#& how could i forget seeing real photos of actual kids being exploited when i was 13

[florenceisfalling]

the duality of "the internet saved my life" and "the internet irreversibly fucked me up"

[unidentifiedflyingfks]

Movie: FINAL GIRL (2015)

Cast: ABIGAIL BRESLIN of Little Miss Sunshine and Zombieland

WES BENTLEY of and The Hunger Games, Yellowstone, and my personal favorite P2

ALEXANDER LUDWIG also of The Hunger Games and Vikings

This movie has literally kept me up all night with questions. Mainly how did they get Abigail Breslin, Wes Bentley, and Ragnar Jr. all to agree to be in this awful movie? Then, answering my own question, can literally anyone with $$ make a movie and pay reasonably well known actors to play in it? Then, is everybody fucking with me?

***Side note: the term ‘final girl’ is a common trope in horror referring to the last girl left alive, or the survivor. (Ex. Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween)

The director, Tyler Shields, is better known for his photography career and before that professional inline skating, funnily enough, where he worked alongside the likes of Tony Hawk and other pro skaters. His photography seems to be centered around shock value with works including items like black guys lynching a KKK member, Lindsay Lohan as a vampire, a crocodile biting a crocodile skin purse, and more recently a photo of Kathy Griffin holding what looks like Donald Trump’s severed head. (Spoiler alert: Donald didn’t take it well) Basically all playing off of easy to reach social issues that will exploit controversy without offering anything other than surface level discomfort IMO. Final Girl was his debut film and while I will credit its high production value and actors I soo wanted to like, that’s where it ends.

(Tyler shields and his infamous photo)

The movie begins with Wes Bentley’s character interviewing a child (young Breslin) who just lost her parents under seemingly violent circumstances. She demonstrates puzzle solving skills and seemingly photographic memory as well as a apathetic view of death—as when she says “death happens” right after the death of her parents. So Bentley recruits her for **something** hard that most people can’t do. He also reveals his wife and child were killed by **someone** (not the villains the whole plot centers around because if they’re seniors in high school at the time they would have been about 6 when his wife was killed assuming it was recent to the death of Breslin’s parents since we’re…. ah doesn’t even matter. Too stupid.)

First of all, I love Abigail Breslin. She’s beautiful, funny, and I especially like her as #5 on Scream Queens. Buttttt, let’s keep it real she was horrible for this role. It was never believable that she was an elite agent trained since childhood to mirk people with her bare hands. That being said, her training basically consisted of talking yourself up, choking Bentley, and taking DMT (Also, what?) so it’s not all on her. I would have even been with it if she used her aforementioned puzzle solving skills and smarts to beat the boys, but instead were treated to unrealistic fights scenes with Breslin’s character takes multiple punches to the face while looking the daintiest I’ve ever seen her.

Stop there if you’d like, you have the jist, but there is a little more.

Anyway it all starts when she’s launched on her mission. Is it the first mission of many, or what she’s been training for her whole life, we don’t know. Breslin befriends a girl in a 50’s style diner with instant milkshakes and they start talking about their love interests. The girl has the hots for a guy other than her boyfriend, and Breslin has the hots for her mentor/dad (basically, right? It’s Wes Bentley I get it, but it’s still kindaaa weird right?) That encounter amounts to very little then Breslin meets Jameson, Alexander Ludwigs of ‘Vikings’, who dresses for prom and invites her out. (Yeah, that’s all I got too)

They meet up with Jameson’s three dumb friends and they’re all wearing their prom garb too. Then they drive out into the wilderness to some teenage drinkin and fuckin couches in the woods—again, not that you’ll see any fuckin’ inthis movie, killin’ motivated crimes only for these teen boys. Breslin’s pops out some DMT laced liquor for the boys and they start playing a game of truth or dare out of a bag for some reason. After a weird spiel from Jameson about a rabbit he feels bad about letting die slowly, Breslin conveniently draws ‘get tied up’ from the truth-or-dare bag. She’s tied behind the back, not that it really matters because she gets out instantly. Then they tell her their plan for the four of them to hunt her down ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ style. They give her five minutes to run, but one guy is too eager to kill her and runs off before the five minutes is up. Luckily he’s tripping balls by now in the way only people who have never tripped any balls imagine tripping balls is like, so while he’s battling two deadmou5e-like apparitions Breslin can steal his axe and kill him with it. Now she’s armed, oh never mind she left the axe in that guy’s chest.

Then she kills another hallucinating guy after taking a couple blows, then she goes after the third guy. Number 3 is also clone kid #7 from UltraViolet, his worst fear is that his girlfriend, the one from the 50’s diner, is fucking Jameson—which she is—and also that she will find out about their “hunting trips” and he will have to kill her for it. After hallucinating all of this, including a fist fight with Jameson who apparently isn’t even there, it is revealed to be Breslin’s character encouraging his hallucinations the whole time. She then kills UltraViolet-child-actor with a rock to the face in the the best kill scene of the film.

(See?)

The only one remaining at this point is Jameson, who incidentally is the only boy who didn’t take the DMT laced drink. Breslin is beat up and exhausted by the time Jameson encounters her. Before THEIR fistfight they engage in a game of wits (not For realz). They each answer each other’s questions with Breslin revealing she enjoyed killing the boys and Jameson AKA Ragnar Jr. admitting they’d already killed 20 women the same way. He then asks her to join him and continue killing together, but she declines, they fist fight, she chokes him like she choked Bentley in the beginning, and drugs him.

(This is the high school goof supposedly responsible for 20 murders. I just can’t get over this. As an avid reader of true crime, numbers like this are unheard of for a guy of his age. Also are we supposed to believe 4 guys in Tuxedos in this seemingly small town have killed 20 women and no one noticed? GTFO)

When Jameson wakes, he’s in a noose on a stump teeter tottering for his life as he starts to hallucinate. He satisfactorily begs Breslin for mercy, then is overtaken by his worst fear—the ghosts of his victims who startle him off the stump and to his death by strangulation.

After Ragnar Jr’s dead, Bentley walks out of the forest with a sniper rifle and I almost freaked TF out. I don’t feel good about comparing it to LOTR, but it’s like Gandalf calling in the giant eagles to take Frodo home after he’s travelled a third of the world to get there ON FOOT. What. Was. The. Point. Seriously. (Actually seriously—would the birds have been corrupted by the ring of power, or is that just like a major plot hole? And was Breslin on hard drugs for a little while and I didn’t hear about it?)

Anyway, after that Breslin and Bentley go to a diner, order pancakes, agree that they taste terrible, and that’s it. The end.

I know you may be thinking ‘yeah unidentifiedflyingfks, but your missing the deeper meaning—they all took the DMT and it made them face their worst fears!’ Yeah—I get that, but it still doesn’t mean it works. I would have literally rather it be magic than DMT. They’d probably all have different reactions and probably not even be incapacitated in the ways depicted in the movie. For it to expose everyone’s ‘worst fears’ is fucking magic anyway so let’s go ahead call a spade a lazy, half baked plot line, m’kay?

What really irks me about this movie though, is it could have been good. Have Breslin act within her skill set and find ways for her to use them that make sense, or at least give her some boxing classes and have her lift weights for Christ’s sake. Also these teens have killed 20 girls already? Where did they even come from? Also Bentley knew and this was the best way he could come up with to take them down? And who told him to act like a total weirdo creep in every scene? I don’t expect much. If you can’t make it good make it funny and this was neither. I wanted to like this movie, I still like Breslin and Bentley, but for as many reviews I read that wanted to give it 0 stars and couldn’t, I will. Never forget…. Oh never mind forget it all.

***0/5 FF’s, first certified TERRIBLE MOVIE!!

Here’s some user comments I found 😂😂 ->

[thefloatingstone]

I feel like talking about my books

Instead of working on the next page of the comic I took photos of some of my books because I wanted to show you guys. Because I honestly like books a lot, and I’ve got some interesting/weird ones I wanted to share.

And sometimes I just like to remind myself of nice things I have. (sorry for the bad photos)

1:

This is a really really good book.

It’s all about ways and cases of how people have faked “new species” or “scientific evidence” of mythical creatures using weird taxidermy, photo-doctoring and other ways in which people have SUCCESSFULLY FOOLED a large enough group of people for a while to be noteworthy. The book was published in 1975 and is honestly written in a way that you can tell the author was having an enormous amount of fun, never dodging facts and never letting a good story ruin what is the truth, but also thoroughly enjoying the joke on people and sometimes celebrating the insane creativity behind some of these creations.

The book includes things you’d expect like the Fiji mermaid, and the unicorn skeleton which was pretty infamous, but also bizarre things like the fur-bearing trout.

I got it for $3 at a flea market.

2:

I’m gonna avoid saying “this is a good book” or I’m gonna say that on every single one of these.

This is a book written in english by an english speaking author who lives in Japan, and although it includes a section on Anime, Chanbara and Kaiju, it also covers all the other sections of Japanese cinema that the non-Japanese audience might not even be aware of. From dramas to Pink movies to ‘Japan on Japan’ to art house. It’s probably the best book I’ve seen on Japanese cinema that offers a really broad look at the country’s film history, rather than focusing on the few exports we associate with the country.

I got this at a warehouse sale where the bookstore chain in this country use to have a bi-monthly thing where they sell their extra stock by weight, rather than cover price. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford the $50 price tag.

3:

The best book on Archaeology I’ve managed to find thus far. I’ve tried finding other books that match how good this one is but I haven’t managed it yet. I’ve found inferior books on Archaeological discoveries, and books about like... the process of archaeology itself, but not a book that documents the histories and stories behind the discoveries themselves, talking about the persons who made the discoveries, the nature of each discovery, the time setting and weird events around the excavations. As well as giving facts about everyday life of people in the past and what each discovered item teaches us.

It’s in this book I learned about Mrs. Pretty and Jean Louis Buckhart. I’m just angry this book I bought on a whim turned out to be the best one and I now have an impossibly high standard for any future books on the subject.

I have this other book about lost treasures and In the Mrs. pretty story it uses a pun on 50 Shades of Grey for the chapter title. Just... fuck off.

4:

I actually keep meaning to read this one and I still need to get around to it because I’m pretty bad at reading. I never seem to just sit down and do it unless I’m forced to.

However I’m still kinda into this book as a concept at least. The blurb says:

The Bible is full of myth and full of mystery and the Very Rev Gillbert Thurlow, the Dean of Gloucester takes the well known stories of the Old Testament and explains the purpose and symbolism behind the myths, showing where myth ends and history begins and how relevant these stories are to us today. He then goes on to examine the nature of the Mysteries of the New Testament.

And you guys know me, I’m all about symbolism and deeper meaning behind things (within reason)

The book was published in 1974. I got is for $4 at a flea market.

5:

“Misao to Fukumaru” is a small little book with no actual writing in it. It’s a collection of photos taken of the author’s grandmother and her partially deaf cat living in rural Japan. It’s a gorgeous little book showing simple, everyday life and happiness. I have the second one too but the first one is much better. The second one is mainly made up of the B-roll and it kinda shows.

6:

A book about the history of toys. Underneath it you can see my other book on toy history, but I decided to show this one instead. The other book documents the history behind things like Troll dolls and hula hoops, whereas this book instead is more “historical” for lack of a better word. Showing us popular toys from hundreds of years ago and earlier. Showing things like Ancient Egyptian horses on wheels to be pulled by string, doll houses from Victorian England, and french dolls from the Rococo period. It’s almost a bit heartbreaking to see the artistry in these toys, and compare to the cheap manufactured factory stuff made today. However I suppose back then only rich kids could get toys, instead of being widely available for everyone the way it is today.

Oh well.

7:

I highly recommend this book if you can get your hands on it!

Honestly, I’ve found it hard to find any books on exploitation movies. Yes, there’s the Internet and shows like ‘The Cinema Snob’ which fills in a lot of the gaps, but no real BOOKS on the film subgenre. This is the best one I’ve managed to find that focuses on the topic itself, rather than talk about exploitation films as a single chapter in a book on film as a whole. Which is a shame, because Exploitation ‘trash’ (and yes. a LOT of it is complete trash) helped build movies into what they are today, for better or worse. They played a very vital role in shaping cinema, and not only that, but to ignore parts of history in favour of other parts paints an inaccurate picture of a time period.

It’s why you have people who believe ‘Saw invented Torture Porn’ when movies like ‘Blood-Sucking Freaks’ have existed since the 60s.

I once attended a screening by Jerry Beck on his ‘Worst Cartoons Ever’ show, where he states that he believed preserving terrible awful shit cartoons to be very important, and how nobody was doing it. Because “If we only remember the good and forget about the bad, of course we’re gonna say ‘Everything was so much better 20 years ago!’ If we ignore the crap how can we really see how much we’ve improved?”

Exploitation films are why the modern horror genre even exists tbh. Hollywood saw how much money ‘Last House on the Left’, ‘Halloween’, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ were making and went “Hey! There’s money here!” and made ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’. The first mainstream blood-soaked horror movie widely distributed.

Which, sadly, mostly killed the exploitation circuit. Because when all you have to fall back on is blood and nudity, how can you compete when Hollywood, which actually has money, starts muscling in on your territory.

Hilariously the opposite is now starting to be true. Hollywood is so focused on churning out stupid gore-soaked horror movies that people are starting to pay more attention to the low-budget indie films that tend to have more thought put into them.

No photos of the inside on this one because it’s an indie released book (as it should be) and printing costs limited how many pictures could be included, so it’s mostly text.

I bought this from the Author while visiting friends in L.A.

[occupyscifi]

The free fyre zone

Incendiary bombs lit up the ruins of the civil war torn city. It lit upon the fort lay grand buildings, reduced to ruin by warring militia groups. It lit up the casinos that had become killing ground and the hotels that had become bombed out shells. It also illuminated a straggling line of hipsters making their shell shocked way to the weed choked outdoor theatre. Once there had been great concerts, when the civil war hadn’t turned tourism into a sick joke. When this had been a desirable place to take a holiday. That the hipsters in their burning man tshirts and faux ironic trustafarian beads didn’t seem to have got the memo was just another hollow irony. They came clutching tickets that promised the concert of a lifetime and an experience like no other. That the experience was likely to be death from a either bullet or cholera was not mentioned. “its…its here right?” asked one boy who had been mugged as soon as he’d stepped out of the perfumed safety of the international airport. Relieved of his passport, his bitcoin e-purse and a fair amount of his innocence he had still doggedly journeyed through the desert heat, past wilted palm trees and rubble piles to the bombed out ruin of the old Hilton hotel. “sure…I guess” said a girl whose face was smeared with soot from the cooking fires that had kept her alive. Best not to ask what she had killed and cooked over it, but it was unlikely to be the organic free range fare that her rich complexion was hitherto used to “its menna be…its menna be….” However words had failed as her spirit had been crushed, the thousands of lolcoin spent on flights and supposed exclusivity to the party of the century. “yeah” said another boy, who had used the last of his e-glass charge to google how to make weapons from the everyday trash left behind by the civil war. He held in his hand a shank made from the remains of a crashed drone cam, downed by some local fighter irritated by network news overflights filming their plight for youtube Epicwarfails videos “stage is down here” he gestured down steps that were pocked with bullets. Beyond there lay an amphitheatre that had clearly been used for executions and had what could be charitably described as a stage. That it was daubed with fundamentalist slogans from one of the more extremist militias did not suggest it was likely to host any international pop acts. “three days…” said the first boy “three days and this…” he sighed in exhaustion. The hundred or so other hipsters, representing a mix of nationalities and ethnicities but all hailing from the richest one percent of the youth demographic were either sitting or wandering about in shellshocked horror. What little light there was came from the few remaining working e-glasses or bespoke antique retro blackberries. The rattle of machine gun fire in the distance and the crump of explosions were now so familiar that the hipsters didn’t even look up. Those that had been fashionably slim before were now unfashionably gaunt, gym trained muscles unused to dealing with the strain of living in a war zone. All of a sudden the last of the lights failed and the amphitheatre was plunged into darkness. The sound of booted feet on the stairs and the whispered crackle of callsigns over radios boded no good at all. The audience all suddenly remembered all the stories their nannies had told them about ISIS and White Pride gangs and what they did to little rich kids when they caught them. “oh my god…” said the girl hysteria in her voice “this is….” “ladies and gentlemen!” boomed a voice from speakers hidden all around them “Freefyremedia entertainment are proud to present – the Beastie Boys!” Spotlights flashed on, illuminating the stage. With a flourish the cloth covered slogans calling for death to blasphemers and heretics fell away to reveal to the now iconic flame logo that had become the byword for ultimate extreme live entertainment. On the stage the cloned and copyrighted heirs to the New York rappers struck a pose. “this first one goes out” cried the cloned Mike D, his DNA reset to License to Ill era youth “to all your crazy mofos who hiked through a goddamn desert war to see us. Make some noise!” “epic!” continued the girl drowned in the sound of people fighting (for their right) to party “absolutely epic!”

The idea to run luxury festival in a warzone had come to Gigi Khan Rodriguez Tesla after the fourth time she had been kidnapped on her Instagram sponsored charity yacht tour of Somalia. “it’s like, you have to give something back” she said, being interviewed on the first day of the Free Fyre festival. Behind her the broken skyline of the city served as the perfect backdrop to her earnest interview. Indeed she had called in her own drone team to demolish a particularly unsightly building that had advertised one of her rivals sponsors “I wanted to both create the ultimate party experience for the spartan race, climate change fighting generation -  and to raise money for kids like these” she gestured to where some local boys - their faces  photogenic in their malnutrition -  lounged adoringly. They were skinny, but not too skinny – that would upset people too much -  and they were dressed in Gigi’s own line of refugeeware tees “I mean, we’ve all done burning man, and Coachella got yawny after the third orgithon” she smiled her perfect smile “when you’ve lived in the bubble of luxury all your life what’s left to experience?” she gestured behind her at a city torn in two by civil strife. Where those left behind feared their own government as much as the roving bands of extreme religious militia. Where the buzz of drones overhead meant either foreign bombs or worse, foreign journalists. “except the real world?” “but Gigi” asked a journalist through a small floating camdrone “what about those who say you’re exploiting these kids for your own gain?” the journalist was not, as might be suspected, talking direct to Gigi. Most journalists from serious publication wouldn’t be able to afford the ticket price to a free fyre zone event. Instead this journalist was skyping from a café in downtown Mumbai “that if anything your events actually cause more instability to the communities they are meant to help, and serve as nothing more than a chance for dumb rich kids to pretend they are facing the real world?” “an excellent question” replied Gigi, who had zoned out slightly during the longer sentences. As a seasoned social media pro she was an expert in the art of multitasking. She had been loltagging her latest set of Instagram pics, hitting the right balance between artistically beautiful shots, perfectly toned flesh and serious photo documentary of ruined buildings that her people told her had historical value. Her lack of attention hardly mattered as there were enough of her paid PR staff to feed her the next lines as she paused to look thoughtful over the heat hazed ruins of the city. One reason to chose this particuatl warzone, the desert climate made it an excellent backdrop to their photos, the sunsets alone were worth the ticket price. “you know, these are people that have lost hope” she said, reading the lines of her e-glasses autocue “They’ve been abandoned by their own government . The international community doesn’t care. The UN doesn’t even bother to send aid anymore. If nothing else we’re making this place cool. And if a place is cool then people will care again. Because of us its trending on social media. People are actually talking about this city. That has to help right?” The journalist wanted to ask another question but has been shunted to the back of the queue. There are other media organs who had paid more money and want to shoehorn in either paid hashtagged phrases or to begin some celebrity faux flame war arranged weeks in advance between Gigi and her carefully curated list of frenemies. “Okay good people!” Shouted Gigi to the crowd. It was the last night of the festival and the renaming in hipsters that had not been airlifted out due to injury, food poisoning or their mummies and ad dies getting scared cheered loudly “we’ve had a great time these last couple of days. We’ve all had a blast – literally” she nodded at the members of the vegan fundamentalist militia who had allowed the hipster to get access to their social cache  of weaponry for just a small extra fee. For even more the audience could choose their own list of targets to be destroyed. All proceeds going to a good cause, of course “but we shouldn’t forget the real reason we’re here, and I’m not talking about your awesome pecs, Bieber junior” at the side of the stage the excellently quaffered but definitely illegitimate child of the singer showed his famous chest. That he had been created without his fathers consent hardly mattered, after all if Beiber senior had wanted to remain childless then he should not have tried to pay off his legal bills with access to his own DNA “no, its all about the good people of this city. Kids like the ones I’ve been speaking to” behind her graphics of more cute kids show, all of them with cute injuries – nothing too disturbing. Research shows that kids with arms missing don’t make people feel anything but sad, and sad doesn’t help anyone “they are the ones that have to live here while we get on with our lives” Gigi does her serous face, it’s one she carefully practices and highlight best the doe eyes her parents paid so much money to have encoded into her genes “so let’s give it up one more time for everyone living in…” there is a pause when Gigi realises she’s forgotten the name of the place. Well all these little shithole desert cities in their failed states all sound the same. Was it Spanish? Latin? Arabic? Didit even matter? “ this great city” there is a roar from the crowd of approval and the noise of elegantly manicured hands that have never known a days work clapping away “and now make some noise for our final act!” With that the lights go down and Gigi exits the stage, grabbing her smart glasses from an assistant. “You said I didn’t need these. Said I looked cleverer without” muttered Gigi angrily “I looked like an asshole instead. Not knowing the name of the place” she pulled on the glasses as behind her the band began one of their most famous numbers. The one from the advert, or the film. Gigi never bothered to remember . It was hummable, that was all that mattered. She climbed into her private APC and the engine coughed into life, driving her out of then city and never looking back. As she passed the edge of the city limits a bullet perforated sign reminded her of the name of the city. “Las vegas!” She said proudly, as the former casino city vanished into the background – now one of many front lines in a bitter civil war “how could I forget?” Behind her the sun set and against the backdrop of a rocket attack Coldplay began their set in earnest. It was going to be epic.

[republicstandard]

Don't be Deceived by the Media’s Pro-Immigration Child Exploitation

American conservatives are crowing from the rooftops of Trump Towers. Their biggest foe, the mainstream media – the Prince of Darkness who masquerades as an angel of light, has been stripped of his horns and pitchfork. Lucifer has fallen from heaven into the shithole of Dante’s Inferno, and is being tormented by the angelic host of conservative radio commentators and Republican roosters cock-a-doodling at the cyclopean cock-up committed by TIME magazine.

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The fakestream media have broken Jeffrey Archer’s eleventh commandment: "Thou shall not get caught." TIME was caught with its pants down and its picture of a crying three-year-old Honduran girl exposed as fake news. The girl was real, the crying was real, the picture was real, but the context was faked, framed and photo-shopped.

TIME shamelessly featured its child pawn like child porn on the cover page of its July 2, 2018 issue. It shows the girl facing Donald Trump, who is looking down on the child with bemusement. TIME would like its readers to interpret the look on Trump’s face as callousness. A canny three-word caption completes the toxic cocktail of half-truth and digital demagoguery: Welcome to America.

The image is further inflated by a TIME human-interest story zooming in on Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, John Moore, who sheds copious crocodile tears as he spins his tale of sanctimonious poppycock. Moore recounts photographing the child on the US-Mexican border as mother and child were trying to enter the US illegally and were apprehended by law enforcement.

"When the officer told the mother to put her child down for the body search, I could see this look in the little girl’s eyes," Moore tells TIME. "As soon as her feet touched the ground she began to scream." The Border Patrol is taking mother and child away in a van and Moore’s bleeding-heart explodes as if he is Mother Theresa. "All I wanted to do was pick her up. But I couldn’t," he recollects.

Am I sounding like a cynical son-of-a-bitch? To this day, I cannot forget what I saw when I was six – a child being separated from his parents. A man with a sack walked through the slums in Mahim, Mumbai. He stopped outside a hovel, picked up a child, threw him into the sack and walked away.

I froze, traumatized with terror, unable to cry or scream or call for help as I watched from the window of our first floor apartment. In India, children snatched from their parents are sold to gangs who cripple them and force them into beggary.

Since when does the Left care so much about keeping the family together?

To this day, I cannot forget what I saw later in life – a British working class grandmother who sat weeping through a service at the Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich, where I served as Chaplain. She accosted me at the door after the service and blubbered like a child about to break down.

She was holding pictures of three beautiful children. Her partner told me her story. Social Services (SS) had forcibly removed her grandchildren from her care. She was looking after her grandkids in lieu of her alcoholic daughter, but the SS wouldn’t let her even see the kids any longer. The SS were giving one child to a gay couple for adoption, despite grandma’s objections. We did our best to help her reconnect with her grandchildren, but the State had kidnapped them.

So when American’s leftwing media erupted into hyper-hysteria over Trump separating immigrant children from their parents and cruelly caging them in Nazi concentration camps and Japanese internment camps, my hermeneutic of suspicion went into overdrive.

"Since when does the Left care so much about keeping the family together?" I asked myself. After all, one of the primary goals of the Left is the destruction of the family. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels "usually wrote about the destruction, dissolution, and abolition of the family," observes historian Richard Weikart.

Marx fulminated against "the bourgeois claptrap about the family" and "the hallowed correlation of parent and child," both of which he found "disgusting". Charles Fourier, a utopian socialist proposed that children be separated from their parents and raised communally. Robert Owen, one of the most influential advocates of utopian socialism declared war on the family. In his commune, children after the age of three were removed from their parents for proper education.

Under Mao, children pulled from their parents. All parents were to eat in large mess halls while their children went into day nurseries. Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai was adamant that the "worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine," but "must remember that there are only our children" who would be wards of the state.

If you think this is history, think again. Prof Melissa Harris-Perry, who holds the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University, believes that children should be separated from their parents. Harris-Perry laments the lack of "a very collective notion" of our children. She wants us "to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities".

Since when does the Left care so much about keeping the family together? I asked myself again. There can be no more permanent separation of a child from his or her mother than killing the child in its mother’s womb. And what about the Left’s dogma of single-parenthood separating children from father or mother and depriving the child of its most fundamental human right to two parents?

Don’t be deluded into believing that the Left cares about children. They are using children as a battering ram against Trump – a socially acceptable form of child abuse, I thought, as the 'separation of immigrant children’ debate raged. But surely, they wouldn’t stoop to the gutter and use images of little children for their political agenda? Wouldn’t that be a socially acceptable form of child pornography?

My worst suspicions were confirmed when it was revealed that the images of immigrant children in metal cages were actually four years old and taken during the Obama administration. Gotcha! Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau was among the many to condemn the photos – until he realised they dated back to His Master’s Reign.

Then came the bombshell – the crying girl in the border picture on the cover of TIME was actually never separated from her mother! It was fake news. TIME took its own time to issue a correction, but chief editor Edward Felsenthal stood defiantly by the picture, saying that while agents may not have taken the child, the photograph captured the mood of the story.

I remembered how the mainstream media had abused the image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi – the Syrian boy tragically drowned while going from Turkey to Kos. The MSM couldn’t even give the little boy the dignity of getting his name right, and called him Aylan Kurdi. The family were trying to get to Canada and join their relatives in Vancouver. The media, activists and politicians fanned the flames of the picture and cried themselves hoarse demanding open borders.

Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Spectator, responded and termed the use of the child’s image "moral pornography". "It’s more like a snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migration in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers," wrote O’Neill. "When it comes to producing moral porn for the right-on, it seems the normal rules of journalism – and civilization – can be suspended," he scathingly added.

They will exploit suffering, dying and dead children in a contemptible game of moral and emotional blackmail.

One of the most morally despicable stories of the media’s use of child porn is the case of Kevin Carter’s picture of a dying girl in the Sudan in March 1993. The girl, no more than five years old, had collapsed while crawling toward a UN feeding center. As Carter crouched to take her picture, a vulture landed nearby, awaiting her death.

Carter waited for 20 minutes, hoping the bird would spread its wings so he could capture a better shot. It did not, and after he took a few images, he shooed the bird away and watched the girl continue to struggle. TIME, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers emblazoned their pages with the picture.

Only later did people raise questions about the girl’s fate and about the "appropriateness, decency, vulgarity, and the tasteful function of photojournalism", writes Barbie Zelizer in her book About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Why did Carter not help the girl or make certain the vulture was gone before he moved on? "Which is the true vulture?" asked one reader in a blistering indictment of the media.

Carter’s callousness cost him his life. Hounded by phone calls in the middle of the night criticizing him for not rescuing the girl, he killed himself in 1994.

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The mainstream media doesn’t give a damn about children. The Left doesn’t give a damn about the family. Their agenda is open borders and uncontrolled immigration. They will exploit suffering, dying, and dead children in a contemptible game of moral and emotional blackmail. Their ultimate goal is totalitarian control. For once a country is swamped by immigrants and Balkanized into warring ghettos –all warring with each other– people will turn to the supreme nanny-state for security and salvation.

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