On the afternoon of August 21, 2015, on a train headed to Paris from Amsterdam, an Islamic terrorist named Ayoub El Khazzan exited a bathroom with a AKM rifle and 300 rounds of ammunition. The first person to try and stop him was Mark Moogalian, a 51-year-old American-born Frenchman, who wrestled the rifle away from El Khazzan but was shot in the back with a pistol Moogalian did not know the terrorist was carrying.

With his rifle and rounds back in his grasp, El Khazzan made his way to the passenger car. It was here that he met up with three Americans, three lifelong friends enjoying a European excursion together: 23-year-old Airman First Class Spencer Stone, 23-year-old Anthony Sadler, and 22-year-old Specialist Alek Skarlatos.

It is the story of the American friends that producer/director Clint Eastwood wants to tell. In fact, the three-time Oscar winner is so interested in these three, he had them play themselves in a $30 million studio film.

The opening scene is a doozy, a sharp stick in the eye of public school tyrants eager to feed drugs to boys as a means to control their behavior, or “to make your job easier,” as Spencer’s mother (Judy Greer) puts it just before Spencer and Alek are placed in a Christian middle school.

The Christian environment does not, however, calm the boys’ behavior, and it is in the principal’s outer-office where they complete their trio with Anthony, a street-wise charmer who proceeds to lead them into even more trouble. Eventually real life intrudes and they go their separate ways. For Alek and Spencer, that means life in the military.

Alek is eventually deployed to Afghanistan while Spencer struggles to find his way in the Air Force.  In the summer of 2015, while they are still young and unencumbered, they decide to get the band back together for a trip through Europe. Near the end of the vacation, they find themselves on the 15:17 to Paris.

The only way I can describe Eastwood’s highly original approach to this story is to call it a populist art film. To begin with, the screenplay, written by Dorothy Blyskal, and based on the book written by our three heroes with Jeffrey E. Stern, primarily focuses on just how American these three guys are.

As kids, Spencer owns an arsenal of toy guns that would make a SJW cry. The boys love to play army, to shoot at each other, to get in trouble. They pray to God and work at the local Jamba Juice. Spencer and Alek are white, Anthony is black, everyone is colorblind. These guys like pretty girls, enjoy some sin in Amsterdam, are unfailingly polite to everyone, and, as young men with so much life in front of them often do, they talk a lot about life’s ultimate purpose while snapping countless selfies.

That is the populist part.

The art film part is Eastwood’s overall approach — which is as close as a narrative movie could ever come to a documentary. Although amateurs, the three key players are surprisingly natural actors. Their dialogue is also natural, which means it avoids the smoothness of moviespeak. You are going to hear a lot of “likes” and “you knows,” just as you do in real life.

Because the central event only lasts a few minutes, there are 80 other minutes to fill, which Eastwood does without dramatics or anything that feels Hollywood. A thing called life just happens to these guys, and it is oddly compelling.

The pace does slow a bit once we arrive in Europe. The travelogue takes up a heavy amount of time and, as they travel from country to country to country, it all starts to feel like you’re being forced to watch someone else’s home movies. But by the time the terrorist shows up, you see Eastwood’s purpose behind this.

By casting three ordinary guys to play their ordinary selves, by showing us their ordinary lives, their ordinary friendship, and their ordinary vacation, it makes that moment when they become extraordinary unspeakably moving; a shock to the senses, a true act of bravery and selflessness (to say the least) made all the more truer because these are not movie heroes.

From the opening attack against bureaucrats and their Ritalin, to watching boys playing in the woods with their toy guns, to the opportunities to become your own man in our military, to the selflessness of the Christian faith, to their proud masculinity, Eastwood is saying one thing above all — that if you will just let American boys be American boys, there is a very good chance they will grow up to be extraordinary men.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

The Soros-backed Best for Britain group working to overthrow the government and block Brexit is “undemocratic”, according to founder Gina Miller.

Miller became well-known as an opponent of Brexit after using the Supreme Court to force the Government to seek Parliament’s approval to activate Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and kick off the Brexit process, which could have seen MPs vote down the will of the people.

However, she has now sought to distance herself from the anti-Brexit group that she co-founded in a strongly worded statement, claiming they are betraying her values of “transparency” after receiving hundreds of thousands from the pro-open borders billionaire George Soros.

The group is working to build a network of powerful allies to undermine the Government before it can implement the Brexit vote, and Miller is insisting the public has the “right to know” who is backing it as it fights the referendum result.

Best for Britain hopes to trigger a second referendum by recruiting MPs to vote down any deal with the EU and stall the Brexit process.

In her statement, Miller slammed the lack of “transparency about key players’ motivations, agendas and activities”, and urged “those keen to play their part in the Brexit debate to be open and honest about what they stand for, whom they represent and by whom they are funded”.

She also claimed not to have been involved in the Soros-backed group since June 2017, but was still describing herself as involved on Twitter and in interviews for most of last year.

New #ginamiller campaign –
#timetobetactical and do what’s #bestforbritain ! https://t.co/Zk6rEdaLOp

— Gina Miller (@thatginamiller) April 19, 2017

Soros’s Open Society Foundations is one of the biggest campaigning groups in the world and the banker frequently interferes in international politics. His involvement in Best for Britain was exposed earlier this week after it was reported that he had given them £400,000 and hosted a meeting between Labour’s Lord Malloch-Brown, two other financiers, and six major Tory donors.

The Hungarian-American speculator, infamous as ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank of England’ for his role in the Black Wednesday crash, has a close relationship with the European Commission and backs many of their mass migration policies.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Ms. Miller added: “When I read the coverage I pulled back and thought this is not where I think this should be going. It was a good decision to part ways.

“[The plot] is undemocratic. One of the objectives cannot be to bring down a Government, not without an election or a referendum.

“This idea of bringing down a Government and guerrilla warfare, I don’t agree with any of that. I’m a transparency campaigner, it doesn’t matter which side of the argument you are on.

“If you are going to have funders who are getting involved in something that could determine Britain’s future then the public has a right to know who is backing it. This is about the future of our country.”

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Britain’s Labour Party is demanding the UK government impose an imperialistic diktat upon the predominantly black citizens of Bermuda for refusing to adhere to the liberal-left’s same-sex marriage demands.

Helen Goodman — Labour’s shadow Foreign Office minister — said the devolved, democratic decision taken by Bermuda to repeal gay marriage laws — “turns same-sex couples into second class citizens”, implying force should be used to impose gay marriage laws.

“For that to happen anyone in the world would be shameful. For it to happen in a British territory, for the legislation signed by a British governor and permitted by a British foreign secretary makes us complicit in something which this House has repeatedly voted against,” she argued.

Apparently imperialism is fine, but only in the pursuit of leftist goals like those of the LGBTQII++ lobby, in a mostly Christian nation.

The British government called Bermuda’s decision “disappointing” but resisted getting involved despite the island’s status as a British Overseas Territory. It’s almost as if the Brits retain some knowledge about holding together an empire. If Bermuda were in the European Union, there’d have probably been some kind of sanctions, or perhaps a gay-migrant quota by now.

Renowned mastermind (click it) David Lammy MP somehow managed to invoke slavery into his pro-imperialist arguments:

“The first slaves we brought to Bermuda in 1620, oppressed, segregated, discriminated against… And that is why leaders like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Barack Obama have not just fought for race rights, but they have fought for rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

“This country has been one of the world  leaders on this subject – so if this is not the issue on which to refuse assent I don’t know which is.”

The Green Party’s Caroline Lucas called it an “absolute scandal” that Britain was not willing to enforce LGBT ideals on another nation.

The rights of gay couples remain the same as those of straight married couples in Bermuda, but only the verbiage applied to each type of partnership is different.

In 2016, over 60 per cent of Bermudans rejected both same sex marriages and same sex civil unions in a plebiscite held on the same day as Britain’s Brexit referendum. The votes were not binding as they did not pass the 50 per cent turnout threshold. Nevertheless the government sought to compromise on the matter, protecting LGBT rights and attempting to respect the will of the people vis a vis marriage as an institution.

The new rules — to add further irony — were drafted and passed by the Progressive Labour Party government in Bermuda, a nation of just over 60,000 people.

Walton Brown, Bermuda’s Minister of Home Affairs, said this week he was pleased with the decision as Governor John Rankin signed it into law.

Here’s the icing on the forcibly-baked-by-threat-of-imprisonment-same-sex marriage cake: Rankin is a 30+ year career diplomat from the British government, propelled into high office by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in 2003 when he became Britain’s Consul-General in Boston. He has since served in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, Nepal, and now in Bermuda.

Raheem Kassam is the editor in chief of Breitbart London