Rev. C.L. Bryant isn’t about to apologize for comparing the plight of black conservatives to the “Peculiar Institution” in his new documentary “Runaway Slave.”

“There had to be something shocking enough to bring them around to seeing it,” Bryant says of the film’s intended audience, black liberals unwilling to consider another ideological viewpoint.

“Runaway Slave,” which recently had its sold out world premiere Jan. 13 at the Landmark Regent Theater in Los Angeles, features Bryant’s attempts to free his fellow black Americans from the shackles of liberalism. The film finds Bryant trying to win over stubborn converts, deploring how black conservatives are treated and interviewing prominent black conservatives like Herman Cain and Thomas Sowell.

Bryant is a former man of the left who switched sides in the early 1990s thanks in large part to radio talk show titan Rush Limbaugh.

“I was driving down the street looking for a client and looking for Jim Hightower,” he recalls. Bryant’s car radio happened on Limbaugh’s afternoon broadcast, and he found himself unable to change the dial. “The things he was saying about the Clintons that was totally alien to my ears, but it was captivating. And the reasons he was saying them were more captivating.”

“I discovered there was an entirely different world out there, trying to tell others how precious freedom was,” he says.

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It is splendid how Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” is not only a double-edged sword but a spear-studded cannonball for world freedom as well.

The Politico-inspired loud-mouthing about Herman Cain’s apparent indiscretion – or perhaps his avuncular bonhomie toward a malevolently ambitious female – the accusations hurled at the presidential candidate have backfired!

It highlights the beauty of freedom of speech.

Yes, we in America also have the freedom to lie and to maliciously exaggerate. However, the court of public opinion in American democracy will decide whether or not accusations are justified or merely the product of greedy but increasingly frightened political ambitions.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the first-such target of left-wing, railroading, character-assassinating, Beltway connivances. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.

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***UPDATE: Sonnie Johnson received an email apology from Kaufman. Unimpressed, she responds.

In the Wall Street Journal, film writer Anthony Kaufman did a fairly straight-forward interview with “The Undefeated” writer/director Steve Bannon. Fine. Good. Proper. Afterwards, though, Kaufman then took to his usual perch at indieWIRE to let his true feelings be known. Mostly, his indieWIRE piece reflects the usual nonsense-complaints coming from the Left over why a documentary specifically produced to tell the story of Governor Palin the MSM refused to tell doesn’t rehash everything the MSM has already rehashed ad nauseum for the last three years.

Blah-blah-blah. Whine-whine-whine. Boo-hoo-hoo. Heaven forbid the public learns the full truth and context about a potential presidential candidate minus everything they’ve already had tattooed on their brain. Then, however, Kaufman gets to this unbelievably offensive and revealing sentence:

For me, the most shocking moment in “The Undefeated,” however, comes with the appearance of a black person about two-thirds of the way through.

No matter how many times I read this (and there’s more), I’m left almost speechless.

Almost.

This “black person” Kaufman references does have a name … and it’s Sonnie Johnson. She’s a person, not a symbol, and she has a mind of her own.  A very good mind.

Before I let Ms. Johnson speak for herself, I’m going to go ahead and call Anthony Kaufman an elitist bigot. You see, the reason the arrival of a black face likely shocked him is probably due to the fact that he’s never bothered to attend a real Tea Party … or maybe Kaufman simply can’t bring himself to recognize Thomas Sowell, Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas, Lloyd Marcus, Sonja Schmidt, Herman Cain, JC Watts, Alan Keyes, Michael Steele, Frances Rice, Jennifer Carroll, Allen West, Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, Tim Scott (need I go on…?) as “real black people” due to their awful, sell-out, Uncle Tomming Republican-ness.

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Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

In many popular narratives of the period, it was the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1960) who “ruined” the movies. Here’s the pretentious film snob summary of the death of Hollywood’s alleged second Golden Age, as popularized by Peter Biskind. The seventies were filled with bold, dark art and transgressive intellectualism. Then the greedy Baby Boomers – like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – made “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” All of a sudden Hollywood did not want to make serious, grown-up pictures. Now it was the age of blockbusters so simple that 3-year-olds can summarize them.

It was the 1980s when Boomer Blockbuster filmmaking would arrive in the event pictures of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. We see this tendency further in the films of arch-Boomers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For a definition of Boomer cinema just look at the output of their company Imagine Entertainment. These aren’t the New Wave-influenced pictures of Roger L. Simon’s generation.

It was the Boomers who also gave us our most strident and simpleminded cinematic leftists: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore. Think about these three careers. Over the past 30 years have any of them shifted an inch in their political thinking? Of course not and neither have most Boomers who are still arguing over sex, race, and the Vietnam War as though it were still 1975. (more…)

‘Racist!’, the political epithet, has rapidly lost credibility and political sting recently thanks to clumsy overuse by grievance-mongering thugs. The slur is a tactical viewpoint discrimination launched as a means to stifle intellectual diversity, rational discussion, and to shame people that diverge from race-hustling orthodoxy. 

‘Race hustlers’ are commonly known as shakedown artists and/or smear merchants who expertly deploy the “R-word”, and it has somehow garnered them credibility to preach the gospel of social justice — and reap the ill-gotten gains of equality-of-outcome Statism — to the intellectual wreckage left below them. 

Tragically, such rhetorical abuse damages the appropriate use of the term – and leaves actual victims of “traditional” racism with a neutered descriptor that is quickly beginning to make the accuser sound like a whining name-caller. The sad irony is that abusers harm the very people they claim to be defending, most often for selfish political and financial profit. 

Of course, follow the money…  (more…)

One of the great adventures in current human understanding is the search for the Grand Unified Theory of physics… an attempt at a construct that explains both quantum mechanics on one end of the scale and gravity on the other – one that brings the four forces of the universe: the strong and weak nuclear force, gravity and electromagnetism – all together into one big comfy equation (or set of equations.) 

Thomas Sowell

I mention this because not too long ago I started reading A CONFLICT OF VISIONS by Thomas Sowell, and as I did, I started to get the sense that Sowell may have developed a Grand Unified Theory of politics, because he went (as usual) right to the core of the issue: beyond Republican / Democrat, beyond Conservative / Liberal… all the way down to the brass tacks of why people believe what they believe. — VIDEO BELOW THE FOLD…  (more…)

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Green Day, which has been around since the late 1980s but only achieved mainstream commercial success with their 2004 album American Idiot, has a bone to pick with Wal-Mart. Why? Wal-Mart won’t carry their new CD, entitled 21st Century Breakdown, unless they provide a special version that doesn’t contain language considered offensive by the retail giant.

Wal-Mart has a longstanding policy about not selling CDs that would require a parental advisory sticker, but that doesn’t stop the navel-gazing band from kvetching about what they seem to perceive as censorship:

“They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there,” he said. “We just said no. We’ve never done it before. You feel like you’re in 1953 or something.”

Newsflash to the boys in the band: that’s what’s called making a business decision. Wal-Mart’s business decision is to ask bands to create “clean” versions of their albums for sale in Wal-Mart stores. Some bands comply while others, like Green Day, do not – in turn making their own business decision (something that Obama has yet to take away from businesses other than some in the auto industry). (more…)

Dennis Miller started out on the political left and, as he matured (helped along considerably by the shock of 9/11), he migrated to the political right.

In this wayward sojourn, he is in fine intellectual company: To name but a few, David Horowitz (former campus radical), Irving Kristol (one time Trotskyite), and Ronald Reagan (early FDR-New Dealer).  And as is usually the case with someone who has viewed the world through both left and right prisms, Miller possesses exceptional insight into the relative strengths and weaknesses of both ideologies.  (more…)