‘Kindergarten Cop’ Screening Canceled After SJWs Claim It Is Racist and Hateful (VIDEO)
A drive-in screening of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy Kindergarten Cop was canceled after social justice activists claimed the film is hurtful to children and minorities.
For movie fans who have enjoyed the film for the past 30 years, this is likely surprising news. In 2020, however, SJW activists are attempting to cancel just about everything, including anything that portrays police officers in a positive light.
Schwarzenegger’s character in the film, Detective John Kimble, goes undercover as a teacher at an elementary school in order to find a criminal whose child attends kindergarten. Adorable hi-jinks ensue.
The movie was filmed in northwest Oregon, so the Northwest Film Center in Portland chose it for their series of “Drive-In” screenings. What was meant to be a way for families to enjoy a movie in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, quickly turned political.
The outrage began when leftist author Lois Leveen (who lives in Portland) complained on Twitter about the film. The SJW online mob joined in, and local media picked up the story. The film center chose to cancel the screening rather than stand up to the outrage.
“National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop. IRL, we are trying to end the school-to-prison pipeline,” Leveen tweeted. “There’s nothing entertaining about the presence of police in schools, which feeds the ‘school-to-prison’ pipeline in which African American, Latinx and other kids of color are criminalized rather than educated. Five- and 6-year-olds are handcuffed and hauled off to jail routinely in this country. And this criminalizing of children increases dramatically when cops are assigned to work in schools.”
Leveen, determined to make the screening a full-blown scandal, contacted a local news website, Willamette Week, to air her grievances. They ran her arguments, detailed in a message titled Kindergarten Cop-Out: Why Does NW Film Center Think There’s Anything Fun About Cops Traumatizing Schoolchildren. She compared the movie to racist films like Birth of a Nation.
“It’s true Kindergarten Cop is only a movie. So are Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, but we recognize films like those are not ‘good family fun.’ They are relics of how pop culture feeds racist assumptions.”
She went on to argue that “Cops transform schools, and in an extremely detrimental way.”
Leveen, who has written for The New York Times and The Atlantic, has an uneven history with racial outrage. She raised eyebrows with her book, “The Secrets of Mary Bowser,” written in the first-person voice of a former slave. Some found the appropriation problematic, as Leveen is whiter than a loaf of Wonder Bread.
Leveen later set her Twitter account to private, seemingly to avoid backlash.
Even though the film center capitulated, her statements earned plenty of ire on Twitter.
Others mocked the entire idea of canceling Kindergarten Cop, including Twitter satire account Titania McGrath. She joked the movie was also transphobic, thanks to a famous line from the film.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has not commented on the controversy.
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