openings in his seminar and that it worked for my schedule, I signed up, not even caring what he was teaching. And so it was that I ended up learning about the history race relations in the US and Brazil.

Fortunately, for me, that handsome young graduate student was an excellent teacher. It made up for the fact that he was happily married, had a baby, and would in any event not have been interested in me. It also made up for the fact that the reading materials were deadly dull.

Thirty years later, the only takeaway I had from the class is that America was rather unique in its “one drop of blood” approach to racism. In Brazil, there’s a great deal of racism, but it’s on a graduated scale. The darker you are, the more racism you face and the lower your status in society.

Meanwhile, in America, it doesn’t matter what you look like. If you’re known to have even a drop of black blood in you, you’re black. Nor is that a racial view that’s changed since both slavery and Jim Crow ended. After all, Barack Obama, half-black and half-white genetically, was our “first black president.” He wasn’t really, of course. He was our “first half-black president” — but that’s not the way things roll in America.

The stigma against that single drop of blood has been so strong in America that it made for a great subplot in Edna Ferber’s Showboat, which started as a book, made it to Broadway as a groundbreaking musical, and then got made into two Hollywood movie musicals. (The 1936 version of the movie is the one to see.)

If you’re familiar with Showboat’s plot, you know that, when the showboat passes through Mississippi, a vengeful man, furious that the beautiful Julie LaVerne has rebuffed him, reports to the authorities that she is, in fact, a black woman. Given that her husband, Steve, is a white man, they have violated Mississippi’s miscegenation laws and he demands their arrest. The couple avoids arrest when Steve cuts Julie and licks her blood, enabling his friends on the boat to state honestly that he has that “one drop of black blood” in him. [Read more…]

There was no switch in the 1960s making Republicans the racist party

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Letting the losers in a war write the history causes fake histories, such as the one claiming that a 1960s switch turned Republicans into the racist party.

Racist Party Political switch Southern DemocratsIn the context of world affairs, victory doesn’t always belong to the side that won the actual battles; it really rests with the side that writes the history. Viewed in that light, the last shot fired in the Civil War didn’t take place on the battlefield. Instead, it took place in 1936, when Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind hit the shelves.

GWTW took the South’s mythology and nationalized it. The epic 1939 movie was a force multiplier. Suddenly, the South, rather than being the losing side in a war fought primarily to end slavery, a foul institution in its own right and one made especially awful in America because it betrayed the promises in America’s founding documents, was a romantic entity, built upon unending charm and graciousness. Moreover, thanks to Margaret Mitchell, readers were well-schooled in two facts that perpetuated black subordination: (a) good slaves loved their masters and (b) bad slaves were evil and/or stupid.

The hold that Margaret Mitchell’s dynamic, romantic, fascinating narrative had on the popular consciousness probably started weakening during WWII, when Americans outside of the South got to see blacks in action, in factories and on battlefields. Truman’s executive order integrating the military, causing black and white troops to serve side by side further educated white Americans about their black fellow citizens.

The final rewrite was the Civil Rights movement. Thanks to television, Northern whites got to see a different side of blacks. They were no longer Margaret Mitchell’s plaster saints, grateful for the chance to serve their white masters or Topsy-esque fools. Instead, they were people of immense dignity, led by a man of God whose words burned themselves into American souls.

People understand the outlines of the Civil Rights, but too many do not know that, in the 1950s, it was the Republican party that drove that train. And it was the Democrat party that fought tooth-and-nail against any effort to remove the legal and social impediments imposed upon blacks, mostly in the South, but also throughout America.

This political division was unsurprising to people at the time. The history of the Democrats from their founding to the Civil Rights movement was as a slavery party, dedicated entirely to ensuring that blacks remained subordinate in America. It was open and proud about its status as the racist party. Meanwhile, the Republicans came into being as an abolitionist party, with Abraham Lincoln becoming their first standard-bearer.

Why then, are Republicans tarred as the racist party today? After all, Republicans won the Civil War, freeing blacks from slavery, and the Civil Rights war, freeing blacks from Jim Crow and the myriad other discriminatory laws in America. Shouldn’t they be viewed as the non-racist party? [Read more…]

A Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoon that’s an Obamacare Rorschach test

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Obamacare Scott Adams DilbertSince I don’t have a license to reproduce Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoons, I won’t. Still, I very much want you to see his cartoon for July 21. The comments indicate that Adams’ readers think he was making a dig at Norton products or similar computer programs.

I think differently. I took one look at the cartoon and thought, “Obamacare. He’s completely attacking Obamacare.”

What do you think? Was Adams specifically making an Obamacare joke or is he really just ragging computer programs?

[VIDEO] Paul Joseph Watson takes on Linda Sarsour

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With panache, Paul Joseph Watson delivers a punishing takedown against Linda Sarsour, an antisemitic, misogynistic, anti-American Muslim progressive.

Linda SarsourBefore January and the Women’s March, I’d never heard of Linda Sarsour. Since then, she’s everywhere — and the more one sees of her, the more repulsive she becomes.

Nevertheless, despite her antisemitic, misogynistic, anti-Western statements (or perhaps because of them), she’s still receiving full protection from many on the Left, including a United States senator. That’s why it’s a pleasure to see Paul Joseph Watson expose what a vile woman she is:

The next generation of young conservatives is on YouTube

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Yes, there are young conservatives, but they’re not at college or watching TV. Instead, they’re working hard and watching conservative YouTube videos.

Sargon of Akkad screenshot Young ConservativesThere’s a young man I’ve known and admired for many years. I met him through one of my children’s activities and quickly sized him up as extremely bright and incredibly hardworking. He also has a brilliant sense of humor; one, moreover, that is perfectly attuned to children. When he left the job through which I met him to start his own business, I didn’t follow him, because doing so would have involved a lot more driving. That was a bad decision because my child’s interest in the activity vanished when the young man left.

It’s been many years since I last saw this man, but I keep up with him on Facebook. He doesn’t post often, but when he does, I’m always blown away. He may be a millennial, but he’s a rock solid libertarian-conservative-classic liberal and he’s not shy about defending his viewpoints. He has a mastery of the issues and will expand upon them if he feels it’s appropriate.

Because I find this young man interesting and his conservativism heartening, I reached out via Facebook to learn a little more about him. He gave me some fascinating information about young conservatives. Here’s what I learned:

My friend believes that young conservatives in his age cohort (people under 40) are much more common than anyone realizes, as evidenced by Trump’s huge victory across America. As far as he’s concerned, the perception that his generation automatically hews Left is a byproduct of the Left’s own self-referential world view in entertainment, media, and the universities, each of which relentlessly promotes and reinforces its own cultural dominance.

Because his job involves teaching skills to young people, my young friend has seen a lot of young people grow up over the years. He therefore sees a trajectory that has them sucked into Leftism through school, and then finding their way out of it again when they hit the real world. He breaks this arc down as follows:

From 15-18, young people are fairly centrist politically and rely on common sense.

From 19-22, young people go “off to indoctrination sleep away camp…. errrr…. I mean University.” There, peer pressure, combined with a system that punishes dissent, pushes them so far Left that they actually view Leftism as a centrist political position.

From 23-25, these kids hit the real world. There, they discover that the real world is unlike anything their education told them it would be. Nevertheless, they are slow to realize what’s going on.

Only after reaching the second half of their twenties do young people start figuring out that they really do live somewhere in the center, and that the whole “institutional racism” issue is not the problem. The problem, instead, is the people relentlessly complaining about “institutional racism.” At this point, it hits them that the far Left isn’t fighting “the man;” it is “the man.”

Fascinating take on things, right? Especially because it comes from someone who lives in the middle of the young demographic.

But here’s the most interesting thing the young man told me: We old people still look at television as a driving force, which is why we’re so exercised by the crap spewed on the major news networks. His generation, however, isn’t really a TV generation, especially for young conservatives, who feel locked out of television. For that reason, young conservatives go someplace entirely different: YouTube. According to my friend, “there is a huge grass roots Conservative-Libertarian-Classic Liberal movement going on now on YouTube and on podcasting formats.” [Read more…]

It never was about gay marriage; it was always about destroying religion

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Feeling the wind at their backs, gay marriage advocates are increasingly open about their true agenda: destroying Judeo-Christian faiths in America.

Gay marriage gay weddingMe, in 2008:

The second problem right now with the emphasis on changing [the civil definition of marriage to include same sex marriage] is the risk that there will be direct challenges between church and state. A lawyer I know assured me that this couldn’t happen because, for example, the Catholic church does not get sued because it opposes abortion.  That was facile reasoning.  While abortions may be a civil right, the Catholic church does not provide abortions.  What the Catholic church provides is communion, which is not a civil right, so the church can withhold it at will.  What happens, though, when the church provides something which is both a core doctrinal belief (marriage) and a state right (marriage)?  It’s a head-on collision, and I can guarantee you that the courts will get involved and that some activist judge will state that the Catholic Church is constitutionally required to marry gay couples.

Gay activists in 2017:

Openly gay LGBT activist Tim Gill, who has poured $422 million into the homosexual movement since the 1990s, recently told Rolling Stone why he won’t allow Christians to opt out of participating in same-sex weddings.

“We’re going to punish the wicked,” Gill told Rolling Stone. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage across the country, Gill turned his activism apparatus against religious freedom restoration acts (RFRAs) and toward a legal mentality that would penalize Christians, and anyone else in business, who refuse to participate in a same-sex wedding.

[snip]

Under Obergefell, same-sex couples can get married. But a wedding ceremony is still a private event, and people should not be forced to celebrate it, if such a ceremony is opposed to their convictions. This isn’t just an issue of religious freedom — it also involves free speech and free association.

But public accommodation laws have become a cudgel by which LGBT activists attempt to force people to violate their consciences. Indeed, an LGBT group in Ohio actually announced plans to try to force churches to host same-sex weddings on their property. A Christian farmer and his wife in Michigan were excluded from a farmer’s market because they posted on Facebook that they would not host a same-sex wedding on their own property.

Read the whole thing here. [Read more…]

President Trump — like Churchill, the indispensable man

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The upcoming Winston Churchill biopic reminds us that a nation’s elite tend to have nothing but disdain for an indispensable man — a man such as Trump.

Winston Churchill Donald TrumpI tend to be leery of biopics because I hate having my history filtered through Hollywood. It always grates on me when I hear a parent explain to a child that this or that movie “is history.” No, it’s not. History is history. All books and movies are merely interpretations and retellings of that history, with some retellings being a whole lot better than others.

Hollywood has always taken liberties with its biopics. There’s the happily married, completely heterosexual Cole Porter in Night and Day (Porter’s homosexuality got better treatment in the otherwise awful De-Lovely);  the cutely Irish, completely heterosexual, almost impressively non-Jewish Lorenz Hart in Words and Music (Hart was a brilliant, anguished Jewish homosexual); the charmingly goyish Jerome Kern in Till the Clouds Roll By (Kern was another Jewish kid from New York); and on and on, in an endless parade of movies both old and new in which history takes a backseat to marketability and prejudice.

I tend to know old musicals, but if you’re really interested in the liberties Hollywood takes, I recommend History v. Hollywood, a website that tackles the challenge of separating historic fact from Hollywood fiction. (The Desmond Doss/Hacksaw Ridge post is especially compelling.) Some of the changes make sense, such as time compression or composite characters. After all, a two-hour movie can only touch the high points of a real person’s life or a history event. Other changes, though . . .  well, I have a three-letter word for you: JFK.

Knowing Hollywood’s general tendency to bastardize stories, and its modern tendency to go hard-Left in its rewrites, explains  why I’m not 100% enthused about the upcoming film Darkest Hour, which is the newest Churchill biopic, due out at Thanksgiving. Gawd alone knows what the movie will do to Churchill’s amazing ascendency in the early months of World War II. Still, the first trailer hints at a movie in which the historic license might be reasonable and the historic facts might be true:

What I find fascinating about the trailer is that it seems to focus so tightly on the elite’s contempt for Churchill. After all, technically speaking, he was one of them — he came from wealth and the uppermost of upper castes in an aristocratic society — yet in practical terms he was not of them at all. He fundamentally offended their values, values that, in the years following WWI, leaned to pure pacifism and a naïve faith in the power of words and sophistication to face down predators.

Is it just me or does that remind you of what’s going on now with Donald Trump? Technically, he should be seen as one of the elite. He came from a monied background that, while not making him a member of America’s self-styled blue bloods, was certainly enough to make him a natural candidate for America’s elite.

But instead of constantly congratulating himself on his sophistication and elegance, Trump instead turned into a scrapper. His wealth wasn’t based on paper exchanges through banking deals or tinkering about with electronics; it was made in the hard-charging world of New York property development.

Moreover, once had made his billions, Trump didn’t endow universities that already have more money than God or subsidize symphonies that can’t make in the free market. Instead, he spent his money on parties, beauty contests, and gilt-furnished penthouses in shockingly excessive buildings.

Trump is a class traitor. No wonder the upper echelons of the American Left, the ones who call the shots with help of all the useful idiots they’ve engineered in America’s colleges and universities, despise him as they do. [Read more…]

Don’t forget to check out WOW! Magazine, with content from the Watchers’ Council

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Watcher's Council WOW! Magazine

I can never remind you often enough that, if you’re looking for insightful analysis about today’s political, social, and economic trends, you can’t do better than to check out WOW! Magazine, the online home of the Watcher’s Council (and their friends). Here are just some of the things you can find there today: [Read more…]