Apparently it is a tumor. The tumor of racism, anyway. A screening of the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Kindergarten Cop was cancelled in Portland because someone thinks it’s racist. It’s probably for the best because Antifa and Black Lives Matter would have burned everything down to advance the cause of insanity.
Willamette Week brings us the sad news:
NW Film Center had planned to kick off Cinema Unbound, its summer drive-in movie series at Zidell Yards, on Aug. 6 with a screening of the 1990 action-comedy Kindergarten Cop.
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a police detective who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher in order to bust a drug dealer, the movie was filmed in Astoria, Ore., and celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. NWFC had planned to show the film “for its importance in Oregon filmmaking history,” according to a press release.
Those plans are now off—in part, it would appear, due to an online campaign against the screening.
In announcing the cancellation, NWFC said it came to the decision after discussions with “staff and community members” convinced them that, given the current political climate, it would be wiser instead to add a second screening of Good Trouble, the new documentary on civil rights icon John Lewis, who died July 17. A screening scheduled for Aug. 7 had already sold out.
What the hell does a John Lewis documentary have to do with Oregon filmmaking? Okay, I’ll stay focused. That is literally the least dumb thing going on here.
While the NWFC said they cancelled the screening after talking with community members (plural) it turns it out it was just one uptight liberal weirdo:
But judging by social media, the Film Center seems to have been swayed by one “community member” in particular.
On Saturday, Portland author Lois Leveen—whose writing credits include contributions to The New York Times and The Atlantic and the book The Secrets of Mary Bowser, a novel based on the life of a slave-turned-Union spy—took to Twitter to excoriate the organization for leading off its series with the movie.
“National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop. IRL, we are trying to end the school-to-prison pipeline,” Leveen tweeted.
“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,” she continued.
Leveen sent a note to Willamette Week explaining her outrage over a 30-year-old goofy comedy titled: “Kindergarten Cop-Out: Why Does NW Film Center Think There’s Anything Fun About Cops Traumatizing Schoolchildren.”
“It’s true Kindergarten Cop is only a movie. So are Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, but we recognize films like those are not ‘good family fun.’ They are relics of how pop culture feeds racist assumptions. Because despite what the movie shows in reality, schools don’t transform cops. Cops transform schools, and in an extremely detrimental way,” wrote Leveen.
Somehow this gets funnier. After Leveen complained on Twitter about the movie, the NWFC responded to her directly, letting her know the screening had been canceled thanks to her bitching. Was she pleased that her squeaky wheel got the grease? Hell no, she was still pissed off:
“I think what you meant to type was, ‘Yes, we made a grave error in not realizing the implicit racism in that programming decision. We apologize and are rethinking who makes our programming decisions hereafter.’ How deep a white normativity hole will [the Northwest Film Center] keep digging?” Leveen wrote.
There is just no pleasing some people. Especially angry leftists.
Leveen is one of the most insane people ever and clearly she has never actually watched Kindergarten Cop. Arnold’s character is an undercover cop not a school resource officer. He’s not in the school to bust children, but rather to protect one of them from his criminal father. At the end of the film, Arnold’s character turns in his badge to become a teacher full-time.
Not only is the film an allegory for the current “Defund the Police” movement, the bad guy is white. There’s nothing about this movie lefties shouldn’t love.
