Labeling President-elect Donald Trump, and MAGA nation by extension, white supremacists is so 2016.
Trump’s November 5 victory found him increasing his share of minority voters. Bigly. One small Texas town with 97% Hispanic voters, flipped for Trump. The president-elect also named several talented people of color to key positions, including Kash Patel (FBI) and Harmeet Dhillon (Assistant AG).
And few leaders flex their pro-Israel muscles quite like Trump. Worst white supremacist ever.
Tell that to entertainment scribes and select filmmakers. They’re still bookmarking pages from the 2016 playbook. Toward that end, they’re weaponizing the new, fact-based thriller “The Order” to slam all things MAGA as racist.
“The Order.” IMDB. Amazon MGM Studios.
The film stars Jude Law as an FBI agent tracking down a hate group known as The Order, led by the charismatic Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult). The real group carried out serial crimes in the 1980s, including the slaying of Denver-based radio talker Alan Berg (played by Marc Maron in the film).
Deadline.com shared the film’s screenplay on its site, saying the film had “modern relevance.” Wink-wink.
As they researched, [Zach] Baylin and producer Bryan Haas saw the parallels to the current rise of white nationalism around the world and in the U.S., developing the screenplay with that front of mind. Kurzel said he got the script three months before the January 6, 2021 attack at the U.S. Capitol.
Subtle.
The Hollywood Reporter made a direct connection between the film’s subject matter and Trump.
Indeed, the film — hitting theaters roughly a month after the U.S. presidential election — feels particularly of the moment, arriving at a time of increased debate surrounding the espousing of racist views on social media and the support that former President Donald Trump receives from neo-Nazis and hate groups.
The film’s producer, Stuart Ford, leaned into the Trump factor in press interviews. Journalists were all too eager to regurgitate the talking points sans challenge.
Ford said that “There is no doubt” that “The Order” fits into the Trumpian Zeitgeist. “Unfortunately, the relevance of the film speaks for itself,” he noted.
Law, Hoult, and Baylin joined “Morning Joe” on MSNBC to promote the Oscar-season release. We’ll assume the film’s publicist didn’t bend the ear of any Fox News host.
Araya Doheny/Getty Images for SAG-AFTRA Foundation
Law said the film “has a resonance to today,” without elaborating. Host Joe Scarborough egged the cast members and Baylin, hoping to snag some anti-Trump sound bites but the artists didn’t bite.
Film critics had far less restraint.
The far-Left Rolling Stone ended its review of “The Order” with this overwrought prose.
“In 10 years, we’ll have members in the Senate,” one racist figurehead says [in the film]. He was only off by a few decades.
Variety’s Trump Derangement Critic in chief, Owen Gleiberman, let his MAGA rage fester unchecked.
“The Order,” while scrupulously true to the events of 1983 and 1984, presents itself as a cautionary allegory of what’s happening today: the entwined rise of MAGA and Christian nationalism and the racist dog whistles (and, at times, racist sirens) of Donald Trump’s campaign to take over America.
He might want to follow director Rob Reiner’s lead and check himself into a “facility.”
Entertainment Weekly brought up the modern-day “connections,” too, particularly in its final sentences.
But the film is also a chilling slice of historical memory in the ways it studies one of the earliest iterations of the version of white nationalism currently insinuating itself into American politics — and its haunting understanding of the insidious creep of such beliefs.
Suffice it to say the author isn’t referring to far-Left college students chasing Jews off campus or pro-Hamas rallies happening nationwide. Left unmentioned? Hostage posters torn down by shrieking Palestinian sympathizers.
And we may never see a film where three Ivy League school presidents fail to properly condemn anti-Semitism on Capitol Hill, shaming themselves and their institutions in the process.
Maybe Angel Studios will make that movie some day.
“The Order.” Photo by Michelle Faye. IMDB. Amazon MGM Studios.
The biggest irony? “The Order” doesn’t stop the story cold to deliver lectures on the evils of white supremacy. Nor does it insert Trumpian parallels into the script beyond a fleeting reference to “storming the capitol.” It’s a well-crafted thriller with a powerhouse turn from Law.
The nuts and bolts of the story are stripped from actual events. End of story, at least technically. It’s like a 1970s movie made in 2024, with woke kept off screen.
Yet the film wraps with a text coda suggesting the January 6 rioters were inspired by “The Turner Diaries,” a hateful text that influenced “The Order’s” real-world monsters.
The film’s Australian director, Justin Kurzel, claims he saw a Jan. 6 protester holding that book, as if Trump supporters made sure to bring such a text along for some light reading. Others have made that connection without tangible proof.
Plus, the Jan. 6 protests were racially diverse like many Trump rallies over the past few years. That’s no excuse for the rioters who fought police and shamed the nation with their violence. Their impetus was based on a mistrust of the election results, not neo-Nazi cosplaying.
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Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at HollywoodInToto.com. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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