I could have told you that Netflix’s race-swapped historical revisionism of Egypt’s Cleopatra was going to bomb with audiences. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would also bomb with typically woke-obsessed critics and the entire country of Egypt.
As I covered in a previous article, the backlash against Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra has been nothing short of disastrous for the streaming service while simultaneously giving its showrunners what they really wanted; an excuse to accuse society of abject racism for not liking the series and calling them out for a blatant lie.
Common message-first movie-making L. pic.twitter.com/kvK6YxtXSV
— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) May 16, 2023
(READ: Netflix’s Cleopatra Proves How Much the Social Justice Community Doesn’t Care About Your Culture)
As top Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass noted, the show is completely fake while it claims to be historically accurate:
He said that the only Egyptian rulers known to have been Black are the Kushite kings of the 25th dynasty (747-656 BC), and he accused Netflix of “trying to provoke confusion by spreading false and deceptive facts that the origin of the Egyptian civilization is Black.”
Egyptian lawyer Mahmoud al-Semary also filed a complaint with Egypt’s public prosecutor to request that Netflix be blocked in the North African nation due to the promotion of “Afrocentric thinking” including “slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity.”
Queen Cleopatra isn’t a historical retelling, it’s black supremacist propaganda. It’s a bunch of social justice activists telling other cultures that this is who they are, not letting the cultures who know better tell everyone else who they are. Don’t think the social justice left is just interested in controlling the self-image of white people or Egyptians. I’d say that black people are getting the worst of it, just in a different way, but that’s its own article.
Social justice activism is an infection that turns everyone against everyone for its own interests. It loves to create haves and have-nots, victims and oppressors, and historical revisionism is one such way to do that. Cleopatra was Greek-Macedonian, but if you’re wanting to push the idea that black people played a much larger part in every culture than they actually did then just rewrite her as black and push that idea on people who don’t know any better, specifically younger crowds. People calling that out as the lie that it is can then be accused of racism and the narrative that we live in a white supremacist society can persist and even grow.
Nobody wins but the activists and the politicians who love them.
And this is why message-first storytelling is so reviled, even among critics when it goes too far. It does nothing to entertain the audience, or at least in this case, educate them. It’s an attempt by activists to propagandize and no one is showing up to listen to activists of any stripe try to sell them on why they should buy into their beliefs. If it didn’t work for the vast majority of Christian media, which has one of the largest built-in audiences in the world, why would it work for the radical left activists which are loud but far smaller in size?
Even when it comes to historical docu-dramas, the story must stay more or less true to the source material. The reason that moment in history is worth retelling is because of how significant and consequential it was on its own. If modernity seeps in and begins changing it to suit “modern audiences,” it loses what made it great. It’s no longer the story, it’s just their story wearing the story like a mask.
The entertainment industry in America would do well to finally learn this lesson the people have been trying to teach it for years. Ditch the politics and just make a good show.
