Daniel Greenfield | Sultan Knish
The 1619 Project was a great awakening and a true history that you probably never learned in school,” Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer falsely claimed, announcing the partnership between the Canadian movie studio, Oprah Winfrey, and the New York Times.
The press release promised that the partnership with the sleazy Canadian studio responsible for Saw, the Hunger Games, and Twilight, will usher in “an expansive portfolio of feature films” and “television series” based on the racist revisionist history promulgated by the New York Times.
There is a reason that the 1619 Project isn’t taught in schools. It isn’t true and actual historians have taken apart its false claims that America was built on slavery.
Lionsgate though is another story.
Last year, Lionsgate Entertainment World opened on Hengqin Island, in the People’s Republic of China.
The theme park brought attractions based on Twilight and The Hunger Games to a country whose brutal Communist regime had used famine as a weapon to kill millions back when Jon Feltheimer was in kindergarten.
But there’s a bigger problem than depicting America as a brutal totalitarian regime that uses famine as a weapon in a Communist country that actually did it back in the 1950s.
While Lionsgate is plotting to smear America as a nation based on slavery, the People’s Republic of China was not only built on slavery, but has the most slaves in the world.
With 1,000 slave labor camps and at least a million slave laborers, the Communist dictatorship where Lionsgate has an important presence vastly outstrips 19th century Southern plantations.
Hengqin Island is located in Guangdong province which contains at least three known labor camps. Some of these camps featured in the brutal Guangdong Cultural Revolution Massacre during which fanatical left-wing thugs killed thousands in a culture war that has ominous similarities to the current Black Lives Matter culture war and its lodestone, the 1619 Project.
China’s booming economy is fueled by forced labor. Construction work incorporates everything from kidnapping to abused migrant workers. Last year, construction workers deprived of their wages threatened to jump from buildings. The Communists responded by arresting them.
This isn’t the type of story that Lionsgate is likely to tell with an “an expansive portfolio of feature films” or even comment on. And if the development of Hengqin Island into a resort, complete with games based on The Hunger Games, involved any forced labor, no one will talk about it.
Not that Lionsgate cares.
When Lionsgate announced that it was bringing The Hunger Games to Dubai, a commenter noted, “the irony of a hunger games attraction in a city that was built on the back of slave labor.”
The greater irony is that a torrent of 1619 Project propaganda is about to flow from a movie studio that is comfortable doing business in slave labor states. A Canadian movie studio is going to lecture Americans about how racist their country is while cheerfully moving projects forward in dictatorships where slavery isn’t a historical artifact, but a present day reality.
The 1619 Project is only able to exist because it’s a lie. Try and release a movie about China’s real life Hunger Games in the Communist dictatorship and you’ll become an involuntary organ donor. The United Arab Emirates won’t let you release films blasting its ruling families.
But Lionsgate knows that in America it can roll out “feature films” based on the deranged ravings of a bigot who claimed that white people are “barbaric devils” and who insisted that African explorers had traded “technology” with the Aztecs, for the entertainment of the elites.
China’s undemocratic ruling class wants to maintain its power and only permits nationalistic movies that depict its country as brave, strong, and moral. America’s corrupt ruling class wants to expand its power by shattering the country’s Constitution with false claims of racism.
Beyond the 1619 Project, Lionsgate made a deal with BuzzFeed to develop “socially relevant” movies for millennials. These movies will inevitably accuse Americans of racism while giving the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic nations where Lionsgate does business a pass.
While Lionsgate peddles sleazy revisionist history about America’s founding, its own origins go back to Montreal and its Cinépix era when the secret of its success was a pornographic movie about a nun who becomes a prostitute. Valerie innovated the “genre” known as “maple syrup porn” while being funded by Canadian taxpayers. And things haven’t changed too much.
During the height of the #MeToo movement, Lionsgate’s executive vice president of legal affairs accused its general counsel of assaulting her and trying to make her his slave. Literally.
At one point the Lionsgate general counsel allegedly told her, “he wanted me to be his slave.”
After coming forward, the former Lionsgate lawyer claimed that the sleazy studio’s execs struck back and prevented her from finding work. There’s probably a movie in that somewhere.
But as CEO Jon Feltheimer said, that’s a history, “you probably never learned in school.”
Who better than a Canadian studio doing business in slave labor countries, whose general counsel allegedly was into enslaving women in this country, to tell the 1619 Project story?
Lionsgate wants to be in the progressive business because there’s lots of money to be made. The politically correct scolds don’t believe anything they’re preaching. They never did.
The Hollywood studios lecturing Americans on their politically incorrect ways turned out to be a den of sexual predators. The only industry that exceeded their abuses of women was the media.
Fortunately, Lionsgate was on it, releasing Bombshell, a #MeToo movie, not about Harvey Weinstein, CBS News, NPR, or its own #MeToo problems, but about FOX News.
The 1619 Project is more of the same cynical hypocrisy from a partnership mediated by Oprah Winfrey, a billionaire who made a fortune lecturing white people on their racism.
Her eponymous magazine, O, which has served as a forum for pushing false claims of sexism and racism against her political opponents, is published by Hearst Magazine. The goddess of political correctness even has an office in Hearst Tower.
Troy Young, the president of Hearst Magazines, was forced out after accusations of sexism.
The New York Times invented the 1619 Project, but a recent investigation found out that its ruling family had Confederates in the attic, including at least one slave owner.
And then there’s Lionsgate, which shifts between doing business in slave countries and lecturing Americans about the evils of slavery, when its employees aren’t enslaving them.
Who better to make a movie accusing America of being built on slavery?
