Throw Momma from the Train is “insensitive to victims of elder abuse.” Home Alone “reinforces society’s relentless normalizing of the white, Christian cis nuclear family.” Kindergarten Cop is not in keeping with our “national reckoning on overpolicing.”
Can you guess which one of those assertions about decades-old pictures is a real thing that someone actually said, and that others took seriously? If you guessed the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, give yourself a vegan pot cookie.
Oregon’s NW Film Center (which you just know is staffed by rock-ribbed conservatives) was going to screen the silly 1990 comedy as part of a film festival. It was filmed in Oregon and they wanted to show it during its 30th anniversary “for its importance in Oregon filmmaking history.” (Okay, sure.)
Not so fast. On Saturday, an excruciatingly woke person named Lois Leveen “took to Twitter to excoriate the organization for leading off its series with the movie,” according to Willamette Week, a local publication. Leveen lives in Portland (of course) and has written for The New York Times and The Atlantic (of course). She doesn’t have many Twitter followers, but somehow she ginned up a proper Twitter mob by tweeting things like: "National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop. IRL, we are trying to end the school-to-prison pipeline."
And:
There's nothing entertaining about the presence of police in schools, which feeds the ‘school-to-prison’ pipeline in which African American, Latinx and other kids of color are criminalized rather than educated. Five- and 6-year-olds are handcuffed and hauled off to jail routinely in this country. And this criminalizing of children increases dramatically when cops are assigned to work in schools.
What a dark dystopia left-wing academics inhabit (and you can tell she’s an academic by her use of “Latinx,” as well as her zany, anything-goes sense of humor.) She contended there’s nothing “fun about cops traumatizing schoolchildren.”
Indeed there isn't. And maybe the producers of Kindergarten Cop should have anticipated America’s precipitous intellectual and moral decline over the following three decades and included a disclaimer like, “No children were traumatized in the making of this film.”
But they didn’t and thus NW Film Center was left with no defense against Leveen’s onslaught but common sense, proportionality and some backbone. Naturally, they folded immediately and substituted Good Trouble, a documentary about recently deceased civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis. It’s sure to be inspirational and uplifting, but it’s got nothing to do with Oregon.
Lewis and her mob notched a victory -- a dumb, dishonest and content-free victory, to be sure. But it's the exercise that counts. They just like knowing they can bully institutions and sensor even the most innocuous content at will. All it takes is flinging some nonsense at scared liberals.
