Perhaps the most compelling subject of conversation in America today isn’t the impeachment of Joe Biden, the Israel-Gaza war, the Ukraine war, our spiraling federal debt or even Taylor Swift’s love life. Instead, it’s Leave The World Behind, an apocalyptic Netflix production which is currently the streaming service’s most viewed film.
Leave The World Behind is a very, very peculiar piece of art. How many motion pictures, after all, can claim a former president and first lady as executive producers? Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Kevin Bacon headline the cast. It’s full of so many unusual visuals and such a bizarre plot that half of cyberspace is convinced it’s an example of predictive programming.
What’s predictive programming? Derided by our elites as a conspiracy theory, it’s the notion that certain things are embedded into the pop culture to make the public accepting of them when later they turn up in real life. The 2011 movie, Contagion, for example, presented a fictional scenario which bore a strange resemblance to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even more peculiar was a 2019 episode of Netflix’s series Explained called The Next Pandemic, in which Microsoft founder Bill Gates was seen predicting a virus would kill millions of people after originating in a Chinese “wet market.”
When COVID-19 emerged, a not-insignificant segment of the population saw the worldwide response, tinged as it was by pronouncements from suspicious actors like the World Economic Forum that the pandemic could be used to bring on a global socialist “Great Reset,” as simply the follow-through to a pre-planned release. And while that might sound like a wild theory, we’ve seen subsequent disclosure that Anthony Fauci, America’s highest-paid government employee, had directed tax dollars to perform gain-of-function research at a Chinese lab with connections to biowarfare. When that same lab was the site of a viral leak which produced the COVID-19 pandemic, a pandemic that deprived us of our most basic God given freedoms, it wasn’t just the zany conspiracy theorists who saw something sinister in the works.
Throw in the George Floyd riots and a 2020 presidential election with a series of statistically impossible anomalies, and Americans of all walks of life increasingly questioned everything our government told us to be true.
Americans always used to take truth, rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition, for granted. It was not just the basis of our civic order, but the foundation of our economic success. This was, until Barack Obama.
American Spectator columnist Scott McKay’s new book, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, makes the case that it’s Obama who’s the most important driver of change in America – and not in a good way. From race relations to economic consolidation to the weaponization of government agencies to the abuse of the culture and more, the book explains, chapter and verse, how Obama managed the “fundamental transformation” of the country in ways Americans didn’t see coming and certainly wouldn’t have voted for.
The appearance of Leave The World Behind, with its bleak, hostile and even misanthropic tone in describing the end of the world brought on by a combination of cyberattacks, nuclear terrorism, disinformation and other means, is more than peculiar.
It’s sinister.
This is a time, after all, when the country is already on edge with a perception that Obama’s former Vice President Joe Biden is totally inadequate to the job and not really in charge, that our institutions have been corrupted and no longer serve us, that community spirit in America has broken down, that our infrastructure is compromised and that we’re in a pronounced national decline. And given all of that, Barack and Michelle Obama come along to produce a film which offers a window into our national destruction?
You can’t blame the internet for raising the specter of predictive programming with respect to this movie. Especially when Esmail told the entertainment press that Obama’s role was to offer notes on the script in an effort to add “realism” to the scenario. But what Obama certainly added was racism, revenge and ruin, as McKay’s very important book suggests. Leave the World Behind is a very, very peculiar film coming out at an even more peculiar time. And Barack Obama has not earned the benefit of our doubt.