By Brandon Smith
Modern social justice in all of its forms is communism. The political left doesn’t want to admit it openly, but there is no way around it and there is no debate. Some would call it “cultural Marxism,” but the bottom line is that there is no such thing as a legitimate social justice movement in the west because by law all people regardless of their ethnic circumstances are equally protected. You could say that SJWs are rebels without a cause, but I would point out that “social justice” is not their real cause. They aren’t really interested in equality, they are interested in control.
There is a classic playbook for communist sabotage of a target society, and one of the first tactics is always the destruction of that society’s history and symbols. When Mao Zedong announced the birth of the “Cultural Revolution” in China in 1966, his goal was to disrupt growing discontent among the Chinese people with the broken promises of the communist regime. Only 8 years earlier in 1958 Mao had initiated the “Great Leap Forward,” which was a purge of his political opponents as well as a massive population reduction program that used food as a weapon. After the deaths of over 65 million Chinese citizens, Mao sought to redirect public anger by scapegoating a supposed conspiracy of “capitalists and imperialists.”
The Cultural Revolution was essentially a nationwide witch hunt spearheaded by rabid and ignorant children; people easy for the government to manipulate and exploit. They scoured their own towns and cities as spies and enforcers for the CCP, looking for any signs that their neighbors were part of the conspiracy to disrupt the communist collective. They held tribunals and struggle sessions where anyone who said the wrong thing or who angered the wrong person was publicly humiliated or even murdered as “insurrectionists” by a mob of communist zealots.
Most importantly, the Cultural Revolution was used as a means to utterly destroy any remnants of Chinese history before the commies arrived on the scene. Museums and universities were raided and ancient artworks, documents, books and historical parchments were burned in pyres. Historians and people with knowledge of the Chinese heritage were marched up and down the streets and chastised as enemies of the people. Statues were torn down and entire buildings razed to the ground. The communist system cannot gain dominance without two things – Rule at the barrel of a gun, and complete control over cultural products and information.
The people cannot have a religion, they cannot have an unfiltered history, they cannot have a moral framework outside of communist law, and they cannot have any cultural expression that does not include communist propaganda. If they have these things, then the communists will always be battling for psychological supremacy over the masses. Competing ideas and interests are a danger to the collective. The existence of choice is like kryptonite to authoritarians.
And this is one of the great crimes of communism in general: Yes, they are the biggest mass murderers in history surpassing the Nazis many times over, but killing people is one thing; deliberately killing their memories, histories and their mythologies is another. It is akin to murdering the soul of an entire nation and poisoning the future.
It is important to remember this distinction when we talk about the current communist cultural revolution now happening in North America and parts of Europe under social justice. I often hear the argument that people are “overreacting” when social justice propaganda is implanted into a reboot or remake of a previous film or television work. It’s “just a movie,” they say. But some of these franchises represent the mythologies of our time. And, when SJW communists and their corporate partners implant their insane ideologies into these franchises their goal is not just to propagandize the public, it is also to destroy something the public loves, to erase our history and our heroes piece by piece and take a little bit of our national soul away each time.
It’s also vital to point out that the mass movement to stop social justice in media, also known as the “Culture War,” is often accused of being anti-equality and anti-representation whenever we criticize a woke production. We’re called racists and bigots by leftists, but we don’t have a problem with race or “representation,” we have a problem with the politicization of race and representation. We’re fine with black and brown and even gay people in movies and television as long as their presence makes sense historically and canonically. What we don’t like in our entertainment is COMMUNIST AGITPROP. This is what the conflict is really about. We want their communism out of our culture, forever.
The current social justice playbook in Hollywood has become so prevalent and mechanical since 2016 that it can be predicted down to specific plot points and character arcs. Almost everything these people make is the same.
One might note that SJWs rarely produce any original stories, and there is a good reason for this – They have no creativity or imagination. Leftist activists and corporate elites in the industry have openly admitted in the past that they prefer to reboot classic properties because they can exploit existing public love for an older movie or character. When they make something original with new characters the project always fails horribly and no one shows up to watch. When they reboot classic movies, they can use nostalgia to trick people into watching without thinking and implant their leftist brainwashing into the production.
Beyond trickery, though, I suspect that these activists are not even as interested in making money as they are interested in murdering our beloved characters and mythologies right in front of us. I think they take perverse joy in it. Why else would they continue spending billions of dollars on these productions and then lose billions more when their movies and TV shows inevitably tank? It makes no sense from a business standpoint, but it makes perfect sense from a militant communist standpoint. Again, the goal is to destroy the existing culture until there is nothing left.
And this brings us to one of the last major story properties that the elitists have yet to touch: The Lord Of The Rings.
I would not consider myself a “superfan” steeped in every aspect of the lore of Middle Earth. I have read all the primary books and The Hobbit, and I have of course watched the Peter Jackson films dozens of times. I do find Tolkien’s works, much like the fictional works of C.S. Lewis, to go far beyond the fantasy worlds they are established in and reveal some innate truths about human nature and our eternal and internal struggles with the inborn archetypes of good and evil. They clarify what the fight is really about, what evil really is, and what sacrifices good people must be willing to make in order to defeat evil when the times demand it.
I often use the Lord Of The Rings as a metaphor to describe core problems we face in the real world. For example, I can’t think of a better metaphor for government power than the One Ring. Everyone thinks that they are pure hearted or righteous enough to wield the ring, but the vast majority of them are not and would only sink into corruption as they tried to exploit it. The only people that can hold the ring at all are the people who don’t want it, the people who have no desire for power and the people that only want to subdue or destroy it. Like the One Ring, so too must we have the same wariness of government control.
Tolkien’s tale was also intended to act as a kind of early mythological history of ancient Britain. Because much of Britain’s ancient history was lost to wars and the destruction of documentation over centuries, Tolkien wanted to create an alternative mythology to represent the spirit of the region, borrowing elements of ancient stories while adding in his personal experiences. The Hobbits were based on the happy natured culture of rural English villages that he experienced in his youth. The horrors he witnessed during his service in WWI and the Battle of Somme are obvious to see in the conflict between Sauron and the heroes of Middle Earth.
Interestingly, ever since Amazon purchased the partial rights to portions of the Lord Of The Rings in 2017, there has been an army of revisionist bloggers and media puppets trying to assert that Tolkien never intended his stories to be British or English in origin or relation. Clearly, the narrative is being adjusted so that Amazon can rationalize its diversity agenda within a story that was always meant to be set in a historically white country. Imagine if I went to Marvel and told them I want to reboot Black Panther but I think Wakanda needs less Africans and more whites and Asians? How well would that idea be received?
The bottom line is it makes no sense when we take the setting and the lore into account. But hey, it’s okay to do it with Lord Of The Rings with Middle Earth as a proxy for ancient England because…well, no explanation for this hypocrisy is ever provided.
The idea that a trillion dollar monstrosity like Amazon with aspirations of cultural domination could ever successfully reboot or revise Tolkien’s books is laughable at best. The team of writers involved have very little previous work worth noting but they do have a predictable roster of social justice virtue signals and hot takes. They are pampered bubble babies; people that don’t have the life experiences needed to grasp the deeper concepts that an older wiser man like Tolkien was trying to address. Of course, if you do enough shoe licking (or other things) in Hollywood and have the right politics you can be a dumb kid with a BA in social sciences and still get a job writing on a billion dollar project.
It would appear that most of the LOTR fandom is in agreement as the trailer released this past week is being decimated by a flood of critical responses and the video has been ratioed into oblivion on YouTube. This was the exact reason why YouTube decided to remove the visibility of dislikes which can now only be seen with a special app; they want to protect the agenda by silencing dissent.
It’s not working.
As a long time enthusiast of film and popular media, I have to say that objectively and technically the trailer is terrible. It has to be one of the most boring trailers I have ever seen for an adventure based series, telling us absolutely nothing and building no emotional suspense. I have seen great trailers for very bad movies (the latest Matrix movie comes to mind), but Amazon’s only interest was to showcase the diversity hires within their new show, and that was it.
That said, one cannot overlook the communistic cancer wrapped around the arteries of this production. Every person involved and all the media coverage involved is steeped in social justice babble and made-up terminology. Usually leftists in Hollywood use a specific formula for marketing films that hides the propaganda until the content is released. They post a trailer which obscures their intentions, and often even makes it look like the show will be close to the source material. Once they have you hooked and get your money, they stab your heroes through the heart and replace them with narcissistic facsimiles that any sane person would hate.
This time Amazon has chosen to go full bore woke out of the gate and it’s not going well for them.
All of us already know exactly what will happen in the new series, we don’t even need to watch it to predict the outcome. Timelines are being compacted down to nothing so this gives Amazon leeway to sabotage popular characters by retconning the lore. The plot points will be oddly close to those in the Jackson films, but with a completely different set of characters and messages. All the male heroes will be replaced with the now tiresome trope of ‘Stronk Wahmen’ and Mary Sues that are good at everything despite having no backstory to justify their awesome-ness.
Expect Galadriel to be the new Aragorn. Expect the female hobbit in the trailer to be the next Frodo but better than Frodo. Expect to see 90 pound women tossing around 200 pound men in poorly choreographed fight scenes. Expect the female characters to act and talk like men while abandoning all femininity (feminists hate femininity more than they hate masculinity). Expect modern SJW language and millennial language to be insinuated into dialogue in the most awkward places. Expect sexual innuendo or sexual scenarios that are out of place in a fantasy story. Expect meaningless LGBT representation that adds nothing to the plot. Expect weak and ineffectual male characters that make stupid decisions. Expect modern race baiting to be prevalent when it comes to black characters. Expect a perfect pie chart of ethnicities in almost every crowd scene. And, as always, expect the villains to be painted as “misunderstood” and only destructive because “society” caused them to turn to the dark side. In other words, it’s all society’s fault that Sauron becomes a bad guy.
It’s an old gameplan for deconstructing beloved properties and marginalizing the values and realities they represent. The thing is, we’ve seen this so many times now that it’s no longer catching us off guard.
Race swapping elves and dwarves and ignoring the species lore and history of the books is really the least of the problems, it’s just a big flashing alarm that tells us what is to come in terms of political messaging. Anyone who needs to “see themselves” portrayed exactly in every film or show they watch in order to relate to the story is undoubtedly a narcissist. Relating to characters is about relating to the ideas and archetypes they symbolize; and if the lore of a story requires that those character be white, then this should not stop any normal black or brown person from embracing the ideals as long as those ideals are honest.
Peter Jackson is noted as saying that he had no interest in implanting his own issues into Tolkien’s stories. He was not interested in using them for his benefit, only in honoring Tolkien’s legacy. The stories are universal, which is why they have appealed to billions of people around the world for the past several decades. SJWs cannot fathom this. They demand that every single new media product contain their political message and represent today’s world of “inclusivity.”
One of the biggest mistakes conservative movements ever made was to ignore the culture war and dismiss entertainment media as not worthy of our attention. It’s just “nerd stuff,” right? This was idiocy on our part and it’s a failure we must now deal with. Today, the extreme left has invaded every facet of media and almost EVERYTHING we see and hear is designed to spread their cultism. Our entertainment is now a communist wasteland.
Luckily, the massive and aggressive backlash against Amazon among the Tolkien fandom gives me hope. It would seem Amazon messed with the wrong nerds. Never before have I witnessed such a unified response to an attempt by a major corporation to pervert a loved property. What this tells me is that the majority of people are starting to become wise to the agenda in media and they are finally taking action by letting these companies know they are not going to play the game. Neither politics nor culture are downstream from each other, they are parallel and equally vital. The fight for one must be taken as seriously as the fight for the other.
Amazon’s hubris has led to an epic mistake which has set fire to the Beacons of Gondor. Everyone knows and everyone is watching them. This may very well mean the death rattle of social justice in popular entertainment as even the normies begin to abandon these shows and movies that represent nothing more than public sacrifices to the social justice gods. Soon, no one will be watching.
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Brandon, I struggle with understanding the difference between the globalist idea of stakeholder capitalism and marxism, which, as you know are both economic systems (or are they?) I know you understand the globalists well and their idea of the 4th industrial revolution, the great reset, build back better, etc. I have been under the impression that the social justice movement is a step in the process of achieving the great reset (stakeholder capitalism). However, If communism is what they’re after, how do the big corporations fit into that system? There’s no question the corporations are woke SJWs. Are they hoping, perhaps, that the globalists won’t “go after” them if they obey? Because classic marxism wouldn’t tolerate private corporations (is that correct?) Or is stakeholder capitalism a new variation of communism that includes corporations?
There is no such thing as “stakeholder capitalism.” There is no such thing as “capitalism” either. Both terms are communist in origin and designed to misrepresent intent. The word “capitalism” was meant to disparage free markets as described by Adam Smith. “Stakeholder capitalism” is just another word for socialism; it’s meant to give the public the false impression that free markets are a detriment to the public and thus the public must be a stakeholder in the way the economy functions; but of course the solution they offer for that is government stepping in and adding more and more restrictions and centralization which only affects average people. I often hear the term used in conjunction with global warming propaganda. The real secret is that corporations and government are ALREADY in deep collusion, they are already working together. The leftist narrative that government is a means to control corporations is a fraud. The governments ARE the corporations – The corporations ARE the government.
Right on Brandon. Corporations exist only through government. They are extensions of government.
So true! And I can see leftists’ heads spinning were they to read your post.
Ok, well that explains why I couldn’t tell the difference between communism and stakeholder capitalism-there is no difference. It appears that government is attempting to circumvent the constitution by using the corporations as an extension of themselves. Shameful. So my next question is: what exactly is the difference between socialism, democratic socialism and communism?
Socialism and democratic socialism are just intermediary steps towards their inevitable outcome: Communism. It’s the various life stages of a parasitic organism.
Brandon,
I appreciate the thought put into your writing. If you’re willing, reach out to me, and we can discuss national security matters.
Dr. Michael
Your explanation here is soooo right on target. Perfect!
Just curious, you make many valid point about Hollywood remakes and how unsuccessful they are. I struggle to keep taking you serious after you started talking about the new LotR. You mention watching Peter Jackson’s films dozens of times and using what you learned as example in your day to day colloquialisms, even to support your arguments. In the context of these arguments in this opinion piece, aren’t those also Hollywood remakes of the books with very little original thought in them too? Curious as to why those movies are OK but any future iterations are not. Thank you!
I assume you’re talking to me since you are using strawmen. At no point did I say that I use Peter Jackson’s films as examples to support my arguments. I use symbolism from TOLKIEN’S stories as analogies and metaphors that support my arguments because they are archetypal and universal. Also, you seem to have missed the primary point: Jackson’s films are FAR more accurate to Tolkien’s vision than this monstrosity from Amazon will be. I also never said that “any future iterations” of the stories will not be good; I said the woke Amazon version will not be good. If you can’t adapt a story accurately, or at least with respect, then you shouldn’t adapt it at all. Rather, you should be making your OWN STORIES, which Jackson has done many times in his film making career as well. This is something that the vast majority of leftists are clearly incapable of doing. Using circular logic is not going to help you here. Come up with another strategy and get back to me.
Were PJ’s LOTR movies a re-make or an adaption? The only other ones I could find were cartoons from the 1970s. Adaptions from original source material happen all the time. Re-makes tend to reboot an already established movie or franchise like Ghostbusters.
I believe Brandon covered this. Wokesters are taking already established movies and injecting ideological venom with the intent to destroy and corrupt. It taints the original and helps undermine positive feelings associated with it. Merely another front in the culture war.
Maybe this quote might help you understand: “Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty, socialism sends them back.” -Jeffrey Fry
From what I’ve heard Amazon never got the rights to The Silmarillion, which is what ROP is supposed to be based on, or at least the part that takes place in the Second Age. And the thing is, if they wanted to have non-white characters they could’ve had them play the role of the Haradrim, Easterlings and Khand. That would make sense if you know anything about Middle-Earth’s geography particularly the southern and eastern regions.
That being said there is some hope for LOTR fans with the anime movie War of the Rohirrim set to come out in ’24. It takes place during the founding of the kingdom of Rohan.
Even the Easterlings are portrayed in Tolkien approved artworks as slightly tan (possibly Spanish looking), but not dark by any means. It makes sense that there would be no black people in his vision of Middle Earth when one considers it’s basically a fantasy portrayal of ancient Britain where there was very little or no contact with Africa. Also, the wars in the 2nd age take place mostly in the Northwest of Middle Earth. But lets say they stretched the lore a little there and made the black actors Easterlings instead of dwarves or elves; the problem is that they DON’T WANT to do that because they want forced diversity among the heroes. They don’t care as much about forced diversity among the villains or the invading hordes.
Also, yes, they don’t have the rights to the Silmarillion, which makes any accurate portrayal of the 2nd Age impossible. Instead, what they do have as I understand it are the rights to certain elements of the three main books, which they CLAIM have enough story snippets describing the 2nd age that allow them to produce the show. Rather conveniently, because they don’t have the Silmarillion, this means they have to take a lot of creative license to “fill in the blanks.” In other words, they are exploiting the fact that they don’t have the rights to the complete story so that they can retcon the story. When I first heard that they were condensing centuries of events down to a single time period, I knew this was going to be a disaster. Why do that unless you plan to retcon a large chunk of the lore?
Please do The Silmarillion completely as CGI, as God intended…no joke here.
Concerning all aspects of “socialism” and especially its dark sides, I recommend this very brilliant and little-known book: “The Socialist Phenomenon” by Igor R. Shafarevich.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2771384-the-socialist-phenomenon
To say the least I am appalled that someone as mendacious and self-serving as Bezos is making a stab at corrupting one of the finest literary accomplishments of the modern age. Tolkien had Vision – his own to be sure – but one that encompassed the entire spectrum of the Good vs Evil dichotomy which is the contemporary World. It is a sheer pity that Tolkein’s masterful work will suffer what it now will at the hands of Corporate Orcs and SJW Goblins.
The rewriting of history does indeed obviate the soul of a Nation, as Brandon so accurately pointed out in his precis of Mao’s actions during the “Great Leap Forward”. No, “Stakeholder Capitalism” is nothing more than an old toy of the Elites re-packaged in a shiny new wrapper (Rapper?) in which the intent is to present their “Vision” of the future as Right and Just…when it is anything but. Ordinarily anyone attempting to repackage “Lords and Serfs” for sale to the general public would be laughed out of the room…but here is where the Hollywood angle comes in. I’m quite sure that everyone here reading this has already noted – with a certain queasiness – how Hollywood has been Hell-bent on re-writing major sagas of old with fresh New ‘diversity hire’ faces yes? Just so, and in this wise their aim is to so muddle actual history that anything they propose doesn’t ‘seem’ quite so outrageous as it otherwise would.
In truth, isn’t it time to start – seriously – considering an actual DIVORCE from those whom we will will never be able to co-exist; continuously and invariably they demonstrate that their Vision of the Future is one that would have our Founding Fathers rolling and moaning in their graves, not to mention the millions who have given “…their last full measure of Devotion.” to allow they themselves to exist as they do. Enough already, let’s man up and DO.
JOG
BTW, you might like Tolkien’s early work, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” Quite a lovely story.
“Everyone thinks that they are pure hearted or righteous enough to wield the ring, but the vast majority of them are not and would only sink into corruption as they tried to exploit it. The only people that can hold the ring at all are the people who don’t want it, the people who have no desire for power and the people that only want to subdue or destroy it.”
..
Very true. The best politicians are perhaps (at least in theory) the ones who don’t want to be politicians, but rather only do so as a form of civil service.
Astute observation G33,
One of a very few such – a smaller than handful sized set! – was Ike Eisenhower, the ONLY man sufficient in his morale convictions in the modern age to warn us what would soon come. Truly, he was prescient in that.
It’s no coincidence I think that none now reaches the Oval Office possessed of true Vision.
JOG
@JOG, thank you. I think it’s similar to an attorney wanting to be a judge. Because although judges make a very good/great income, the best/highest-paid attorneys make significantly more as practitioners and would therefore only become judges if they believe they are doing a service to society (believing they would be more just and fair than the ones already on the bench), or for ego as they would otherwise be taking a very substantial pay cut, I’m guessing especially so in the big cities.
Thank you for this article Brandon.
Jeff Bezos’ superyacht will see historic bridge dismantled – BBC News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C2Q7R89hhA
Isn’t that insane! As Babylon rises: WAPO states Bezos is a nice guy who likes to help out our beloved CIA, thanks Jeffy
Brandon, I find your writings to be so thought provoking. You really seem to address the deeper issues that most don’t take the time to think about or think through. I very much appreciate that. And, most of your commenters are well worth a read as well…. smart folks!
Amen to that.
Vote with our wallets and leave them all behind.
I knew Amazon would butcher LOTR. The same way they butchered Wheel of Diversity, um, I mean Wheel of Time. Now we get Lord of Diversity. A travesty.
Yeah, I saw how badly that show got panned by critics and fans of the books, ranging from the forced diversity and race-swapping characters to changes in the plot and lore. But the biggest insult to me, as someone who likes swords, was the heron-mark sword which looks like some cheap wall-hanger katana some cosplayer bought at a flea market. They’ve done similar things to He-Man and She-Ra.
What a sad state of affairs. After watching the trailer, I am left with a sad feeling. This looks like they are doing exactly what Brandon said; destroying a beloved story. Female hobbits stayed home to raise the children. If they don’t have the rights to the Silmarillion then what’s happening before The Fellowship of the Ring is just hearsay because the original books and The Hobbit only give tiny glances back in time. Fuck Amazon. Fuck the “woke” communists. If anything ever needed to be cancelled it’s these types of corporations that piss on us and call it rain.
https://linktr.ee/doublethoughtdimension1
One of your best articles yet, great stuff. Bezos is just another in a long line of robber-barons, and completely out of touch with the actual world and its people. It’s like Bizarro World, where villians from James Bond movies are real.
“feminists hate femininity more than they hate masculinity”
Spot On.
Unless expressed in the opposite sex, in which case it’s borderline celebrated.
Hi Brandon,
Just change the show name from Lord of the Rings to Wheel of Time and everything you wrote is applicable word for word. They ruined the whole premise of the story by adding woke elements to it. I don’t want to say more as it may be seen as a spoiler.