Leftists ruin everything. Nothing, not even children’s toys, is immune from their hateful ideology. A case in point is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. There are countless women who played with Barbie dolls as children, put them aside when they grew up, and occasionally think nostalgically about them without ever suspecting that they were the targets of Leftist consciousness-raising. But from the very start, Barbie sets them straight.

Barbie begins with a voiceover that sounds like a witch. In the bad old days, little girls only played with baby dolls, which their cunning parents foisted on them to brainwash them into wanting to become mothers. It was soooo boring.

Then, to the opening strains of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, a monolith appears above the primitive little girls, exciting them to an orgy of baby doll smashing. Smashing baby dolls is in questionable taste. It smacks of killing babies in effigy. I guess Roe v. Wade really died hard for the Sisterhood.

The monolith is Barbie. First introduced in 1959, Barbie changed everything. Instead of playing mothers, little girls began playing Barbie. Who was Barbie? Barbie is an emancipated single woman with lots of clothes and other accessories that you can buy for her, including a boyfriend named Ken. But Ken and Barbie don’t marry and have kids. They don’t even have genitalia. As the movie points out, Barbie once had a pregnant friend, but that doll was discontinued. Thus, Barbie does not prepare women for motherhood, but spinsterhood.

Barbie and Ken were initially archetypal Nordics living the California dream, when California used to be synonymous with blond surfers rather than tech geeks with wretched physiques.

But then the kvetching began. Ugly people are a huge burden on society. Not only do they ugly the place up, they also resent their betters and want to tear them down. Moreover, they wish to overthrow the standards of beauty by which they are judged inferior.

Whites, especially Nordics, have long been the focus of the lusts and resentments of the darker, less comely races. And beautiful whites have been lusted after and resented by the fat and ugly of all races. As America becomes more miscegenated and non-white, the rising tide of ugliness threatens to wash away all standards. Thus, Barbie and Ken have become the symbols of everything loathed by the Left’s bio-Leninist coalition: feminists, the fat and the ugly, Jews and other non-whites, etc.

Barbie and Ken have been accused of making brunettes feel bad for not being blonde (as if the world does not contain countless hot brunettes). They have been accused of making ugly people feel bad by being too damn beautiful. They have been accused of making fat people sad by being lanky and fit. And they have been accused of making non-whites feel inferior by being archetypal good-looking whites. It would really set these people off if Ken and Barbie were capable of producing blonde plastic babies.

Barbie’s manufacturer responded to the Leftist hate coalition in two ways. First, they diversified Barbie. Barbie can now be every shade of black and brown, as well as ugly and fat. Second, they marketed Barbie as a feminist icon. It wasn’t a stretch; after all, she was a childless, materialistic, single career girl. Barbie, I am sure, started out as an innocent children’s toy. But she has been retconned into a Leftist psyop by a giant corporation. Capitalism has simply learned how to coopt and commodify Leftism.

This cynical marketing strategy is hilariously parodied in the movie as “Barbieland,� where every woman is Barbie, Barbie comes in all colors and sizes, and every Barbie leads a perfect life, even Wheelchair Barbie. Every sort of diversity is represented. There’s a gay ally doll named Allan, and the black President Barbie is obviously a transsexual or drag queen. Come to think of it, a lot of the Barbies look like drag queens.

Barbies do everything. They run the government. They run the industries. They award one another prizes. We are even asked to believe that they risk breaking a nail as sanitation and construction workers.

What about the Kens? They do nothing. They are just accessories. As far as Barbie knows, they don’t even have houses. They just hang around on the beach.

But Barbie (played by Margot Robbie) and Ken (played by Ryan Gosling) are just not happy as perpetual adolescents in a post-historical consumerist utopia. Barbie has thoughts about death, and she’s beginning to age. Ken, moreover, is not happy being in the friend zone forever.

At this point, I was beginning to think that Barbie could become a great subversive film exploring how feminism and the sexual revolution have failed worse than Communism, producing a world in which more people than ever are lonely and incapable of forming friendships, relationships, and families. I wondered if we would meet Benzodiazepine Barbie and SSRI Barbie, as well as Incel Shitposter Ken.

I was really hoping the movie would end with these two archetypal Nordics leaving behind their empty materialism, growing some genitals, and starting a family. Since Barbie and Ken are literally the only white, non-dysgenic couple in the whole film, the future of the white face hinges on the production of the Margot Robbie-Ryan Gosling miracle baby. But, of course, Tinseltown will go to any lengths to prevent that from happening.

Barbie seeks advice from Cynical Wine Aunt Barbie, known in the movie as “Weird Barbie.� Naturally, she gives bad advice. Weird Barbie blames her problems on society. Specifically, she says that she became weird because a little girl in the real world “played too hard� with her, whatever that means. Weird Barbie suggests that Barbie’s problems may have the same origins. So Barbie sets off for the real world, and Ken joins her by stowing away.

Ken and Barbie arrive in Los Angeles, one of the most politically correct cities on the planet, which is depicted as a dystopia of sexism and patriarchy. It is not, however, depicted for the dystopia it really is: overrun by Third Worlders, junkies, and beggars.

Barbie is dismayed by the patriarchy, but Ken is entranced. He’s never felt affirmed and respected as a man. The depiction of bro-culture is genuinely appealing, which is highly subversive. Ken decides that power, responsibility, and horses are the answers to his malaise. He thus decides to bring the patriarchy back to Barbieland. The Barbies immediately knock off the career girl stuff and become dutiful Stepford Girlfriends to the Kens. Everyone is much happier with the new order.

Meanwhile, Barbie meets the source of her discontent: a middle-aged Latina with visible black ancestry who looks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has a weak, bumbling white husband and a sneering tween daughter who spouts woke drivel. The Barbie returns to Barbieland with the two Latinas, where they are horrified to discover Ken’s patriarchy. The Barbies have obviously been brainwashed. Honestly, I don’t think a woman on the planet could say no to Gosling’s Ken. He’s an amazingly charismatic actor and makes a lot of this dumb role. Sadly, a lot of people hate him for that.

Naturally, Barbie and the Latinas work to overturn the patriarchy. AOC easily snaps the Barbies out of their brainwashing with feminist duckspeak. The Barbies then conspire to get the Kens fighting with one another (“Let’s you and him fight.�), and while the Kens are distracted, the Barbies overthrow the patriarchy. The Kens go along with it, because they literally don’t have the balls to say no.

Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) is a science fiction classic. The setting is a devastated Earth in the far future. The premise is that humanity has been enslaved by artificial intelligences. Human beings spend our lives in what are essentially coffins while mechanical vampires drain our energy. We don’t know it, because we are asleep, dreaming that we are in a radically different world. This is the Matrix. Today we would call it a multiplayer online game.

Like many dystopias, The Matrix is actually too optimistic. The Wachowski brothers thought the human race would have to be forced into the pods. They didn’t imagine we would choose them. But eventually, gaming addicts will build coffins for themselves as in The Matrix, where they can loll about catheterized, diapered, and fed intravenously, so the game never ends. To sustain themselves, they’d gladly share their body heat.

The image of the human race both enslaved and deluded about its condition by a fake world of mere projections goes back to the Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in the Republic. It is echoed in Descartes’ Meditations and the Marxist concept of ideology.

Plato, Descartes, and Marx all believed that emancipation is possible. But there’s no way to think yourself out of the Matrix. If you managed to wake yourself up, you’d discover that you are a naked, flabby blob in a pod full of pink goo, hooked into a machine that both nourishes and drains you.

Plato posited a sunlit world outside the cave where one could live and plan to return and liberate one’s fellows. Outside the Matrix, however, the Earth is devastated and shrouded in nuclear winter. You wouldn’t have a chance.

Thus it isn’t clear how the resistance movement of the Matrix started or how it can end. To begin, the resistance needs a deus not from the machine but outside of it altogether: perhaps a seed of unenslaved humanity living in a place called “Zion� near the Earth’s core.

Getting people to join the resistance is a hard sell. You can persuade people to quit a job or a relationship by arguing that “it isn’t really you.� But imagine telling people that everything about their world, including the people they love, including their very selves, is fake. The real world is a hellscape where they are living corpses, imprisoned in coffins, fed upon by parasites. Which world would you choose?

Thus it is nice that the resistance gives people a choice: the first choice they ever really had. If they take the red pill, they will trade everything and everyone they knew and loved for life in a post-apocalyptic hell. If they take the blue pill, they will go back to sleep in the Matrix. Naturally, only deeply alienated people would take the red pill.

However, the ultimate goal of the resistance is to crash the Matrix for everyone, whether they like it or not. But it is not clear how the human race could survive such an event. There’s Zion, but that promised land probably isn’t big enough for everyone.

The Matrix works as the story of the hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves) awakening to his power and joining the resistance. But as far as the larger project of liberating humanity goes, the creators of The Matrix had written themselves into a corner, and they should have quit while they were ahead. The story could not stand up to too much scrutiny about where the resistance came from and where it was going.

The first sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, was a clever movie with a bleak message: the resistance itself is an illusion, created by and subordinate to the Matrix. Of course that’s a useful lesson in a world of coopted and manufactured oppositions. The problem is that on the basic premises of the films, there can’t really be a true opposition. Which means that no matter what happens, the machines will always be in control.

The second sequel, The Matrix Revolutions, was pretentious, incoherent garbage in which Neo and the heroine Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss) both die. It sounds like a bleak ending, but look on the bright side: if the hero and heroine are dead, at least there won’t be another sequel, right?

Wrong. For, as the movie has the brass to explain, Warner Brothers needed more money, and money has the magic power to resurrect dead franchises over and over again. Hence The Matrix Resurrections. What could possibly go wrong? Look how well it worked for Star Wars!

The Matrix is objectively more useful to the pro-white Right than the anti-white Left, but you have to look past the casting to see that. In The Matrix, the bad guys are all clean-cut white men. The good guys look like the Left: a coalition of non-whites and white misfits. But just bracket that out for a minute. Imagine the movie with a monoracial cast and you’ll see that the story itself is not anti-white. Only the casting gives that impression.

In today’s world, what is the closest thing to the Matrix? The mass media, including gaming. In today’s world, who are the parasites who control the Matrix? They are overwhelmingly Leftist and disproportionately Jewish. (The Wachowskis are not Jewish, but Anglo and Polish in descent.) In today’s world, the race-conscious Right are the advocates of realism—racial, sexual, and political—whereas the Left are advocates of social constructionism, utopianism, gender fluidity, and delusional happy talk. (Both Wachowski brothers have “changed their sex.� Larry is now known as Lana, and Andy now styles himself Lilly.)

In today’s world, who are the slaves of the Matrix? The answer is tricky, because almost everyone is bamboozled and exploited to one extent or another. But whites, especially straight white men, are at the bottom of the progressive stack. Whites are targeted with relentless hate propaganda, including the casting of The Matrix itself. Thus it was natural for race-conscious whites to see The Matrix as an allegory for our situation and to appropriate the “red pill� as a symbol of our awakening. To my knowledge, the first use of the red pill in this manner was in Michael Polignano’s speech “My Awakening Too� from May 2004.

One of the ambitions of The Matrix Resurrections was to somehow “take back the red pill� from the Right. The movie accomplishes nothing of the kind, so I suspect that this was just another cynical attempt to promote a movie by getting race-conscious whites to hate it online. (See my article on the No Time to Die trailers.)

The Matrix Resurrections is directed by “Lana� Wachowski, but after a few minutes, I thought this was the work of Jar Jar Abrams, since it follows the pattern of his cursed Star Wars movies. Because the Mouse needed money, Abrams was tasked with resurrecting Star Wars. Since the purpose was money, and since he held the fans in utter contempt, there was no question of creating an original story within the larger Star Wars mythos (what the money people call a “franchise�). So Jar Jar decided to simply coast on nostalgia. He dusted off the original cast members (who were long past their discard dates) and put them in scene by scene, sometime shot by shot rip-offs of the original trilogy, this time as farce. Since he had no idea what make the original trilogy popular, he took the 70-IQ cargo cultist route of imitation, thinking that would be safer. He also junked the plots up with so many inanities and gags and leaps of logic that he delivered running times of 138 and 142 minutes, which simply highlighted the vapidity of the stories. Not only did he insult the intelligence, taste, and values of the fans, he bored them silly.

House of Gucci is a highly entertaining combination of comedy, tragedy, and farce, tracing the decline of the Gucci fashion empire from an Italian family business to a global capitalist brand.

House of Gucci would have been the best Martin Scorsese movie in years—if it hadn’t been directed by Ridley Scott. It has all the Scorsese touches: lots of Italians (albeit Italian-Italians rather than Italian-Americans), a plush running time, studies of characters who are seldom admirable but always interesting, excellent acting from a distinguished cast, Al Pacino, and a meticulous, nostalgia-infused reconstruction of another era, this time the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, a time that seems impossibly glamorous, wholesome, and white compared with the present.

Gucci was founded by Guccio Gucci in 1921 and passed on to his sons upon his death in 1953. The film considerably simplifies the Gucci family tree, focusing on two of Guccio’s sons, Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) and Aldo (Al Pacino) plus Rodolfo’s son Maurizio (Adam Driver) and Aldo’s son Paulo (an unrecognizable Jared Leto).

Maurizio is depicted as a nerd who is targeted for seduction and marriage by Patrizia Reggiani. Brilliantly portrayed by Lady Gaga, Patrizia is a social climber from a less wealthy, less distinguished background. Rodolfo dismisses her as a gold-digger, but she wasn’t. She stayed with Maurizio even after his father cut him off. She was, however, a social climber with a whole cluster of personality disorders. At first, her ambition and lack of scruples served her husband well. She had a child and reconciled Maurizio and his father just in time to collect his inheritance. This guaranteed her enormous wealth and prestige. She enjoyed a lavish lifestyle that is only hinted at in the movie.

But Patrizia could not leave well enough alone. She egged her husband on to take a role in the company. Why in God’s name would you want to run a company if you are not cut out for it, especially if you already have more money than you could spend in two lifetimes? (When Maurizio Gucci died in 1995, his estate was worth $400 million.) Then Patrizia created a conflict between Maurizio and his uncle Aldo, allying with Aldo’s idiot son Paulo. Aldo eventually ended up in jail for tax evasion. Then Patrizia turned on Paulo, urging him to pursue his own design work then hitting him with a cease and desist for using the family name. Eventually, Maurizio went into business with some shady Iraqis who bought Aldo and Paulo out of the company. Once in charge, Maurizio proved to be a terrible businessman. He cut back on profitable but down-market product lines while expensing his increasingly lavish lifestyle to the company. Eventually, he was forced to sell his shares, leaving the business Gucci in name only.

Patrizia turned Maurizio from a tongue-tied nerd and wallflower to an increasingly self-confident jerk. But he resented her interference in his family. Her social-climbing was also increasingly grating, which is beautifully brought out in a scene in Switzerland where Patrizia is reduced to gibbering insecurity by Maurizio’s old-moneyed school chums. Finally, Maurizio turned his new-found self-confidence against Patrizia, first separating from her then divorcing. He soon discovered, however, that there’s only one thing worse than a scheming wife working “for� him—namely a scheming ex-wife working against him. If you don’t already know the story, I won’t spoil it for you.

House of Gucci most resembles Scorsese’s Casino, in which a quasi-autistic nerd marries a femme fatale, although in Casino the villainess is a junkie and petty grifter, whereas in in House of Gucci, she is the crazy ex-girlfriend from hell.

House of Gucci is great filmmaking that does not insult the intelligence, taste, or identity of white filmgoers. There are no politically correct messages. There is no tendentious “diversity� casting. House of Gucci is Ridley Scott’s best movie since Alien: Covenant and, along with No Time to Die, one of the best movies of 2021. If you see one movie this Christmas season, make it House of Gucci.

You have to give the Left credit. They never take a day off. The eye of Sauron never blinks. They are frenzied and relentless in their attempts to overthrow our civilization. They softened us up for a long time, rotting away our character and identity by promoting vice, cynicism, and nihilism—all while playing the victim. Now that we are too weak to resist and too deracinated to care, they have launched a ferocious campaign of iconoclasm against our forefathers’ heroes: Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, etc. Once they have finished destroying us in effigy, the next logical step is destroying us in person, i.e., open genocide against whites, rather than the stealth genocide they instituted in the 1960s with multiculturalism and race-replacement immigration.

But Leftists don’t just tear down idols. They are also both shameless and tireless in molding new idols from human excrement. George Floyd is just the latest and most ludicrous in a long line of fake heroes, saints, and martyrs: Lenin, Stalin, Martin Luther King . . .

Jewish gay rights advocate Harvey Milk (1930–1978) is one such figure. Milk was the first openly gay elected official in California as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. In 1978, Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were murdered by Dan White, a mentally unbalanced former member of the Board of Supervisors.

White had resigned his position impulsively then asked to be reinstated. Milk lobbied against his reinstatement. White was white, male, heterosexual, Catholic, his high school valedictorian, a Vietnam veteran, a former policeman, and a former firefighter celebrated for his bravery. He represented everything Milk loathed. Milk worked with him when he was on the Board, but he was hoping to replace him with another Leftist. Moscone agreed.

Moscone was not homosexual, and Milk was not killed because he was homosexual, but such details did not stop Milk from being touted as a martyr for gay rights and the recipient of an ever-increasing, ever more absurd list of honors and tributes.

For instance, in November of this year, as part of the ongoing anti-white cultural revolution, the United States Navy launched the USNS Harvey Milk. My first reaction was that the ship should have been named after the Village People, because at least they sang about being “In the Navy.� But it turns out that Harvey Milk had been in the Navy, receiving an “other than honorable� discharge for being homosexual. Here, at least, Milk was arguably a victim because he was gay.

But we used to name ships after heroes, not victims. Naming a ship after Harvey Milk is still an “other than honorable� gesture. It is less about honoring Harvey Milk than dishonoring the US Navy. Apparently, five other ships will also be named after woke icons. I don’t even want to know their names.

To my mind, the most absurd Milk tribute is the opera Harvey Milk by “American composer and cantor� Stewart Wallace, which casts Harvey Milk as a baritone and Dan White as a tenor and includes such characters as Dianne Feinstein and (of course) “concentration camp survivors.�

There is, however, a genuinely worthwhile tribute to Harvey Milk: Gus Van Sant’s 2008 biopic Milk, starring Sean Penn who won the Best Actor Oscar for his whiny nebbishy portrayal of the man himself. Milk was released to universal critical acclaim, but I gave it a hard pass when it was in theaters, since no critic would dare expose it if it were bad. Years later, I gave Milk a chance when it popped up on cable.

Milk is a well-made but typical biopic, complete with montages set to contemporary pop music. I don’t know how accurate it is, and I honestly don’t care enough to look into it too deeply. I know it omits Milk’s endorsement of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple and his penchants for manic and emotionally abusive behavior. I must note, however, that if the movie is a whitewash, a lot of unflattering facts still show through.

Milk is portrayed as neurotic, abrasive, duplicitous, and aggressively Jewish. He is portrayed as an active player in the Leftist takeover of the San Francisco government which eventually ruined America’s most beautiful city. He wasn’t above outing fellow homosexuals for personal political advantage (which is merely hinted at in the film). He cynically instructs his followers to start a riot, so he can pop up and play the peacemaker before the news cameras. In debates, Milk was an aggressive prick. His speeches began with the line, “My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you,� which is shown to be self-defeating, since it played into the hands of fundamentalist Christians pushing a ballot proposition to fire homosexual teachers to prevent them from “recruiting� children into homosexuality. As soon as he got elected to office, Milk began throwing his weight around, making demands and issuing threats. He dated a drunkard with clear borderline tendencies who embarrassed him in public and later hanged himself.

The movie begins in 1970 with Harvey Milk, a closeted Republican in New York City, turning 40 and feeling that he has done nothing to be proud of. (This movie offers hope to late bloomers.) Milk and his then boyfriend Scott Smith (James Franco) decide to move to the Castro District of San Francisco. Harvey morphs into a hippy, but he has the capital and the skills to open a small business, Castro Camera.

The shop not only is a source of income, it becomes a power base. It is a place to interact with the public and network. Later, it serves as a meeting place for political discussions and organizing. Milk’s first foray into politics was organizing gay shop owners in the Castro. He also began directing business to friendly straight shop owners and away from hostile ones. (Although it is not shown in the film, when Milk organized the Castro Street Fair, it brought large crowds to the district. Skeptical merchants were won over by booming sales.)

When Milk first ran for City Supervisor in 1973, he was an angry, abrasive hippy with a narrowly sectarian gay agenda and an energetic but amateurish campaign. He lost. When he ran again in 1975, he cleaned up his appearance, sought to build coalitions, and became more diplomatic. He lost again but came closer to power. In 1976, he ran for State Assembly and lost to Art Agnos, who later became Mayor of San Francisco.

Agnos is shown dispensing valuable advice to Milk. His speeches were angry rants about gay victimhood. He needed to articulate a more positive vision and offer policies to improve everyone’s lives. Milk took this advice to heart. Later he ran a campaign against dog poop, to clean up San Francisco’s parks.

In 1977, Milk ran for City Supervisor yet again. This time, he brought in a professional campaign consultant and sought establishment endorsements. This time, he won. But it would not have happened without San Francisco changing the election rules. Instead of the whole city voting on a common roster of candidates, the city was divided into districts. The establishment’s goal was to elect a more “diverse� (i.e., Leftist) Board of Supervisors by creating districts that would favor strongly leftist constituencies. That year, Chinatown put a Chinaman on the Board. A heavily black district elected a black woman. Milk’s district included the Haight and the Castro. He was a shoe in.

At every step of his political career, Milk was courageous, tireless, and masterful at motivating others to work for him. Once he paired these virtues with the right packaging, message, and objective political conditions, he succeeded.

Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948) is one of the greatest Westerns. Starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, Red River is the story of the first cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail from Texas to Abilene, Kansas. In Hawks’ hands, however, a movie about an episode in the history of America’s livestock business becomes mythic, epic, and philosophical. The frontier strips away the trappings of civilization and displays human nature and the origins of society naked in all their glory and squalor. Like such great Westerns as The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , and Once Upon a Time in the West, Red River is an origin story about the transition from savage to civil society.

This transition is particularly problematic for Americans, since our default programming is liberal individualism that prizes equality, personal freedom, contractual obligation, private life, and comfort above things like adventure, conquest, honor, and glory, to say nothing of holiness and truth. Unfortunately, as Red River shows, you can’t carve civilization out of the wilderness by following liberal principles—although it is increasingly evident that liberalism can wreck any society that takes it too seriously. Liberalism forces us either to cover up the illiberal origins of our society or to destroy it in a fit of self-loathing. (But there’s another option as well: to embrace the truth about our origins and stop immolating ourselves before the Moloch of liberal norms.)

Red River begins in 1851. A wagon train is headed to California. Pioneers banded together because there is strength in numbers, and strength was needed to confront the dangers of the frontier, including merciless Indian savages. But practically the first thing we see is a wagon pulling away from the safety of the train. Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) has decided to strike south for Texas and found a cattle ranch.

The leader of the wagon train doesn’t want Dunson to go. They are all safer sticking together. Dunson understands that, but this appeal to rational self-interest falls on deaf ears. He has a vision, and he is willing to accept the risks to follow it. The leader says Dunson agreed to go to California. Dunson says he signed nothing, and as we will soon see, promises on paper mean nothing to him anyway. The leader says that Dunson is too good with a gun to lose. Dunson replies that he’s also too good with a gun to keep. In the end, it comes down to the threat of force.

Dunson has fallen in love on the trail with Fen (Colleen Gray). He wants to leave her behind as well. Founding a ranch is hard, dangerous work. She’s not strong enough. But what about the nights? she asks. Good question, but in Tom’s mind, starting a cattle ranch requires cows for the bulls but not women for the men. Tom promises to send for her when it is safe and gives her his mother’s bracelet (which he himself was wearing) as a token of his pledge.

This opening scene establishes that Tom Dunson is not a man to be reasoned with. Once he makes up his mind, he is immovable. Being open to persuasion, of course, is one of the principles of parliamentary democracy. Dunson, however, is quick to reach for his gun to silence his critics. He’s a budding tyrant, not a liberal democrat. But, as it turns out, it takes a tyrant to found a great ranch in the wilderness.

Dunson turns south with his sidekick Groot (Walter Brennan) plus two cows and a bull to start his herd. A few hours later, the wagon train is massacred by Indians. Dunson and Groot see the smoke in the distance and prepare to defend themselves. They kill the raiding party sent after them, but the two cows are slaughtered. Dunson also recovers his engagement bracelet from one of the braves, who surely killed Fen to take it.

The next morning, they come upon a boy named Matt Garth (Mickey Kuhn) leading a cow. He is the sole survivor of the massacre. He’s gibbering from the horror. Dunson snaps him out of it with a brutal slap. It’s a rough beginning, but Matt and his cow become the co-founders of a great ranch, the Red River D. “D� for Dunson.

When Tom finds the spot he wants to settle down on, he is greeted by two Mexican riders, who inform him that this land belongs by grant and patent from the King of all the Spains to one Don Diego, who resides 400 miles to the south. Groot thinks that’s too much land for one man. So does Tom. Groot is a Lockean, who believed that when we appropriate property from the state of nature, we should leave as much and as good for others. Tom, however, has no such notions. He wants to build his own empire. When one of Don Diego’s emissaries draws his gun, Tom kills him and tells the other to inform Don Diego of the new arrangement. When Tom releases the cow and bull, he says that wherever his herds roam will be his land. The herd will appropriate for him. There’s no talk of leaving as much and as good for others.

Flash forward to 1865. The Red River D has become the largest ranch in Texas. Tom has killed six more men to protect it, but other ranches have started in the area.

Matt has grown into a man superbly played by Montgomery Clift. Matt is the son Tom never had. But there is a strange intimacy between them. Matt now wears the engagement bracelet Tom gave to Fen. They share cigarettes with one another. When Tom starts putting his brand on other ranchers’ cattle, Matt jokes that pretty soon his will be the only rump around there without Tom’s brand. Tom says, “Bring me the iron.� There’s more than just a hint of pederasty here. This is what happens on the frontier when women are left behind as too weak.

The Civil War has ended. Matt has returned to Texas, quite practiced in the use of his gun. It goes without saying that he fought for the South. Texas is in crisis. There’s no market for beef in the defeated South, so Tom decides to drive his herd a thousand miles to a railhead in Missouri, to ship them north. They will face obstacles from men as well as nature. Indians and murderous gangs of rustlers stand in their way. It will be a brutal march, but Tom Dunson is a man of enormous will. He will make it happen.

As the drive progresses and obstacles mount up, the men become sullen and restive, and Tom becomes increasingly obsessive and tyrannical: Captain Ahab in a saddle. When the men learn that they can drive the herd to Abilene, Kansas and avoid the Missouri border gangs, Tom will hear none of it. His mind is made up. Although the story began with Tom quitting the wagon train, when three men propose to quit the drive, Tom guns them down. Tom has no sense of being on equal footing with other men. When three more desert, Tom sends a gunslinger to retrieve them. One is killed and two return. Tom then says he is going the hang the deserters.

At this point, Matt leads a mutiny. They will take Tom’s herd to Abilene and leave Tom behind. Tom vows to kill Matt, and Matt believes him. Tyranny might have been necessary to create the ranch and start the drive. But men are not animals, and Matt’s more democratic style of management is necessary to finish it. As the men move closer to civilization, they begin taking on some of its features. And in this case, who can blame them?