Still from a scene at the beginning of The Humanity Bureau (2017) showing a sympathetic character, a deposed former state governor, sitting proudly next to a smiling President Trump

By coincidence, I just happened to be watching THE HUMANITY BUREAU (2017) last night. I say coincidence since I had no idea this low budget Nicholas Cage film was a fever dream for right-wing conspiracy types, so watching it, I felt like I was getting a glimpse of their thought world in the aftermath of last week’s real-life insurrection.

The first scene in the film introduces the main character, Noah Kross (Nicholas Cage) as he determines the viability of an impoverished man who turns out to be a former governor of Colorado (presumably Republican) and associate of Donald Trump.

Rural whites are experiencing a genocide in a future where an urban elite impose a eugenics policy on the rural poor and extermination in death camps. Environmental contamination is a lie told by the government to control population settlement and movement. Death squads operate under the cover of a cost-conscious bureaucracy. Killer drones are constantly monitoring overhead. The end of the film presents a nascent popular and violent uprising with rural whites driving into cities to explode things.

That’s all I have to say. I can’t recommend the film on its merits but scholars of popular culture in this political moment probably shouldn’t ignore it.

This reaction to the film, THE HUMANITY BUREAU, was first posted on my Facebook page.

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About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“The Humanity Bureau (2017)” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.