The CLOAK of WOKE

Sometimes you have to take a step back and look at everything that has happened over the past year…you know, with a bird’s eye view. 

A year ago, we have a president (Trump) who is making America’s economy as strong as it has perhaps ever been, or at least stronger than it has been in a long while. At the same time, he’s being very tough on America’s number-one International competitor (China). He works out a trade deal where China ends up paying much more money in tariffs.

Not surprisingly, China is not happy about this. It’s a blow to their growing economy.

Right around the same time that Trump is making this trade deal, a virus (COVID) suddenly appears out of nowhere in China, the outbreak of which suspiciously occurs near a virology lab in Wuhan. This virus is spreading quickly and it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to the rest of the world, including America.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden has just secured his position as a frontrunner in the 2020 presidential democratic primaries. As soon as Super Tuesday ends in March and it looks like Joe Biden will be the democratic nominee, COVID arrives in America.

With the arrival of COVID, there are shutdowns, Trump’s prized economy takes a blow and everybody is miserable. Biden is being presented to us as the guy who will save us from Trump’s ineptitude in handling COVID and somebody who will return our lives to a state of normalcy. In fact, COVID becomes the main issue driving Biden’s presidential campaign. It’s what he’s running on.

As the year moves forward, it appears as though Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, has very suspicious business ties to China. It also appears that Joe may be mixed up in this business as well. The mainstream media and big-tech social media try to censor a New York Post story about a computer repairman stumbling upon a Hunter Biden laptop containing emails that help prove these ties are real. (It’s only after the presidential election on November 3^rd that the media stops censoring this story and admits Hunter is under investigation by the FBI).

Meanwhile, COVID also provides an excuse to alter how the presidential election process will take place. Mail-in voting will become more the rule than the exception and other changes are made to supposedly make it “safer” for people to vote. Although it’s presented (mainly by the democrats) as something that is in our best democratic interests, this mail-in voting system makes it easier to “muddy the waters,” so to speak, and basically create a smoke screen so that voting fraud can more easily take place.

Not surprisingly, Biden ends up winning the presidential election on November 3^rd.

So, let’s recap. A year ago, we have a President (Trump) who is clearly disliked by China. A suspiciously-timed virus comes out of China that makes Trump look like a bad president, helps Joe Biden have something to run on (i.e. he will save us from the virus and the incompetent Trump), and, at the same time, it appears as though Joe’s son and maybe even Joe himself have suspicious business ties with China. Then, the changes in the electoral process due to COVID end up favoring Joe Biden in the election…

In other words, it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist here to arrive at the conclusion that China, COVID, and Joe Biden are all connected to one another.

Need further convincing? Let’s see what happens as soon as Joe Biden gets into the White House.

Every single policy of Biden’s is designed to hurt America, make it weaker and push it further away from its status as the world’s superpower. These anti-America-first policies, in turn, strengthen China, because whatever hurts America basically helps China and its goal of usurping America as the world superpower, numero uno, the big cheese.

Here are some examples of Biden’s anti-American policies:

 

-        Ending the construction of the Keystone pipeline. On the surface, it seems like this is all being done in the name of protecting the environment and addressing climate change, but what it really does is make America less energy independent and more dependent. In other words, it weakens America.

-        Rejoining the Paris Climate Accord. Again, this sounds good on the surface, something being done in the name of the environment and climate change. But what it really does is cripple America with environmental regulation while China doesn’t have to do a darn thing about its own dirty, polluting ways. So this move only hurts America’s economy but helps China’s.

-        Ending “harsh and extreme immigration enforcement” (quoted from Biden’s executive order) as well as stopping the construction of the border wall. Once again, this looks like a virtuous move and like we’re helping immigrants in need; however, this open-border policy where we are much more lax about who and what (i.e. drugs/diseases like COVID) is coming in and out of our country also makes America generally less secure as a nation, less stable and, in turn, weaker.

-        Ending the Muslim country travel ban. As much as we would all love to have peaceful Muslims able to travel in and out of our country with ease, one must admit the travel ban Trump instituted may have been necessary to tamp down on the ISIS problem. After all, we have not had an ISIS attack in our country for quite some time. Will ending the travel ban make us less secure? Yes, even though it’s politically incorrect to admit this.

-        Establishing a $15 minimum wage. Indeed, this looks good on the surface, but many small businesses cannot afford to pay these high wages, so their growth is stunted in a devastating manner. In other words, wages may go up but small business growth goes down. Maybe the transnational corporate world gets stronger as a result, but small business America in general gets weaker.

 

There are many more examples of these America-weakening policies, but those are just a few.

Now, how does Biden get away with all these policies that are so destructive to America? Well, in reading the examples above, you may have noticed a theme: he cloaks these policies with wokeness. Every policy comes wrapped in a package that looks good on the surface but is really not as benevolent as it appears to be. These policies are basically wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Additionally, Biden signs other overtly woke executive orders that directly address transgender rights, racial “equity” etc., all of which raise our new president’s appearance of wokeness to even greater heights. The end result is that the Biden administration establishes moral supremacy over us, which basically gives itself immunity from criticism. After all, how could you ever question a guy like Joe Biden when he appears to be so kind to immigrants, transgenders, blacks, Muslims etc.? A woke cloak gives you the moral high-ground and, thus, near-invincible power. That’s right: wokeness in politics today is less about being truly virtuous and more about the power it gives you. I repeat: It’s ALL ABOUT THE POWER.

So that’s the game-plan: establish yourself as super-virtuous and then nobody dares question your destructive, anti-American policies. Questioning you would simply make a person feel guilty and ashamed for not being woke enough.

In conclusion, it’s time to think about who Joe Biden is really working for. America and the American people? Or China? Because, so far, all signs point to him hurting America with almost every single policy, while helping China move closer and closer to superpower status. Biden gets away with this because he cloaks himself with woke, but it’s time for us to look beyond the sheep’s clothing. We need to stop being concerned with appearing virtuous and, instead, actually be virtuous in calling him and his administration out on their total, 100-percent, unadulterated, treasonous bullshit.

I will leave you with a relevant quote from the Bible:

27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

-- Matthew 23:27-28 

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MATT BURNS is the author of THE BURNZO PAPERS: Selected Articles & Essays and also the novels JOHNNY CRUISE, THE WOMAN AND THE DRAGON and WEIRD MONSTER. In addition, he’s published a memoir called GARAGE MOVIE: MY ADVENTURES MAKING WEIRD FILMS. Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.

Writing the Sequel

I owe it all to Back to the Future 2. One day in November 2020, shortly after Thanksgiving, I felt tired and lethargic, so I decided to fire up Netflix and see if there was anything good on it. I scrolled through all sorts of TV series and documentaries, Stranger Things, Cobra Kai etc., and then eventually came upon Back to the Future 2. For some reason, I felt drawn to this movie. I hadn’t seen it in a very long time and I felt it was time to give it another viewing. What I realized was that Back to the Future 2 was much more solid a film than I remembered it to be. It is not the best sequel ever made, but it is certainly one of the better ones. 

This got me thinking about sequels in general and how rare it is for them to be…well, good. I could only think of a few sequels that were better than or at least as good as their predecessor. Terminator 2 came to mind. Airplane 2 also popped into my head. But then I actually had to do some Googling to think of others. Yes, I literally Googled “best sequels of all time” and then I realized that most of the good sequels were part of a longer series, like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter and that kind of thing. Do those count? I suppose they do. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t. However, my overall conclusion was that, jeez, it’s rare that a sequel is any good. Probably about one out of five sequels are decent. Four out of five are terrible.

With these statistics in mind, I began thinking, “Hmmm…I wonder how I would do writing a sequel.” And then I remembered, “Oh yeah…I already tried that!” And it didn’t go well.

Indeed, about a year ago, I had tried developing a sequel to a screenplay I wrote called Weird Monster (I also wrote a “screen novel” version of Weird Monster now available on Amazon). When I say I “developed” a sequel, I mean I wrote about a 60-page outline for that sequel. Now, you may be thinking, “Wow, a 60-page outline!” … yes, that seems like a long outline, but my outlines are extremely detailed and include all dialogue that comes to mind. I basically wrote 60 pages and then got to a point where I felt the story was no longer interesting to me, I was hitting too many roadblocks, eventually thought I was at a dead end, and I gave up. I shelved the project and concentrated on other things. As far as I was concerned, a sequel for Weird Monster seemed to be out of the question.

However, watching Back to the Future 2 rekindled my interest in writing a sequel. I basically said, “Ok, this sequel (meaning Back to the Future 2) is good, but it’s not exactly the BEST thing ever made. Maybe I can do something close to or at least as good as this. Maybe I should dare to fail, go forward with WEIRD MONSTER 2 and don’t stop this time, no matter what.”

And this is exactly what I did. I figured that even if WEIRD MONSTER 2 turned out to be a piece of garbage, it would still be an interesting writing exercise nevertheless. Thus, I took the 60-page WEIRD MONSTER 2 outline out of the drawer and read all 60 pages of what I had so far. What surprised me was that it was actually decent. Getting away from a project for a year is very helpful because you end up looking at it with a fresh eye and you can make a fair assessment of whether the material is decent or terrible. I mean, if you pick up a project after a year, give it a read and it ends up being terrible, then things are probably looking rather bleak for that project. If, however, it seems decent, well, then that means your project has potential.

I definitely saw that my project had potential.

Instead of working on the outline any further, I decided I would write, in screenplay format, what I had written out in my outline so far. Like I said, my outlines are very detailed, so I already had much of the dialogue written but getting everything into script form would help me iron out a lot of the wrinkles in the story and, more importantly, I would hopefully get to a point of no return in the project, meaning I would get to a point where the project was more complete than incomplete and I’d be a fool to give up and stop. In other words, this was a psychological tactic to motivate me; if I got a third or even a half of a screenplay onto paper, I would be much more likely to take it to the finish line.

Thus, I simply began writing the screenplay and things went well for about 50 pages or so. Page 50 is pretty much a point of no return, so I knew I wanted to finish this bad-boy no matter what. The problem was that I kept stumbling upon parts that I felt were either weak or lazy writing, made no sense, or simply wasn’t entertaining. I also found that the main characters were no longer very interesting to me, that maybe I had milked what made them interesting dry in the first story. I found myself hitting so many obstacles that I found it was paralyzing me and I had the urge to stop writing. I was berated by a voice in my head that said this sequel sucked. There was only meant to be one—not two—Weird Monster stories!

But then I took a shower.

I don’t know what it is about showers, but they often give birth to profound revelations. I once heard a theory that running water provides a conductor for energy from other dimensions to get beamed into your head, which is why people have so many good ideas and revelations while taking a shower. Maybe this is true, but that’s not really what’s of importance right now. What IS of importance is that I had a revelation. My revelation was that it’s basically better for me to write crap as opposed to writing nothing at all. I needed to free myself of the worry that I was writing garbage and I basically needed to write anything and everything that came into my head. Even if it was clichéd. Even if I knew it was terrible. Unfunny. Or trite. I simply had to keep going. I had to keep moving. I could not stop no matter what.

I consequently found myself making a ton of stuff up and I sort of felt guilty about this, because a lot of it felt so contrived, and I usually feel much better when the writing flows out naturally—you know, when it feels “meant to be”—but I didn’t allow myself to get too bothered by this. What was crucial was that I laid down the tracks, so to speak, got a very basic skeletal structure of my story down on paper. That’s really the toughest part. Getting the skeleton out of your system and down on paper. Then it’s much easier to go back and flesh everything out through editing, editing and more editing.

It took me about a month, but in the end, I actually managed to get a decent first draft of WEIRD MONSTER 2 (aka WEIRD MONSTERS) onto paper. And it wasn’t no flimsy 70-page screenplay either. The script is about 130 pages, give or take a couple of pages. I’m not sure it’s on the level of Back to the Future 2, at least not yet, but it’s definitely better than I ever thought it would be, especially considering how I felt when I first reached that page-50 area.

So what is the moral of the story?

Don’t ever give up. Writing garbage is better than not writing at all. And you can always go back and edit. This, of course, is true for writing anything, not just a sequel like what I was doing. Writer’s block can be paralyzing, but you’d be amazed what can happen if you simply free yourself of the paralyzing panic that sets in when you’re worried that you’re writing crap. Once you free yourself from this fear, you’ll be amazed what you can ultimately pull off.

Here is a helpful video I found on YouTube that echoes a lot of what I say above:

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MATT BURNS is the author of numerous novels, including Weird Monster, Johnny Cruise and The Woman and the Dragon. He has also written a filmmaking/screenwriting memoir called Garage Movie: My Adventures Making Weird Films. Find these books (and many more) at his Amazon author page HERE.