Tag: The Falling Down Revolt

I’m the Bad Guy?  How Did That Happen?

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In a recent post I said that the current revolt on the Right could be described as the Falling Down Revolt.  This references the 1993 movie, “Falling Down,” that starred Michael Douglas as a divorced, recently laid off defense industry engineer, named William Foster, who, while stopped on the Los Angeles freeway on a sweltering hot day discovers he has reached the end of his rope.  He leaves his car in the middle of traffic and goes on a trek across the mean streets of Los Angeles to see his young daughter on her birthday.  Along the way he runs into all the dysfunctional aspects of modern America.  There is the Korean inconvenience store where the clerk won’t let you have change unless you pay larcenously high prices, the fast food store where a minute after the prescribed time breakfast becomes an impossibility and the food looks nothing like the nice pictures on the wall.  There are the Mexican street gangs holding up a stranger at knifepoint and then peppering a whole sidewalk full of neighbors with automatic weapons fire to revenge themselves on someone who didn’t allow himself to be robbed.  There are construction sites that spring up and leave the drivers stopped in place for hours, not to repair streets but just to maintain the size of the city construction budget.  There are the panhandlers and psychotic hate-mongers and all manner of unhappy people wherever he turns.

At the end of the film the police detective (played by Robert Duvall) following behind Foster’s trail of destruction figures out that Foster’s unconscious plan is to commit a murder suicide against his wife and daughter.  When Duvall tells him he’s under arrest Foster and the detective have this exchange:

  • “I’m the bad guy?” he asks, in a moment of rare clarity.
  • “Yeah,” says Robert Duvall’s police officer evenly, pointing a gun at his chest
  • “How did that happen?”

Now, up until the very end of the film Foster actually seems like a well-meaning guy who’s having a nervous breakdown in the middle of a city that is psychotic.  When he replies to the detective, he tells his side of it.  To paraphrase Foster, “I always did what they told me was the right thing and now I’ve been thrown away by my job and my family.  I’ve been lied to.”  The detective tells him that everyone has been lied to but that what Foster did isn’t justified.

“I always did what they told me was the right thing and now I’ve been thrown away by my job and my family.  I’ve been lied to.”  This is the crux of the analogy.  The regular joes were just doing all the right things we were told we should be doing.  We were being the good guys and bending over backwards to help the other guys out and what is our reward?  We’re told that we’re the bad guys.  That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.  I guess you could say it’s insult on top of injury.  And if they hadn’t added the insult at the end, when they thought it was already too late for us to do anything, they probably would’ve gotten away with it.  But these folks on the left just have to rub it in.  They not only want to destroy their enemies but they also need them to grovel too.

So that’s how we got here.  We can make a good showing for ourselves now that we know who and what we are up against.  We don’t actually have to help them dig the hole they want to bury us in.  We can stop paying them extortion money as they have no intention of showing gratitude because of it.  In fact, it only makes the Left more self-righteous about their entitlement.  Basically, it’ll be every man for himself, if I may be so bold to use the singular masculine pronoun.  So that’s why I think Falling Down is relevant.  We don’t want to pay for being the good guys if we’re still gonna be called the bad guys anyway.

The Falling Down Revolt

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The Revolt on the Right is actually a civil rights movement.  Nobody frames it that way because the revolt is of the people that every other civil rights movement in this country has been framing as their oppressor.  This is the civil rights movement that at its core is straight white men.  That is the one identity that has no value in the victim identity rating system.  Or rather the value is negative infinity.  If you possess the three identity components of male white and straight then you can be passed over for a college spot, a scholarship, for a job, for a promotion, for an award and everyone will say it was the right decision even if you were objectively more qualified.

Now I said it was just straight white men who make up the core of the movement but it is becoming clearer that identity politics can affect other people too.  Recent investigations into Ivy League admissions show that Harvard has a policy to limit Asian American applicants even if they are demonstrably more qualified than some of their other favored minority applicants.  And the state of women’s sports is beginning to feel the impact of what having actual women compete against so called trans-gender women will mean.  Pretty soon the actual women will be completely crowded out of the winner’s circle.

And look at the recent cases of minorities running afoul of the royal flush of identity politics, the LGBTQ hand.  Normally being a black man is a pretty strong position when navigating the Hollywood landscape but Kevin Hart saw this credential trumped when he was hounded out of his Academy Awards hosting gig for having said uncomplimentary things about homosexuality in a tweet a number of years ago.  And as the final one-upsmanship situation a lesbian recently was shunned by the LGBTQ community for asking the question “How are trans-women different from men?”

But what is happening is an awakening to the fact that straight white men and to various degrees other groups are being discriminated against in the name of fairness.  And there isn’t a bit of fairness about it.  For decades the people of this country were told that each new identity group needed to be given special consideration to make up for the disparities in wealth or power or acceptance in order to bring the country together.  But rather than make the country more united it only stoked resentment and provided an industry in government oversight into every aspect of our lives.  School, college, work, housing, social organizations, sports and every business and profession became the target for relentless harassment and micromanagement.  At this point we’ve reached the point where freedom of religion has been trampled on to the extent that a wedding cake baker is hounded out of his own business to satisfy the spite of truly evil individuals.

I think Donald Trump’s campaign may be looked back at as the match that set off the powder keg.  Awareness of the situation is growing and more and more regular people are recognizing that they are being abused by a system that’s rigged against them and isn’t fair.  And they’re starting to realize that they don’t have to take it anymore.

To the mainstream media and the democrats this isn’t a civil rights movement.  To them it’s just racist people showing their lack of compassion.  But I think it is exactly the civil rights movement needed to bring back into balance the rights of the only people allowed to be trampled on by the identity politics cabal.

The real problem is what to call this movement.  All kinds of labels have been circulated.  The logic of it is basically Anti-Anti-White.  Now, that is a terrible name but the sense of it is there.  This is a revolt against reverse discrimination.  This is a reaction to the tyranny of the affirmative action regime.  This is a push for freedom from the thought police.  If I was looking for a symbol that represents the spirit of who is behind this movement, I would take the character in the movie “Falling Down.”  A schlub who has been trying to play by the rules all his life and finds that the game is rigged against him.

How about the Falling Down Revolt?