Operation Green Flame

The Secret Public-Private Alliance to End Inflation and Save the Biden Administration

One of the great mysteries of our time is the utter flameout of popular culture, particularly as epitomized by the failure of numerous high profile intellectual properties (IPs) to maintain audiences through their latest iterations. It seems like either idiocy or madness both to fans and critics alike; studios essentially handed money-printing machines with the blueprints in hand and failing to churn out one wet dollar. Great minds have struggled to make sense of it. How, after billions lost and goodwill wholly sacrificed, could they still not get it?

Take, for example, The Marvels. It was to have been the high point of Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Released a few weeks before Thanksgiving of last year, the film cost nearly $300 million dollars to make, and with marketing and other costs factored in, would have needed to bring in nearly $700 million to turn a profit. Now, normally, there would have been no reason to think that was out of the bounds of possibility; after all, the first Captain Marvel movie made over a billion dollars. Unfortunately for Marvel Studios and Disney, however, The Marvels was a massive bomb, not even earning back its original budget before they gave up and stopped counting. Things did not turn out like they had hoped.

Or did they…

I want to introduce a thesis that some naysayers might call a conspiracy theory- but remember, that’s what they said about Covid and gay frogs and flat Earth too. No, I believe that the disinterested reader will come to the inescapable conclusion that the only thing that explains phenomena like The Marvels and the others I will mention is a secret understanding between Big Media, Big Tech, Big Finance, and the Biden Administration to siphon off huge sums of money from big projects and literally light the cash on fire in the interest of fighting inflation- yes, a dark undertaking so vast as to corrupt not only Hollywood, but Washington DC as well. I didn’t want to believe it myself; I’d previously attributed the whole thing to entitled arrogance, much like our foreign policy. But I’ve connected enough dots and performed enough esoteric interpretations to blow the very mind of my mind. When your shocked face relaxes, read on for the full exposé.

Yes it is, Mr. Thgil.

To understand the story, we must all go back to the year 2016. In that Annus Mirabilus, the whole world rejoiced at the election of Republican candidate and possible Kwisatz Haderach Donald Trump as president of the United States. However, dark forces were stirring against him. Consider that on election night, none other that Paul Krugman- Princeton economist, Nobel Laureate, and graduate of MIT no less- dropped this warning to the Orange Euergetes:

It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?

Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.

Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.

Yes, that’s a man whose brilliance and economic knowledge cannot be questioned telling the new president that every rich man in America is prepared to destroy the stock market forever rather than let him succeed. No matter how much they like money, they will forgo all of that and let another Great Depression ensue rather than accept him. Now, some skeptics might argue that the stock market did in fact recover and that Paul Krugman’s analysis was a hysterical and effeminate emotion-driven feels-dump rather than any kind of insightful reflection.

This was four months later.

But that’s what they want you to think. How do I know? Let’s connect some more dots. Right at the same time, the Propaganda Wing of the Democrat Party, the media, began to do some strange things. A movement called #metoo arose, coming out of seemingly nowhere to challenge Hollywood’s culture of sexual exploitation. Now, this was odd, as sexual exploitation is a beloved Hollywood tradition going back to the days of Fatty Arbuckle. Here, for example, is a highlight reel of celebrities joking about the rapey Harvey Weinstein with good nature and aplomb:

Now, all of the sudden, Hillary Clinton just stops hanging out with him? Barack Obama’s oldest daughter isn’t going to intern for him anymore? [edit: she actually did end up interning for him, and he ripped her off- classic Harvey!] Again, some so-called skeptics will say that this was all some cynical bee-balling designed to create moral space to criticize Trump. For my part, I find that to be an incredibly implausible thing to even think about America’s Sweetheart and the Chocolate Messiah, to say nothing of the brave men and women of Hollywood who cured AIDS and colorblindness with their Red Ribbon campaign. No, something else was put into the works.

At the time all of this was going on, Hollywood was experiencing a new golden age of the blockbuster. Superhero movies could do no wrong, and studios were raking in billions. There was nothing accidental about this; the films were assembly-line products designed to push the money-hurling button in the minds of teenage boys around the world. Critics derided the movies as “capesh!t,” but whatever they lacked in quality they certainly made up for in quantity. Big name actors, big name directors, the best producers, editors, and CGI artists money could buy, all under the overall control of studios who had turned revenue-maximization into a glorious art, and there was lots of it. It all culminated near the end of the Trump administration with the release of Avengers: Endgame, a movie that brought in more money that year than the GDP of the Central African Republic.

In fairness, Wakanda did a bit better.

And then, just as Phase Four of Marvel was set to begin, Phase One of Operation Orange Crush was initiated. All over America, astroturfed movements sprung up on behalf of dead criminals, violently asserting that the problem with America was all the laws and white people. Meanwhile, elements within the Trump administration began telling everyone that they had to stay in their homes for a year-long fifteen-day period, as China’s addiction to bat soup had resulted in a pandemic as deadly as the yearly flu. Vaccines were on the way, but even when vaccinated, one would still be in danger from unvaccinated people, the vaccine’s one weakness. The only sure places to avoid infection were parties with pre-screened Democrats, marijuana dispensaries, or those aforementioned race riots. Laws were quickly changed to accommodate the new reality, and Joe “Sundown” Biden was installed as president, much to his delightful and continuing surprise.

The new “Biden” administration had a problem coming in, however. Trump had used his last days in office to issue emergency funds to all Americans and Biden’s handlers realized that they would have to match their foe to earn the nation’s goodwill; after all, the Democrat’s main constituencies- urban liberals working for the system, slum-dwellers, and connected foreign nationals, expected a payday in any case. They probably figured that Republicans would come behind them and clean up the mess such that serious inflation wouldn’t ensue. But Republicans, shamefully cowering away from their Leader’s mostly peaceful January 6th Election Justice Protest, refused to do even less than usual. So inflation came, and it was bad.

Now “Biden” had a problem. Eggs were $10 a carton, not $0.23 like he last remembered, and people were angry. There was too much money in circulation. Some of it had to go. People weren’t going to accept new taxes and none of the rich and powerful were going to do anything so stupid as to invest in factories or pension plans for their workers. So what to do with all that surplus cash?

Remember- Democrats and Hollywood and Big Finance are all buddies, just like Big Everything Else. Circulating among the Power Elite was a framework set up years before, one detailed in a film cleverly disguised as a comedy movie: The Producers.

This is from the Producers, but the footage was reused in “The Harvey Weinstein Story,” with Rose McGowan’s face shopped in over Gene Wilder.

First released in 1967 and remade in 2005 (each time the country was mired in a controversial foreign war . . . hmmm), The Producers tells the very un-Hollywood story of a sleazy Jewish impresario who needs a financial scam to get out of trouble, who stumbles upon the answer with his equally Jewish and corrupt accountant, who tells him to simply attract as many investors as possible for a new play by promising each of them half the profits. When the play is so bad it makes no money, the two of them will be able to write off those obligations before anyone notices and walk away with the invested funds. But the script they choose for their Broadway play, Springtime for Hitler, turns out to be a surprise hit, and they receive their comeuppance in the end. But clearly the idea has been circulating for some time: big budget productions are a great hole into which to throw money that is not meant to be seen again. Cynics will again wonder why “they” would broadcast their plans for the world to see- probably for the same reasons rappers let everyone know they’re in the Illuminati; they just do, so move past it, ok!

This should be blasting in your head the whole time you are reading this.

By now you should be putting things together. The #metoo movement and the BLM pogroms in every major city became the pretext for a “re-imagining” of long-standing IPs, in a way that made no sense as business decisions, but were perfectly rational if the goal was, in fact, to make money disappear.

Consider the two films featuring Captain Marvel as the lead. It was clear from the beginning that star Brie Larsen was an acquired taste on the level of those Jamoca blizzards from Dairy Queen that taste like someone put out a cigarette in each one. The first film was also somewhat experimental from the perspective of the studio, in that rather than feature a likeable hero overcoming the odds and his own personal flaws with courage and friendship, it instead showcased Ms. Larsen realizing for more than two hours that she was always awesome and that men just need to get out of her way. Yass Queen Slay! However, the film had a number of things going for it nonetheless. It featured experienced big names like Jude Law and fan favorites like Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury; the studio made a huge financial investment; the CGI was good; and most importantly, they released the film in the best possible place, between Avengers: Infinity Wars and Avengers: Endgame. It made over a billion dollars on a $175 million budget.

Bearing in mind that Marvel knew how to make money off the Captain Marvel IP, now look at the second film, The Marvels. The studio doubled down on everything that made the first film problematic- more feminism and misandry, even less of a narrative arc, and even more Captain Marvel(s). The main villain’s superpower was being Tom Hiddleston’s wife. Samuel L. Jackson was there, playing a humiliated and confused old man wandering around in the belief he was Nick Fury. And consider the directors- the first movie was written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, a platonic couple known mostly for smaller, indie films, but here given the chance to helm a major studio release. One can imagine the tight grip Marvel had on them. For The Marvels, the studio selected Nia DeCosta, even more indie and even more diverse, checking every box including “first black woman to destroy a Marvel movie” (first woman in general went to Chloe Zhao and The Eternals). The CGI was terrible; the story incoherent; the leads lacked all chemistry; and the director, DEI though she may have been, was so hag-ridden by studio notes that she dipped out on the project before the wrap party even commenced. Corners were clearly cut everywhere, yet it all cost nearly $300 million dollars before all the other expenses. Where did the money go?

To get away from Marvel for a moment, consider the greatest destruction of a brand in modern times- Amazon Studios’ Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. If ever there was easy money to be made, here it was. Hire Peter Jackson, or one of his proteges. Hire someone to read all the books and supervise everything to be in full accordance with the lore that thousands of Quenya-fluent nerds know by heart. Assure the fanbase that all respect will be given to that source material, and do what the Game of Thrones TV producers were smart enough to do for six seasons- closely follow an established story by an acknowledged great writer whose fanbase you hope to appropriate. Then clear your calendars for all the Lambo test drives you’ll be going on in the near future. Or at least that would have been the case if Amazon had not instead hired inexperienced and indifferent show runners, used a story and script that are widely believed to have been created by AI, deconstructed and defiled every element of Tolkien’s lore, and hired a lead actress to play a genocidal girlboss version of Galadriel who was so off-putting the studio had to hire an intimacy coordinator to convince the orcs to try to assault her (it didn’t work and the idea was dropped). Everything about it exuded cheapness. The sets were Ren-Faire-esque; the armor was from the very forges of Mount Three-D-Printer, and the CGI was spotty at best. Yet it purportedly cost nearly $60 million per episode.

Those ten seconds of Galadriel’s grinning psychotic constipation you just watched cost approximately $100,000.

To put that in perspective, The Matrix, a film that featured innovative filming techniques and groundbreaking CGI that still holds up today, cost $63 million dollars in 1999; that’s for a feature length film. Even adjusted for inflation, there is simply no way that much money was spent on any Rings of Power episode. None. Likewise, The Witcher and a bunch of other projects that have one thing in common other than blowing money. Hint, here’s every Hollywood showrunner: “Hey you know that guy Henry Cavill, the purest living example of a leading man, who everyone likes, who loves the lore of all the projects he works on and puts himself fully into every role, who just wants to make the fans happy- well, F*** HIM!!!” How much money was supposedly spent on that and related travesties? You probably forgot about the Wheel of Time. How about She Hulk…

"Let’s start with a concept, a cult-tier comic book character known for sexy banter and breaking the fourth wall. We can throw in Daredevil!”

“That actually sounds really promising. But how will we . . ?”

“Ruin it? Easy, we just make her Captain Marvel and use the fourth wall breaking to roast the audience for being dumb enough to watch. And Daredevil, well, we’ve got plans for him…”

“But people really like Daredevil, can we really destroy him that quick?”

“If we don’t get him in She-Hulk, we’ll finish him off in this thing we’ve got coming up called Echo. He and Kingpin will get beaten up by a pudgy deaf woman with one leg and resting squaw face. There’s no coming back from that.”

So clearly they have no intention to earn money and are in fact doing everything they possibly can to lose as much as possible as quickly as they can. Thus demonstrated, what is happening to the actual cash? While I do not have what most skeptics would regard as “evidence,” I do have plenty of hearsay and conjecture, which are kinds of evidence.

Yes, this is where I got it.

Consider the wildfires that California has been experiencing of late. Skeptics would chalk them up to endemic mismanagement on the part of a sclerotic and incompetent bureaucracy, which refuses to allow controlled burns due to the environmental harm those fires would cause, which inevitably leads to worse fires shortly thereafter. Perhaps… But what if instead movie studios are trucking pallets of cash into the Sierra Nevadas and igniting them under the cover of natural disasters? Sure, no one has seen this happening, but significantly, no one has denied seeing it happening. I took the trouble to call the California Department of Forest Management and asked the person who answered if the forest fires over the last few years were caused by Marvel burning hundreds of millions of dollars in cash there. She hung up on me! If that doesn’t speak volumes, I don’t know what does.

But why would studios, investors, etc., go along with a scheme that impoverishes them? Because there are measures of wealth other than dollars and cents. Remember that Big Media and Big Finance are allied with the Democrat Party and the managerial system more generally. Staying in their good graces is a prize in itself. As we saw at the beginning, big brains like Paul Krugman have admitted that the wealthy elites of society would destroy the whole stock market forever just to stop Trump; that’s just how civic minded they are. Bob Iger at Disney wants to be president one day, and he can’t do so if people blame his party for $20 per pack hot dogs. Like the Kingpin, he plays the long game.

Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio need Josh Bernthal’s agent.

Does it work? Every media outlet assures us that inflation is now under control and the economy is awesome now. The only challenge remaining is convincing people to ignore everything they experience in their daily lives. And remember, this is running parallel with Operation Slavstermination, the plan to save Ukraine by killing all of its young male inhabitants, which mostly involves pretending to buy weapons that the media pretends are making it to the front, other than once when someone didn’t get the memo. So, yes, yes it is working.

If you doubt me, remember, I didn’t believe it at first either. Then I wrote most of it while suffering from a 101 degree fever, but when I came down, I realized that it still made sense! So much like the Ancient Persians, who made collective decisions while sober and then got drunk to test if they still thought it was a good idea, this passes the sane/ not-so-sane test. Call Mark Dice and get him on this if you haven’t already. But I know you have.