It is no great revelation that life was a lot easier in the '90s, but one rather overlooked advantage of existing at that time was how much easier it was to watch a good film. You just waited until 9pm on Friday or Saturday night, and there'd be something entertaining and scintillating and well worth sticking some McCain Microchips in the microwave for, on at least two out of four channels (obviously not on Channel 5, forever cursed by conflating its name with the 5 members of the Spice Girls...).
You might get a Back To The Future rerun, or a John Hughes comedy, or something serious and profound, like A Perfect World (that scene where he drives around with the kid on top of the car, oh, the aching poignancy...).
Anyway, point is, sourcing a decent evening's entertainment was easy back then.
Now, though, when you want to find a "good film" for the evening, you are confronted with the much maligned mammoth mountain that is:
Finding something worth watching on Netflix.
We all know the pain, the slog, the bitter disappointment that comes with such an endeavour, which is why - on the precious few occasions you discover something that is actually good - it tends to stay with you.
Such was my experience when, about two years ago, I watched Hillbilly Elegy.
For the unanointed, this film - directed by the oft-celebrated Ron Howard (it's Richie from Happy Days!) and starring Hollywood royalty, Glenn Close - charts the challenging childhood and obstacle-ridden early adulthood of one JD Vance, now the Vice President of the United States.
However, at the time the film came out, and the time I watched it, Vance was a complete unknown on the world stage, busy working behind the scenes with his great friend and benefactor, Peter Thiel, to establish venture capital firm, Narya Capital (this endeavour also received funding from our favourite creepy tech billionaire, Marc "remove reality privilege from the masses" Andreessen). In 2020, the year Hillbilly Elegy came our, Vance raised $93 million for the firm. A hillbilly no more, it would seem.
The film - and the eponymous memoir, penned by Vance, upon which it was based - was a huge hit, providing some of the best publicity possible for Mr Vance when he decided, the subsequent year, to enter politics. He launched his Senate campaign in Ohio in July 2021, and in May 2022, won the Republican primary, defeating multiple candidates by some margin. In the subsequent General Election, he defeated the Democratic candidate by 53% of the votes to 47%.
Just two years after formally entering politics, and aged just 39 at the time, it sent shockwaves through the US and around the world when JD Vance (who had previously vehemently denounced Trump and compared him to Hitler) had been chosen as Donald Trump's running mate.
How on earth did such an unlikely, young, and inexperienced person, from decidedly the wrong sort of background - as Hillbilly Elegy was at great pains to point out - find himself in such an extraordinary position?
As Vance's bio on Wikipedia states:
"Trump's two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, advocated for Vance. Several media and industry figures are said to have lobbied for Vance to be on the ticket, including Elon Musk, David O. Sacks, Tucker Carlson, and Peter Thiel, who first introduced Trump to Vance in 2021.[101][102] The Heritage Foundation, which drafted Project 2025, privately advocated for Vance."
And as Miri AF's bio on JD states:
"JD, by the way, has been funded by as-establishment-as-it-gets Peter Thiel, to the tune of about $15 million.
Thiel, described as "an iconoclastic tech investor and pioneer", not only cofounded PayPal (who bestowed a permanent lifetime ban on your author here) and was one of the first investors in Facebook, but he is also deeply invested in AI and transhumanism, and has financed both SpaceX and Neuralink (Elon Musk's "brain chip" company).
So why would such a person have an interest in ploughing mammoth amounts of money into JD Vance?
When, in fact, did Thiel and Vance first become acquainted?
While one might imagine Thiel only became interested in Vance once he entered politics, in reality, their connection goes back much further, and they first met when Vance was a student at Yale Law School and Thiel gave a talk there.
Vance describes this talk as, "the most significant moment" of his time at Yale.
We can therefore imagine that the fact Vance wrote a best-selling memoir immediately after leaving Yale, is not entirely unconnected to Thiel.
The "official story" Vance gives regarding his memoir is that it was one of his professors - another best-selling author, the controversial Amy Chua - who convinced him to write it.
Yet is it not far more likely that the man who went on to be such a generous benefactor to Vance later on, was also the power (and the money) behind Vance's book? A book which has gone on to serve as an explosive political polemic, laying the foundations for Vance's Vice Presidential candidacy, a candidacy that Thiel is also bankrollng...
Please note that it is incredibly, mercilessly difficult to break into publishing, and when Vance submitted his memoir, he was a 31-year-old "nobody". To imagine that such a person, from an extremely disadvantaged background and with no obvious establishment connections, could have his book snapped up, turned into a bestseller, and then made into a film, is, frankly, the stuff of fantasy. That simply doesn't happen to ordinary authors.
It only happens to people with deep establishment connections who are being utilised to fulfil some sort of an agenda. In short: the establishment does not give you a central role on the world stage, it does not make you a bestselling author and turn your life into a film, unless you are an integral part of said establishment and deeply invested in serving it in key ways."
In short, Vance has been groomed by some of the wealthiest and most powerful players in the industry for his current role, and so we should all be most interested indeed to learn that Mr Vance is imminently to meet Reform's Nigel Farage "for breakfast" whilst Vance and his family are holidaying in the Cotswolds.
Why, one might ponder, is a serving Vice President meeting the leader of an opposition party who are not in government and only have five MPs?
Surely it would be more pertinent to meet the actual Prime Minister, or at least the leader of the formal opposition, a party which currently has 120 MPs? (Interestingly, Vance did meet with Conservative MP, Robert Jenrick, but not party leader, Kemi Badenoch.)
It would be bizarre enough for Vance to snub Labour and Conservative leaders in favour of the Lib Dems, who have a lot more MPs than Reform do.
So why is Vance meeting with Farage?
The reason for this, I believe, is that we are on the precipice of a dramatic (that being the operative word) political crescendo that will culminate in what will appear to be revolutionary regime change, with Vance at the helm in the US and Farage over here.
Not incidentally, both Vance and Farage have close links to US political "kingmaker", Peter Thiel, and, famously, one of the first things Farage did after finally being elected as an MP, was fly over to America to hang out with his good pals in the Trump administration.
The Trump administration is also making clear and unabashed overtures to get involved in UK politics by claiming to be "monitoring" the Lucy Connolly free speech row.
Meanwhile, the UK political climate is becoming increasingly tense and febrile as anti-migrant protests proliferate around the country.
Robert Jenrick, the Conservative MP with whom JD Vance recently met, has been prominent in escalating tensions in this regard with his recent incendiary article entitled:
"I care more for my daughters' safety than the rights of foreign criminals. That's why I support every peaceful protest outside an asylum hotel."
Mr Jenrick wrote in the Mail on Sunday:
"The Government won’t admit it, but the situation in the Channel is a national security emergency.
The news only seems to get worse: drug dealers, murderers and even reported spies from Iran have exploited our open borders.
In just the past two months we have seen a spate of crimes, all allegedly committed by migrants.
A girl in Epping, sexually assaulted. A ten-year-old in Stockport, nearly kidnapped. Three stabbed in Southampton.
A 12-year-old in Nuneaton, a young woman in Portsmouth and an eight-year-old in Lambeth, all raped.
And those are just the crimes for which the immigration status of the perpetrator was recorded.
It’s no wonder fair-minded people are furious. They’re right to be."
Meanwhile, the Mail on Sunday's sister paper, the Daily Mail, reported recently that:
"We've been silenced on mass migration and the nation's furious. All it will take is one spark and tinderbox Britain will go up in flames."
So, what we are rather clearly being teed up for here is a big, bombastic "event" that will ignite the aforementioned tinderbox and cause vengeful, violent crowds to take to the streets.
This event will probably be something along the lines of an immigrant murdering, or severely assaulting, some kind of totemic figure in the cultural wars: someone who has the requisite cache that means their being targeted would catalyse such powerful emotion in people that they lose their reason (crowds are always the easiest for devious elites to manipulate and control when they're emotionally whipped up and not behaving rationally).
Needless to say, said triggering event will be faked/staged - there's simply no way all these authorities could be so sure a "spark" will ignite to push people over the edge unless they themselves were planning and scripting that spark.
But of course, like all faked events, people will react as if it's real, those of us who say it isn't will be demonised as vile ghouls, and on the pantomime will go.
Although, while the trigger event will be fake, the repercussions thereof will be very real.
The planned violent riots the authorities are so desperate for are multifactorial in purpose, but one key goal is to topple Starmer's government.
Keir Starmer has intentionally made himself as reviled a figure as possible so people react by demanding he is removed from power. Consequently, Labour's approval rating is currently at its lowest ever - minus 55 - with just 13% of people saying they are happy with Labour's performance.
So, one more immigration-related catastrophe under Starmer's watch, and that would likely be it: mass public outcry, Starmer forced to step down, and widespread demand for a snap General Election (a new petition on that score has already attracted well over half a million signatures).
Enter Reform, who will style themselves as the only sane solution to an out of control immigration crisis that has led to whatever "terrible tragedy" the collapse of Starmer's government will be accredited to. Backed by the US government and Peter Thiel's billions, Reform will be quite unstoppable. We will all be drowned in the "turquoise tide" of a Reform landslide.
We can also expect, at some point before the end of his official term, that Trump will "exit stage left" - falling from grace, illness, assassination - leaving the top job free for JD, which, in this author's opinion, was always the plan. Trump was a Trojan Horse for JD, who obviously could not have secured the presidential position on his own merits, but can get in this way.
The UK-US alliance will then be presided over by figureheads JD Vance and Nigel Farage, with the tech bros like Thiel and Andreessen - and their handlers - really pulling the strings.
So, what is the purpose of this planned alliance?
It's ultimately to destroy the political right wing and cultural conservatism.
The end goal of the ruling elites is a one world communist dystopia as laid out in John Lennon's Imagine - no countries, no religions, and (as Klaus Schwab has eagerly informed us) no possessions. No families. No genders. Essentially, no identity beyond allegiance to the all-powerful state. That's the endgame of all tyrannical totalitarians everywhere.
Yet to get there, the ruling classes have to obliterate a rather large obstacle in their way, that being, the political right wing and those with culturally conservative beliefs.
In order to get rid of these things, they need to present them to the public as being so unutterably evil and abominable, that people demand their abolition.
See, for reference, hugely successful predictive programming, The Handmaid's Tale.
What effect does residing in the 'Republic of Gilead' have on its inhabitants?
Those who aren't psychopathic rapists reject it in horror and revulsion and, by virtue, reject the political right wing, cultural conservatism, and religion, as all of these things are said to be what inspired the creation of Gilead, and upon which its tyranny is based.
All the heroes of The Handmaid's Tale dream of fleeing to liberal, liberated Canada where none of these evil oppressions exist.
So, that's more or less what is planned for the US and UK. Nothing quite as extreme as Gilead, but with many similar flavours.
The right wing regimes, here and abroad, will become seen as increasingly oppressive and authoritarian, replete with all the isms and phobias (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc). See for reference the chillingly prophetic Years and Years, released in 2019 and depicting the time period from then, until 2034 - and note what happens when a "populist right-wing leader" comes to power in the UK in 2026.
Initially incredibly popular, and promising to take a hard line on social scourges like uncontrolled immigration, Prime Minister "Viv Rook" is eventually revealed as an evil calculating criminal, who the people turn against and oust from power.
It's all there in the predictive programming. It always is - see 2011's Contagion, and then 2020's Covid, which the then-UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, openly admitted was based on the film.
And that brings us full circle back to films and their power to shape the human psyche. JD Vance has been firmly installed in the international consciousness courtesy of the runaway hit - and one of the few watchable things on Netflix - Hillbilly Elegy.
Now his star has been further cemented as Vice President of the United States, and breakfast buddy of incoming UK leader, Nigel Farage. This means he has extraordinary power to shape the political and cultural landscape of the future.
We may find the performance entertaining in parts, but - just like his infamous memoir - we must never make the mistake of believing that it's all real.
JD Vance's memoir was an agenderised polemic to elicit specific reactions, none of which are ultimately in the wider public interest. That is what his political career is too.
'Hillbilly Elegy'?
It's an interesting word to use to entitle your memoir, 'Elegy', as Vance's book is ostensibly about a culture that - whilst flawed and struggling - nevertheless embodies many things he loves and wishes to preserve, things like family, tradition, and heritage.
Yet the meaning of 'elegy' is:
"a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead."
Is the real encoded message of JD Vance's memoir, and consequent career, that he is not here to improve or support "hillbilly" - right-wing, Christian, conservative - culture (Vance himself only very recently converted to Catholicism from atheism, and was once a hero of the political left)...
But to kill it?
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