Most obviously, this is another sign of Trump’s inability to produce evidence of his new pet conspiracy theory about huge masses of “white farmers” being killed in racial pogroms. But there’s another ugly irony here that shouldn’t pass unnoticed: The Trump administration has suspended foreign aid to Congo and the resettlement of refugees from that nation, thus abandoning countless victims of the very same real-life humanitarian catastrophe that he’s cherry-picking imagery from to portray an atrocity against whites that isn’t actually happening.

Plainly, a hapless Trump aide was tasked with finding web postings about murdered South African white farmers for Trump to wave in Ramaphosa’s face as part of some sort of humiliation ritual—probably dreamed up by Stephen Miller—designed to thrill white nationalists everywhere. As it happens, the video he showed Ramaphosa of crosses designed to depict a killing field full of white corpses also turned out to be a wild distortion.

Trump’s broader claim of a white genocide has similarly been debunked. Yet Trump has sought to feed this gutter conspiracy theory by resettling several dozen white Afrikaners in the United States, even as he’s suspended the resettlement of refugees from everywhere else in the world. 

[. . .]

As I argued recently, Trump’s “white genocide” imagery draws heavily on a kind of internationalized “great replacement theory” that’s popular among white nationalists. In this storytelling, embattled white populations around the world must come to each other’s rescue to avoid elimination. The “farmers” trope gives all this a producerist feel: The white populations are the salt of the earth in their homelands, under siege from shiftless, rootless, swarthy masses being manipulated against them by dark international forces or even by the globalists themselves.

Trump, Miller, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt don’t use this precise language. But they constantly describe white South Africans as a “persecuted minority”—even as they taunt us with their refusal to settle genuine victims of mass persecution from the rest of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. The flaunting of this contrast is itself the intended message.

The depravity of it all was perfectly captured by Reuters video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty, who shot the image Trump used. “In view of all the world,” Al Katanty said, Trump manipulated his work to broadcast the story that “white people are being killed by Black people.”

The not-so-coded message is that the only victims of mass historical crimes who exist or merit our attention are white victims of nonwhites. All the rest will be summarily erased as matters of concern to us. The unabashed declaration of the power to replace actual historical crimes with mythological ones—ones featuring whites as world-historical victims—is the main event here.

 
 Chump embarrassed himself and the country on the world stage with more cognitive crazy.
 
We don't the need the bad drama.  We never did.
 
Bad drama is all that racists like Chump and his buddy Mel Gibson have to offer.
 
We were reminded of it this weekend when we watched FLIGHT RISK.
 
 If you missed the movie, consider yourself fortunate and part of the vast majority of the country.
 
The film bombed in the US and around the world.  
 
We watched it for Mark Wahlberg, a strong actor, and to kill time
 
After we watched it, we assumed the reviews -- the film was slammed by one critic after another -- addressed the problems.  But they didn't.  We read six reviews before we gave up and knew we were going to have to weigh in.
 
Mel Gibson is not a good director.  He depends on a cinematographer like no other director because he has no visual sense on his own.  He never has.  With a bad cinematographer, his motion pictures come off like bad TV movies.  And like too many actors, he's more focused on dialogue -- great if he were directing a radio production.  THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST was a really bad movie that was helped by zealots and idiots around the world who did not speak the language onscreen and could pretend that there were strong performances taking place.  They projected onto the big screen what they wanted it to be and what they wanted it to say.
 
The Black List.  
 
That's the term used, since the early 00s, for scripts that are good reads but don't get produced.  They've been called other things in the 90s and before, but that's what they are.
 
FLIGHT RISK made the 2020 Black List.  It's by Jared Rosenberg and it's everything that's wrong with The Black List.
 
And no one wants to tell you about that.  There have been very few hits from that yearly list of scripts.  HITCH is the only blockbuster from it.  But there aren't even hits.  Each year there is one bomb after another.
 
Why is that?
 
Because these aren't really scripts.
 
Unless you're an auteur who writes or co-writes the film you direct,  you're dealing with a script by someone else.  And a script is dialogue and minimal descriptions that a real artist contemplates and brings to life.
 
The films of Black List are over written.  Not in terms of dialogue.  But in terms of direction and mood and blah blah blah.  No real director is ever going to take one of those scripts and treat it as a shooting script and follow every written description.
 
They make good reads.
 
But they're not good scripts.
 
FLIGHT RISK is a really bad script.  NICK OF TIME didn't work.  That's the reality.  And FLIGHT RISK is NICK OF TIME with some salty dialogue, nothing more.
 
 
A real director might have been able to have turned out something interesting but this film died the minute Mel Gibson signed to direct.  Topher Grace is . . . Topher Grace.  Like Jodie Foster, Mel Gibson does not know how to use his own acting experiences to help someone shape a performance.
 
So we're left with Topher playing Eric on THAT 70S SHOW.  That's a real problem because this is basically a film with three onscreen characters.  Topher's needed as a witness against a gangster.  Michelle Dockery plays a FBI agent who shows up with two other agents with no personalities or characterization or even one stand out moment.
 
Michelle starts off way too wound up.  Her performance is not properly paced.
 
Worse yet, as the film quickly moves into the airplane, try not to notice that Michelle's make up becomes more intense as the film goes along.  
 
The pilot is played by Mark Wahlberg and it's easy to see why he wanted the role.  He has the best lines and he could be a memorable villain.
 
With a real director.
 
But Mel fails Mark over and over.  
 
Mark's not really the pilot.  He's a bad guy posing as the pilot.  
 
At one point, Topher learns this when a photo of the real pilot slides around on the floor of the plane.  Know what?  That photo could have shown a Black man.  Or an elderly man of any race.  There are many ways that the photo could have made clear Mark wasn't the pilot.
 
But Mel goes with bald.  
 
Now fully bald, okay.  That could have worked.  But instead it's a circular bald on the top of the head.  As though Mark's the old guy at Pep Boys telling your car's still up on the air jack.
 
The only way the film would have worked was to allow Mark to be the seductive psycho.  
 
And that bald spot on top of the head is far too distracting and far too normalizing. 
 
A real director would have caught that.  A real director would have also stopped the makeup nonsense on Michelle Dockery's face -- it's like in LOVE STORY where Ali MacGraw's make up gets more and more piled on as she's laying in the hospital bed dying.  
 
Mel Gibson is not a real director and he's proven it with yet another half-assed film.  Actors can direct.  Kevin Costner, Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand and others have demonstrated that it can be done.  If you have a visual eye.  But just tossing people in front of a camera and yelling "ACTION!" does not a film make.
 
The Black List should end immediately.  Real director don't want a script telling them how to shoot a scene.  The only time The Black List scripts ever work is when, as in MANCHESTER BY THE SEA, the screenwriter is allowed to direct their own script.  
 
They might be able to bring a vision to life.  Hacks like Mel Gibson never can.