“Get out, you black and brown devils! Out!! And if you won’t, we’ll kill you. Better yet…. hmmmm…. we’ll make you kill yourselves!!!”
That is the orgiastic fever dream that liberals carry around in their oft-vacant craniums of what Conservatives fantasize about during our idle hours. And it’s the inspiration behind The First Purge, the most recent and possibly final – we can hope, can’t we? – installment in this otherwise ho-hum movie series.
The Purge, for the sake of the more discerning moviegoers among us, who won’t know, is a horror franchise consisting of four films, The Purge (2013), The Purge: Anarchy (2014), The Purge: Election Year (2016) and The First Purge (2018) and reportedly an upcoming television series called – wait for it — The Purge.
The movie series has generated so-so critical reception, and grossed more than $420 million in worldwide box office against a bargain-basement combined budget of just $35 million.
The fun takes place in a futuristic dystopian America, but what work of fiction doesn’t these days? In the wake of an economic collapse and widespread social unrest, a political organization called The New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) overthrows the government and institutes the Purge, a 12-hour carnage-athon (much like Wal-Mart at first light on Black Friday, only less medieval) in which every conceivable crime becomes legal (much like the DNC’s 2016 Elect Hillary campaign).
In this latest installment, a prequel to the trilogy, the real motives of the nefarious scumbags who created the Purge become known. The goal wasn’t simply to give Americans a chance to let off steam once a year, but to get rid of minorities and the poor in a no-holds-barred take-out-the-trash bacchanal.
The NFFA, you see, is a metaphor for the Republican Party, in case you haven’t gotten it by now — the party of the Deplorables, the Irredeemables, the folks you can smell at Wal-Mart. You see, Republicans are all racists… isn’t it obvious!?!… and live for the day we can restore America’s lily-white complexion.
The snarky, bitchy and politically biased Washington Post published an appropriately snarky, bitchy and politically biased article on February 6 under the headline “Trump immigration plan could keep whites in U.S. majority for up to five more years” – as if that was Trump’s real goal (wink-wink) in trying to secure our southern border, not to crack down on human trafficking, drug smuggling, cartel violence, MS-13 animals and all of the run-of-the-mill hold-ups, gang rapes, car thefts, shootings, drunk driving manslaughters and axe or gun murders that have become South and Central America’s most abundant exports.
Here’s what National Review had to say about The First Purge:
“All of this has entertainment value if you’re entertained by propaganda about how America’s conservative party (and perhaps especially its current president) is just one dire recession away from offing black and poor people in huge numbers. But as the political allegory passes from the merely obvious to the thudding and relentless, the more genuinely horrifying idea — which is about the lure of evil to ordinary people, not the concentrated threat of far-right villainy — behind the Purge steadily evaporates.”
Ugh.
Howard Riell is a veteran journalist, editor, author, teacher and consultant. An Orthodox Jew, he has hosted and produced his own radio talk show, Riell Truth, on Christian radio station KHNC 1360AM in Colorado, since 2008.