By Davis Carlton
I remember watching the movie Galaxy Quest when I was younger. The basic plot is that an alien race sends a representative to recruit the aging actors of an old space sci-fi television show to help them fend off an attack from an aggressive reptilian alien species. The aliens who are asking for help do so by mistaking the old television show for “historical documents” that chronicle actual history and the actors for real life combat veterans and heroes. Today, the consumers of streaming content don’t seem to have any more discernment than the naïve alien race featured in Galaxy Quest. Enter the new series available on Amazon Prime called Them, purportedly about the dystopian horror that was the black experience in 1950s America.
The show is about the misadventures of a black family that has moved from North Carolina to Compton, California, then still a white suburb of Los Angeles. The family’s last name is Emory in homage to a black doctor and “civil rights activist” named Emory Hestus Holmes. Holmes fought against restrictive covenants that sought to keep neighborhoods white through homeowners agreeing to only sell their homes to white residents. Restrictive covenants were eventually declared unconstitutional during the 1960s, and are the inspiration for the series’ subtitle Covenant, which also doubles as the covenant that white men supposedly have made with the Devil in order to make black people miserable.
The series’ portrayal of white people is entirely one dimensional and unsympathetic. Whites are showcased as simple-minded bigots who hate blacks for the sheer fact that they are black. Whites mercilessly harass the Emory family as soon as they move into the community. Some of the harassments that the Emory’s experience in the show such as having their dog poisoned and having racial epithets burned into their lawn are true to history. These incidents did occasionally happen, and this provides the justification for many publications such as Esquire and Vanity Fair suggesting that Them is rooted in common experiences of blacks during the Great Migration following World War Two. This characterization is entirely dishonest, because while some blacks were unjustly harassed during this period, the series Them portrays the Emory’s suffering far worse than mere vandalism.
The mistreatment of blacks by some whites during the Great Migration deserves to be little more than a footnote in the history of American race hostility, and the creators of Them figure as much because mere vandalism wouldn’t adequately drive home their message. One of the main characters is a vengeful white woman named Betty Wendell who simply hates blacks for existing and attempts to have a hit man murder the whole Emory family. Betty’s husband secretly frequents gay bars and it is later revealed that Betty was likely molested by her father which potentially contributed to her being unable to conceive. Her hatred is focused exclusively on blacks for no other reason than they are different.
Another major villain is an undead white man from the nineteenth century named Hiram Epps who lost his wife and child during the Civil War. Epps is a devout Christian whose prayers to God go unanswered. Epps finds an abandoned child named Miles who he cares for, only for it to be revealed later that Miles is actually the Devil who recruits Epps into embracing his utter hatred for blacks. Epps persuades his town to turn against a traveling black couple, and it is Miles who shows Epps the Scripture that he is to quote to justify the execution of these poor innocent blacks. This scene takes place in a church, but as sentence is passed the black woman curses the town, which causes it to instantly burst into flames, burning the church and the town to the ground. Afterward Miles reveals himself to Epps as the Devil and offers him everlasting life in exchange for a covenant against black people, called “Them” by the Devil, to which Epps agrees.
After revealing the backstory of Hiram Epps, we are returned to the present of 1950s Compton, where we find an undead Hiram Epps tormenting Livia “Lucky” Emory, the matriarch of the Emory family. It’s revealed that Lucky was gang raped by white men during a home invasion back in North Carolina in which her infant son Chester was killed while her husband was at the movies with their two older children. We learn that the Emory’s home sits atop the plot once occupied by the nineteenth century church where blacks were unjustly lynched. We witness Hiram haunting the members of the Emory family based upon different tropes. Epps manifests to daughter Gracie as a stern schoolmarm named Miss Vera. Eventually Gracie overcomes her fear of Miss Vera and tears apart her book of school lessons which causes Miss Vera to tear in half, thus delivering Gracie from her academic oppression.
Hiram Epps torments the oldest Emory daughter Ruby as a white girl named Doris who persistently convinces Ruby that her black features make her ugly and that she should strive to look white. This culminates in Ruby covering herself in white paint and cheerleading in front of her all-white school at a pep rally. Hiram Epps appears to Henry Emory as “da tap dance man” who wears blackface and incessantly mocks Henry’s manhood because he wasn’t there to protect his wife and infant son when they were attacked by white men. He constantly provokes Henry to violence by asking him, “what’cha gonna do?” He tries to convince Henry to kill his family to deliver them from their misery, only to be roused from his stupor by Lucky, who has escaped from a mental institution. He shoots “da tap dance man” and wipes away his face paint to reveal that he was a white man all along.
Season 1 of Them ends with Hiram offering Lucky an opportunity to be reunited with her deceased son in a place without pain or suffering and Lucky refusing when she realizes that Hiram is lying. Hiram is consumed in hellfire as his covenant with the Devil has failed. The Emory family emerges from the home surrounded by flames and angry white people, including police with guns raised. The devil and his minions have finally been vanquished, but there still remains the even more difficult reality of white supremacy to be overcome, and black families like the Emory’s can only accomplish this by sticking together.
The occult features prominently in this series. Vigilant Citizen has noted the occult imagery in promos making use of the Masonic/occult one eye symbol. The concept of white people being in league with the Devil is a major theme, with Hiram Epps having consciously made a covenant with the Devil. The anti-Christian nature of Them is readily apparent in that the Bible is only quoted by white people as a means of oppression and bigotry. Hiram initially appears as a Christian whose prayers to God go unanswered and who is unwittingly tricked into serving the Devil. This theme of the hidden nature of God has been a noteworthy feature of recent movies that deal with witchcraft and the demonic.
A good example of this is in the 2015 film The Witch: A New-England Folktale, in which a Puritan family exiled to the backwoods of New England at the beginning of the Puritan Great Migration is relentlessly harassed by a witch and Satan in the form of a goat named Black Phillip. The family is presented as devoutly Christian but their constant pleas to God for deliverance remain unanswered. God appears to be entirely absent as the family is massacred one by one under demonic influences or direct attacks even as they reaffirm their love for Jesus. The same fate awaits Hiram Epps in Them. When the Devil finally reveals himself to Hiram he says, “I answered when He remained silent.” The message that viewers are supposed to come away with is that the God of the white Christians doesn’t exist and will not hear your prayers. Only the Devil is real, and it is actually the Devil who has been provoking white hatred of blacks as they cloak their bigotry under the appearance of piety by praying and quoting Scripture.
The upside-down cross is a symbol of Satanism, and Satan the father of lies traffics in the inversion of reality. This is perhaps the most pervasive feature of Them, as the portrayal of interracial violence is the opposite of reality. During the show Henry Emory has to chase away white assailants during a home invasion. Lucky Emory was gang raped by white men in North Carolina and her infant son was murdered. Violent interracial crime is almost entirely black on white, and white on black gang rape is almost nonexistent and calls to mind the recent Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax. Chances are many of the viewers of Them and other similar programming don’t even remember this real life incident, but are all too ready to believe that attacks such as the one portrayed on Them were commonplace and remain so today.
The distortion of history includes an account of Henry Emory being the subject of mustard gas experiments as part of his service during the Second World War. Many commentaries included this plot line as one of the show’s “true” stories. NPR has also posted a deliberately misleading article in which it is stated that blacks were specifically selected for World War Two era chemical weapons experiments carried out by the United States military. The truth is that there were mustard gas experiments that were conducted on American soldiers because of the prominent role that mustard gas played in the First World War. Consider this ominous excerpt: “[Rollins] Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program — formally declassified in 1993 — to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American.”
For the gullible, blue-pilled millennials watching Them who do not fact check beyond the first page of a Google search, this will confirm their horrifying suspicions based upon what they have been taught since grade school. However, the key fact omitted by Them and NPR is that the vast majority of soldiers used for these experiments were actually white men. The National Institute of Health reports, “The vast majority of those participating in chamber tests were Caucasian men. A small number of African American and Japanese American soldiers were recruited for tests to determine possible differential skin effects of sulfur mustard on members of these races.”
There you have it. The vast majority of the test subjects were white, but some blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Japanese soldiers were selected to see if there were any race-based differences that were relevant as in other cases like organ transplants. You would never know this from reading the NPR article or watching Them, which both serve as Leftist propaganda by omitting the relevant facts. This is similar to how the mid-twentieth century Tuskegee Institute syphilis studies were distorted during the 1990s to suggest that blacks were the subjects of unethical medical experimentation.
To find the truth amidst the lies requires persistence and discernment, both qualities that are sorely lacking among virtually everyone today. Programming like Them is aimed at actively changing people’s knowledge and perception of the past in order to get them to consent to an anti-white agenda in the present. It turns out that the white residents of Compton were justified in their fears. In a short time Compton, California went from a middle class white suburb of Los Angeles to an underclass black city with rampant crime, drug abuse, and cultural degeneracy that led to the birth of what has become known as “gangsta rap.” Modern entertainment operates as propaganda to justify the transformation of communities like Compton, from safe, quiet towns comprised of intact white families to crime-ridden cesspools. Without a dramatic change in our current course, the future fate of America is Compton, California writ out large.
Perhaps that will be the meta-narrative of Them‘s second season…