STEAL THIS MOVIE!

STEAL THIS MOVIE! is a very sketchy, uneven survey of the life and politics of 1960s radical leftist, Abbie Hoffman. Starring Vincent D’Onofrio as Abbie, the movie briefly tells viewers that Hoffman began as a clean-cut activist in the Civil Rights Movement. He then encountered the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, whereupon he was suddenly radicalized into a pot-smoking, Marxist activist against the Vietnam War who specialized in mocking the capitalist establishment. Hoffman takes part in the demonstrations during the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago in 1968, which leads to violent confrontations with the police and a celebrated trial. He eventually goes underground for several years after being arrested for alleged cocaine trafficking. The movie ends with Hoffman returning from the underground and winning some kind of trial concerning anti-CIA demonstrations. As Abbie and his cohorts celebrate their victory, the rock group Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young sings, “Love is coming to us all!”

One of the main points STEAL THIS MOVIE! makes is that the FBI conducted secret surveillance and sabotage on Abbie and his political friends. The sabotage involved instigating violence around them to make the leftists look bad. This contention ignores the fact that, as former leftist David Horowitz shows in his book DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION and elsewhere, by the time of 1967-68, if not before, the anti-war movement, including the future husband of Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, a co-defendant with Hoffman in Chicago, was already committed to using violence. They even began an alliance with the Black Panther Party, a violently-inclined group of Marxist gangsters. Thus, the 1960s leftists didn’t really need FBI agitators to abandon the non-violent policies of people like Martin Luther King. Thus, STEAL THIS MOVIE! in reality is an excellent example of Marxist revisionist history at its worst.

STEAL THIS MOVIE! also attacks middle class values and sympathizes with Hoffman’s rebellion against all forms of authority. Both are signified by his comment in the movie that all “sacred cows” should be ground up into hamburger. On this note, it is insightful to hear Hoffman’s character proclaim such things as, “Use the media to subvert the children,” and, “It’s always the young that makes change.” This, of course, is apparently what many executives in Hollywood, who are either refugees from or sympathizers with the 1960s radicals, still believe.

Although not entirely wrong in their opposition to some aspects of the Vietnam War and some aspects of the federal government’s police state tactics, Abbie Hoffman and his friends were the fathers of the political correctness movement that’s decimated the intelligence of America’s schools, journalism, media, and political institutions. Viewers should reject the Marxist humanism that has infected so many of their liberal, moderate and even conservative leaders.