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2019 was the year of the “frustrated-white-loser-living-at-home-with-his-mom” movie. First there was Todd Phillips’ Joker, an origin story of Batman’s most memorable nemesis, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the clown himself. Then came Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, the true story of a Georgia security guard who discovered the Centennial Olympic Park bomb in 1996.
Jewell alerted the police, insisted they follow protocol when they were initially dismissive, and evacuated people from the area before the explosion, which killed two and injured more than 100. Jewell’s vigilance and conscientiousness saved many lives. He was hailed as a hero. Then he was framed as a suspect by the FBI and the media and hounded mercilessly. Why? Because he fit “the profile” of a mad bomber: a “frustrated white male” who lived at home with his mother.
Both Leftists and the Alt Right tried to meme Phoenix’s Joker into a symbol of white male rage and alienation. They did this long before the movie came out, based largely on hearsay, and many on the Right kept flogging this meme even after the movie belied it. For Phoenix’s Joker is not a charismatic criminal mastermind. He’s just a pathetic, vacant, mentally ill loser. Nobody would want to identify with him, not even pathetic, vacant, mentally ill losers.
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Beyond that, there’s nothing especially insightful about Joker’s diagnosis of the modern malaise. Heartless rich people are cutting government programs, and Patrick Batemans are terrorizing people on the subway. It is true that during the Reagan years, thousands of mental patients ended up homeless, but most of Joker’s vision of dystopia is just unimaginative Bolshevik boilerplate. Nor does Joker offer any positive lessons for white men to overcome their alienation and rage. Joker isn’t the worst movie I aw in 2019—that prize goes to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker—but it is certainly the most disappointing.
Richard Jewell is one of the best movies of 2019, with a brilliant script, excellent performances, and an important message. It is infinitely superior to Joker because it shows the true cause of white male rage and alienation. Richard Jewell is not a nutcase dumped into the gutter by Reaganism. He’s simply an ordinary white man who fit “the profile.” No, not the FBI profile, the hostile elite profile. Richard Jewell is the kind of white man that the American system increasingly blames for everything that is wrong with our society—while depending upon these men to keep the society going. It’s a profile authored by people who regard white Americans as contemptible aliens. It is propagated through a thousand movies, TV shows, books, songs, and bits of journalism.
Richard Jewell is a fat, white, Christian, heterosexual, Georgia redneck with a heavy Southern accent. He likes guns and hunting, drives a pickup truck, believes in the American system, looks up to authority—especially men in uniforms—and wants a career in law enforcement, because he wants to protect people. He’s kind-hearted, observant, attentive to the needs of others, and obviously desires to be liked. These are pro-social virtues, but he’s also somewhat pathetic. Assholes and bullies regard him as an easy target. Yet he doesn’t seem to be especially bitter, although he has good cause to be.
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I vividly remember the Richard Jewell case. When he was being hailed as a hero in the media, they were obviously pained by the fact that he looked like a redneck from central casting. And when they turned on him, it was with an obvious relief and relish, because he looked like the kind of guy they spend all their time sniggering at and vilifying anyway.
You know very well that if even one or two of Jewell’s traits had been altered—if he were thin, or female, or black, or gay, or a Yankee—the whole thing would have played out very differently. But Richard Jewell was everything the hostile elite loved to hate. And they almost lynched him for it.
In the opening scenes of the movie, Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser in his breakout role) is an office supply clerk in a law firm who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young lawyer named Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell). Bryant is presented as a cocky Chad. Jewell is presented as observant to the point of nosiness and obsequious to the point of cringe.
Viewers with modern Leftist prejudices immediately dislike both men. Bryant is “toxically masculine,” and Jewell has “low self-esteem.” But the film then brilliantly shows that Jewell’s sharp eyes and punctilious desire to please others are what allows him to save lives, and Bryant’s cockiness is what allows him to save Jewell.
Richard Jewell offers a scathing portrait of two of the hostile elite’s enforcement arms: the mainstream media and the FBI, personified by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs (played by Olivia Wilde) and FBI agent Tom Shaw (a fictional character played by Jon Hamm). Both are arrogant, ambitious, manipulative, and dishonest—and the system rewards them for this behavior. They team up to frame Richard Jewell as a terrorist and ruin his life, because they are utterly indifferent to truth and see him as a perfect patsy, for he “fits the profile” of the system’s number one enemy. He personifies the America they want to destroy. They really are “enemies of the people,” and it really is them or us.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies here
It was perfectly reasonable for the FBI to look into Jewell. The bomber, Eric Rudolph, really was a frustrated white male. People really do plant bombs for attention. They also fake hate crimes for attention and even make their own children sick. And Jewell’s record could be taken to show signs of this sort of malignant narcissism. He was fired as a sheriff’s deputy and a campus security officer for overstepping his authority, which could be taken for self-importance although it is probably just the same over-zealousness that made him a hero in the Olympic Park bombing, and once Jewell was in the media spotlight, he was humble and gracious, not self-aggrandizing.
But the FBI did not just look into Jewell. They tried to frame him. What’s more, they tried to use his patriotism, respect for authority, and desire to do good to destroy him. Eastwood is brilliant to hone in on this point again and again. It is a lesson that all white people need to learn.
This is not our country anymore. It is not our government. It is not our FBI. It is not our media. All of these are in the hands of our enemies. All the authoritative institutions of our society have been hollowed out, taken over, and repurposed to our dispossession and destruction. And one of the chief tools this system uses to destroy us is our own patriotism and naïve trust in the people who despise us. Richard Jewell repeatedly hammers home this moral obscenity.
This is one of the most important lessons we can teach, for when people cease to trust the media and the government—when they see them as a hostile elite, as enemies of the people—that is the beginning of populism. We have come a long way since 1996.
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Many decent white people cringe when they look at Richard Jewell. Part of that reaction is healthy, because fat people are gross and unhealthy. Poor Richard Jewell died at the age of 44 from diabetes and heart disease. The stress of being framed as Public Enemy Number One surely did not help. I wish that Jewell had a longer, healthier life, and I hope that Paul Walter Hauser pulls a Chris Pratt body transformation.
But most of these negative reactions simply spring from anti-white hate internalized from the media, as well as the shameful American mania for exalting oneself by denigrating other whites. The truth is, we are all Richard Jewell. We are all targeted for destruction, and a smaller waistline and a better haircut won’t save you in the end.
What saved Richard Jewell? He knew his rights and asserted them. When he suspected that he was being framed, he called a lawyer with genuine character, Watson Bryant. Jewell slipped up a few times because of his trust in the government, his unassertiveness, and his desire to help. Bryant was there for support, but in the end, Richard Jewell was sufficiently smart, suspicious, and self-assertive to walk away a free man. He is an example to us all.
It would also be helpful if our people learn to see every reporter as a Kathy Scruggs and every cop as a Tom Shaw. There would be a lot fewer hit pieces and frameups.
Richard Jewell is a populist classic, which is why the enemies of the people have tried to bury it with silence or screeching. Every white person needs to see this superb film.
The Unz Review, January 29, 2020
13 Comments
I know people who will like this article and identify with Jewell, people who would not otherwise explore CC or the other sites whose links I send them because they become terrified by any mention of race. I can therefore use it as bait to get them here to read further. Great review.
I saw this movie in the theaters and was mesmerized. Very enjoyable movie with great acting all around.
Jewell would seem a very hard man not to like. Happy go lucky “sad sack” who tried to see the bright side about everything. He seemed to know that the media and FBI saw him as a loser but never became bitter. He left a rose at the site of the bombing every year in honor of the black lady who died. Jewell died young but actually got married and became a cop. In the old America, he would be a sort of folk hero. Now, he is an object of anti-white hatred, even if they admit he was innocent and a hero who saved many lives.
I saw this movie a couple of weeks ago, after Spencer’s article about same, and I wanted to do a critique, but couldn’t find much more insight to add. This is honestly a very good take on the movie.
The only thing that I would add, and I wish Eastwood could have simply left this out, is the scene (about the time the Feds are about to comb through his house) when he has all of his guns and ammo and “controversial books” laid out, and Bryant mentions that the Feds are going to try to paint him as some kind of KKK neo-Nazi skinhead white supremacist, and Jewell says “I hate those people”.
I’m sure that Jewell probably DID hate anyone he viewed as a right-wing extremist, and considered himself to be just a normal good-old-boy southerner (which as a southerner myself, I can identify with on some levels). What pains me about attitudes such as this is that even in the 90s, the “good-old-boy southerner” who likes to hunt and maybe participate in militia training, was already being lumped into the extremist category. (i.e. Randy Weaver etc). Jewell was simply a patriotic, law abiding, pro-constitutionalist who no doubt sympathized with Randy Weaver, but just as normie conservative types today, was unable to question his own proclivity for obedience and loyalty to liberal ideals to see the State as the enemy, and that was ultimately his undoing.
On a side note, this is why the Virginia 2A protest was mocked by many right-wing dissidents. (Which I refrained from, but understand). It’s hard to get too excited about and defensive of a bunch of people who believe in owning guns because they think it is their patriotic duty to defend America’s institutions from cartoonish outside threats when their real enemy is the powers inside their own institutions that hate them.
Other than this one cringe scene, it was an excellent movie and I’m sure it was a good redpill reminder for a lot of people.
I have very little faith in the fbi. Their failures are comical. There was the similar Bruce ivins case with the anthrax letters. The grandiose failure to avert 911, if in fact that was not intentional incompetence. Failure to avert the Florida school shooter even though it was brought to their attention. I was reading about ted kacinski(Unabomber) and for years the fbi was investigating a circle of dungeons and dragons players in the Chicago area and trying to connect the bombings with them! They have this big vendetta against D&D and were actually surveiling Gary gygax! The file on him called him “highly inventive and dangerous”. Lol.
OT I forwarded the author’s Star Wars review to a normie friend and he said “that’s a hateful review by an obvious hater.” Later that day he saw the movie and said “that review was far too kind.”
Re Chalamet as Paul atreides. If the allegorical interpretation of Dune we have discussed at this site previously is correct, wouldn’t chalamet’s mixed ethnicity be almost precisely right? He’s a good Paul.
This is a great essay. It is a good example of how the Dissident/Racial Right perspective illuminates current issues. I found the following comments by the author particularly powerful with clarity and righteousness:
This is not our country anymore. It is not our government. It is not our FBI. It is not our media. All of these are in the hands of our enemies.
…[W]hen people cease to trust the media and the government—when they see them as a hostile elite, as enemies of the people—that is the beginning of populism.
Both nicely said and in the context of the essay points to how ‘populism’ in the US easily leads to racialism: Exactly what our enemies say is happening and exactly why they fear so fear ‘populism’.
The path is Populism -> Nationalism -> Racialism
Excellent review. I agree with the other commenter who noted that this is exactly the kind of film review that illuminates a film’s significance, and in the correct way. I wish I’d seen this film in the theater . I tried a coupel fo times, but my companions both times persuaded me to see other movies (Ford v Ferrari, which I liked, and Knives Out, which I did not). And then it was gone.
This was the heart of the review for me:
“This is not our country anymore. It is not our government. It is not our FBI. It is not our media. All of these are in the hands of our enemies. All the authoritative institutions of our society have been hollowed out, taken over, and repurposed to our dispossession and destruction. And one of the chief tools this system uses to destroy us is our own patriotism and naïve trust in the people who despise us. Richard Jewell repeatedly hammers home this moral obscenity.
This is one of the most important lessons we can teach, for when people cease to trust the media and the government—when they see them as a hostile elite, as enemies of the people—that is the beginning of populism. We have come a long way since 1996.”
I would say these two paragraphs illustrate that the White Right has itself come a long way since The Dispossessed Majority, which basically made these same points, came out in 1972. We whites are a dispossessed and demographically dwindling majority in the land our own fathers founded and built (and for us, their genetic descendants, not for future generations to give it away to alien peoples). We are ruled by a hostile Deep State in collusion with their ethno-alien allies in the media and academia and Big Law and ‘woke’ corporations (and, most disgracefully, the Christian churches, which badly need a laity-driven racio-ideological reformation and house-cleansing). We exist already in a state of racio-ideological Cold Civil War. The sooner more white Americans have internalized these facts, the greater our chances of white racial and Middle American ethnonational survival.
“This is not our country anymore. It is not our government. It is not our FBI. It is not our media. All of these are in the hands of our enemies. “
I would go further and I would advise all Whites, at least the ones not foaming at the mouth LEFTISTs, that the US Constitution is no longer ours, nor has been for over a half century. It was harped during Nixon’s administration that he shredded the US Constitution. That document was in tatters by the time he entered office in early 1969. Earl Warren and previous Courts wiped their ((( collectivist ))) and collective hind ends with it.
Today, in 2020, Whites had better start understanding that the political LEFT, on the verge of total political domination of this Democracy i.e. majoritarian ruled nation, will not apply the “Living Breathing Constitution” to Whites the way it was to the non-Whites.
Future Courts are not going to rule against the racism of non-Whites toward Whites; private or public. That was only meant to make Whites change the country to suit the non-Whites. It gave non-Whites more political power than their (low) numbers accorded them in a majority ruled democracy. Non-Whites are already signaling such an attitude by saying that social media are private businesses that do not owe you Whites any right to free speech (that they extend to all other races) and not be censored by them. You think Courts with these non-Whites on them will do different? You are in for a rude surprise if you think this.
Future Courts will not respect freedom of speech and apply it to Whites. That was only to let the non-Whites speak out loud and use their total dominance of the MSM to brainwash as many Whites as could be accomplished: did it ever work!!
Future Courts will not apply right to assemble and protest for Whites when Whites are dispossessed completely. That was only for the non-Whites, to use to gather in the streets and make the public listen and pay attention to them. Non-Whites already had the same freedom to speech and protest and assemble that all others had. What the LEFT wanted was for the public to listen to them. If the LEFT had used the same outlets for speech/protest/assemble that all American had, namely town halls, civic centers, collesiums, etc, no one would really show up to listen to their angry un-American screeds.
Future courts are not going to apply substantive or otherwise due process to Whites, when Whites are totally dispossessed, the way it was applied to non-Whites. Look at what happened to the Right in Charlottesville in 2017; if a Right politician had done to antifa/BLM what the Va. Governor and Mayor of Charlottesville did to Unite the Right, civil rights prosecutions would have flown, pardon the pun, left and right. Trump and Repubs not only did nothing, but said nothing. Look at what happened to George Zimmerman, now the McMichaels in Brunswick Ga. and that White cop in Minneapolis: long time rules about how the gov’t decides whether to declare a homicide to be 1) self defense 2) manslaughter or accidental death or 3) murder have been thrown aside when it comes to a White who causes harm to a black and the White is put on trial for murder when his/her own local gov’t declared the homicide non-murder. It can fairly be claimed this is the kind of thing Jewel suffered at the hands of the fed cops the FBI. FBI should have never charged him; the FBI seemed to know he wasn’t the perp but persecuted him anyway due to being a poster boy for White males.
The LEFT, with jews in control, will not apply all those legislate-from-the-bench Court creations to Whites the way the jews in MSM snake bit the White race into accepting all through the 20th century. I’ve heard many Whites in recent years express the belief that the US Constitution will protect them when they are a minority nation wide and in every state. No. It. Will. Not!!!! The LEFTIST judges and Executive Branch will pull the same shenanigans, in reverse, when this soon to be dystopia arrives.
Whites need to see the US Constitution as applying only to an all White nation, simply because non-Whites, principally jews, see it as so much toilet paper to wipe their hind ends with. It is time for Whites to put aside this loyalty to Democracy; every bipedal hominid given the right to vote or hold office. It is killing our society. The (human) cream isn’t rising to float on top; the caca is. We Whites, for the foreseeable future, need to embrace authoritarian gov’t because We Whites are not going to vote our way out of this racial Mulligan Stew we’ve allowed to form in America. That ship sailed a long time ago. In the mid 1960s we were over 90% of the population and we didn’t really rule this nation: jews did, through the courts. A veritable Old Testament Book of Judges style gov’t. What good did demographic dominance do us even then? We allowed an alien minority to come in and dominate us like that.
‘This is not our country anymore. It is not our government. It is not our FBI. It is not our media. All of these are in the hands of our enemies…”
That quote from Johnson in its entirety is probably the best and most concise summary of how I think and feel post red pilling that I have ever seen. I think I will frame it and put it on my wall.
It could get me ruined of course but I don’t have my old friends over anymore anyway. I am only recently denormied. Sometimes I cannot believe that I think like Johnson thinks. But I do and that quote gets it exactly.
I suspect it’s like that for lots of us. You discover a slightly different person inside the person you thought you were; it seemed like you had to claw your way through a lot of barbed wire to reach that person, but in fact it was just cotton wool.
Yes but sometimes it is more than a slight difference. I was pretty blind vs the J question. And I still – after 3 years = have days where I will write something about Jews and then get up the next day feeling like “How could you possibly have written that? How could you have possibly become the sort of person who thinks like that?” Then I immediately realize that what I said about Jews adds up. It is empirical. I was the wrong sort of person 5 years ago, not today. But this journey into WN is a strange journey. Sometimes I wish there were recovery groups for ex semophiles, the exsemitized. I liked just hearing from you
The scene early on where the whole news room stands and applauds the vicious railroading and attack on Richard is very powerful and telling of the contemptuous and unmasked hostility.
They show how they are simply waiting for ANY opportunity to deride and status signal their superiority in destroying people.
Even I shuddered a bit.
I’ve just seen this at my local cinema (there were three other viewers at a matinee screening). Completely endorse the review. Nothing jarred, not even the “I hate those people” line, which isn’t obviously directed at the Right. Didn’t know that you have campus cops in the US; I particularly enjoyed that bit.
Please encourage more people to see it. It really deserves a wide audience.