Because the subject has come up several times with a variety of 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, two weeks ago I wrote a long discussion on the need for and difficulties involved with implementing reparations for several of America’s past and current mistakes, and sins against its people.
So in summary, we’ve had 250 years of chattel racial slavery, followed by 100 years of racial terrorism and lynchings, sharecropping, black codes, Jim Crow, segregation, poll taxes, literacy tests, and the denial of voting rights. This was followed by another 50 years of a racially biased police and criminal justice system; red-lining; housing, lending, and job discrimination; voter suppression; white-flight; re-segregation; and a rapidly increasing wage and wealth gap.
And frankly, as bad as this is, the injustice and crimes that America rendered upon our Native American population is actually far, far worse than any of this and certainly should be addressed as well.
Reparations aren’t just about slavery itself (which again, didn’t technically end in 1868). It’s about all of this, all of these various issues of continued racial injustice and violence which have spanned more than 400 years.
Many people pointed out that this would likely spark a major backlash and that pushing this issue would likely guarantee a second term for Donald Trump. In reponse, I wrote a piece on the history of affirmative action, which documented how insufficient it has been as a form of reparations. Still, affirmative action has generated its own fairly rabid backlash and resistance during the past 50 years.
This week I will examine how even the smallest attempt to balance the scales, or even the most minor public statement by either a lawmaker or a movie star, can spark a virulent backlash—or white-lash if your prefer—of anger, umbrage, and outrage, which is completely out of all reasonable whack.
If they’re going to distort your position and come after you for being too #woke; being openly in support of #Black Lives Matter and #MeToo; admitting to being a #Social Justice Warrior (SJW); or supporting reparations, you might as well get ready for the white-lash and buckle up.
It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
In the last few weeks we've had a massive right-wing attack in progress against freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar, for what was a supposedly “anti-Semitic” tweet that she posted. But almost no one has reported the full context of the tweet.
On Sunday night, Omar was responding to a tweet from prominent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who said, "Equating [Omar and Tlaib's] criticism of Israel to Steve King's long defense of white supremacy is obscene (McCarthy said it's worse). In the US, we're allowed to criticize our own government: certainly foreign governments. The GOP House Leader's priorities are warped."
In response to Greenwald's post, Omar tweeted, "It's all about the Benjamins baby," followed by a music emoji, which suggested that money was calling the tune for McCarthy.
When asked to explain where the money she was referring to came from, Omar tweeted: "AIPAC."
An Omar spokesman said the tweets "speak for themselves."
Rep. Omar was quite literally responding to a post that specifically said that criticizing a government for its policy is vastly different from being a bigot, and the issue of the “GOP Leadership priorities being warped.”
When she said, "It's all about the benjamins, baby,” she was saying why those priorities were warped. Later when she was asked who specifically was "warping priorities” in regard to Israel, she answered "AIPAC," which is quite frankly true. The entire point of lobbyists is to warp policy toward the goals of their clients. Saying this in public doesn't at all seem controversial; if she was asked who is warping policy in regard to drug prices, the obvious answer if PhRMA. But since AIPAC’s clients are largely Jewish, this suddenly became an anti-Semitic trope and critics called for Omar to be thrown off her committees just as Rep. Steve King was thrown off of congressional committees, even though what he said was “When did white supremacy become a bad thing?”
Like, since always, man.
Pardon me while I digress into pop-culture parallels, because after this there was an enormous backlash when actress Brie Larson had the temerity to express an opinion.
The Oscar award-winning actress advocated for more diversity during a speech given at Wednesday night’s Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards in Los Angeles by citing data from USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. According to the study, in 2017, only 2.5% of top critics were women of color, while 80% of film critics who reviewed the year’s top box-office movies were male. To highlight her point, Larson referenced A Wrinkle in Time‘s critical reception.
“I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time,” Larson said. “It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.”
For the record, Brie Larson wasn’t even in Ava Duverney’s (Selma, 13th) science fiction/fantasy adventure A Wrinkle in Time.
She clearly wasn’t saying this about her own new movie, Captain Marvel. She was simply saying that widening the pool of reviewers, from being 80 percent male to include some women of color on a movie that features Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Resse Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling might be a good thing.
Totally and deliberately misunderstanding her point (just as Rep. Omar was misconstrued), a gang of trolls descended onto Rotten Tomatoes before Captain Marvel’s premiere to argue how they now didn’t want to see Captain Marvel because Brie Larson said “she didn’t want white guys” to see her movie, even though that’s not even close to what she said about having more female and POCs review movies that feature mostly females and POCs.
Even though Larson went on a short “apology tour” to explain that she didn't hate all white men, for some people it was already far too late. Conservative publications like the Washington Examiner were more than eager to twist her words.
As the actress embarks on a publicity tour for the first female-led Marvel movie, Brie Larson has a message for white males: Move to the back of the line.
The Oscar winner said she picked Keah Brown to interview her for a recent Marie Claire profile because the journalist has cerebral palsy and is a woman of color. That’s commendable. Less so is Larson’s posturing.
“About a year ago,” Larson explains in the interview, “I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male.”
Yes, I think 80 percent would be overwhelming.
And then you have people who had to run up and defend this wrong-headed attitude by claiming that those who had noticed and were complaining about the troll comments were “exaggerating” or somehow “lying” about the film being “review bombed” on RT.
People like Gary Beekler of Nerdrodic.com.
Yes, technically these weren't reviews, because the film hadn’t been released for review yet. These were comments and posts about whether people wanted to see the film, and a surprising number of people got that simple fact wrong. However, the argument that none of the posts were bigoted or sexist is also just as wrong because some the examples Beekler included above were some of the following, which he totally denied are sexist. But they absolutely are.
nigel b — as a white male I don’t think Brie would want me watching this movie.
Sara p — Marvel execs are bragging that Captain Marvel is “the most powerful Hero” in the Marvel Universe. [They said “Cinematic Universe” and technically that’s true because there are stronger heroes who are still only in the comics, but not that many.] This guarantees that she's going to be a total Mary Sue. Disney already killed the Star Wars movie franchise. This looks like this will be the fist [sic] nail in the Marvel Coffin. Not interested in seeing anther SJW propaganda film. Hopefully, Captain Marvel doesn’t take down Avengers 4 with it.
— Tired of all this SJW nonsense.
— Not interested in supporting Brie Larson’s agenda.
J P — I somehow feel that the Skrull is not the enemy. I am sine Brie Larson has been careful to state she doesn’t want the Press Tour to include guys like me.
She didn’t say anything like that.
Joseph U — Larson has made it clear, men need not attend this movie.
Kevin P — Brie Larson has already said this isn’t for me. I’ll spend my money elsewhere.
She was talking about reviewers for a Wrinkle in Time, who also represented the voice of the main characters of that film, not Captain Marvel.
Here are some of the top Ccmments from Beekler’s YouTube page.
Brie Larson doesn't want white males to see it and I was taught to respect women so I'm going to respect her request and not see it.
I think I'll just see Alita again
So the people who watched Wonder Woman but don't want to watch Captain Marvel... Sexist. This is our reality now. This is it. Thanos save us.
I've been taught as a latino never to look down on someone because of race or sex. Brie Larson is both racist and sexist at a disgusting level. I'll never watch anything she is in.
If they leave politics out of it would probably be a good movie. I couldn't care less if there's a female lead role. I just hate politics in Hollywood
marvel looks and sounds boring. But, rotten bananas will give it a 100% score, while audience's score will be around 50-60%.For example, Alita Battle Angel's AUDIENCE's score is 94%, because it's a good movie.
Alita Battle Angel..Awesome Movie according to AUDIENCE (female lead)! Attacked by critics and above all things jealous feminists complaining about her android body having breasts!!😩 smh Lets be real....Its gotten to the point that if a movie is not about, girl power, man bashing, subservient weak males, borderline lesbian, sjw and feminist rhetoric, the movie gets attacked by rotten tomatoes and angry feminists, EVEN IF THE MOVIE IS GREAT! What has this world become!!
In true SJW fashion, Capt Rich White Woman asks other people to pay for her activism.
Men and boys need to boycott this film. Hit Hollywood where it hurts them, in the Wallet.
Let's see.. men are the majority of comic buyers, are upper 30 to mid 50s, have expendable income, watch these movies, take their families... let's run them off.
Following this, Rotten Tomatoes completely removed the "Want to See" comment feature from their entire site. It was a fairly drastic move—but it didn't help. It just made the haters spin a big corporate conspiracy theory about the “access media” that would give positive reviews and spin to studios who have a corporate connection to their publication. For example, CBS owns TV Guide, so that automatically makes any TV Guide review of CBS programming, like Star Trek: Discovery, suspect of simply being shill work. The same goes for professional reviewers who work for other companies that want to maintain their access to early premieres and so on. You see, it’s all one big corporate conspiracy.
That perfectly explains why Captain Marvel has a professional reviewer Rotten Tomatoes score of 79 percent, and a public review score of 62 percent. Or maybe it doesn’t.
I see this entire false narrative of pitting other female-led action movies—such as Alita or Wonder Woman—against this one as a fairly familiar defensive trope for bigots. It’s divide-and-conquer, pitting one woman against another. “Why can’t you be more like Bethany, she doesn’t complain?” “I don’t hate all women leads in every movie, I like these over here—see?” And if they could just have Lynn Patten stand behind them while they said it, that would be perfect.
This next video takes that trope to Warp Factor 10, even if sardonically.
As you’ll notice, he uses examples from Aliens and Terminator 2. Those are both sequels to previous films where the lead female actress spent the entire movie running away from the deadly antagonist like a scared rabbit, only to just barely survive after all the male leads had already been killed by finally pulling herself together and reaching depths she didn't believe she was capable of. They were plucky and all that.
The second parts in both of these movie series show that, eventually, they've embraced that inner confidence and power in a new, fully formed way (and not exactly without some considerable PTSD). In Aliens, Ripley steps up big time after all of her Marine Security team is killed in order to save a young girl who reminds her of her own daughter who, as shown in a deleted scene, has passed away from old age while she slumbered in hyper-sleep, so she grabs some of their weapons and goes after the aliens in a way that the first film couldn’t have conceived, and wouldn't have been believable. Sarah Connor, who spent the first Terminator movie as a frightened waitress in Los Angeles, has practically turned herself into a human Terminator in the second film, sacrificing everything—even some of her emotional health—in a mad plan to save, protect, and train her son John Connor, who is reportedly destined to save humanity in the future.
Further, both of these movies were made by James Cameron. Like George Lucas before him with Princess Leia, Cameron did have an agenda of trying to highlight and portray strong women as action heroes. He basically did it again with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Abyss; to some extent with Rose in Titanic;, with Jamie Lee Curtis, who goes from a housewife to a secret super spy like her husband in True Lies; and obviously with Zoe Saldana as the lead Navi character in Avatar. Now he’s done it with Alita: Battle Angel, which after all this time shouldn’t be surprising in the least.
Lucas and Cameron largely planted the seed, but it’s also true that the Red Sonja movie wouldn't have happened without the success of Conan: The Barbarian, and Xena Warrior Princess wouldn't have been on the air if she hadn’t been introduced in Hercules.
Creating a strong female super anti-hero was exactly the entire point of Kill Bill, which you will note doesn’t openly reveal the main character’s real name until the second movie and actually names a guy—Bill—in the title and not her. Tarantino also did this sort of female anti-hero again with Jackie Brown.
All of these films were part of exactly the agenda that these guys are now saying shouldn't be allowed today.
However, the real truth of all this is that it’s not really about female or POC lead characters. What all of this noise is about is that white guys are feeling threatened. White guys are losing their shit because they feel dissed and dismissed. How dare anyone make a movie like A Wrinkle in Time, where the white guy demographic honestly isn’t the target audience?
How dare someone do any movie at all that doesn’t have an Awesome White Man—let’s just call them AWM for short—in it somewhere? Having a strong female—an Awesome White Woman (AWW)—or an Awesome Black Woman (ABW) if you want to add a little spice and cayenne pepper to things, or even an Awesome Black Man (ABM) is just fine with these guys.
They don’t really mind if the lead character is an AWW, ABW or ABM. That’s totally okay. Honestly, it really is. What’s really getting their goat is the idea that in order to promote any of those other guys and gals and make them look good, you have to do a movie without any AWMs in it. They figure that means that you’re putting white guys down in order to build other people up. You gotta have an AWM to keep things “balanced,” otherwise it’s a sign that you must be afraid of “toxic masculinity” and just can’t stop yourself from constantly flogging a gender agenda. If you don’t have a least a single AWM in the project, it's obviously suspect. If all the white men in the project are weak, stupid, incompetent, generally awful, or just too Beta (BWM), then these guys will grow livid with outrage.
How dare you make white guys look bad!
Consequently, they happen to like Wonder Woman just fine and don't feel threatened because it had an AWM: Chris Pine as Steve Trevor. Black Panther had an AWM: Martin Freeman as CIA Agent Everett Ross. Alita: Battleangel has two AWMs: Dr. Ido (played by Christolph Waltz) who recovers and restores her abandoned cyborg body and brain in a junkyard, and her boyfriend Hugo (played by Keann Johnson) whom she spends most of the movie trying to protect and save. (Lois Lane much?) Even Green Book has an AWM: Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip, the driver and protector for Mahershala Ali’s character Dr. Donald Shirley.
They had a problem with Rogue One because it didn’t have a single AWM. The closest it had was Captain Cassian Andor (played by Diego Luna), but he is actually Mexican so he doesn't count. They tolerated Star Wars: The Force Awakens because it had AWM Harrison Ford as Han Solo, but since he gets killed and Luke Skywalker gets turned into a grumpy jerk during most of The Last Jedi, there aren’t any AWM good guys for that movie. Finn is sometimes a little goofy (and he's also played by English actor John Boyega, who is black). Poe Dameron is played by Guatemalan actor Oscar Isaacs, who despite his awesome flying skills gets talked down to and woman-splained by General Leia Organa and Vice Admiral Holdo. Then there are Kellie Marie Tran and Benicio Del Toro, who are hanging around taking up space that any decent AWM could have easily filled up.
Obviously Ghostbusters 2016 did not have an AWM in it, not even Chris Hemsworth as their dumb-as-a-post receptionist. (Which was actually funny as hell since we all know Hemsworth isn’t dumb, he’s doing a role for cryin’ out loud.)
Heaven forfend we have one movie that doesn’t have an AWM in it somewhere, even if we have to put them in red face, black face, or under a latex mask. If there's no AWM, the project is clearly a bogus unbelievable piece of SJW propaganda. How are all these women and minorities supposed to get anything done if they don’t have a handy AWM around to make sure things work right?
I mean, what's the point of even making the movie if a white guy doesn't have a reason to come see himself getting praised and fluffed by it?
Of course perpetrators of these tropes will deny any of this is the case. They will argue that the problem with SJW movies and shows is that they’re just plain “bad.” They have weak scripts. They have weak characters who aren’t relatable, aren’t likeable. They’re too emotional, when they aren’t being emotive enough. They’re aren’t like all the movies (which coincidentally happen to have white male leads) that we’ve been seeing for basically the last 100 years of cinema.
They’ll tell you It’s not that these guys hate women, or gays, or black people, or Muslims, or Jews, or Mexicans. They’re all good with people of color (POC) as long as they don’t get mouthy like Brie Larson or forget their proper place. They just don’t want any of their AWMs disrespected and not represented in their full Awesome/Alpha White Guy glory.
They don’t even see color unless the project is completely devoid of a heroic white guy. This is proven by the fact that they’ve gone apoplectic over the announcement that one of few AWMs on another of their target shows, Anson Mount on Star Trek: Discovery, will be leaving at the end of Season 2.
Now the show is just plain ruined—ruined, they say.
The problem here, besides the fact that this is just as much of a bigoted heavy-handed trope of tokenization as what they claim to hate, is that this is the same argument you’ll get from the current Imperial Wizard of the KKK, who says that they aren’t a racist organization: they're just trying to protect themselves and white western culture.
We do not hate anyone,” said Frank Ancona, the imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “The true Ku Klux Klan is an organization that is looking out for the interests of the white race. It is a fraternal organization, and we do good works.”
[...]
"We look out for the interest of our family first, I feel that other races feel the same way - it's a natural instinct, " he adds.
[...]
Jesus Christ is our criteria of character. If you look at Romans 12:1-2, that is how Klans are supposed to live, that is the standard, " he explained. "We do not burn the cross, we light the cross to show that Christ is the light of the world."
[...]
The situation that existed in the 1950s and '60s simply does not exist. The white supremacists are no longer in charge. They are now fighting for the very survival of the white race, and they have to fight to protect," said Pitcavage. "This is a fundamental difference of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and today in the 21st century.”
So the Klan are environmental activists now, and these guys are just as not-racist as the KKK. Swell. I’m not calling AWM promoters “Nazis.” I’m just saying they think alike and kinda talk alike. A lot.
The United States is diversifying, but it remains 77 percent white. White supremacists, however, have long contended that the country’s demographic changes will lead to an extermination of the white race and culture.
The “alt-right” – an umbrella term describing modern online white supremacist movement – uses the same language. And it has expanded this 20th-century xenophobic worldview to portray refugees, Muslims and progressives as a threat, too.
Alt-right leaders like Richard Spencer, extremist Jared Taylor and the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin also use social media to share their ideology and recruit members across borders.
They have found a global audience of white supremacists who, in turn, have also used the internet to share their ideas, encourage violence and broadcast their hate crimes worldwide.
“The hatred that led to violence in Pittsburgh and Charlottesville is finding new adherents around the world,” Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, a civil liberties watchdog, told USA Today after the New Zealand attack.
There is a White Isis out there, and they’re growing in number.
I confronted some of these SJW critics on YouTube with the idea that considering the near century it took between the 14th and 15th Amendments, before the Civil Rights and Voting RIghts Acts were implemented to actually provide what those amendments promised, progress simply doesn’t happen magically on its own. Someone has to push the issue and make it part of their agenda, or else things either stagnate or slide backward. I got this response back.
Except that it WAS happening up till about ten years ago. The stats prove that race relations in the United States were improving steadily over time, since the 50s, until 2009. Some of the improvement was nudged by law, but most was by simple natural evolution of our society. But it all began to regress about 10 years ago... prompted by the Treyvon Martin case and the Furgeson riots which began under false pretenses. [No, neither of those cases were false!] In both cases, the leadership in our country - Federal, local, and civil - had an opportunity to return us to our previous path. But instead they saw an opportunity and thus decided to make it worse, to abide their own political agenda, or to increase their industrial base. And so here we are today... race relations have gone absolutely backwards, and none of it for natural reasons.
Obviously, I think that’s a load of crap, but it is illustrative.
There was a good long time were the issues of race relations essentially dropped from the radar. Some people did feel “better” about it, but then that’s because it was “out of sight, out of mind.” The Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases brought the issue back as clearly as it had been during the Rodney King Riots or the OJ Simpson cases 20 years earlier. This highlights my counterpoint that as far as police and criminal justice was concerned nothing had changed in all that time.
Nothing had gotten better, nothing had improved. People just didn’t think about it much, and that ignorance is what they thought was “improvement.”
The Trayvon case had apparently triggered this guy. Well, it also triggered Dylann Storm Roof.
"The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case," Roof wrote in the racist manifesto he published online, a cached version of which was saved to Internet archive sites.
"I kept hearing and seeing [Martin's] name," Roof wrote, "and eventually I decided to look him up." Roof wrote that he "read the Wikipedia article" about the shooting and came to the conclusion that Zimmerman was not at fault.
"But," he continued, "more importantly this prompted me to type in the words 'black on White crime' into Google, and I have never been the same since that day."
What Roof found on the internet were doctored and falsified stats—or fake news— from the CCC (Council of Conservative Citizens), which grossly exaggerated crime by African Americans, painting them as inherently violent and dangerous. Armed with that (false) information, Roof felt justified and emboldened to take “defensive” action against the bible study group at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, ultimately killing nine people who had welcomed him and offered to pray with him.
And please recall that Roof not only had black friends at the time, he told them what he was going to do ahead of time. They just didn’t believe him.
Almost immediately following the heinous killings, a white acquaintance, Joey Meek contacted the FBI and told reporters that Roof, also 21, was looking "to start a civil war." He said in the weeks preceding, he and Roof drank vodka together while Roof complained that "Blacks were taking over the world" and that "someone needed to do something about it for the white race," CBS News reports.
Another classmate described him as a "pill popper" who "told racist jokes."
Scriven didn't experience that. "Everybody's making him out to be racist but here I am in front of you today as a Black man and telling you that I look at him no different today than what I looked him last week because he never said anything racist to me," he said.
How much different is Roof from these guys who are raging about SJWs, and white men being diminished and demeaned all over the media? They say that they aren't sexist or racist. Okay, yeah, but some of Roof’s black friends continue to say the same thing about Roof simply because he wasn't racist to them.
People like Permit Patty and Bar-B-Que Becky, who have been calling the police on black people for having the temerity to try to bar-b-que, sell lemonade, walk, talk or stand while black, certainly don’t consider themselves racist, either.
They all claim they’re innocent of all this and that a large part of their anger at the media is because they feel they’ve been falsely accused of bigotry. Alright, fine. But if the people closest to Roof didn’t see it coming, even when he told them, how are we to tell who really is and who really isn’t a real danger in the near future? Who’s just a loud mouth, and who’s going to take real actions like trying to call the police on perfectly innocent people, comment bomb a new upcoming movie on Rotten Tomatoes that has gender politics they don’t agree with, or try to organize a mass boycott of “SJW” projects that they find offensive, like the entire Star Wars and Marvel franchises?
I mean, it’s just idle talk, right? Idle talk where people foment greater and greater outrage about being “attacked and disrespected” by corporate entities that dare to remove AWMs by adding more stories featuring POCs, all because of an SJW agenda in a media that is owned and operated by corporate conglomerates. And they take pains to point out that those conglomerates are often headed and controlled by rich Beverly Hills Jews like Les Moonves, Harvey Weinstein, Harry Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Arnon Milchan, Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Aaron Sorkin, Sue Kroll, Toby Emmerich, Judd Apatow, Robert Downey Jr., Amy Schumer, Akiva Goldsmith, and Bob Iger.
It’s almost like “Jews will not replace us” isn’t it? By which I mean, exactly like it.
Maybe these guys haven’t thought it through that far, but these kind of ideas about AWMs being overrun were part of the same argument found in the manifestos of mass murderers Anders Brevik and the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand.
The alleged shooter posted the manifesto, along with a link to the forthcoming live stream of the promised attack, on 8chan, one of the main online homes of meme-loving right-wing extremists. In the post, he wrote that it was “time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort” — meaning, essentially, that it was time to stop fooling around on the internet and turn his extremist views into real-world action.
Then, right before the starting the attack — which he live-streamed to Facebook as if it were a first-person shooter video game — the alleged shooter referenced the “subscribe to PewDiePie” meme. Additionally, the guns used in the attack were decorated with memes, mostly insider white nationalist references.
The shooter appears to have been extremely familiar with extremist corners of the internet. The choices he made — to post a manifesto to a known radical community, and to carry out the attack as if he was doing it “for the lulz” — are unlikely to have been made at random.
Instead, they were most likely designed to entertain his fellow extremists, and above all, to help them see him as someone to admire and even copy. The memetic elements of the manifesto were also most likely designed to provoke the media and the public into sharing it and debating the shooter’s actions — thereby increasing the amount of attention, virality, and public debate surrounding the attack, and further spreading the manifesto within the mainstream.
Of course, there is a huge difference between being an annoying, whining AWM troll on the internet or being a Permit Patty and becoming a mass murderer who shoots up a black church, a synagogue, or a pair of mosques. Then again, in each of these cases, these individuals were mostly radicalized online after interacting with similarly minded “harmless” trolls. One thing does seem to lead to another, even if only in small numbers.
Unfortunately, those numbers are growing worldwide.
Despite President Donald Trump’s suggestion that white nationalist terrorism is not a major problem, recent data from the United Nations, University of Chicago and other sources show the opposite.
[...]
In researching our upcoming book on extremism – our joint area of academic expertise – we found that hate crimes have risen alongside the global spread of white nationalism. Racist attacks on refugees, immigrants, Muslims and Jews are increasing worldwide at an alarming rate.
Scholars studying the internationalization of hate crimes call this dangerous phenomenon “violent transnationalism.”
And being very familiar with how to make things go viral seems to be a common trait all around.
In its first weekend and despite the sabotage campaign being run by AWM trolls, Captain Marvel made $153 million domestically and totaled $455 million, or almost half a billion worldwide. Also, about 65 percent of the audience were men. Imagine that.
But of course, that made the AWM-lovers really, really mad.
In its second Friday, Captain Marvel continued to do at least as well as most movies in its range have done historically.
Captain Marvel topped the box office for the second Friday of its domestic run, earning $19 million and bringing its domestic cume up to $215m in just eight days. That's a 69% drop from its $61.9m opening day (including Thursday previews). Bawdy jokes aside, that's an exceptionally boring drop, neither a super-strong hold nor a catastrophic fall. It's exactly in line with most big-scale comic book movies and big-scale fantasy actioners these days, such as The Hunger Games (-71%), Rogue One (-65%), Logan (-70%), Venom (-69%), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (-70%) and Avengers: Infinity War (-70%). The likely $70m second weekend will be the second-biggest second-weekend in March, behind Beauty and the Beast's $90m second-weekend-gross in 2017 following a record $174m debut weekend.
After the full weekend, Captain Marvel moved further up in the ranks compared to other Marvel movies.
It’s become tradition for most Marvel movies to have no other competitors on opening weekend, which often leads to big debuts at the US domestic box office. With Captain Marvel only in its second weekend in theaters and having already crossed the $200 million mark in the United States, many might be wondering how its second weekend box office drop compares to other films in the MCU franchise. Well, we have the answer.
Here's a look at which movies retained their audiences the most from weekend one to weekend two, ranked in order of the smallest drops to the biggest, with all the data pulled from Box Office Mojo. Did any of these surprise you?
- Black Panther (2018) - 44.7% drop
- Thor (2011) - 47.2% drop
- Iron Man (2008) - 48.1% drop
- Doctor Strange (2016) - 49.5% drop
- Marvel's The Avengers (2012) - 50.3% drop
- Thor: Ragnarok (2017) - 53.5% drop
- Captain Marvel (2019) - 54.8% drop (estimate)
- Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - 55.3% drop
- Avengers: Infinity War (2018) - 55.5% drop
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) - 55.5% drop
As of today the movie has generated $910 Million worldwide.
In full disclosure, I have seen Captain Marvel. I thought it was great and it deserves all the viewers it’s had so far. I never felt the movie was cringe-worthy or preachy. It’s a basic superhero original story which comes across as stronger than Ant-Man and Spiderman:Homecoming, but not quite as good as the original Iron Man. It’s funny when it needs to be, heartfelt and dramatic when it should be. Which is to say: It’s fine.
Let’s be real here: Tom Cruise is still making movies. So is Bradley Cooper. And Brad Pitt. Tom Hanks. Matt Damon. Jake Gyllenhall. Christian Bale. Matthew McConaughey. Russell Crowe. Tom Hardy. George Clooney. Johnny Depp. Chris Pratt. Ryan Gosling. The fact is that Leonardo DiCaprio is not hurting for work, either. But everyone else is in the industry is basically scrambling for the crumbs these guys leave behind, unless it’s a project that just doesn’t happen to focus on an AWM.
Captain Marvel is the first female-led solo movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, out of 22 total films. That’s 4.5 percent. If you include a half point for Antman and the Wasp from last year, that’s 6.8 percent.
I've literally seen people argue that the film Elektra from 2005 should count, even though it wasn’t by Marvel Studios and isn't part of the MCU. If you’re going to go that far, you're going have include that the total ratio for every Marvel movie is more like 55 to 2.5. That includes movies like Daredevil with Ben Affleck, all three Toby McGuire Spiderman movies, both of the Amazing Spiderman reboots, Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse, Big Hero 6, three Fantastic Four movies, all three Punisher movies, Howard the Duck, the Nick Fury movie with David Hasselhoff, six X-men movies, three Blade movies, three Wolverine Movies, two Deadpool movies, the original Hulk movie by Ang Lee, and both Ghost Rider movies.
So that's like 4.5 percent of all their films. If you remove the ensemble films without a solo character in the title, it's 37 to 2, or just 5.4 percent. So either 95.5 percent or 94.6 percent of all Marvel movies, between ensembles and solo only, have had male leads. The world would start spinning in reverse if the rate of female leads ever reaches double digits.
Skirt-pocalypse looming!
And for lead characters that aren't white, it's still 1 to 22 for the MCU, or just 5 to 44—9 percent—for all Marvel movies ever made including Black Panther, Into the Spiderverse, and three Blade films.
The fact is that white men are 38 percent of the population of America and only about 9 percent of the population of the entire planet.
But these guys still basically have 90 to 95 percent AWM representation in all these movies, and that's still not enough for them. They really have to have absolutely 100 percent representation, and nothing less is acceptable. Sure, there can be some Beta Men or some bad white guys here and there, or a few women and POCs scattered about, but only as long as there is ultimately at least one AWM to “even it out.” Anything less is part of a diabolical plot against men and white guys. How are little white boys supposed to believe the best possible version of themselves exists and is attainable if they don’t see that represented every. single. time. in. every. single. movie?
Anything less than 100 percent validation is obviously a justified excuse for a Righteously Indignant White Man Online Jihad on these projects, if not the entire franchise, and then maybe the entire Hollywood studio system (which is all run by Jews, homosexuals, and betas anyway, amiright?). Let’s not have anymore MCU, let’s not have any more Star Wars or Star Trek. Just burn it all down.
These guys truly think they are basically the entire fan base for these kinds of movies and if they don't show up, then anybody else showing up really won’t matter much.
But apparently despite all this Sturm und Drang, the AWM plan to scuttle Captain Marvel, the upcoming Avengers:End Game, and the entire MCU purely out of petulant spite has failed, just like the attempts to generate a false narrative about Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib being anti-Semitic have fallen flat—at least so far.
I suspect that’s going to scare them even more than not being positively represented in 1 out of 40 movies.
Regardless of the statistics, trying to implement basically any progressive and anti-bigoted agenda is going to generate an over-the-top white lash of outrage, wounded egos, and butthurt feelings.
That’s a given. Whiners are gonna whine, and really that’s the bottom line.
Advocating for inclusion, diversity, reparations, or remedial actions to fix the failures of the past and the present does not necessarily require attacking, demeaning, or denigrating others. It doesn't have to be seen as a threat.
On the other hand, not doing the right thing and not fixing the problems is the reason we have only made small incremental improvements since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX half a century ago. Those who feel threatened by change are going to lash out even at things that have nothing to do with being “#Woke” or “#BlackLivesMatter” or “#MeToo” or “#TimesUp.” Even if we don't say it, they're going to re-imagine what we said in the worst possible light. Even if we don't do it, they're going to imagine that it’s happening anyway.
So we might as well do what we can, and do as much as we should to make this world a better place anyway. Some people will never be on our side, even if in the long run we really should all be on the same side.