[VIDEO] Dinesh D’Souza Unveils Hillary Clinton Video Ahead of DNC Speech
Posted: July 28, 2016 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment, History, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Abraham Lincoln, And the Money Kept Rolling In, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Anti-fascism, Broadway theatre, Democratic Party, DNC, Evita, Guinevere, Helen of Troy, Helena (Empress), Hillary Clinton, Hollywood Reporter, Jim Crow, Ku Klux Klan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Slavery, The Pantsuit Report, Woodrow Wilson 1 Comment
The clip coincides with the launch of a new website where D’Souza answers critics who claim his movie distorts facts. ‘Detractors and several film reviewers have been challenging many of its claims’. Example claim: ‘Democrats had backed slavery and the Ku Klux Klan decades ago’. This is in dispute, really? 
5 percent of critics gave ‘Hillary’s America’ a positive review, compared to a favorable review from 82 percent of the audience.
“‘Evita’s foundation funneled money given to the poor into her own bank accounts,’ D’Souza says in the clip. ‘Certainly, the Clintons wouldn’t steal from the poorest of the poor?’”
Hollywood Reporter: Hours before Hillary Clinton is set to accept the Democratic nomination for president, Dinesh D’Souza has releasedscene from his documentary film Hillary’s America that compares the former secretary of state to Eva Peron, the Argentine politician famously accused of money laundering in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita.
The release of the scene coincides with D’Souza launching a website that he says debunks criticisms of Hillary’s America by offering evidence that what he says about her and her party in his movie is historically accurate.
His “evidence” page cites various historical sources and quotes notable figures, like Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson, to make the case that Democrats had backed slavery and the Ku Klux Klan decades ago.
The Hollywood Reporter puts Scare Quotes Around the word “evidence”, for unknown reason @THR #ScareQuotes #Journalism #DemsInPhilly #panic
— Pundit Planet (@punditfap) July 29, 2016
Since D’Souza’s movie opened two weeks ago, detractors and several film reviewers have been challenging many of its claims. The Hollywood Reporter’s reviewer likened the movie to a “highly subjective history lesson” while the Los Angeles Times said it “doesn’t even qualify as effectively executed propaganda.” On Rotten Tomatoes, only 5 percent of critics gave Hillary’s America a positive review, compared to a favorable review from 82 percent of the audience.
[Read the full story here, at the Hollywood Reporter]
Republican nominee for president Donald Trump, meanwhile, has endorsed the film. Read the rest of this entry »
‘American Progressivism is a Cult of Whiteness’
Posted: October 14, 2015 Filed under: Economics, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Agriculture in China, Antisemitism, Barack Obama, Che Guevara, Communist Party of China, Fascism, Fidel Castro, Homogeneous, Jim Crow, Mao Zedong, Nordic, Nordic Exceptionalism, Racist, United States, White, White Supremacist Leave a comment
The American’s Left’s Blond-Haired, Blue-Eyed Fantasyland
Kevin D. Williamson writes: The curious task of the American Left is to eliminate “white privilege” by forcing people to adopt Nordic social arrangements at gunpoint.
Progressives have a longstanding love affair with the nations of northern Europe, which are, or in some cases were until the day before yesterday, ethnically homogeneous, overwhelmingly white, hostile to immigration, nationalistic, and frankly racist in much of their domestic policy.
When leftists preach socialism, they have in mind a very white version of it.
In this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally have been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging anti-Semites, who believe that they discern within the Nordic peoples the last remnant of white European purity and who frequently adopt Nordic icons and myths, incorporating them into an oddball cult of whiteness.
“In this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally have been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging anti-Semites, who believe that they discern within the Nordic peoples the last remnant of white European purity and who frequently adopt Nordic icons and myths, incorporating them into an oddball cult of whiteness.”
American progressivism is a cult of whiteness, too: It imagines re-creating Danish society in Los Angeles, which is not full of Danish people, ascribing to Scandinavian social policies certain mystical tendencies that render them universal in their applicability.
Call it “Nordic Exceptionalism.”
[Read the full story here, at National Review Online]
The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong; we might even count Benito Mussolini, “that admirable Italian gentleman” who would not have been counted sufficiently white to join Franklin Roosevelt’s country club — but the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, 
Norway, Finland, etc. The significance of this never quite seems to occur to progressives.
[Kevin D. Williamson’s book “The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome” is available at Amazon]
When it is suggested that the central-planning, welfare-statist policies that they favor are bound to produce results familiar to the unhappy residents of, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia — privation, chaos, repression, political violence — American progressives reliably reply: “No, no, we don’t want that kind of socialism. We want socialism like they have it in Finland.” Read the rest of this entry »
Book Review: In Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Atticus Finch Defends Jim Crow
Posted: July 12, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Reading Room | Tags: Atticus Finch, Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee, HarperCollins, Jim Crow, List of To Kill a Mockingbird characters, New York City, Pulitzer Prize, Segregationist, The Wall Street Journal, To Kill a Mockingbird 1 Comment
One of the few unambiguously heroic figures in American literature was originally conceived as a segregationist
Sam Sacks writes: Ever since the announcement in February that a second novel by Harper Lee had been found among her papers, untold numbers of readers have been counting the minutes until its publication. And why not? Ms. Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960) is the most beloved novel in American history—more popular than even the Bible in numerous polls.
[Order Harper Lee’s classic “To Kill a Mockingbird” (Enhanced Edition) (Harperperennial Modern Classics) from Amazon.com
But the anticipation has somewhat obscured the awkward details about “Go Set a Watchman,” as the novel is called (the title comes from the Book of Isaiah). Although it is set in the mid-1950s, around 20 years after “To Kill a Mockingbird,” it is not a sequel. Ms. Lee, who is now 89, wrote it first, submitted it to a publisher in 1957 and, on an editor’s advice, refashioned it into the book that’s now assigned in grade schools all over the country.
Harper Lee with Gregory Peck, the star of the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
Properly speaking, “Go Set a Watchman” is a practice run for “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and it existed before anybody could have known that small-town Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch would become a symbol of the nation’s moral conscience. All this throat clearing is not meant to damp the enthusiasm of expectant readers but to introduce a friendly 
word of caution. “Go Set a Watchman” is a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This story is of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion.
[Order Harper Lee’s long-awaited book “Go Set a Watchman: A Novel
There’s little hint of darkness as the novel begins. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, better known to us by her childhood nickname Scout, is returning to Maycomb, Ala., for a two-week vacation. For the past five years, Jean Louise has been living in New York City trying to make it as a painter. Her older brother Jem—I regret to report—has died of a heart attack. But her father, Atticus, is still hanging on. Seventy-two and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, he is cared for by his priggish, busybody sister Alexandra.
[Read Sam Sacks’ full book review here, at WSJ]
Then there’s a brand-new character, Henry Clinton. Henry is Atticus’s protégé at the law firm, and he has 
carried a torch for Jean Louise since high school. She is hardly off the train before he is again proposing marriage, which she coyly declines: “I want to be like Dr. Schweitzer and play until I’m thirty.” This is how the two talk, trading enough sassy banter to fill a Hepburn-Tracy movie.
“Go Set a Watchman” is told in the third person, but it stays close to Jean Louise’s perspective and contains the familiar pleasures of Ms. Lee’s writing—the easy, drawling rhythms, the flashes of insouciant humor, the love of anecdote. Read the rest of this entry »
