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June 17, 2024 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:15:01
20240617_Mon
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Hey, everyone.
Welcome to View from the Right.
This is Gregory Hood.
I'm here with Paul Kersey.
And the sound may be a little different this time.
I'm actually on the road.
I'm at FPAC and out here in Michigan.
And, Paul, I gotta tell you, I saw a terrifying vision of the future, because I had to pick up a mic, and I went to the Walmart in Dearborn, Michigan.
Good God.
If you want to see what we're fighting against, just go there.
Well, hey, get into the story.
Why is that?
What was, you know, Dearborn, Michigan?
Is that where Bob Seger's from?
Well, that's one of the funny things, is that everything around here is still named after Henry Ford, and you still see all these tributes to him and everything else, but this is obviously the kind of nightmare scenario for him.
I mean, it's overwhelmingly Muslim at this point, overwhelmingly non-white.
You certainly see everybody in the burqas and screaming in Arabic at each other, and it's just got that general sense of chaos and disorder you get in any kind of third-world environment, with their stuff just kind of being thrown all over the place.
People screaming at each other and everybody looking on Kempton and you know falling out of there even though people at Burke is on somehow people are also simultaneously like fat and falling out of their clothes and everything else and people screaming obscenities.
It's just sort of you're looking around and.
I thought to myself, you know, I just have nothing and it's not like a particular malevolence or anything like that, but just I have nothing in common with any of these people.
And I looked up and the American flag was flying there and I was like, what, what does that possibly mean?
In that context, what does this have to do with anything?
What does this have to do with me?
What does this have to do with Henry Ford or any of the people who built this state or built this country?
But in any event, that's that's where we are.
Yeah, it's funny with AFPEC 4 being in Detroit, Michigan, which is just a fascinating location to choose.
Whatever.
But you're right.
It's an important one.
We're going to have to reclaim it at some point.
But we're not going to be talking about that today.
Obviously it hasn't really started yet.
I haven't been there, but maybe they will talk about that in the future.
But right now we're going to talk about the state of entertainment because unfortunately.
For many of us.
And I think it's something that we have to kind of come to terms with.
It's something we don't really like to talk about because everybody likes to talk about high culture.
Everybody likes to talk about the Western canon.
Everybody likes to talk about the great books and things like that.
But the fact is if you're a young man or a middle-aged man, frankly, The, the main things that you, that shaped you when you were young, the things that give you your default cultural expectations and default cultural values came from entertainment.
And if you were of a certain generation, you, you could at least take for granted certain like masculine action heroes.
You could take for granted certain motifs in film and literature and television and in music.
You could take for granted certain expectations about what it was to have a country, what it was to be a man, what it was to take care of a family, what it was to be responsible.
These sorts of things were just commonly understood.
They were, they're now perceived as apolitical.
And occasionally you'll see conservatives say things like, well, there was a time when entertainment wasn't so political.
No, it was still political.
The leftists are fundamentally right that the personal is political.
It's just that these were so taken for granted.
That they weren't perceived as political in the same way that Christianity wasn't perceived as a political thing 100 years ago, just because it's so saturated the culture that it was taken for granted that these values were taken for granted.
Now they're not taken for granted.
And now when we see entertainment.
You see conservatives and you see moderates reacting against it, furiously saying, well, this is woke.
This is politicized, but the generation that comes after it, they're not even going to know what they're objecting to.
They're going to take these things for granted in the same way that you took for granted that, of course, the action hero is going to shoot dead the villains that saved the day 20 years ago.
Of course, they're going to take for granted... Zoomers today, they may question it, but the generation after that is going to take for granted what's being put forward to entertainment today.
What prompts this, of course, is what's going on with... Now, I haven't been a Star Wars fan, certainly for decades, but the online furor over this makes it pretty hard to ignore.
This show, The Acolyte, which has now made it, it's this non-white, and I wish I was making this up, like lesbian space witches.
Like that's what Star Wars is now.
And the Jedi are actually the bad guys.
So they're basically deconstructing what's left of that entire fandom.
And this is what Disney is doing to what they bought from George Lucas.
And it's interesting because this is now something that's going on 50 years.
Insofar as America still has a mainstream culture, this is a big part of it.
And even this is being reworked in a more fundamental way than even the last series of films.
And if you've got kids and they think of Star Wars, this is what they're thinking of.
Yeah, you know, there's an article about one of the actors, actresses and the acolyte, Amandla Stenberg, Uh, who said that, uh, the goal back then was to, uh, you know, make white people cry, uh, with one of her roles.
And a lot of people thought that she meant about Star Wars.
She was just talking about a film she made about race relations, but she's starring in this really weird reinterpretation of, uh, the Star Wars canon, which is set before the events of episode one through nine.
It said like a hundred years before even the first film took place in 1977.
And they're basically retconning the entire franchise to destroy the concept that Anakin Skywalker was born from the Force.
And yeah, you're right.
They're trying to make it as fake and gay and as paused as possible.
And Mr. Hood, one of the fascinating things, I am a fan of the original franchise.
4 through, episodes 4 through 6.
Of course those came out, I believe you and I hadn't even been born
when episode 6 came out, Return of the Jedi.
And in a lot of ways, the franchise laid dormant after that.
It didn't really take on a life of its own.
It was really just the toys, and then it was when the re-release came out,
when George Lucas said, oh yeah, you know what?
I think I'm going to go back and I'm going to re-tinker and I'm going to re-edit a lot of scenes because technology has gotten so much better.
This is CGI.
Yeah, remember when that was the worst thing people had to complain about?
Then he inserted like a weird creature in one scene and people were like, oh, this ruins the original.
It's like, man, people didn't know how good they had it.
I am such a Star Wars, I'm such a fan of those that I actually have And I'm such a fan of cinema in general, I bought a Laserdisc and I bought episodes four through six because that is, it's believed that is the most honest interpretation on film of the actual theatrical releases from 77, 80, and I think 82, if I'm not mistaken.
That's when episode four came out, six came out, Return of the Jedi.
I might be wrong on that, don't quote me.
So I bought a Laserdisc player just to have some of the films because it is, it's not, CGI'd with the re-release and of course Disney will never
release the DVDs or Blu-ray or stream the Star Wars without all the edits and stuff. And of
course they bought Lucasfilm from George Lucas, they bought Star Wars and they bought, I think he
also owned Willow, and they basically have carte blanche to do whatever they want to. And of
course they did a remake of that too.
They did, and it's not- Apparently notoriously bad, and that, I think that flopped instantly, but- Willow is a beautiful film, came out in 87, it's a Ron Howard film, it's Val Kilmer's best role as Mad Martigan, it is- It's almost as if they said,
hey, we don't have the rights to Lord of the Rings.
Let's make something Lord of the Rings-esque.
And Willow is a good family film.
It's scary, but it's got all the right messages of the importance of family, fighting for your family,
fighting for your people, fighting for your community.
There's only one weird scene where inexplicably, and inexplicably, there's a black dwarf
that lives in Willow's little hamlet.
And it's like, why is there a black dwarf?
There's only one black dwarf.
Is this really necessary?
But everything else, it's a great film.
But of course, Disney, they made a sequel to it, and they turned the white character, the girl, I forgot her name, they turned her and made her black.
And then they made Madden Martigan and Saoirse's daughter a lesbian.
Mr. Hood, they don't even air that on Disney+.
It was hated that much.
They don't even air it.
It's not even streamed anymore.
You can't find it because it was that panned by fans.
Certainly, you see this not just with film genres.
There's this concept that I call IP mining, where Essentially, the point is to buy an IP and then mine out the value from it until it's exhausted, the same way you would go to a gold mine or a silver mine, and you just keep hacking away at it until the mountain's destroyed and there's nothing left in it, and then you move on.
But I think that might actually be too charitable.
I think at this point, especially because the money is essentially unlimited.
I mean, you hear people say things like, you know, get woke, go broke, but that's not really true.
Disney's not going to go broke.
None of these companies are going to go broke.
You're essentially dealing with unlimited money because of the way these companies are structured with finance capital.
And certainly the people who make these films and make these shows, they just move on from one thing to another.
They don't, they're not discredited by any of this.
And from a career standpoint, making a failed show that puts forward the right social values and therefore wins positive media coverage and critical acclaim.
That's probably the right thing to do from a career standpoint.
The same reason that the same way like a modern artist who just makes throw some splotches on a canvas that doesn't mean anything that's going to get you or donors more purchases more critical interest than actually learning to paint and creating something beautiful because nobody who matters is interested in any of that.
And I think now.
Given that they can take their salaries essentially for granted, given that they can take their position for granted, given that you can buy these intellectual properties and do whatever you want with them.
And you're always going to have a kind of tapped in audience, no matter what that's going to, it's like from the line in a network, you know, why are you talking to me?
Because you're on TV, dummy.
I mean, it's just because it's on TV, because it's that IP, it's going to have an audience that you can kind of take for granted.
And I think the destruction and the subversion is the point at this point that there's something to our McIntyre talks about this in the total state.
I mean, this is one of conquest rules that the behavior of any organization is best explained by assuming that it's controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
And that sounds crazy.
But the reason for that is because if you're looking at for your own individual interest within one of these companies or within a creative industry, It's always better to try to insert chaos into an existing story, to shake things up, to destroy the actual story so you can tell your story instead.
That's always the best thing to do from an individual point of view.
And I think that's what's happening with these things, where it's not just Okay, we're going to tell a different spin on the Star Wars story.
We're going to have a Jedi who's black.
We're going to have a Jedi who's gay.
We're going to have a Jedi who's whatever, but now we're actually going to make the Jedi the bad guys because they're not progressive enough.
Yeah.
And we're going to do this other thing.
Well, what, I mean, what we're really watching is not, I mean, certainly I'm not watching it, but what people are really watching it has had nothing to do with Star Wars.
It's just, This is the self-image of the actors and the actresses and the writers and the producers telling us how great they think they are.
And they are essentially given unlimited money to do it.
And ultimately, this flows out of the universities, which are all publicly subsidized, i.e.
funded by white people, with DEI majors.
And again, the money for that is completely unlimited.
And there's no reason to believe it's going to stop anytime soon.
Yeah, you know, one of the fascinating things we are talking about both the macro and micro right now, we will get into other franchises, but I think the most important thing to go back to Star Wars is you and I were working undercover in Conservatism Inc.
back in 2015 when episode 7 came out, The Force Awakens, and that's one of the biggest movies of all time in terms of box office results.
But of course, if you look at the The way that it was received and the way that they tried to push the female character, who they teased that she was going to be a Skywalker in a lot of the trailers.
And then, of course, they completely decided to like, oh, no, she's actually the granddaughter of Palpatine.
And the last movie, which I've actually never seen, Episode 9, which is just hated apparently by fans.
I refuse to see it because Episode 8 was so bad.
And one of the more important videos you can watch, Mr. Hood, and all of our listeners out there, you go to YouTube, And just search or just type in Mark Hamill thoughts on on Star Wars.
And there's a video that's been viewed 7.4 million times where it's all 50 plus times Mark Hamill tried to subtly warn us about the last Jedi Force Awakens in Disney.
And it's an amazing video where he's honest.
You know, we now see Mark Hamill shilling for Joe Biden, which is just pathetic.
I think he did a press conference with the White House press secretary, that black lesbian,
and where he talked about Joe Biden being this great president.
But he was really honest when episode eight came out in 2017?
2018?
I think it was 2017.
And that movie did not do well.
And that was when Law of Diminished Returns set in, and that's when the fans really, really went crazy against Star Wars.
And it's fascinating to watch because you see the love that he had for the Luke Skywalker character.
And he was trying to describe in a language that he knew, because he's a leftist.
He couldn't understand what they were doing.
He thought that, you know, you're taking this beloved character... Yeah, yeah, and he's just kind of this liberal boomer who doesn't quite get it.
He doesn't get it, exactly, and we saw with the episode 7, I was actually one of the first people, there's actually an article you can read, it's by some leftist, where they tried to figure out who started the Star Wars' anti-white meme back in like, I think it was 2015, because remember when that first trailer came out, And the shocking scene was the Stormtrooper
takes his helmet off and it's a black guy.
And it was universally panned.
Everyone's like, oh, come on, what are they doing forcing this?
And of course, I think the guy's name was John Boyega.
And that was- Yeah, and of course he gave all these interviews
about how great, I mean, this is the thing.
It sounds paranoid and crazy, but the actors come out and say this at this point.
I mean, they just come out and say, no, this is actually subversion.
No, what we're doing is we're, we're taking this away from people like it and giving it to us.
I could never see myself as this because I wasn't represented, which is a very, I mean, I'm not trying to be offensive here, but that's like a very female way to look at things.
There's actually, there was actually a famous study where it was a toy company looking at what's up.
Oh, good.
No, I'm sorry.
I just had a delicious... With men and women looking at, or boys and girls, I should say, looking at toys, and they watch the difference between boys and girls, the way they view a character.
If a boy, I don't know, is watching Batman or something, and he likes Batman, he's seven years old, whatever, what he's going to do?
He's going to find out everything about Batman.
He's going to dress like Batman.
He's going to try to be Batman.
He's going to try to talk like Batman.
This is what he's going to model himself on.
If a girl sees a character, the girl is going to try to make the character like her.
And so therefore...
You have to, if you're trying to market to females, essentially you have to show, you have to represent them directly.
They have to see themselves in the character, otherwise they're not going to go for it.
Well, this seems to be how it is with non-whites too, where they can't mentally model themselves.
At least, I think that most minorities actually can, but certainly the actors and actresses can.
You have to literally show them doing something in order for them to relate to it.
And the problem is, if you do that, you just get very lazy writing, and you don't even really have characters, because essentially, and you certainly see this with video games too, every character at this point is just a self-insert of the writers.
Oh, see, I'm not a gamer, so I know that you're a big fan of Warhammer 40k, Oh, don't.
See, you did it.
I wasn't going to avoid doing this.
We had a whole show on that.
40K is done because they decided, and poor, I think it's Henry Cavill.
Poor Henry Cavill.
I'll just say this as an aside.
Henry Cavill was, of course, the star of The Witcher, and he's notoriously a lore nerd.
When it comes to these things so he got expelled from The Witcher because The Witcher is based on video game series again never played it but this is just stuff you pick up from cultural osmosis from Twitter from whatever and he always wanted to make sure that the main character behaved in a way consistent with What is put out in the video games and the video games, of course, come from a series of novels, which themselves are based on Polish folklore.
So this is a people's cultural heritage.
It's not something you just kind of mess with.
Well, the writers, of course, want no part of this.
What they want is they want the Witcher to behave.
They want the main character, I should say, to behave the way they want.
And Cavill said, well, we're not doing this.
And so what did the studio again?
If you say entertainment is about making money, you would think they would go with the star.
No, they don't go with the star.
They go with the writers.
Instead, they get rid of Cavill.
So then Cavill moves on to other projects, and he's notorious again for being a huge fan of Warhammer 40k, which is the biggest tabletop game in the world.
Books, video games, movies, you name it.
But there's never really been like a big budget movie, and there's never really been a big budget TV series, certainly.
So he gets the nod to basically make this thing.
I mean, any actor's dream project, basically.
And he says that his favorite faction in this thing, which is going to be meaningless to all of you guys, but he says his favorite faction is this group called the Adeptus Custodes, which are sort of this like super elite force of whatever.
It doesn't matter.
But the point is, they're all male.
And so what is the first thing that happens like six months after this announcement?
They say, oh, actually, there have been girls in this the entire time.
We've had decades of lore.
You've never seen any of them.
We just did this novel series about all this stuff that happened.
Literally 70 novels.
He never saw any girls, but trust us, there have been girls in this thing the whole time.
And it's really hard to resist the idea that they're just doing this to to trash his favorite franchise because They don't want people to actually tell their stories, because at this point with any established IP, again, it's Conquest Third Law.
It sounds like it's just a pop culture nonsense, but this is actually what happens in political institutions and in the law, by the way.
I think the law is one of the best examples where this happens.
People don't actually want to be faithful to any kind of a tradition because what they want to do is they want to tell Their story and make sure that they enhance their reputation within the institution.
Certainly, this is true within the churches.
Mainline, this is the story of mainline Protestantism, certainly over the last hundred years.
You look at these denominations that once defined American culture, fundamentally a Protestant country, and they have just been annihilated.
And even the most conservative denominations have not been able to stand up to this.
The Catholic Church is still holding to dogma, but a lot of people are not going to even forget Vatican II.
So this is a universal trend.
Political distinction.
It's not even a political distinction.
It's not really right versus left.
It's order V chaos and Ultimately chaos wins.
I mean again sounding like a 40k person Ultimately chaos wins B is because it's ultimately about entropy and this is a universal thing this is why history is cyclical and when it comes to culture, I mean, I think this is why I There's this palpable sense, and I don't think this is just us getting old, although we are, because it's actually the younger people who sound more reactionary than we do.
They sound more like stuffy old men than we do.
Yeah.
There's a palpable sense of cultural exhaustion.
There's the sense that there are just no stories that are worth telling anymore, and that the people in Hollywood have forgotten How to tell a story.
And this brings up what I think is probably the last, probably the last IP that, and last film series that may ever be made, which is going to have universal appeal, which of course is The Lord of the Rings.
I'm going to stop you real quick.
Henry Cavill, to his credit, did not get fired.
He actually quit.
He quit, yes.
But he was getting denounced by people on the staff.
Oh, totally.
He was pressured.
Yeah, he basically said that Netflix owns that intellectual, excuse me, that's one of Netflix's big shows and they own the intellectual property.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I think Liam Hemsworth has now taken over.
Can you imagine being Miley Cyrus's ex-husband?
Dude's down bad, man.
Him and Will Smith.
Lowest status Hollywood husband.
Take your ex-wife's name out of my mouth.
It's really fascinating because Henry Cavill, I just want to wrap up before we get to Lord of the Rings because he of course is a guy that I remember seeing play the son of Count Mondego and Count of Monte Cristo and he just stole the show.
You just knew this guy's gonna be a big star and then he got cast as Kal-El in Zack Snyder's very good film, Man of Steel.
I believe he wrote, actually, a very good review of that for Greg Johnson's website, Counter Currents.
And then, of course, DC just did an abomination with the Batman Superman film, and they basically hit reset.
I mean, when you say that there's this exhaustion when it comes to films, they're about to make yet another Superman with another actor.
It's another interpretation.
They basically said, yeah, the world we created with Ben Affleck and Henrik Cavill, that didn't work.
It didn't make enough money, so we're gonna start over.
And there are rumors that Robert Downey Jr.
is gonna reprise the role of Iron Man, and they're gonna create some sort of,
with the multiverse that they have in Disney's Marvel IP, they're gonna be like, oh, we gotta bring him back,
because they've done the same thing with the Marvel.
They basically said, we're going to center the next, uh, next series all around women.
And that they've bombed the, um, the captain Marvel with Brie Larson.
It didn't do that well, but then the sequel came out and it was, it had, uh, a black character, her friend and a black female character and a Muslim character from the, uh, Disney plus series.
I forgot what the show's called.
Movie.
Movie.
It doesn't even matter.
I mean, the point is that you can you can do shows with minority characters that do well.
I mean, the obvious example, of course, is Black Panther, which I think Jared did a video on.
I did a huge article on because it was a bona fide cultural phenomenon.
There was a lot of interesting stuff.
It's a great example, sort of like The Last Samurai.
It's a great example of how Hollywood loves right-wing traditionalist themes,
as long as they're about non-whites.
They're positively reactionary, they're positively fascist, and not even fascist,
they're like a Evolian, Julius Evola, traditionalist god kings,
like is the best form of government, as long as they're non-white.
But the problem is that that's a very, that is at least its own thing.
And there's something pure about that vision.
It's not, you know, something that will necessarily appeal to us, but it's not made for us, so it's not supposed to.
So who cares?
You know, you respect it for what it is.
But when you have something where the only thing that's on offer is subversion, the only thing that's on offer is deconstruction, the only thing is, like, look at this, Chud, there's a woman kicking butt.
Isn't this wacky?
You've never seen anything like this before.
When you've seen it over and over and over again our entire lives, No one is interested in seeing this, not even the leftists.
The only people who are interested in seeing this are journalists and people in academia and people who derive their entire livelihood, if we can call it that, basically from cultural vandalism.
And good point there.
At this point, you see it.
It's pop culture is the best way for people to wrap their heads around it, but it's not significantly different than what we see in more significant fields of cultural life, politics, law, religion.
And if there's one IP that kind of bridges the gap between what I would consider high culture and popular culture and even low culture, it would be Lord of the Rings.
And we should talk about that because, and we should start it by talking about the current Yep.
effort to subvert that, which is of course the rigs of power, which is now coming back, I think,
for season two for Amazon. This is the most expensive television series of all time, I believe.
And the obvious question that everybody is asking is, where did all the money go?
You look at some of the effects in this thing.
I mean, you've, let's back up for a second.
When they made the original Lord of the Rings, when you see guys wearing armor, that's real armor.
Like they actually made armor.
That's hard to do with chain mail and things like that.
You know, these are real swords.
If you've ever seen Braveheart, for example, when you see guys running at the end, the axe heads are like flopping all up and down because these things are made of rubber and you can actually notice it if you're looking for it.
Lord of the Rings, you don't see that.
These things are real.
You can tell when something is CGI or when something is just a prop, but something is real.
With Rings of Power, I mean, you see people's so-called suits of armor crinkling because they're just basically wearing t-shirts.
Everything is cheap.
Everything is secondhand.
Everything is special effects.
And you notice it.
The acting is atrocious.
The characterization is terrible.
Everything is undermined in the service of this kind of girl boss character, which itself is a takedown of a beloved character from the original films and books.
And you ask yourself, why are they doing this?
And the answer is because.
If you can't create you gain status from destroying what somebody else made.
Yep.
And that that is the psychological key and that's also if you believe that the fundamental driver of human behavior as I do is the search for status and you're a mediocrity and you're in a system that only selects for mediocrity.
This is the only thing you can do.
What are they going to do write a new story have a new IP they We're incapable of doing that now.
Yeah.
I mean, again, they've already announced that there's going to be what the search for Smeagol, uh, another, and it's, you know, you, you've basically got the films that came out back in a one Oh two and Oh three and December of Oh one of Oh two and Oh three.
And it's, it's, it's perfection.
I mean, this is a movie series that the SPLC, which just laid off 25% of its employees,
they immediately knew what the movies were.
They denounced them.
And it's actually shocking to think that there weren't more articles
that denounced Lord of the Rings for what they were, for the overt whiteness.
And especially when you consider the great British actor who played Gimli, he came out so vociferously
against what was happening with Muslim immigration in Britain.
There was so much happening in the early 2000s.
Cause that movie came out a couple of months after 9-11.
And I remember just being, just, I didn't know what I was watching
back in December of 2001, when I saw The Fellowship of the Ring.
Because we had never seen anything like that on film.
And to think that they gave the director who had made, I think The Frighteners,
and who had made Dead Alive, this unbelievable.
kind of schlocky 1980s like horror films.
Yeah, and Frighteners is actually a good film with Michael J. Fox, because they showed that film, and that's what New Line New Line Cinema actually realized this guy can do effects, like he can do some of these really cool effects.
That's one of the reasons why he got the movie and, you know, just the making of it is so fascinating because he said, listen, if we make all three back to back to back, we can save a lot of money.
This is going to be huge.
And the guy on set, they were consulting the book as canon to make sure that they were shooting scenes and everything as Tolkien was setting things up.
I mean, watching the making of Yeah, it's remarkable.
You'll never see anything like that again.
You'll never see anything like that again.
The idea of putting the money up front for three movies, the idea of really making all these props and approaching everything with such a sense of devotion, the idea of having an all-white cast, because that actually makes sense.
Given what the story is being told, because again, it's not that they had an all-white cast because they wanted to have an all-white cast.
They had an all-white cast because that's what the story was, and that's what it's being based on.
And, you know, there are non-white characters, and you actually get a glimpse of some of them when you get the invasion from the South.
Later on, you see these kind of, sort of Arab-looking guys coming up.
But I mean this is one of the things that that sort of breaks immersion you see in series now where you're seeing a film that's either a historical film or a thinly veiled you know fantasy film that's a thinly veiled mythological version of the historical past and you have a black and Asian and white.
Pansexual lesbian or they them, whatever it is.
And you just had this grab bag of random people all thrown together and what's supposed to be 14th century Poland.
And you're like, already, you're just like, I'm not, I don't buy this.
And more than that, the people themselves don't buy this.
And I've been searching like crazy for it.
Um, I hope I'm not just going insane here, but I'd, I'd swear to the death that I saw this.
There was the BBC producer talking about.
Their current practice, and we have this kind of image in our head of the BBC with historical dramas that they faithfully remake these sorts of things.
This isn't true anymore.
If you watch a BBC period drama now, it's all mixed in with various actors and actresses and gender swapped and race swapped and everything else.
And the producer said, look, we know this isn't true.
But and we know that we're essentially telling a lie, but it's a noble lie.
Because we're telling a lie about the past because we're trying to create a better present and by telling a lie about the past, we're hopefully making that true in the present because what they're trying to do is convince people that blacks have always had a place and say the British aristocracy.
Or for example, that blacks have always had a place in the Middle Ages in Europe.
You certainly see this even with things like there was a famous video game, which I wrote a thing on American Renaissance for called Kingdom Come Deliverance.
It was the number one video game in like the Czechia, which used to be called the Czech Republic.
And the creator got a huge amount of criticism from Western game developers because he didn't put a bunch of blacks running around in the Holy Roman Empire when he had set this game.
And the guy responded very, very authentically.
And he said, well, I'm making a game rooted in my own country's history.
Who are you to tell me what should be in it?
But that is the atmosphere we work under now.
And when you look at Lord of the Rings, what's interesting about it, it's not just That they stuck to their guns with the story, that they stuck to their guns with the demographics of the casting, but also that they stuck, with a few exceptions, they basically stuck to their guns with the themes.
I mean, this is a traditionalist movie with a capital T. Oh yeah.
There's a YouTube commentator called Philosocat who has had a, you know, past in the nationalist movement and stuff.
I think Janelle Hill's her real name.
She has a good series on this about the traditionalist themes in the Lord of the Rings, and there's a lot to unpack there if you're of that bent.
But if you're not, frankly, you could just watch it as like normal entertainment.
I mean, I remember Watching it with my older boy when he was a few years younger.
And my wife and I, of course, love those films.
And, you know, once a year, we'll watch all three back to back to back.
And, you know, I said, sit down, boy, like we're going to watch this.
And he kind of looked at me like, oh, like, Dad, what are you making me do here?
But he loved it.
And everybody loves it.
And one of the things that you see among the younger generation, especially, is that Somebody made a good post on this where he says, you know, when Gandalf shows up to the Shire for the first time and Frodo runs up and basically greets him, you know, within the first five minutes you feel, and this is this post writing, you feel like you know these people, you feel a connection to these people, you feel like you care about them, you care about what happens to them, and you suddenly have a stake in the story and none of this is being explained to you.
Like, you don't actually know who these people are, who their backgrounds are.
It's a classic case of show, don't tell.
They just don't seem to be able to do this anymore.
And part of it, and I hate to give such a strict ideological reading to it, it makes me feel like some sort of communist censor in the late Soviet Union, but there's no getting away from it.
I think part of it is because... Which would have been a good one, by the way.
That would have been a great one.
I think part of the reason is that People now, you need permission to know what you are and are not allowed to like, because whether you are allowed to relate to a character, whether you are allowed to accept a certain emotion as legitimate, you have to know the sexual background of the character.
You have to know the racial identity.
You have to know the political ideology.
You aren't allowed to just respond to things on a human level because everything has to be parsed through this ideological filter.
That is extraordinarily strict.
And people say things like, well, you know, the real problem is cultural relativism.
This is the most morally stringent society that has ever existed.
I mean, you, if you take a current cultural critic, he can tell you who the absolute 100% good guys and absolute 100% bad guys are in any historical scenario and in a fictional scenario.
And that flows downstream.
And we, that's, that informs how we view anything.
In pop culture or for that matter in academia or in law because everything is who who everything is who not what.
Lord of the Rings is probably the last I don't know big budget film series that got away with it before that kind of iron curtain came down and it sort of grandfathered in.
The only other thing I could think of would maybe be Master and Commander.
Which was also made, which was also made by, uh, well, an Australian director.
Um, I think Peter Weir, I can't, I can't remember his name.
Well, Master and Commander was a standalone, but of course, Master and Commander, that has a Extraordinary reputation and again, what's what's interesting about in this surprised me is there were a number of interesting think pieces on that about the popularity has some new people and Including a lot of leftists including a lot of people who you think would really despise it, you know, sort of the the choppo left irony bros and all this kind of stuff like these guys really get into it too and you say well, why is that and I think it's because
It's one of the few films that lets you just sort of immerse yourself and forget about what you're supposed to be thinking.
You don't, you don't feel that gun at your back.
You don't feel like that, that weight of judgment of what you're expected to say.
You can just sort of be like, okay, these are the things that's happening, that are happening.
This is the world these characters are in.
This is how they're responding to it.
This is the story that's being told.
This is what I think about it.
It's, it's a film that lets you make up your own mind and Very few, maybe none, I don't think any cultural products at this point really give you permission to do that.
Of course, the interesting thing about Master Commander 2 is, what is that famous test about the number of dialogues in a film that come from women that aren't about men?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And there's not a single line of female dialogue in the entire film?
No, there's not.
No, there's not.
And by the way, I found the article you were referring to.
It's in the BBC.
The article came out on January 19th, 2020, with the title, Is it time the all-white period drama was made extinct?
And they talk about how the British cinema was based on these historical dramas and the fact that England has been, up until the 1970s before, The country launched the Enoch Powell denounced reverse colonization of all the former Commonwealth countries.
And it's a fascinating article.
So the article Mr. Hood was referencing is called, if you want to look it up, Go to your Google machine.
It's, uh, is it time the all white period drama was made extinct?
That's in the BBC by Hannah Flint.
Very good article.
And yes, Mr. Hube was correct.
The producer does talk about, and they do use, um, some very explicitly anti-white language to try and describe why they're doing this, why they're subverting English history, um, and, and making, um, white historical characters black.
And of course, I think one of the most egregious examples is in Netflix's, uh, Troy series.
They made Zeus and they made, um, uh, they made, uh, Achilles black.
They made Achilles black when he's of course mentioned in Homer's epic, which is such a, one of my favorite movies, Troy, uh, which again, that's another movie came out in 2004 with Brad Pitt and Eric Bana.
That's a very, except for the fact that the gods are absent, that's a beautiful, adaptation with absolutely no diversity. It's on all white
cast and I would actually argue, you'll laugh at what I'm about to say here,
there's another trilogy that came out in 2002, the first film, that's
actually lambasted all the time for being all white and that's Sam
Raimi's Spider-Man with, oh god what's the guy's name who played Peter Parker,
and that Tobey Maguire. Almost all the, almost every character is white. I
mean they're in Queens. And the famous anti-gay joke that they always go
nuts about now. Yeah it's set in Queens and there's a scene where it's like this high
school.
It's like you're in a 1990s sitcom, Boy Meets World, where there are no non-whites at this high school, except there's this one nebbish science teacher who threatens violence when they're going to Oscorp at the very beginning, which is fascinating because, again, These were made before really the advent of social media completely took over, when you would have to go to Entertainment Weekly to find out any news about movies.
You joke about diversity that was inserted into films.
I remember when Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves came out with Kevin Costner.
He was the biggest star on the planet.
They make this movie, which I think is a very good film, but they actually make, they try and make a logical reason why they inserted a black actor into the film, because otherwise it would just be a bunch of white people.
And it was, this is a character who made a blood oath based on his family.
So we wouldn't desecrate his family because Robin saved him when they were in Jerusalem, when they were in, when they were captives by, um, by, uh, by Saladins by Muslims.
Um, and, uh, He says, you saved me.
I have to return the favor.
So that's the only reason.
That's how they explain the diversity.
Now, of course, they don't have to explain.
You don't need an explanation.
Exactly.
With Lord of the Rings, though, I mean, God, you just have to think back to that time period.
I mean, it's such an amazing cast.
You know, initially, Aragorn was going to be played by a different actor.
And thankfully, Peter Jackson.
Yeah, that's the bullet there.
Early on, he said, this isn't working.
We've got to get this other guy, Viggo Mortensen, who really hadn't made a big film at that point.
I think he had been in G.I.
Jane and a couple of other things.
And they were like, hey, man, will you come do this film?
And he's like, yeah, sure.
I'm in.
And his presence on the screen, and he's a goofy leftist, an absolutely goofy leftist.
But he has now made something that goes beyond anything.
Everything he's done in his career, you have to look back and say, dude, you're Yeah, and he's done some other good stuff.
But I mean, this is one of the keys, though, and this is something we have to think about because there's a debate raging on the online right now where they say The right doesn't make culture because you have this unspeakably god-awful looking show coming out from like Adam Carolla's animated thing that the Daily Wire is putting out.
Yeah, Daily Wire, yeah.
Yeah, it just makes me want to gouge my eyes out.
I hate the word cringe, but that's the definition of cringe, is that trait.
It's because they have to just beat you over the head with this thing.
I mean, you remember when they tried to make a right-wing daily show and stuff like that.
I mean, it's just awful beyond belief.
There's something to be said for the fact that the creatives, if I hate using that cringe term like influencer, but let's go with it for now.
It's always going to be biased toward the left because you're talking about people who are trying to subvert somewhat, but they're also trying to explore new things.
They're trying to put different spins on things.
But the difference is that at that time, even 20 years ago, There was still the sense that there were certain assumptions and there were certain restraints that they had to work within.
And there was only so far that they could go.
For example, if you read about the behavior of actors and actresses during the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, I mean, they were just as degenerate then.
I mean, Catherine Hepburn and all these people, like, these people were not on our side by any stretch of the imagination.
And you'll see people say things like, oh, such and such.
exuded such class, you would never see anything like that now.
It's like, yeah, the reason they exuded such class is because back then,
if they strayed outside the lines and it went public, that was the end of their career.
The difference now is that everything these people do is public.
We all see how stupid and just pig-headed ignorant they are.
I mean, somebody like Robert De Niro, for example, who humiliated himself by going to
Trump's trial and giving this bizarre press conference, which the Biden campaign apparently
thought was a good idea, and then just getting embarrassed by some random heckler.
The idea of De Niro, who had this kind of mystique of, oh, he's this dangerous guy,
this actor who's portrayed all these dark characters.
And then when you see what he actually is, it's oh wait, he's just a moron.
And.
Ultimately, these people are just pretending to be something else, and without the cultural constraints that were once in place, it's not just that you see them for who they truly are, and therefore any mystique or romance or anything or charisma to these people are kind of stripped away.
It also impacts the work, which I think is the more critical point, which is that They can no longer faithfully tell a story.
They can no longer relate to being a character who's somebody different and who has different motivations than what they themselves have now.
And the idea of understanding somebody who's not some sexually degenerate 21st century shitlib, it's something that they're intellectually incapable of now.
I mean, maybe the biggest thing, I mean, not that this is a bit outside our wheelhouse in terms of the issues we talk about here, but if we wanted to talk about the one thing that really changed things, that sort of took the cultural guardrails off, it was probably gay marriage.
Because that sort of opened up, because now all personal behavior became a question of individual liberation.
There were no longer any standards for what was considered respectable and what was not.
And of course, because there's always going to be an orthodoxy, it flipped very quickly.
And then it became, if you, yeah, if you, so certainly if you were like in a faithful marriage, you were the freak, you were the fascist, you were the authoritarian.
And that eventually bleeds over onto the screen where, I mean, you sort of see this and I'd like to invite the audience, for example, like when you see a television show, when you see a film, if you see a character who seemingly has a happy marriage, you're waiting for the other shoe to drop.
You're waiting for this guy to be revealed as a sexual pervert, as a murderer, as having something going on, because that's how it always is portrayed.
There's never just a normal guy who happens to be conservative and is faithful to his wife.
You just don't see that anymore.
And the reason is because that is coded as authoritarian and therefore evil.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, I'm surprised there hasn't been some look at like home improvement,
which in my opinion is such a wonderful, that's like the last great sitcom
where Tim Allen's character was masculine and he loved his wife, he loved his kids.
And you know, there was a, if you watch episodes now, I remember when I was, you know,
growing up, born in the mid 80s, you would watch, I'd watch it with my family
and always be uncomfortable because Jill and Tim, the character, the Taylors,
they had a very playful sexual marriage.
And there's a lot of sexual jokes that as a kid, you just don't get, but at the same time,
it's a loving marriage and it's about a guy who is raising a very good family.
And he then of course famously made Last Man Standing where they kind of tried to remake Home Improvement
where it was set in Denver instead.
And it's, you know, you can't do it.
You can't do it.
It didn't have the magic.
But at the same time, it had a lot of the really goofy tropes that conservatives have.
But there were some good episodes where they made fun of, you know, diversity for diversity's sake.
And of course, it famously got moved from ABC to Fox.
And it lasted just a couple more seasons.
But at the same time, going back to what you're talking about, the gay marriage thing, I completely agree with that, because Entertainment Weekly, you and I were, again, we were ensconced, entrenched in Conservatism Inc., and I'd always be trying to bring it up to people, we need to cover what Entertainment Weekly's covering, because they're bragging about how entertainment was what led to the acceptance of gay marriage.
They've got a timeline here.
They've got a timeline where they're bragging about, well, we went from Ellen, an episode of Ellen where she came out as a homosexual, That was like on the cover of Time or something like that.
the girl from Jurassic Park. I can't think of the actress's name.
That was like on the cover of Time or something like that.
I mean, that was how big a deal was. And of course, at the time, she lost all her
popularity, but she waited a couple years, about a decade to come back. And then she was this
icon, this individual who was iconoclastic, who was the, who was, I'm going to, she
kicked the door in, she made it safe for all of us. And then they had the moments where it went
from Dawson's Creek.
I remember, I hated that show.
I just instinctively knew, why do people watch this?
Like, there's just something bad about this.
And then one of the characters came out as gay, and yet again, that's a moment where, okay, we're getting representation.
Yeah, that was really where the poison came in, because the idea of a gay character, for example, I mean, obviously you'd seen that in entertainment before.
I mean, Dog Day Afternoon or stuff like that.
You could think of some iconic films and television shows that had things like this.
The idea of the purpose of—and again, this bleeds into the way social justice or the social gospel became the purpose of religion, rather than the teaching about theological truth, for example.
The idea that the purpose of entertainment is not to entertain or to tell a story, but to provide representation to underrepresented groups.
Well, once you've done that, then the only reason to become a screenwriter, the only reason to tell a story, is to achieve this political end.
And the only reason to be an actor or an actress is to hold the banner up for your underrepresented group, and frankly, if you're not very talented or don't bring anything to the table, well, what you can always do is you can identify as one of these quote-unquote underrepresented groups.
And I think one of the reasons you see this kind of installs are for Lord of the Rings.
It's not just because objectively.
It's a well-made trilogy of films objectively because the other films in that IP were not as good and television show now is abominable and everything that comes after it is going to be worse.
It's not just because that the story itself has such deep roots in the Western soul because Tolkien I mean, this is about He had broached in a letter, and he didn't actually say it.
You see this quote thrown around, but he had said that he had been toying with the idea of creating a national mythology for England.
And he didn't say that this is what the Lord of the Rings is.
He said that he was thinking about that.
But it's pretty close.
If you look at the other things that he wrote, he briefly, he almost wrote this thing about King Arthur.
There's sort of an incomplete King Arthur work that he did.
He has his version of Beowulf.
He has all the writings he did on Anglo-Saxon as a language.
Now we're in a time where Anglo-Saxon as a field has been renamed in England because the very term Anglo-Saxon is perceived as offensive.
That's right.
To speak of the most important founding group, the thing that makes England, England, as opposed to Britain, that area of Britain anyway, that is too offensive for the English themselves.
That's how deracinated this people is.
That's how defeated and conquered this people is.
And so when you see some glimpse of what they once were, as if in a dream, as if in this fictionalized setting though, You relate to it.
And people who are of other peoples relate to it because you want to see the best in each people.
I mean, I think that one of the reasons that the Lord of the Rings struck such a chord with so many people is that, at some level, it's what white people wanted to see themselves as.
And this is what the SPLC condemned at the time.
They called it Eurocentric because they said, this is giving a positive image of European history and heroes and this is a bad thing because we don't want people to be proud of themselves.
We want people to be ashamed of themselves.
Don't you want to see the Matrix instead where you have the multiracial hero beating up the white male bad guys?
And I mean that was direct from the articles at the time and at the time people kind of ignored this but now that's all entertainment and there's no way even if you could somehow I mean certainly for the reasons that we talked about the actors and the actresses and everybody involved.
Would not participate in such a project.
I'm sure they would like apologize for it.
It's grandfathered in, but they would apologize for it now.
Here's the great thing, Mr. Hood, is that unlike someone like, say, Molly Ringwald, who is famous for the John Hughes films, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, who has now come out and denounced John Hughes for not having a more diverse cast.
You know, John Hughes in the 80s, he also made Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
He wrote He wrote Home Alone.
He, you know, John Hughes is brilliant.
He's one of, I love watching those films.
Planes, trains, automobiles.
And they're about white people, because that's what he knew.
Midwestern white people.
The kind of people that you want as your neighbors.
The kind of people you want to be as the bedrock of your community.
The kind of people who used to live in a city like Dearborn, Michigan.
Yeah, the kind of people, yeah.
And he would show the different socioeconomic backgrounds of all these characters.
And it was set with teen angst.
And Molly Ringwald came out recently and she denounced the films.
She said they need to be remade with diverse casts.
And they will be, it's just like- And no one will watch them and no one will care.
No one will watch them.
People will still go out and they'll seek Matthew Broderick's, you know, Ferris Bueller's Day Off,
or they'll wanna go see, you know, Ducky and all the characters in Pretty in Pink,
because the music's so great.
Those are great films.
And to their everlasting credit so far, I don't think we've seen any of the actors
who played in Lord of the Rings come out and denounce the movies.
Well, like I said, I mean, it's just a question of, It's already, they're too well established to be dislodged, but they will be dislodged at some point, just not yet.
And one of the things that we should point out before we wrap up here is one of the reasons we are talking about this now is relatively recently Bernard Hill, who played Theoden, recently died.
And I don't want to call him a character actor, I mean he He had a huge career and was in all sorts of films, but if there was a type, certainly in his later career, it was basically the older male authority figure with a tragic fate.
I mean, he was, for example, the captain of the Titanic, and that was probably the other role that a lot of people of our age group would remember him from.
But the interesting thing about Theoden, and this also goes for Boromir, this goes for some of the other guys in Lord of the Rings, that The characters that people relate to the most strongly are not necessarily Aragorn, who's pretty much the ideal of, like, you know, the male archetype of the hero.
I mean, that is what he is, and that's what he's supposed to be.
Yeah, Strider.
Right, Strider.
And even that, there is some subtle deconstruction there.
In the books, for example, he's not so, oh, I don't want to be king.
I mean, he's much more willing to take up his responsibility.
It's just that we have this, This norm so established in our culture now that seeking power or seeking your birthright is automatically bad.
I have to interject there because there are two versions of Lord of the Rings and the one I'm actually I want to talk about because we only got a few minutes left here.
There were for each of the films that came out Mr. Hood 30 to 45 minutes of footage cut and there's the ultimate additions of all films
and I would argue that a lot of the stuff that was cut of Aragorn story actually reinforces what you just said the
most beautiful scene in the entire trilogy in my opinion is When they go in the first film Fellowship of the Ring we
choose the statues. Well, no, no, he didn't see the statues That's great
But this is in a cutscene that's in the Ultimate Edition where he goes to his mother's grave.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
He removes all of the debris, all of the vegetation, all the growth off, and he's looking at his mother.
And, oh God, the guy from The Matrix who played Agent Smith, I can't think of his name right now.
Oh, Elrond?
Elrond.
Elrond walks up and says, you know, your mother protected you because she knew you always would be hunted until you took your rightful place.
And he's saying, you know, you understand your place.
You understand your ancestry.
You understand why you were born and what you represent, the last of your line.
And your mother came here.
You were raised here to protect you.
It's one minute and 50 seconds, if that.
And it's such a beautiful thing, because it's when he really has to start thinking.
Because in the theatrical release, you know, it's like, who is this character?
And, you know, there's that unveiling when Boromir is told Sean Bean's great character.
By Legolas of, you know, who he is and his ancestry.
But it's that scene.
It's one of the most touching scenes in any movie because, you know, we all have mothers and we all have our great memories of them.
But this is the first time he's been there and he sees her grave.
And it's that just powerful reminder of what she sacrificed and why she sacrificed for him.
Because, again, as Elrond says, she knew you'd always be hunted.
And at some point, the hunter must, you know, The hunter, uh, the hunted must become the hunter and must take their rightful aim.
And I think that's what the whole, you know, the series.
And again, you're right.
We decided to talk about this a couple of weeks ago when that great actor passed away.
And, and, you know, I remember when I was in college, I couldn't wait to get the DVD, uh, in 2003 of The Two Towers because he has so many poetic, beautiful speeches where he talks about how did it come to this, you know, the days that come down in the West and then, you know, There's a scene where they decide to ride out and meet them, you know, for death and glory.
No, for Rohan, for your people.
And I remember thinking to myself, you do not hear this type of language used in a film.
It's for your people.
And the same thing with Boromir when he's dying.
Viggo Mortensen's character Aragorn says, you know, I don't know what I am, but, you know.
You know, you died for your people.
And Borneo realizes our people, you know, because they're from both different lands.
And it's, it's this idea of, you know, it's what ethnocentrism means, but in a positive meaning, it's what the European Union should be.
It's that's what the Lord of the Rings is representing.
And that's those few scenes, they're so subtle, but you watch them, and the impact they have emotionally, because it's like, there's no other film where We're putting the interests of our people, our posterity, our ancestry, our history.
That's what matters.
And death, that's what matters.
It's your honor, it's your valor, it's your courage.
And standing up for that in the face of all odds.
And I mean, my God, that's why those movies are so powerful to me, because they speak in a racial language that's atavistic.
And Just beautiful.
And so, uh, I would, I would argue that if you watch the, you know, I think, I think it would take, uh, probably 11 hours to watch all three with all the, uh, Peter Jackson stuff that was cut just to make them theatrical, uh, theatrically, uh, uh, appetizing to be able to sit there and watch.
Uh, it's a powerful story when everything's, everything's added, but you're right.
That scene you're talking about when they see those statues again, it's like, you're like, Oh my God, There are greatness walked before us and we must honor that greatness.
Yeah.
Sacrifices.
I always kind of related to that scene not because lineage of a king or anything like that but certainly If you if you're walking a battlefield that we forget how old like America really are.
It really is.
I mean this country for all intents and purposes existed since the 17th century.
I mean since Jamestown and you know, I went to school and William & Mary second oldest country second oldest college in the country.
And so, you know, you'd see these places and you would see, you know, this is where Patrick Henry gave a speech and this is where George Washington went to church and this is where all these things these are where all these things happened and You walk around and every once in a while, every once in a while, you'll be in some place and you'll see some neglected corner of something.
So, for example, when I was living in West Virginia, I was, my then girlfriend, now wife, were walking around and we somehow just kind of blundered into this battlefield and we found these Confederate graves that had just basically been ignored and just kind of, you know, Brush the stuff off, sort of like, uh, Eric Groen with his mother.
We're looking at him.
And I don't think they were, like, abandoned.
I don't think, you know, obviously some park service or whatever knows they're there, but it was the turning of the seasons.
Obviously nothing had been done over the winter, so we're looking at him.
As you think about the people who gave their lives for certain ideas, or certain ideas of country, or certain ideas of the people, and how the people who live in this place now Just have no recollection of it whatsoever, because very few of them have any real roots to this place.
I mean, certainly where I'm sitting now, it's making me think about it because, I mean, half the people I've seen here in Dearborn, they can't be here for more than a decade, and certainly don't care about the place in any significant way.
But they're more American than you are.
Yeah, they're better than we are.
And the interesting thing is that there are certain moments in Lord of the Rings where you get this kind of This idea of the cyclical nature of history, but also the the the idea of renewal.
So, for example, again, in that first one, I think it may have been a deleted scene, but they're one of the statues certainly hits home now in a way that didn't then.
There's a statue of a great king of Gondor that has been decapitated, and the orcs have put like a stone, like a mutilated orc head on the statue, and the king's head is lying on the ground, decapitated.
They kind of look at it glumly and they walk past and then the Sun comes out and Sam stops Frodo and says look because when the Sun comes out the flowers on the head appear like a crown and it kind of looks like a crown for a second and then the Sun moves behind a cloud or sets or whatever and then it kind of goes away but just for one second you'd get sort of this glimpse of what was and what could be again the dream of what was and what could be as the If we want to get into 80s movies, there's the great film Excalibur, right?
As King Arthur says, yes, that's definitely going to be a thing at some point.
But one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this real quickly in light of the death of Bernard Hill is that that character particularly, I mean, I think this is more for older people, but There's this inferiority complex that Theoden has throughout the whole film, because when we see him, of course, he's down bad.
He's been basically crippled by bad advice from Wormtongue and spells from Saruman, so he's weak, he's a shadow of his former self, he doesn't even know that his son has died, things aren't registered to him, and he's basically healed, for lack of a better word.
Exorcised, yeah.
That poison was drawn from a wound.
I think the demon is exorcised from him, so to speak.
And then he leaves his people in the battle, but as he himself points out, he's not really the one who saves the day.
Ultimately, he doesn't get his true redemption until the very, very end, when he dies in battle.
And then he says, now I go to the halls of my fathers, in whose mighty company I shall now not feel ashamed.
Yes, yes, yes.
And I think older, a lot of older men that you see walking around now, I've just noticed this with older guys, people not of our generation, but like 20 years older, really related to that character because there was this sense of, for a lot of them they didn't fight in a war, They didn't or maybe they were a bit too young for Vietnam
or something like that or maybe they didn't believe in it then and have second thoughts about it now.
Uh, too too young for the Persian Gulf for some for first Gulf War and they have this this sense that they're they're
missing something and.
That I think is why that character struck home to so many people in the same way that I think Boromir struck home to
a lot of people are age.
You know where you have this kind of the young kind of gregarious guy who this is like what guys want to act like but he still fails because he lets his ego get in the way of everything.
But he still you know goes out like a champ.
One of the best deaths ever.
I think that What really is being brought home, especially with the character of Theoden, it's the core thing that people now are really looking for, which is that something that was really brought home, I think, in Fight Club, which to me is like the proto-alt-right movie, there is no Great War.
There's no Great Depression.
Our Great War is a spiritual war.
Our Great Depression is our lives, where you have this sense that the culture has moved on past you, that the things that you were made to do, that the things that you want to do, you're not allowed to do. And so therefore everybody is
just sort of drowning.
Yeah, existing. And when people see these opportunities to do something, perhaps
recklessly, as certainly a lot of people have done in terms of right-wing politics,
They rush forward and they try to seize it because they want to be a hero, because they want to do these things.
And this is the last point I want to make with Lord of the Rings, and it reminds me a lot, particularly with this idea of looking to pass greatness, it reminds me a lot of when you'll see somebody like Joe Biden, say, appeal to something like the American Revolution.
And you say everything that these guys did, it's not just that it has nothing to do with the system we live under now, it's diametrically opposed.
Everything these guys did, it's their beliefs, their very beliefs, forget the tactics they used, their very beliefs are illegal.
In every country of the west. Yeah, you would not be you would not be allowed to have a job for 10 seconds
People say like well, what would george washington do today?
He'd be thrown in jail for life and that's all that would happen
And you know everybody under the sun would denounce him as like a crazy lunatic who should be killed
Like that's what would happen. You there are no heroes of our past that can be looked to as heroes
and This process repeats with every generation if things keep
going the way they are going It's not that previous the generation after this is going
to look at joe biden as a hero They're going to say, well, he might have saved us from that fascist Donald Trump, but he's Genocide Joe and he's actually just as evil when you get down to it.
But, you know, this person we have in charge now is good.
And then 20 years later, they'll be the fascist oppressor.
And so we constantly are just ripping our own guts apart as a society over and over again as we remake ourselves.
That's what's happening in the cultural sense, that's what's happening in the political sense,
and in entertainment that's even what's happening because it seems like such a flippant example, but
when you see something like this that's almost a cultural survival, a holdover from what seems
like a previous age, you know, the dawning of the third age or something like that,
this was only 20 years ago.
And yet it's something that could never be made now, could never be made again, not just in terms of the values that it puts forward, but because it requires a level of intelligence and nuance and skill that is literally impossible now.
And we'll never come again without almost incalculable cultural change.
Yeah, it's funny you say that because three years ago, almost to the date, May 30th, 2021, that's when it was announced that there was going to be this Amazon show.
I mean, Jeff Bezos had had, I think he put out, I think he put up A quarter of a billion dollars just to buy a court.
Yeah, I think he put up like 250 million dollars just to just on this show alone.
And the rights were also he had to pay the the Tolkien estate unbelievable amounts, hundreds of millions.
And there was an article in Hollywood Insider, the all white Lord of the Rings, a continuing lack of diversity.
And it's just again, it's just one of these articles that just bemoans the fact that the that the Lord of the Rings trilogy existed, that it was made and that it was made and that is perceived as Probably the greatest, probably the greatest three films that have ever been made.
I mean, you know, Return of the King won an Academy Award for Best Picture, basically as a, hey, we made a mistake not giving this for Two Towers.
And oh, yeah, probably for Fellowship, too.
All three of these films should have won, should have swept the awards those three years.
And it was basically, hey, Peter Jackson, this is an apology to you.
Yeah, this film, you've made something that will stand, not only stand the test of time, but in a lot of ways is a myth that Is gonna replace other myths, you know, I think as our
cynical age begins to change and like you've said people Understand that their lives what exactly have they lived
for and then and then they see in film, you know You are inspired by this, you know, there are so many
people who have this very Ludicrous view of movies and they think oh, that's not highbrow
entertainment, you know, come on go read a book go read go read Homer
You know, it's like it's a good what are you talking about?
This is the language of all people.
This is the kind of stuff that actually, unfortunately, it's what unites us and it's what we all see and it's what we perceive.
It's culture.
It's what you have to interact with.
I mean, God, just go be a Ludite somewhere and just don't watch anything.
Just, you know, just read your old books and pretend that that's reality.
The reality is we live in a country, we live in a nation, we live in a society that is dominated by one strain of thought, and that's anti-whiteness.
And when you see a film like Lord of the Rings, I mean, even Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy,
Mr. Hood, has been attacked for not having enough diversity.
That's one of the reasons why in the Batman that just came out with Robin Pattinson, everyone
was like, oh, wow, they've added a lot of diversity.
They've made they've made Catwoman black.
And they add the line about white privilege.
And they add the line about white privilege.
And so again, it's anything that's made that is too white is illegitimate in the eyes of our cultural betters
And so, again, it's it's anything that's made that is too white is illegitimate in the eyes
of our cultural betters and our gatekeepers.
and our gatekeepers.
And that's why we're talking about Lord of the Rings today, because again, we got to see in this film
And that's why we're talking about Lord of the Rings today, because, again, we got to
what could be if, again, and it wasn't made as explicitly right wing.
It's not, it's made by people who were just making an adaptation faithful to Tolkien,
because again, every day they would consult the book.
They would consult the book to be like, Are we doing the scene right?
You know, what, what are we trying to shoot today?
What are the dailies?
What are we trying to accomplish today?
Cause if you've ever been around a movie set, you know, basically you're sitting around the whole time as the producers are setting up the shots to make sure the light looks great.
Uh, you, the actors are basically just reading the lines and they're, they're barely doing anything.
Um, and a lot of times they're not even acting with the other actors.
They're just doing their, their shot, um, on the screen, uh, right in front of the camera.
But again, It's, it's, it's all these parts made this whole of this, this film and you know, Mr. Hood all in with another scene that I think is one of the great scenes is when they decide to take the fight to Sauron and, um, Saruman, I'm sorry.
There's a sort of, I can't, it's, it's late.
Sauron, Sauron.
Yeah.
It's at the very end and you know, it's for Frodo.
That's the reason why, you know, he gives the great speech, stand men of the West, Aragorn.
And it's when, The ring has been taken to Mount Doom and they realize it's over and it's the look as they watch the tower fall.
It's, again, it's my second favorite scene in the film where all the characters, they've all sacrificed so much in their lives.
Gandalf has battled so much.
Legolas and all these other bit actors who have stood by the king and decided to do this just suicidal mission for Frodo and for Sam to be able to their duty. And so the eye of Sorin is not on is not on is
not on Sam and and and Frodo as they're doing their their their trek. And it's the scene
where they realized it was successful that they're that they're that they're last
ditch effort after saving saving the white city was successful. Now they've made this other
sacrifice and they're seeing it happen. They're watching. It's almost astonishing to
them. It's almost as if is this actually happening. And I think in a lot of ways that is that's the
look that we have to strive for in our role. We might not get to see the day when we
win. We are going to win. We are going to win. And it is going to be something that is so
catastrophic to to the left because we have to win once. And it's just like that. Yeah, we just
we just go. We just got to win once.
And that's the beautiful thing about that scene because they realized all and then of course the other hobbits realize what that means because in Mount Doom it's blowing up.
That Frodo and Sam are in trouble, and the first thought they have is not to victory, but it's to their fellow members of the Fellowship, and how do we save them?
And I think that encapsulates so much about the love and the bond that you have as men fighting for something that's beyond you, both past, present, and future.
And that's, I think, the scene that really is what we have to strive for, because we won't know what victory looks like.
When it happens, we will.
And then it's, it's, it's, we only have to win once and that's, that's what that film shows.
And then that great scene where they all reunite and they're just laughing and it's like, did this just happen?
And you know, it's, it's, it's yeah, I come on and watch the movie.
I think that's a, I think that's a good word.
Good place to end it.
All we got to do is get there.
So I'm Gregor Hood.
Thank you, Paul Kersey.
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