If you were sitting at a bar and someone bet you the next round of boilermakers that you couldn’t name the top two best-selling movies on Amazon.com, which movies would you guess, off the top of your head?
Would you bet that it was something like “Downton Abbey” or “The Avengers?” If so, you’d win yourself a drink: America’s women are indeed devouring “Downton Abbey” via Amazon.com, while their husbands go in the other room to watch “The Avengers.”
Let’s make the bet a little more interesting: What are the site’s top two best-selling documentaries? At this point, you might scratch your head, try to remember the most recent films put out by Ken Burns or Michael Moore.
Here’s a hint: Both films concern national politics. Each explores the radical Left in America and around the world, and its impact on our culture and government here and now. They both share stark implications for the looming presidential election, and while it isn’t a partisan product of the staff of either campaign, each has the potential to change voters’ minds or massively stimulate voter turnout–which means that committed Americans are buying multiple copies and sending them to their coworkers.
Parents are shipping them to their kids in college. People are dragging their “undecided” friends to theaters on weekend nights by the thousands to watch… documentaries. There hasn’t been anything like this in movie theaters since “An Inconvenient Truth” or “Fahrenheit 9/11”–though these two new movies are outselling those two liberal chestnuts. In fact, they are breaking box-office records, too.
Have you won your bet yet? Okay, I’ll win it for you: The two top-selling documentary DVDs in America are both conservative exposes of radical leftist ideology on the march: “2016: Obama’s America” and “Occupy Unmasked.”
That’s right: In an election season when the mainstream media is already writing up news accounts of President Obama’s acceptance speech, the liveliest action in theaters and online media purchasing is taking place on the right.
Why is this true? There’s a long list of reasons. Many conservatives are frustrated at the Republican campaign so far, at its unwillingness to hold the other party’s feet to the fire. They are also getting worried that the Republican establishment doesn’t know how to win. So they’re taking matters in their own hands and making blockbusters out of grass-roots-funded documentary features that do go after the issues that matter today.
“2016: Obama’s America” exposes the deep, ideological roots of Obama’s policies and offers a carefully-researched interpretive “key” that makes sense of his seemingly sprawling, ineffectual presidency. That film explores:
- The deep hostility to our market economy that Obama absorbed from the man he has claimed as his teenage mentor, Communist Party journalist Frank Marshall Davis.
- The neo-Marxist intellectuals who shaped the young Obama in college and law school, who sought to reduce America’s influence in the world, and shrug off our mantle of global leadership–while empowering Islamist movements and socialist states around the world.
- The socialist egalitarianism of each of Obama’s parents, which goaded him to align himself (as he admits in his memoirs) with the farthest reaches of the radical left in every environment where he found himself–and led him to a career as a “community organizer” trained in the Marxist tactics of Saul Alinsky, at Alinsky’s own school.
- The post-colonial globalism that makes Obama indifferent to the survival of America’s ally, Israel.
“Occupy Unmasked” goes from Pennsylvania Avenue to the streets of America’s cities to uncover how it was that dozens of seemingly “spontaneous” demonstrations with identical signs and slogans erupted across America in 2011-12, all calling for the destruction of the free market, massive tax increases on America’s job-creating classes, and a socialist “revolution.” I bet most people who held their noses as they passed the filthy encampments of what they thought were youthful idealists didn’t know:
- That the Occupy movement was planned a year in advance by leaders of the radicalized government workers union the SEIU–who hired professional anarchist agitators with ties to Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro to get the demonstrations started and school their youthful adherents in “revolutionary tactics.”
- That Obama’s early political patron (and longtime friend) the Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers still claims that attacks on private property (such as stores and banks) “are not acts of terrorism.”
- That the same organizations which orchestrated the Occupy movement were involved in the riots in Seattle in 1999, and in the violent attacks on the Republican National Convention in 2008–where two anarchists were arrested just before they could deploy Molotov cocktails against police. Provocative attacks on policemen are routinely encouraged by Occupy leaders.
- That Occupy activists coordinate with the hacker group Anonymous to intimidate police officers and skeptical journalists–breaking into their email accounts and revealing their personal information (including their home addresses) on the Internet.
- That Occupy leaders did nothing to stop the wave of sexual assaults and dangerous drug use inside their “encampments.”
These are all issues Americans should be discussing in the next six weeks. If the media and the political parties won’t bring them up, other citizens will–and each of us should do our part to let our friends know what’s going on, while there’s still time to change it.