30 September 2004 >> For years, the media’s promise to news consumers has been, “trust us. What we say is true.” But after CBS News gets caught airing a fraud, it’s easy to wonder how many times we’ve been snookered before. We may never know, but one thing is clear: when reporters say their opinions don’t shape what they report, they’re deceiving you, plain and simple. If the news media wants to regain our trust, they’re going to have to level with us. More >>

28 September 2004 @ 3:36PM >> The folks at PowerLineBlog are discussing a striking similarity between the articles written by one AP reporter, Jennifer Loven, and the political writings of her husband, Roger Ballantine, a liberal activist and former Clinton Administration official who is now a John Kerry advisor.

An example of coordination between a Kerry campaign official and the “unbiased”, “non-partisan” press? Say it ain’t so!

28 September 2004 @ 1:40AM >> In a recent political rally at the taxpayer-financed Colorado State University, Teresa Heinz Kerry revealed that she’s firmly entrenched in the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party, saying that her husband would never go to war “because of our greedy need for oil.”

(Her remarks included no information on the gas mileage of her private jet.)

Shortly thereafter, she hinted that America under John Kerry might well be a dictatorship: “Day One of his presidency, every child in America will have health care. Period.” Last I checked, Congress has a right to weigh in on whether the president can nationalize healthcare unilaterally. (Just ask Hillary.)

Teresa’s comments answered those who wondered whether she had yet grown tired of the taste of her own feet.

24 September 2004 @ 11:39PM >> James Taranto, who by the way serves as the editor of OpinionJournal.com, noticed a few similarities between C3PO, the haughty, British-sounding robot in Star Wars, and John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate. While re-watching the film recently, Taranto collected some choice quotes from the persnickety android, of which these are a few:

• “That malfunctioning little twerp! This is all his fault! He tricked me into going this way, but he’ll do no better.”
• “We’ll be destroyed for sure! This is madness! We’re doomed.”
• “Hey! You’re not permitted in there! You’ll be deactivated for sure! Don’t you call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!”
• “Secret mission? What plans? What are you talking about? I’m not getting in there! I’m going to regret this.”
• “Protocol? Why, it’s my primary function, sir. I am well versed in all the customs.”

Taranto’s column is called Best of the Web Today, ostensibly because it links to some of the best stuff on the Internet. But if you ask me, Taranto’s daily column is deserving of the title itself. It routinely consists of some of the funniest and most insightful writing on the web.

17 September 2004 @ 10:34PM >> John Kerry argues that if he were president, he’d be better at bringing allies to our side than President Bush. But when making that argument, Kerry frequently makes insulting comments about our existing allies.

This makes me wonder: if being a current ally of the United States results in derision from Candidate Kerry, how exactly would that make a President Kerry more adept at attracting allies?

The same sort of logical consistency is apparent here:

• In 1991, President George H. W. Bush calls for war against Saddam Hussein. He creates a coalition and gets congressional approval. The U.N. tells Saddam Hussein to comply with its Security Council resolutions or else. He does not comply, and the United States leads the way in supplying the “or else”. In 2004, John Kerry cites that war as a model to be followed. But in 1991, John Kerry voted against the war.
• In 2003, President George W. Bush calls for war against Saddam Hussein. He creates a coalition and gets congressional approval. The U.N. tells Saddam Hussein to comply with its Security Council resolutions or else. He does not comply, and the United States leads the way in supplying the “or else”. In 2004, John Kerry calls it “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Yet for some reason, when it came up for a vote, John Kerry voted for the war.

Maybe we shouldn’t think about complicated stuff like this. You see, John Kerry is smart enough to understand these intricate issues. That’s why he should be president and not any of us. If we fail to grasp John Kerry’s positions, it is only because we are insufficiently intellectual and wholly incapable of comprehending the complexity of Kerry’s thinking. That’s basically the argument Teresa Heinz Kerry made when she said “only an idiot” would disagree with her husband on health care.

Listen to John Kerry on a day-to-day basis. Do you hear much of anything other than criticism? We know all about what John Kerry is against—it seems to be whatever President Bush is for—but do we really know much of anything about any of Kerry’s plans?

So, what would Kerry do in the White House? Without an opposing candidate to calibrate himself against, how would Kerry determine what he believes? What are his default positions? Well, he shares a state (and staff) with Ted Kennedy, and his Senate votes reflect that. Perhaps that’s why Kerry talks more about four months in Vietnam than two decades in the U.S. Senate.

Want an idea what four years of a Kerry presidency would be like? Just look to his campaign today. The Kerrys apparently believe that people who disagree with them are idiots. (In all fairness, only Teresa actually said that, but watching John Kerry all these months, I’m not convinced he disagrees.)

And if we voters are idiots, it relieves John Kerry of the burden of articulating his plans, if any. We simply wouldn’t get the nuance. But if we can’t decipher Kerry’s plans, neither can al Qaeda. Therein may lie the true strategic brilliance of John Kerry: after four years of Kerry in the White House, Osama bin Laden will be so damn confused, he just might forget who his enemy is.

16 September 2004 @ 4:31AM >> When a speech about hurricane safety veered off course, Teresa Heinz Kerry reminded us why she’s been kept under wraps recently by her husband’s campaign:

Clothing is wonderful, but let them go naked for a while, at least the kids.

In unrelated news, Michael Jackson announced his endorsement of John Kerry for president.

14 September 2004 @ 5:21PM >> John Fund of The Wall Street Journal writes about the American Film Renaissance film festival in the Monday edition of his Political Diary (subscription required), and he mentions Brainwashing 101:

...the clear favorite of festival attendees was “Brainwashing 101,” a guide to “speech codes” and political correctness on America’s college campuses.

While I’m not quite sure how he determined that, it is not my policy to argue over compliments.

13 September 2004 @ 5:40AM >> Since Friday, I’ve been in Dallas for the American Film Renaissance film festival. Jim and Ellen Hubbard—who organized the festival—performed a top-notch job at putting together a fun, interesting and well-polished three-day event.

I came down here not knowing what to expect; a first-year festival, I assumed, might be poorly attended and plagued with operational glitches. But the festival—which at times ran concurrently in two theaters—was packed to the rafters, and it seemed that every detail was executed flawlessly. If I hadn’t known that this was AFR’s inaugural year, I would have thought the festival had a 20-year history behind it.

On Saturday, my new film Brainwashing 101 was shown for the first time to a live audience that wasn’t comprised solely of friends or relatives. It was tremendously gratifying to hear the laughs, applause, and the occasional gasp of horror from a sold-out theater reacting to the film.

When you’re editing a film of this length, by the time anyone else sees the finished product, you’ve seen all the footage yourself hundreds of times. As a result, it loses its impact, so it’s often difficult for the filmmaker to have an accurate sense of how other people will feel about the work. Although this festival does not award prizes, the reaction from the crowd and the comments I got after the film was shown made me feel as though I had won one.

On Sunday, a film called Michael Moore Hates America premiered. I had commented before about the choice of title, but noticed that the film’s website said “isn’t a hatchet job on the filmmaker.” It is not. In fact, it is a very well done film, and I think it has the potential to be quite successful. I hope it is, because the film deserves to be seen. When it hits theaters—the date is up in the air, but apparently not too far away—I would encourage you to check it out. It was fun, uplifting, and at times very moving.

Lastly, the Young Conservatives of Texas deserve some praise. Not only did they volunteer to handle a lot of the grunt-work during the festival, but they threw a hell of an after-party at our hotel. If anyone ever tells you Texans can’t drink, don’t believe them. (Then again, I don’t think that accusation has ever been lodged against Texans.) And on behalf of the attendees of that party, our apologies to Michael Medved, who had the unfortunate luck of trying to get some sleep in the suite next door.

11 September 2004 @ 4:29PM >> Three years ago today, I watched the towers burn from the rooftop of my office building.

Some of my friends were even closer.

I consider myself remarkably fortunate that I did not know anyone who was killed that day. In fact, I know several people who for one reason or another avoided death.

Seth MacFarlane—the creator of the TV show The Family Guy and with whom I went to high school—told me that he had a ticket on Flight 11 out of Boston. He got caught in traffic and arrived late. If not for that traffic, he would have died in the first plane to hit the World Trade Center.

A former coworker was attending a week-long seminar held at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop one of the towers. He was so bored in the first day of the seminar that he decided to skip the morning session of the second day. That boredom saved his life.

Several months before the attacks, I applied for a job at a software company in the World Trade Center. I ended up taking another job.

It’s strange how fate marks some and not others, and it’s easy for those of us who weren’t personally affected to feel guilty for being spared pain that has been spread so widely. None of those thousands of people deserved to die that day, but die they did. I’ll never be able to answer the question why, so all I can do is honor them in my own little way, by doing my part to ensure that we bring about a world where that will never happen again.

To all those who greet this day with an emptiness I can’t fathom, my thoughts are with you.

10 September 2004 @ 3:57AM >> Didn’t he just switch to being pro-war a month ago? Even knowing that no WMDs would be found? Sounds like Pendulum Boy is starting to swing in the other direction again.

10 September 2004 @ 3:21AM >> Jonathan V. Last, the online editor of The Weekly Standard, was the first to review my new video Brainwashing 101.

This is from Jonathan’s blog Galley Slaves:

Evan Coyne Maloney, of Brain Terminal fame, has just put out a feature-length documentary on political bias at universities. It’s called Brainwashing 101 and it’s as funny and incisive as his shorts are, but much, much more devastating. For instance, one radical Bucknell economics professor worries that the schools board of trustees is turning fascist: “The chairman of our board of trustees right now . . . has, for example, said at times that we need to make sure that Bucknell has a sufficiently diverse curriculum, and has proposed maybe that we need an American studies major—implicitly meaning ‘American studies’ should be about celebrating America.”

It’s good stuff. Go take a gander and think about picking up the DVD. Maloney is going places, fast. He’s got the on-screen dexterity of a Michael Moore, only with integrity.

9 September 2004 >> Today, many American college campuses are dominated by the ideology of political correctness. According to the tenets of political correctness, the United States is the source of all the world’s troubles, capitalism is evil, and people’s biological heritage makes them either “oppressors” or “victims”. Political correctness does not tolerate dissent, so students who disagree with the ideology are often punished. Tools like speech codes are used by school administrators to enforce thought conformity. At Cal Poly, one student endured a Kafkaesque disciplinary ordeal that lasted more than a year and ended up in federal court—just for posting a flyer announcing an upcoming event! Welcome to the world of higher education today, where universities seem more intent on teaching students what to think than how to think. More >>

8 September 2004 @ 9:09AM >> For a while, I’ve alluded to a documentary project I’ve been pursuing. The time is finally right for me to tell you a little bit more about it.

At the end of last year, I formed a production company with two other partners to create a film tackling the topic of political correctness on college campuses. There are many great books that discuss political correctness, but to our knowledge, nobody has ever produced a film on the subject.

While our ultimate goal is to produce a feature-length documentary for release in 2005, a more immediate goal was to produce a short documentary and release it at the beginning of the 2004/2005 school year. That’s where we are now, and I’m proud to announce that our project—a 46-minute film entitled Brainwashing 101—will be screened publicly for the first time at a film festival in Dallas this Saturday, September 11th. (I will be there, as will my two partners in the production company.) We are also making the film immediately available online. More about that below.

Why are we releasing a short film now? Well, we’re obviously interested in finding mainstream distribution for our final film, the one that will be released next year. Knowing the political proclivities of the film business, we expect that finding distribution might take us a little more time than it does for left-of-center documentarians. So, there’s no time like now to get started making connections.

But we’re also trying to do something that might prove a lot more interesting: we’re making the first documentary where the Internet will play a pivotal role in helping create the film.

We’ll be using the Internet to organize a distributed network of digital video gatherers—what we’re referring to as our DV Squad—to cover territory that our small crew can’t. We hope to have DV Squad members at schools around the country, ready to document the political environments on their respective campuses. The most compelling of the submissions from our DV Squad members could end up in our final film. Because we’re capitalists and we believe that good work should be rewarded, we’re holding a contest for the best DV Squad footage. The top three winners will take home an Apple Macintosh iBook G4, an Apple iPod, and an iPod Mini, respectively.

We’re also using the Internet to distribute Brainwashing 101. Anyone familiar with this site knows that online video distribution is nothing new, but our 46-minute film is quite a bit longer than your typical online video. We’re really pushing the technological limits of the Internet. Can the current infrastructure provide independent filmmakers with a viable medium for widely distributing their long-form work? We don’t know; as far as we’re aware, it hasn’t been really tried this way before. Will people tolerate watching a long video in a small window? We will soon find out. (We are also making DVDs available for people who want to watch a high-quality version of the film at home.)

Want to see for yourself? Visit our new website AcademicBias.com. From there, you’ll be able to watch Brainwashing 101, download it, buy it on DVD, join the DV Squad and learn more about political correctness. We’re trying to build a website comprehensive enough to serve as a web portal for information on campus political correctness. We’re not out to replace the good websites that are already out there, but to augment them by providing users with a one-stop location for finding relevant resources elsewhere on the web.

People often stub their toes while breaking new ground. It remains to be seen whether our online experiment will work. With your help, it will. And if it does, it’ll represent another leap forward for online media.

4 September 2004 @ 12:48AM >> I thought President Bush’s speech was a home run.

He articulated a clear foreign policy vision: the key to being safe from terrorists is to spread freedom to the parts of the world whose conditions create terrorists. The theory is based on the view that repressive societies breed terrorists—not America—which is precisely why it’s such an anathema to the left.

Perhaps that’s why leftists—the nominal defenders of liberty—are aghast at our freeing two countries: if President Bush is right, and Middle Eastern repression is responsible for creating terrorists, then his plan might work. And if freedom in the Middle East stems the outward flow of terrorists from the region, then it is proof that America isn’t at fault for “creating” those terrorists.

Since the sum total of leftist theory seems to be that all world problems are created by America, history proving President Bush right would be just as damaging to the left as President Reagan’s victories were. Of course, during the time that Reagan tried to implement his policies, many more people were skeptical of him than today, which is why the left seethed at the recent tributes paid to President Reagan.

When it comes to foreign policy, I think President Bush is as big and as bold a thinker, and that his optimism will be borne out over the long haul.

If that’s the case, then President Bush may some day have a sendoff as grand as Reagan’s.

One underreported aspect of the speech was the sheer emotion of it. Even the video right before President Bush’s speech was moving, but there were times when you could see tears forming in the eyes of the delegates. President Bush looked a little misty at one point, too.

Aside from the foreign policy vision he outlined, I think the real power of the speech was its emotional aspect. That’s why I think viewers connected with it—and with President Bush. And if that’s one of the major reasons why the speech worked, it’s interesting that nobody seems to be reporting that angle.

After this week, I was left with a pretty strong sense that President Bush will win, and I don’t think it will be close. Then again, one of the prime purposes of predictions seems to be to make a fool of the person making them.

2 September 2004 >> The problem with John Kerry isn’t so much that he changed his mind about such a defining moment in his life, it’s that he has no explanation for why he changed his mind. When a man undergoes a major personal transformation—such as President Bush’s decision to quit drinking—there’s usually a very telling biographical episode that gives us some insight into the man’s character. But in the case of John Kerry, there is no explanation. We’re just supposed to accept at face value that, one day, Kerry throws his medals away and the next he brandishes them as evidence of his heroism. One day he accuses his fellow soldiers of mass atrocities in Vietnam, the next day he stands on stage with a handful of them as evidence of his strength.

So, who is John Kerry? With just over sixty days to the election, we still don’t know.

Last night, Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat from Georgia, broke away from his party to speak at the Republican Convention. Miller’s speech sought to end the mystery of John Kerry by reciting more from Senator Kerry’s voting record than Kerry himself cited at his own convention. More >>