31 March 2010 >>
Not too long ago, taking to the streets to protest your government was considered a patriotic act.
It’s true!
But it seems that publicly airing your grievances stopped being patriotic right around noon on January 20th, 2009.
Once President Obama was sworn in, protesting became incitement to violence.
If you’ve opened up a newspaper or watched a cable news program in the past week or so, you’ve probably seen members of the media painting Tea Party activists as dangerous bigots. That’s because disagreeing with President Obama on issues like government spending and high taxes makes you a racist, you see.
What’s interesting about the media’s latest freak-out is that there were radicals a-plenty under President Bush. They protested in the streets. They talked openly about revolution and killing. But oddly, the violent imagery used by people claiming to be advocates for peace never registered with the media. They were too busy fawning over Cindy Sheehan.
Why the difference in coverage? Did the media cheerlead protests against President Bush to hurt him politically? Are they trying to marginalize the increasingly powerful Tea Party movement because they favor President Obama’s agenda?
One thing’s for sure: If there is such a thing as dangerous rhetoric, then the media is at least one president too late in reporting the story.
Don’t believe me?
Well, then let’s take a trip down memory lane...
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13 October 2009 @ 6:22PM >>
Months before Barack Obama formally accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, the name “Obama” was already being stamped on or sewn into objects of every type, and these objects could be purchased just about anywhere you happened to be standing. Keychains, buttons, hats, t-shirts were all readily available. I saw Obama skateboards and heard rumors of Obama bongs. Eventually, companies usually seen selling things like pewter gnomes and porcelain kittens got into the game, hawking commemorative coins and Obama dinner plates on late-night cable shows.
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20 August 2009 >>
Not too long ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets with signs comparing our president to Adolf Hitler, painting him as “the world’s biggest terrorist,” even calling outright for his killing. Here in New York City, posters of a cartoon George W. Bush replete with simulated bullet holes began springing up around town.
It was a time when Democratic politicians complained loudly whenever they felt their patriotism was being impugned. In those days, bumper stickers reminded us that “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism” and Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, declared that disruptive protests were “very American and very important.” Now that protests are directed against a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, Nancy Pelosi thinks such disruptions are “un-American.”
During the Bush era, the media looked the other way at the extremist element in the protest movement; the large number of protest signs bearing swastikas and mathematical formulae like “Bush=Hitler” just didn’t interest them. But it did interest me, and because the media didn’t want to report it, I did some reporting of my own. The videos I posted online inadvertently launched me on a second career as a documentary filmmaker.
I recently dug through my old footage and found many examples of the same kind of inflammatory speech that the media and the Democratic Party—forgive the redundancy—now decry. What follows are just a few examples.
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20 March 2009 @ 9:08AM >>
A television producer recently asked me for my reel. It had been quite a while since I updated it, so I put together a new one:
By the way, I’m looking for an agent, so if you know a good one, please let me know!
11 March 2009 >>
I was pleased to have been invited on CNN to discuss Indoctrinate U with Lou Dobbs, but I was blown away at how complimentary he was. Dobbs called the film “terrific” and said, “I can’t recommend it highly enough.” He closed by recommending that viewers “get this documentary. It’s extraordinary.”
In related news, Indoctrinate U will be shown at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival on Tuesday, March 24th at 6:00PM. The film will be shown at the Village East Cinema, on 12th Street and Second Avenue. Tickets are available online.
19 January 2009 >>
Congressman Charles Rangel has been in the news quite a bit lately. He’s having trouble keeping up with his taxes, despite being the chairman of the committee responsible for writing the nation’s tax laws.
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27 October 2007 @ 6:58AM >>
Matthew Sheffield of NewsBusters recently interviewed me on a wide range of topics. His extensive interview, the first in what will soon be a series on the website, has now been posted.
It is quite apparent from reading the transcript that I must have spoken with Sheffield after a few cups of coffee.
31 July 2007 @ 12:01PM >>
Over at the Indoctrinate U film website, we are starting to post some of the scenes we loved but ended up having to cut from the film.
This less-than-five-minute video may prove embarrassing to the administration of Columbia University, which very clearly did not want me filming—unless I could convince them that my film would paper over the truth and make the university look good.
5 September 2006 >>
On a remarkably clear morning five years ago, New York City came under attack. This video memorial, taken from footage shot by eyewitness David Vogler, shows New Yorkers waking up to that grim reality. Crystal Morning tells the story of September 11th, 2001 through fire and ambulance radio calls, the 911 call of a trapped World Trade Center worker, and the lens of local resident who saw an explosion while walking to work.
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23 May 2006 >>
First, let’s define “they.” For the purposes of this article, “they” refers to Jihadists: a radical subset of Muslims who believe it is their duty to kill anyone who refuses to abide by their religious law. Coincidentally, “they” are responsible for a disproportionate share of the terrorist attacks around the world, as un-politically-correct as this might be to recognize.
Now that we know who “they” are, who’s “us”? Even though the “us” that “they” hate pretty much amounts to all of Western society, I will take “us” to mean the United States, since in the eyes of many in the non-Western world, the U.S. symbolizes Western society. But as the ongoing terrorist attacks worldwide prove, people are grossly misinformed if they believe the United States is the only country the Jihadists wish to destroy.
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9 January 2006 @ 1:35PM >>
The Republicans campaigned to bring their philosophy of limited government to Washington and pledged to clean House, literally. And they did, for a while, but over time, certain principles seemed to disappear. (Whatever happened to the idea of term limits? Oh yeah, bad for incumbents, so let’s forget about that.) Now that the Republican Party has controlled Congress for over a decade, it seems that they have morphed from the party of limited government into the party of, simply, government.
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16 September 2005 @ 12:00PM >>The Times of London’s Higher Education Supplement profiles Evan Coyne Maloney: “You need to leave or you’re going to jail,” intones the policeman. The camera pans down to a holstered gun at the officer’s waist. Evan Coyne Maloney, scourge of the Establishment, is clearly not welcome.”
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15 August 2005 @ 4:09PM >>The Daily Telegraph of London profiles Evan Coyne Maloney: “Undercover film-maker Evan Coyne Maloney is making a name for himself as the fresh-faced tormentor of the American Left. He tells Damian Thompson about his new documentary, in which he exposes the tyranny of political correctness on US Campuses.”
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11 April 2005 @ 10:06AM >>
Many colleges and universities have permanent political offices staffed by paid university employees. These offices exist to push their views on students, and if you’re a student, parent, alumnus or taxpayer, you’re paying for it.
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26 January 2005 >>
President Bush’s re-election left some Americans distraught and depressed. And with Inauguration Day set to rub salt in those still-healing wounds, I decided to act in the interest of national unity and extend an olive branch across the great Red/Blue divide. Would my overtures of peace be rebuffed?
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13 December 2004 >>
Any tech junkie who travels extensively is undoubtedly familiar with the pangs of withdrawal suffered when decent Internet access is nowhere to be found. There are many folks like me whose work depends on frequent, reliable access to e-mail and the web. Most of my business communication, in fact, is done by e-mail. Even the voicemail from my home phone gets sent to my e-mail inbox, freeing me from having to constantly call in and check for messages.
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23 November 2004 >>
What if, instead of paying taxes in money, the government forced you to work on a chain gang in order to pay taxes? If you have to work until 5PM every day, but everyone else gets to go home at noon, would that be fair?
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29 June 2004 >>
Bill Clinton’s latest attempt to define his legacy is a 957-page book called My Life. Though panned by the New York Times as “sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull,” thousands of people still stood on line for eight hours or more to have the former president sign their copies. As the line snaked around the corner of Broadway and Wall Street in lower Manhattan, I asked the autograph-seekers for their thoughts on Bill, his book, and his legacy.
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24 March 2004 >>
Some people would like you to think President Bush lied when he talked about Saddam Hussein’s weapons. The funny thing is, many of the president’s current critics are politicians who made strikingly similar claims about Iraq in the not-too-distant past. To find out if the current spin was sticking, I impersonated a game show host and quizzed a few protesters about some particularly hawkish quotes from notable Democrats.
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19 January 2004 >>
On January 15th, New Yorkers awoke to single-digit temperatures and a few inches of new snowfall. In what has since become known as “the Gore effect,” former Vice President Al Gore chose that day to give a speech on global warming. The speech was sponsored by MoveOn.org, a website-turned-political-action-committee that recently gained notoriety by hosting two political ads equating President Bush with Adolf Hitler. Although such comparisons were common at anti-war rallies, I still wasn’t sure whether this mindset was now infecting the Democratic base—the sort of folks who’d brave the cold to hear Al Gore speak. To find out, I spent a few shivering hours outside the Beacon.
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17 December 2003 >>
At some point, changing babies where people are eating food and drinking coffee became acceptable. For some reason, I was not notified.
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20 October 2003 >>
I was now completely encircled. When I tried to escape, the protesters then started smacking the camera with their signs, while others were shoving me from different directions. I started retreating, pushing my way back from the loudspeaker, all the while leaving the camera running and asking the protesters why they weren’t letting me film. Just when the scuffle between me and the protesters seemed like it was about to take a turn for the worse, I remembered that there were some cameras present from a few mainstream media outlets. I started yelling, “Why are you trying to censor me?” The idea was to attract the other cameras, thinking that the protesters would back off if their actions were captured by the news media. The gambit worked: we were soon surrounded by cameras.
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19 September 2003 >>
The fact that liberals dominate the industry is even more significant given the recent changes in campaign finance laws. Michael Moore and his fellow filmmakers are free to embed their opinions in movies, but citizens who want to finance political ads will discover new limits to their freedom of speech. What would Mr. Moore have to say about this? To find out, I staked him out over the course of four days.
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4 April 2003 >>
Anti-Israeli sentiment ran strong at the San Francisco protest, in some cases suggesting an undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Is support for a Jewish state the same as ethnic cleansing? Should the Israelis be shipped to Madagascar? Some of the protesters thought so...
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3 June 2002 >>
“How would you feel if you went to your local music store, bought a tape of your favorite band’s latest release, and discovered that playing it in your car damaged the stereo so severely that your entire car needed to be brought in for servicing? Or what if the tape you just bought were incompatible with your walkman, so you couldn’t listen to it at the gym or while jogging? What would you think if you found out that the music industry intentionally manufactured tapes so that their customers would suffer this damage and inconvenience?”
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