What The HighwayMen Tells Us About Our Cultural Paradigm Shift

This recent movie by John Lee Hancock seems like a radical departure from the 1967 counterculture film that elevated Bonnie and Clyde from grotesque criminals to sympathetic antiheroes in popular culture.

Film critics are nearly in lockstep, bleating that The Highwaymen is a step backwards from The Narrative so carefully cultivated over generations. Americans who identify as “conservative” praise the new film because it is more factually based and has a “law and order” slant to it.

Both the critics and cheerleaders of The Highwaymen are stuck in a superficial analysis of the film, seemingly oblivious to how it fits into the context of where we are culturally and politically, and have conveniently missed or ignored hints from the film makers why The Narrative of Bonnie and Clyde has been turned topsy-turvy.

But context is crucial. To understand how both the Hancock and Penn films could spawn from the same cultural Marxist Hive Mind, and yet take such dramatically opposed perspectives, we have to go back to when the Baby Boomers were young radicals spitting on veterans returning home from Vietnam at the airports.

The Boomers were the most pampered generation in recorded world history. They showed their appreciation for the peace and prosperity they inherited by strangling the golden goose, ensuring that nobody else could enjoy the world they grew up in. Pop culture was just one of the weapons in their arsenal.

In the lost America they enjoyed, cultural icons like pioneers, farmers, cowboys, soldiers, inventors, entrepreneurs and fathers were accepted and promoted as role models that children should aspire to emulate. But this infuriated the cultural Marxists, who wanted a society like what we have now, where the “heroes” are degenerate celebrities, drag queens, pedophiles, other sexual deviants, illiterate street gangsters, sleazy lawyers, hate crime hoaxers, infanticidal feminists, grifters, serial killers and treasonous politicians.

They couldn’t get the population to accept such a radical change overnight, though. Boiling frogs requires a gradual long march. You could conclude that Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde was one of the early experiments by the cultural svengalis, to determine just how big a step in that direction American moviegoers would accept. The film attempted to transform some murdering thieves from the Depression Era into sympathetic characters. Long story short: it worked.

There was a slew of films glorifying criminals and other “antiheroes” in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde. (You could argue that the trend never really stopped.) Some of the copycat flicks, like George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) not only made the criminals sympathetic, but presented as almost non-human the people who attempted to serve justice. The Pinkerton agents tracking down the protagonists of that film are disposable, interchangeable empty suits, insignificant except for their employment by an “oppressive system” to harass the very human main characters portrayed by popular actors. They are nameless, faceless drones working for “the man.”

The movie critics, now foaming at the mouth because the Texas Rangers in The Highwaymen who stopped the glamorous bankrobbers are portrayed sympathetically, gush in masturbatory praise over the trailblazing, romantic, revisionist Bonnie and Clyde from 1967.

The makers of The Highwaymen are also fans of that Arthur Penn cinematic whitewash.

What has happened in the USA since 1967? To put it simply: the inmates took over the asylum. The communist agitators have been running our government for quite a while now, though they are considered “moderate” or “liberal” by the talking heads on Cux News because they have shoved the Overton Window so far left since taking power.

The “anti-establishment” radicals from the 1960s ARE the Establishment, now. Those who encouraged others to “question authority” now are IN authority. They have been for a while. Those who sought to destroy our institutions now CONTROL those institutions. Those who once complained about the messages in Hollywood movies now DESIGN Hollywood’s messages.

In a 180 degree turn from the Arthur Penn flick, Bonnie and Clyde were almost non-persons in The Highwaymen. Their treatment is shockingly reminiscent of the faceless Pinkertons in Butch Cassidy. Parker and Barrow’s brutality was emphasized, but nothing else was revealed about them (except a little backstory on Clyde’s history of thievery). We didn’t even get a good look at their faces until the end. To put it another way: they were just faceless murderers for nearly the entire film.

That about-face from the Vietnam-era counterculture antihero schtick might be confusing to some.

Know what else could be superficially confusing? The revisionist history on Clyde’s homosexuality. That was intentionally left out of the old movie, because society wasn’t yet conditioned to accept sodomy as normal or preferable. Even a lot of lefties at the time still considered it perverse.

But now homosexuality is ubiquitously promoted as normal and moral–and you better not speak against it or you’ll either lose your job, be fined out of business, or in some cases, jailed. Audiences wouldn’t bat an eye at seeing Clyde depicted that way today, so why wouldn’t the film-makers ram it down our throats as usual, to perpetuate their familiarity-conditioning? They insert it absolutely everywhere else, even when it’s not relevant or necessary, let alone historically accurate. What a curious artistic decision, my dear Watson.

It all makes sense if you look at the cultural landscape today and how different it is from the Vietnam era. Again: the counterculture then is the Establishment now, and vice-versa. Now the ruling class must be presented as noble and heroic, while the everyman proles must be depicted as suspicious, unwashed, and dangerous. Outsiders, dissenters, and anti-establishment rebels need to be feared, doxxed, ostracized, demonized, financially ruined, and, the very moment it is acceptable to popular opinion: riddled like Swiss cheese by armed government goons.

Like free speech and everything else, the fringe left’s position is opposite what it supposedly was before they secured ironclad institutional power.

As an adjunct of this, the film makers had to rewrite Clyde as heterosexual or they just couldn’t have brought themselves to show him for the murdering thief he was.

The Vietnam-era Bonnie and Clyde were stand-ins for the likes of Saul Alinsky and Jane Fonda, while the nameless, soul-less G-Men were stand-ins for Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. The current-year law men (played by Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson) are stand-ins for Eric Holder and John Brennan; while the faceless, soul-less bankrobbers are stand-ins for the likes of Donald Trump, Roger Stone and the average deplorable in Flyover Country.

The Highwaymen screenwriter John Fusco is another fan of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and himself (in the interview linked above) implies a connection between Trump supporters and Bonnie and Clyde, confirming the reason for this paradigm shift.

Alt Hero # 6 – a Review

We are back in Europe for this issue. The Global Justice Initiative is trying to track down the French nationalist superhumans.

The nationalists use the catacombs under Paris to escape, initially, and their invisible benefactor (invisible in this issue, anyway) has some tricks up the sleeve to help them along. Writer Vox Day has inserted some in-jokes for his blog followers, but not in a way that harms the flow of the story.

Arkhaven’s production quality continues to improve from issue to issue. Aside from an acquired personal affinity for the legacy superheroes that the Hive Mind drones at Marvel and DC are hell-bent  on perverting, there’s absolutely no reason to read any of the cultural Marxist comic books anymore.

Captain Europa does provide an excuse for losing the fight in Issue 4: he was taken by surprise. Not sure how you can consider it a surprise when you’ve already been fighting with the guy for a while, but this could just be an insight into the character’s self-rationalization mechanism.

All the Arkhaven comics have been worth the time and money so far, but I’ll write about my favorite one next.

Hosanna to the Son of David

Some have been claiming for years that the conflict between left and right is irrelevant. As people who were once on the right adopt more and more doctrines and presumptions of the left, that would seem to be true. All conflicts on this planet will ultimately give way to one final conflict. Maybe you can see it beginning to happen right now.

The battle lines are drawn, and every human being must choose a side.

There are only two sides. There is no fence to sit on or gray area to dwell in. Jesus said those who are not with Him are against Him. If you are not on the straight, narrow path to eternal life, then you are on the wide, easy path to the second death.

Christianity is the faith of the empty tomb. Our Savior went into the grave as the Passover Lamb, but emerged as the Lion of Judah. The Prince of Peace is now the King of Kings. The three days He spent in the belly of the Earth, as prophesied in advance, was the turning point of world history. Our calendars reflect this even today in the post-Christian West.

As exclusive as the Kingdom of God is, there’s an open invitation to sinners from every nation, tribe and tongue. What Jesus did on the cross paid for your clean slate. That He overcame death and the time-space continuum proves that He has the authority to clean the sin off you and accept you as one of His own.

One day the Son of God will return to claim what is rightfully His, to eradicate evil, and restore what was perfect before Adam fell. Every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord. Choose to accept Him as Lord now, of your own volition.

Secret Police, Secret Courts…Not-So-Secret Agenda

We haven’t mentioned the Mueller witch hunt investigation much at Virtual Pulp because…

  1. we’ve been inundated with coverage of it 24-7 for years now.
  2. people with a functioning brain already had a pretty good idea what the purpose of the Special Council really was.
  3. people without a functioning brain don’t like this site, anyway.

Now the Democrat/Media Machine is scrambling to save face and find a way to convince their bovine constituency that being caught in a lie really proves they were right and valiant all along (global warming logic), and that Orange Man still bad. It’s not clear which Narrative Readjustment they’ll settle on yet, but a few of them you might observe floating around in left-wing echo chambers are:

  • Although Mueller was unable to find and hanky-panky between Russia and the Trump Campaign, Trump is still guilty of collusion.
  • Mueller did find evidence of collusion, and is hinting at it in code within the lengthy $30,000,000 op-ed called the Mueller Report.
  • Alright, maybe Trump didn’t collude, but what really matters is that he obstructed justice regarding the crime he didn’t commit. They are just as vehement about the validity of this accusation as they were that Trump colluded.
  • The Mueller Report is part of a big cover-up perpetrated by HAND PICKED Attorney General Barr, who is also an agent of  Vladymir Putin.

Some interesting observations were made before the report was actually released.

For example, in filing false-statement charges against former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos in October 2017, Mueller’s team included a footnote that said emails obtained by the special counsel revealed that a Trump “campaign official suggested ‘low level’ staff should go to Russia.”

As the Senate Judiciary Committee pointed out in a secret letter to Mueller, the special counsel neglected to mention that the emails had been provided to it by the Trump campaign and they showed the campaign wanted someone “low level” to decline these types of invitations.

In other words, Mueller and his Democrat character assassins twisted and distorted facts in the report to imply obstruction. Low level Trump Campaign staffers were discouraged from accepting entreaties by Russians; but the report makes it sound like just the opposite occurred: that they were encouraged to cozy up to the Ruskies.

Papadopoulos said Rhee repeatedly threatened him, telling him he was “looking at 25 years in prison” if he didn’t cooperate with Mueller. Ultimately he pleaded guilty to making a false statement – he claimed he did not know that Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese academic who had told him the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, had connections to the Russian government when, in fact, he did. There are no reports he tried to track down the “dirt” or told anyone in the Trump campaign about Mifsud.

The Democrat/Media Machine, of which Mueller and his dirty cops are part, is habitually  selective about what it reports. If it doesn’t support The Narrative, they omit it. If there are no facts that can be cherry-picked to prop up The Narrative, they’ll invent some, and/or distort existing facts.

 Mueller charged the retired general with lying to FBI investigators about his conversation with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, even though one of the investigators — noted Trump critic Peter Strzok — “had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying,” according to internal FBI documents uncovered by Flynn’s defense team.

In fact, former FBI Director James Comey has said Flynn provided truthful answers and wasn’t intentionally misleading investigators on Jan. 24, 2017, when he was questioned by Strzok and another agent.

Mueller omitted the exculpatory information from the charging documents he filed against Flynn.

They were desperate to find any kind of connection between Trump and Putin, no matter how tenuous and superficial. Most of the facts did not support the Collusion Narrative, and therefore had to be suppressed.

On page 7, Mueller mentions that Cohen tried to email Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office on Jan. 14, 2016, and again on Jan. 16, 2016. But Mueller omitted the fact that Cohen did not have any direct points of contact at the Kremlin, and had resorted to sending the emails to a general press mailbox.

“It’s clear from personal messages he sent in 2015 and 2016 that the Trump Organization did not have formal lines of communication set up with Putin’s office or the Kremlin during the campaign,” one Hill investigator said. “There was no secret ‘back channel.’”

“So as far as collusion goes,” the source added, “the project is actually more exculpatory than incriminating for Trump and his campaign.”

Mueller, it has been noted, self-identifies as a “Republican.” You know: like John McCain, Jeff Flake, Paul Ryan, et al.  He’s controlled opposition and an Establishment tool who wants to divert attention away from the “Justice” System’s double standard on display in their handling the Hillary “investigation” in contrast to what they did to President Trump. And that’s far from the only demonstration of the rigged system perpetrated by the Deep State Mueller is so invested in.

Former federal prosecutor and commentator Andrew McCarthy pointed out that Mueller knew he had no collusion case more than a year before the midterm elections, yet kept teasing collusion in court filings throughout the 2018 campaign.

…Exit polling shows that 49% of voters – nearly 1 in 2 – said they believed the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government during the 2016 election.

Purely coincidence, right? Otherwise, it sounds a lot like collusion.

Books of the Year

There are more books than ever available that don’t completely conform to the cultural Marxist agenda, and the CLFA has an annual election to determine the best of the year. I’ve read two of these books and have reviewed them here. Links to those two, which I recommend, are below.

Appalling Stories II–an anthology of sci-fi/speculative fiction and cautionary tales about SJWs and the fundamental transformation of life as we know it that they support.

The Narrative is a tongue-in-cheek (and sometimes tongue-thrust-right-through-the-cheek) novel about an empowered womyn trying to make her mark in the mainstream media.

Politics is downhill from culture. One huge reason the left has been consistently killing us at the polls is because the electorate has been brainwashed so extensively with subversive messaging in all forms of entertainment-including books.

If you don’t want your kids or grandkids to grow up in a third-world police state where the USA used to be, then it is suicidal to support our domestic enemies by funding their propaganda with your “voting dollars.” There are finally entertainment alternatives, and I hope you will look into them.