I’ve got a piece coming up in the next few days at “Hot Air” on the movie “Citizen Vigilante”.   I’m going to hold off on my opinions here until that comes out.  

But Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, sends us his review:

I watched the much-hyped Citizen Vigilante movie. Not great. Looks like a college film class project – random flashbacks, choppy scenes, wooden dialogue. SPOILERS:

Here’s the set-up: The vigilante (not named so I’m going to call him V instead of typing the word every time) is a rich American, about 35 years old, white, male, fit, no mention of wife or kids. His mother died when he was young. His father shipped him off to boarding school so father could concentrate on the business, only saw each other twice a year at holidays. V eventually graduated from West Point and spent time in the military. Dad died, V inherited the business, thousands of units of rental property. 

All of that explains why he’s such a cold-heart bastard who knows how to use a firearm, and has an overdeveloped sense of justice, and has time and money to spend. Good so far.  

Of course, the film makers don’t spit it out as I have. Those background facts are revealed in dribbles and flashbacks. Very confusing.

The rental units are in Europe. V enters the country illegally – no explanation why – and acquires/brings in a boatload of firearms – no explanation how – and begins killing immigrants who have wronged European women. The immigrants definitely need killing, no argument there. One woman had her throat slit in broad daylight by a random stranger, one was gang raped by half a dozen teenagers, one was beaten into a coma for no reason. White European women, North African immigrants, that part is realistic.

The women are victims not only of their attackers, but also the “justice system” which sympathizes with the attackers because society hasn’t given immigrants enough help adjusting to our ways, some of which are against their religion anyway, and besides, the women were asking for it. The attackers get lawyers and bail and social workers and endless continuances, the victims get forced to relive the trauma and called liars.  

For sure, I’m on V’s side there – some people just need killing, and maybe their families, too (thinking of the Henry Nowak case in Britain, where an immigrant stabbed an 18-year-old and filmed him dying, the immigrant’s mother took the knife and hid it, the immigrant’s brother made up a story telling the police the stabbed kid attacked the brother in a racially motivated attack, the cops believed the family and when the kid claimed to have been stabbed, the cop said, “I don’t think you have, mate” as the kid bled out and died. Yeah, that whole family can go).

So V decides to do something. It’s not personal, like Bronson in Death Wish. He’s setting an example, trying to motivate people. He does a bunch of blurred screen videos (half-hearted attempt to disguise his face but not his voice) which somehow get on TV – not explained how – giving long speeches claiming the system is corrupt, people are misled, they need to take back power over their lives. He’s an internet sensation – people all over the world love him – and the news media does their usual furrowed brow pondering why he’s popular when he’s such a racist. Again, I have no objection to the substance of his speech, only the way it’s done in the film. In real life, he’d never get on TV or the internet – he’d be banned instantly, nobody would ever hear or see him. Like the manifesto of every spree killer is instantly suppressed so we have no idea why they did it. 

Some of the attackers can be identified from court records. V tracks them down and shoots them. For some reason, he kills a couple of bleeding heart judges by faking suicides instead of just shooting them. No explanation why. If they’re all part of the same social rot, and subject to the same ultimate cure, should they all die in the same method? Wouldn’t that be a more effective message/motivator than hiding the punishment as suicide? 

V did some other stupid stuff, too. There are two guys flirting with two women in a bar. The women go to the bathroom together, the guys order shots of liquor and use an eyedropper to put something in the women’s drinks. V sitting at the bar having his own drink sees it, distracts the guys, switches their drinks, the guys pass out, V tells the women what just happened, they all leave. Why interfere? Why draw attention to yourself? White-knighting is risky. His actions are observed by an Interpol agent who picks up V’s glass from the bar with a cloth and presumably takes it for fingerprints. Why? What’s the Interpol crime of foiling the rape plot?

Now that Interpol has the fingerprints, they get V’s identity but don’t release it to the public, they somehow track him to a house and move in to arrest. About five minutes of dramatic music as cops load weapons, drive armored personnel carriers through the streets, climb up the stairs single file behind the shield guy, breach the door and storm into the house. It’s completely empty except for a giant cube made of plate steel that has two firing slits facing the room and two AK-47s sticking out. Rather than fall back or take cover, the cops line up in a straight line across the room facing the box and shoot at it. Naturally, there are no ricochets but their pathetic 9mm rounds don’t penetrate, either. V gives them a warning to leave, which obviously they won’t, so he opens fire, killing a dozen cops. That was weird, too. It’s a European country but all the cops’ uniforms say POLICE and SWAT. Maybe that’s just for American audiences, doesn’t matter, the cops in the room all die. The Interpol officer – the bar glass lifter – is behind a sheetrock wall so he’s completely safe from all of V’s rifle rounds, don’t penetrate a bit. The officer gets a backup team, they mill around the room looking horrified at their dead comrades, then cut their way into the steel box, it’s empty. There’s a trap door in the floor. V must have escaped that way.  

Now I axe ya – would you grab that handle and lift the trap door lid? After all the cops’ V’s killed? Knowing his military background? Or would you think, “Gee, I wonder if it’s booby-trapped?” That was my first thought but it never entered the cops’ minds. They yank up the lid, the explosive goes off, the cops inside the box are incinerated and everyone in the room (including our glass lifter) is slammed into the walls, critically injured or dead. 

Big climax is when V goes to the apartment of one of the gang rapists, forces his way inside with a silenced pistol, shoots the boy in the leg to convince Dad, Mom and Sister to sit down and shut up. Big lecture about justice, family pushing back that they shouldn’t have to give up their religion and the way the girl was dressed made the boys horny so she wanted/deserved to be raped. Nice scene showing the whole family has no intention of assimilating, they were in it together, and all deserve to die. Although I wonder that the leg wound doesn’t hurt after the first few seconds. 

V then tells the boy to call his rapist buddies to come over right now, tells them his lawyer is here, there’s new information they must know. As the buddies arrive, V shoots them and the rapist family, too. News footage of the bodies being hauled out of the apartment is on TV, watched by the rape victim, who cries tears of joy.

People say the film is banned because of gratuitous violence. Hardly. Didn’t they ever watch John Wick?  

It could have been a great movie. It’s not. But one positive note – it’s already banned in a couple of countries because it speaks truth about migrant crime. Elon put it on X which is where I watched it. News media are horrified that truth is being spoken. So it might do some good. 

Joe Doakes

 

I agree with Joe on some parts.  There could be, and needs to be, a really good movie about what happens when the rule of law becomes a social engineering tool.   It’s something I’ve talked about on SITD many times in the past.  More later this week.  

“Reality has become too absurd to be satirized”

Ironically, tracking down the attribution for this classic aphorism is, itself, an exercise in absurdity.   Depending on what corner of the internet you ask, it might be GK Chesterton, Tom Lehrer, Fran Leibovitz, Christopher Buckley or Evelyn Waugh.   

Kyle Mann notes that the aphorism has been floating around the English Language in one form or another for about a century, maybe more.  

Mann is, as this is written, the editor in chief at The Babylon Bee, an online satire site disguised as a news outlet that on the one hand is all satire, and on the other not-at-all disconnected hand may be one of modern America’s best news sources, not despite being a satire publication but because of it.  The Bee’s satirical “news” coverage has not only been covered as hard news by several mainstream media outlets – the hapless Snopes has “fact-checked” the Bee’s satire several times, and the Bee took the New York Times to the brink of litigation over the Times classifying the Bee as a “Hard Right” news source –  but has anticipated actual hard news on more than a few occasions. 

So – maybe the aphorism is wrong?

Maybe reality, especially the reality of politics in modern America, has become so absurd that satire is truly the most accurate way to analyze it?

In the summer of 2004 that was the last thing that was on my mind. 

It’s high time I did another book.  

And Berg’s Law is probably the stockpile of material that is most begging for me to do something with it.  

So I’ll be doing that in serial form in the coming…weeks?  Months?  Year or so?  I think it took me nine months to write Trulbert, and this is likely going to be a much bigger project. 

So stay tuned.  

Joe Doakes, ex-Como-Parker, emails:

President Trump is getting grief from all sides.  He shouldn’t have bombed Iran.  He shouldn’t have stopped bombing Iran.  The job’s not done and never should have been started.  The peace agreement is too generous, Iran won’t honor it and neither will Israel.  Everybody is unhappy with the President.  What’s a guy to do?

Walk away.

The purpose of the American government is to protect the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of American citizens, says so right in the Declaration of Independence.  There might have been an argument that Iran’s nuclear program, coupled with its ballistic missile program, could have threatened American interests.  That might have been a good enough reason to start the war.  But we’ve set back those programs by a significant (if impossible to determine) amount.  Mission accomplished.  Move on to solving America’s many other problems in the short time he has left in office.

Democrats aren’t happy but they never will be.  Their sole purpose is to hate Trump and all his works, even down to demanding pond scum in the reflecting pool by the Washington Monument. Ignore them.

RINOs aren’t happy but they never will be.  Their sole purpose is to get re-elected, wait out Trump’s term of office, and get rich on kick-backs and insider trading.  Ignore them.

Israelis aren’t happy but they never will be.  Their sole concern is survival in a tiny state surrounded by enemies.  Tough situation for them but not our problem.  Ignore them.

The media is happy.  They’re thrilled with the President.  They have something to talk about on the air: controversy, name-calling, second-guessing, fake polls, dire predictions . . . couldn’t be better for them.  But theirs is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Ignore them.

So who should the President listen to?  Me.  You.  People like us.  Ordinary Americans, the kind of people you meet at McDonald’s or a farm in Wisconsin or the Mack Truck factory.  Real people with real lives doing real jobs in the real world, raising our kids, paying our taxes, praying for a better future.  We are the reason the President’s job exists.  We are the people he should be looking out for.

Walk away, Mr. President.  Walk away from the Strait of Hormuz, we don’t need it.  Walk away from Israel’s feud with Lebanon, doesn’t concern us.  Walk away from the religious fanatics heir to the Persian Empire, they’re no threat to us now.  Focus on America.  Put Americans First.  Make America Great Again.

Joe Doakes

 

Well, I agree in principle – other than the little matter of letting terrorists have nukes, which aren’t geo-fenced even if they don’t build a concomitant ballistic missile program.

Michelle Griffith at the Minnesota Reformer has a think, sorta, piece about the first anniversary of the shooting of Melissa and Mark Hortman (and the Hoffmans).   

We need more civility, we’re told, and we just don’t have it yet:

In the year since former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed, their son has spent countless hours researching political rhetoric. He used the moment with his late mother’s co-workers to emphasize that how legislators craft their arguments matters. He wasn’t there to lay blame on any individual lawmaker or political party. 

“This can really feel abstract for the general public, but the people in that room, for myself, for my sister, for our whole family, political violence will never feel abstract again,” Hortman said in a Reformer interview. 

 

Conspicuous in its absence in the article – Aisha Gomez telling Elliot Engen to “go shoot himself” over the GOP’s refusal to pass the DFL’s cynical gun grab bill.

But who’s counting individual hypocrisies?  Even I gave up on that years go – and to quote Rochefoucald, “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue” – only people with principles can violate them.  

But back to Colin Hortman:

In the year since former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed, their son has spent countless hours researching political rhetoric. He used the moment with his late mother’s co-workers to emphasize that how legislators craft their arguments matters. He wasn’t there to lay blame on any individual lawmaker or political party. 

“This can really feel abstract for the general public, but the people in that room, for myself, for my sister, for our whole family, political violence will never feel abstract again,” Hortman said in a Reformer interview. 

 

I’m going to try to invite Mr. Hortman onto my show one of these weekends to talk about this research.

Because I have a strong hunch that having a presidential ticket including our governor calling half the nation “Nazis” and “Fascists” – people are near ancestors spent the best years of their lives killing – didn’t help a whole lot.  

The big news in right-wing alt media lately has been the travails of the Daily Wire – heretofore the most successful conservative alt media source in the business.   In many ways, DW was what picked up Limbaugh’s mantel after his untimely passing. 

But the Wire has had its problems lately:  some chalk it up to MAGA’s decreasing  tolerance for Israel, which Shapiro’s DW supports.  

I think the problem is a lot simpler than that.  I think it boils down to two things:  it’s spread its focus too far, and much of what it does focus on just isn’t that good.  

Unfocused:  the nation needs a solid conservative news and opinion source.  Limbaugh was that.  Fox News used to be.   Limbaugh’s gone, Fox News is in a mushy middle zone, and the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are lapping up the horseshoe right – there’s a definite market for the DW, or something like it.  

But along with that very worthy mission, DW took on trying to enter the culture war.  Which is, again, and again very noble and much-needed venture.  

But their entries, although no doubt catastrophically expensive, have been pretty much trash.   They’ve released a non-documentary movies – all of them properties the various studios passed on, and so were available on the relative cheap.   “Run Hide Fight” was the first – a concept (high school girl takes on school shooters) that I loved, but it came off like a high school theater class production of “Die Hard”.  “A” for concept, “C-” for execution.  And it was a lot better than some of the other efforts – “Ladyballers” would have been a fun ten minute Youtube short, sort of like one of the Babylon Bee’s videos.  But they tried to make it a feature length film, which was about 110 minutes too long and, I suspect, 110 minutes too costly.  Can’t say I’ve had the interest to sit through their other offerings.  

Their documentaries are better, more or less – “What is a Woman” was a good concept (and only 20 minutes too long).  The follow-up, “Am I Racist”, started out strong and swerved into cringe, finishing “Meh”, for all the same reason.  Which we’ll come back to. 

The two documentaries did well enough at the box office.  Well enough to pay for the turkeys – or the gargantuan “Pendragon Cycle” that seems to have been in production for years? 

Not to mention some of the dubious dives into merchandizing?   “Jeremy’s Razors” would have to not just shave your face, but make you taller and richer to be worth $30 more than a pack of Harry’s Razors.   Harrys’ made a stupid woke ad; for $30 for razors, I can overlook it.  

All of that – and running a news service as well – had to have been a huge money suck.  

The cash cow should have been their basic content – the podcasts and radio shows that bring in the listeners and viewers.

And that’s the bad news.  

No Beat:   I’m a Ben Shapiro fan.   No bones about it.  If you’re not, that’s fine – there are plenty of forums for you out there.  He’s brilliant.  On a scale of 1-100, his podcasts are a 90 with a standard deviation of about 2 always good, frequently brilliant.  

But the rest of DW’s flagship personalities?

Matt Walsh may be the least interesting person in media today.  He’s a professional troll – sometimes brilliant (“What is a Woman”), frequently more like an entitled ninth-grader.  His podcast is a 50, with a standard deviation of 20 – occasionally brilliant, frequently cringey.   Part of the problem for me – admittedly someone whose style is “radio” – is one of the tics in his delivery;  he will frequently (like, once or more in every podcast) make a point, then re-iterate it, then re-re-iterate it, and re-re-re-iterate it…I’ve heard seven or eight repeats of a point or conclusion, done with out irony.    A nervous tic, or a mark of sloppy thinking?  Who cares?  It’s annoying as hell.  And unlike the Medved-like information vacuum that is Shapiro, he’s frequently crushingly ignorant.  Last year, talking about Trumps’ record on abortion, he went through one of his muttering, sometimes barely audible lists of examples to the contrary, and got to “Reagan.  Ronald Reagan.  What did he ever do for us?”, ignorant of the fact that Reagan ever controlled the house, barely he’d the Senate for six out of eight  years, and had to spend his political capital on the top of his agenda, eliminating the USSR and fixing the economy.   I’d love to ask Walsh which he’d prefer to have tried (futilely) to trade.   His one strength?  He’s a troll with a level of commitment that Shapiro called “sociopathic”; it was tongue in cheek, but it lands.  It’s a personal thing, but a little trolling goes a long way for me.  “What is a Woman” was pretty brilliant – 50 plus two standard deviations.   “Am I Racist” had moments – shaming Robin DeAngelo to cough up a purse full of pocket change for a black guy was a classic – but I descending hard and fast into the kind of cringe that has me tuning out on “Fawlty Towers” these days.  

Michael Knowles is better – I’d call him a 70 with a standard deviation of 5.   He’s an agreeable sort, with some intellectual heft on matters of the Catholic Church, campaign politics, the Catholic Church, history, the Catholic Church, logic, the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church.   An avowed former atheist, he brings that “the douchiest New Yorkers are the ones that grew up in Buffalo” vibe to his discussions about the nature of faith.   And enough of the cigar talk, ffs.  

The res to the lineup?  Can’t say I can be provoked to care all that much, although watching Reagan Conrad’s rise to her “Token Gen Z Podcast” slot gave me “Top Forty Radio in the ’90s” vibes.  I suspect there’s a lot of money going out there.  

I hope DW can pull it out.   Or that Salem is smart enough to pick up the scraps if it doesn’t.