Review: American Insurrection

Warning: spoilers

JEWISH billionaire Haim Saban’s Saban Films brings us this horrific imagining of a near-future dystopia in which feminists, Muslims, non-Whites, and homosexuals are “branded” with barcodes and rounded up, tortured, and lynched by the Volunteers, redneck followers of Richard Spencer stand-in Richmond Spence Williams V (Toby Leonard Moore). Released in 2021, the film is now streaming and on DVD. I give the film 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Hiding out in a remote house is a cell of freedom fighter undesirables consisting of shaved-head feminist Sarah (Sarah Wharton), liberal Muslim empath Zabi (Nadine Malouf), and various anguished homosexuals. The home they occupy previously belonged to the group’s “dog,” a racist Volunteer named Gabe (Michael Raymond-James) who is being held as a prisoner, chained up in a barn. As the Volunteer movement grows and encroaches on their hideout, the group debates what is to be done with Gabe. Can he be deradicalized with new tricks or will the dog have to be put down? The best line in the movie is when one of the “gays,” without seeming to be facetious, remarks, “My ass is killing me.”

Ideological Content Analysis indicates that American Insurrection is:

Usury-ambivalent. Interestingly, one of the ways Richmond Spence Williams grows in popularity is by promising to wipe out followers’ student loan debt, which can be interpreted in two ways. Either American Insurrection intends to tarnish the cause of debt cancellation by associating it with racism and violence, or the writers seek to caution leftists not to abandon the popular issue to nationalists.

Feminist. Checkpoints manned by misogynistic Volunteers serve as pretexts for groping and rape, with Sarah bravely fighting back against the indignity.

Media-critical. Mainstream media bear some responsibility for the ascendancy of the Volunteers because they gave airtime to Richmond Spence Williams to express his views and publicize his movement.

Homophobic! Erratic and drama-prone “gays” are depicted as the weakest link in the guerrilla brigade of the fringes.

Neoconservative. In the movie’s hokiest moment, Muslim Zabi tells Afghanistan veteran Gabe, “Thank you for your service.”

Multiculturalist. “America means to me a place of diversity, actually, and community, and strength from that,” comments actress Nadine Malouf in a featurette on the DVD. The only blemish on the beautiful mosaic of multiracial America seems to be the White men who bomb mosques and spit on women. Elements of exaggeration are introduced into Gabe’s otherwise reasonable statement of nationalist concern: “I wanna preserve my culture, my way of life, my country,” he explains to “s__tskin” Zabi. “Your existence, people like you, they’re actively replacing my entire race, that’s just a fact. It’s the largest genocide this world has ever seen. You ever stop to think that that’s wrong?” The notion that nationalists are opposed to the mere existence of non-Whites — rather than their problematic presence and maliciously sponsored ascendancy in White communities and countries, specifically — is, of course, misleading. The more level-headed Zabi is “trying to understand all this rage,” but Gabe shuts down the discussion, becoming irate and shouting, “Shut the f___ up!” In reality, it is the integrationist side, as manifested in academia, Silicon Valley, corporate media, and radical “antiracist” activism, that puts a stop to racial debates or dialogues on the merits of multiculturalism through firing, online deplatforming, lawfare, and antifa violence.

Anti-White, but not quite exterminationist. While others in the group have little patience with Gabe and want to shoot him, Zabi makes it her mission to probe their prisoner’s psyche and, if possible, cure him of his hateful and irrational beliefs. “What kind of pain were you going through,” she asks him, “when you started believing everything that you believe?” Zabi being a liberated, non-fundamentalist Muslim, the pair eventually bonds over beers, with Gabe finally softening toward her and offering to guide the freedom fighters past the Volunteers’ checkpoints and to sanctuary. One of the “gays,” unaware of Gabe’s change of heart, decides to execute him before also killing himself — depicting in literal form what the filmmakers apparently perceive as the tragic potential of leftist overreach and political suicide through extremism and lack of compassion. Heterosexual White men, American Insurrection seems to suggest, just need to be chained up in barns for a while and treated with therapy sessions from wise and sensitive Muslim women, instead of being physically liquidated.

* * *

Source: ICAReviews