30 September 2008 >> The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto eulogizes The New York Sun, which published its final issue today.

Back in January 2005, the Sun was the first newspaper to cover the film project that ultimately became Indoctrinate U.

The Sun’s content was ahead of its time, in an industry that doesn’t seem to have much time left.

27 January 2006 @ 7:15AM >> Last fall, The Times of London ran a profile discussing my film project covering the political correctness on college campuses. I just got an electronic copy of the text and have now posted it online.

7 November 2005 @ 10:55AM >> British news outlet Sky News will be running a segment on my documentary efforts. I will be participating in a live interview by satellite from New York, and the segment may also include clips from Brainwashing 101 and the unreleased Brainwashing 201: The Second Semester.

The piece will be broadcast during the 8PM-9PM hour, London time. (The producers currently expect it to air around 8:30, but these things sometimes have a way of shifting around at the last minute.)

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.” More >>

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.” More >>

15 August 2005 @ 2:46PM >> Over at The Corner, the website of National Review magazine, John Derbyshire mentions the profile in the Telegraph:

I have just been watching the movie “Brainwashing 101,” made by Evan Coyne Maloney. (You can view it online here.)

Maloney’s work is new to me, though I suspect I’m behind the curve here & you’ve all been watching him for months. I actually read about him in one of the London newspapers. He doesn’t seem to get much coverage over here. Wonder why?

One of Coyne’s premises is that if he can get his films distributed, the parents of America will have their eyes opened about leftist indoctrination on our very expensive college campuses, and alumni donations will be hit. I think he underestimates the degree to which the American middle classes, especially Boomer parents, have bought into the PC package. Bill Clinton won two terms.

I just e-mailed a response:

Mr. Derbyshire,

Thank you for the plug on “The Corner”. As far as I know, Jonah Goldberg is the only Cornerite familiar with my work, although he may know me only as “the Brain Terminal guy.”

Also, although I take your point about President Clinton, he was elected twice in a very different media environment than exists today. There are many more conservative voices who have platforms today than in 1992 or even 1996. And with the continually better technology available at ever-cheaper prices, we can build our own platforms now. That’s what I did online, and it led to my being able to make a feature-length film.

One by one, various channels have expanded to allow the inclusion of views that, for a generation, were largely shut out of the establishment media. Radio, newspapers, television and book publishing have all been slowly opening up. What’s next? Film.

So, I see the trend in all media, and I’m optimistic. Somewhere in the film business, there’s a smart distributor sitting at a desk who understands that the best place to make money is in an untapped market.

I also don’t share your pessimism about college campuses. Public reaction to the recent campus scandals—from Ward Churchill on down—has been fairly uniform in its negativity. When the general public sees the overall picture of academia today, they will be quite shocked, I think, perhaps enough to ask for some changes.

To clarify one point, the purpose of my upcoming film (”Indoctrinate U”) isn’t to starve colleges of funding, but to cause people to ask what we’re getting for our money.

At my alma mater, Bucknell University, one year of education will cost nearly $40,000 per student. Some of this money goes to financing things like the school’s “Women’s Resource Center”, which has full-time employees who arrange bus trips for students to go to Washington and protest the Bush Administration. Some of it pays for Bucknell’s Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Awareness, which has university staffers who use the office to encourage students to adopt their political views on gay marriage. The university may need to admit a dozen students each year just to keep those offices afloat. (The exact number is an estimate, since the university refuses to state how much those offices cost.)

I think you could find a consensus of people in America—right and left—who would support smarter spending by universities. Fiscal conservatives would prefer more prudent spending for its own sake, while egalitarian liberals would like the idea of a less expensive education being available to people who can’t afford it now.

Students and parents pay tuition, alumni give donations, and taxpayers subsidize public universities directly and private ones indirectly through tax breaks. Just about everybody in the country is paying for higher education right now.

Institutions that take your money have a responsibility to spend it wisely. And, if money is being wasted, then count me an optimist, because I think people will make themselves heard...assuming they know about the problems in the first place!

Take care,

Evan Coyne Maloney

13 August 2005 @ 6:18PM >> Today’s (Saturday) edition of the London Telegraph has a profile of me by Damian Thompson. Unfortunately, it is not available on their website, so I can’t link to it. I haven’t seen it yet, either, but I’ve been getting some encouraging e-mails. To the newfound visitors from the UK, welcome!

Update: Thanks to some helpful British readers, I now have the text of the Telegraph profile and have posted it online.

26 June 2005 @ 12:55PM >> The Arts section of today’s New York Times discusses the emerging conservative film movement. Although it’s quite nice that the article contains a mention of Brainwashing 101, the casual reader would probably leave with the impression that conservative = religious right. That’s too bad; conservatism as an intellectual strain is far more diverse than that, which was very apparent at last year’s two conservative film festivals.

26 May 2005 @ 11:01AM >> A number of people have been asking about the follow-up to Brainwashing 101, the 46-minute documentary on political correctness released as a preview last fall. By the end of this year, On The Fence Films will complete Indoctrinate U, the feature-length follow-up to Brainwashing 101. When it’s out, you’ll be able to see why I’ve been threatened with arrest on multiple campuses, including my own alma mater, Bucknell University. More >>

8 April 2005 @ 3:48PM >> This Sunday at 7:00PM, Brainwashing 101 will be screened at Princeton University in the Frist Campus Center, Room 302. The event, sponsored by the College Republicans and the Princeton Tory, is free and open to the public. I will be on hand for the screening and will answer questions afterwards.

7 April 2005 @ 12:42PM >> RNN, a regional cable news network covering New York City, Connecticut, New Jersey, the Hudson Valley and upstate New York, will be airing an hour-long special on campus political environments and academic freedom. I participated in a panel discussion taped for the show yesterday at Columbia University. Clips from Brainwashing 101 may also be shown.

The program runs from 8PM to 9PM (ET) tonight on RNN. If your cable provider does not carry RNN, you can watch the program on the web as it airs. (Unfortunately, the show is only streamed and not archived; if you miss it, you will not be able to view it on their site in the future.)

Throughout the show, the network solicits viewer feedback on the topics presented. If you wish to call in or have your e-mail presented on the show, you may contact RNN at:

comments@rnntv.com
1-888-RNN-CHAT (766-2428)

Don’t be shy about calling in or writing! The producers asked me to publicize this information to help ensure a balanced response from the audience.

Update: Unfortunately, it looks like RNN cut out the most interesting portions of the discussion, such as when Donna Lieberman from the NYCLU compared conservatives with holocaust deniers to explain why conservative views are so vastly underrepresented in higher education. I called her on that, and it got quite heated.

14 March 2005 >> Over at TownHall.com, Tim O’Bryhim reviews Brainwashing 101:

If one cares about academic freedom, this documentary is a must-see. It shows in painful detail how little many university administrators know or care about the ideas that their students advocate on campus... especially when those ideas conflict with the administrators’ ideological biases. The film is not a conservative screed nor does it become mean and nasty to the antagonists; it is primarily a call to action. Brainwashing 101 draws attention to the fact that universities are becoming tolerant of anything except ideas which they regard as reactionary — i.e. anything that is remotely conservative or Republican in nature. That notion is antithetical to liberal democracy and freedom. It must be exposed as such or else we will find our universities becoming the enemy of our freedom. And that is not acceptable.

3 March 2005 >> The feature-length follow-up to Brainwashing 101, scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of this year, was recently named the Most Anticipated Documentary of 2005 by the American Film Renaissance festival. (More information about the AFR awards is available at WorldNetDaily.)

10 February 2005 @ 6:20PM >> A professor from the Miami University (of Ohio) recently sent a rather nasty e-mail that illustrates quite well the environment that many students face on campus.

Check out the e-mail over at AcademicBias.com.

24 January 2005 >> The New York Sun profiles Evan Coyne Maloney. More >>

12 January 2005 >> Over at AcademicBias.com, the website set up to showcase Brainwashing 101, we’ve added a blog. We’ll be posting reports on campus political bias as well as updates about the feature-length version of Brainwashing 101, which is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of 2005.

Check it out and read about the Arab Muslim student from Kuwait who was told by his political science professor that he needed “regular psychotherapy.” The student’s offense? Being thankful to the United States for liberating his country after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion.

4 January 2005 @ 2:54PM >> The Liberty Film Festival announced their top 20 conservative films of 2004.

I’m happy to say that three of my films made the list: Brainwashing 101 in the “10 Best Documentary Films” category, and both Peace, Love and Anti-Semitism? and Gettin’ a MoveOn in the “5 Best Shorts” category.

While it is very flattering to be selected three times, I know there are other films that should have been on the list as well.

2 December 2004 >> Front Page Magazine reviews Brainwashing 101:

The past year has seen an explosion of political documentaries. But the single most interesting one has yet to find a commercial distributor. Evan Coyne Maloney’s “Brainwashing 101” employs the techniques which made such films as Supersize Me effective: cheeky commentary, smartly ironic editing, a self-deprecating onscreen persona and cleverly staged confrontations with soulless bureaucrats. In this case, the bureaucrats are leftist administrators at American colleges.

Brainwashing 101 can be viewed or downloaded for free on the AcademicBias.com website. The film is also available on DVD.

25 November 2004 >> On OpinionJournal.com, the editorial website of The Wall Street Journal, Bridget Johnson has a piece entitled “Look Who Isn’t Talking: A filmmaker is murdered, and Hollywood loudmouths say nothing” that discusses the film industry’s silence in the wake of the murder of documentarian Theo van Gogh:

One would think that in the name of artistic freedom, the creative community would take a stand against filmmakers being sent into hiding à la Salman Rushdie, or left bleeding in the street. Yet we’ve heard nary a peep from Hollywood about the van Gogh slaying. Indeed Hollywood has long walked on eggshells regarding the topic of Islamic fundamentalism. The film version of Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears” changed Palestinian terrorists to neo-Nazis out of a desire to avoid offending Arabs or Muslims. The war on terror is a Tinsel Town taboo, even though a Hollywood Reporter poll showed that roughly two-thirds of filmgoers surveyed would pay to see a film on the topic.

I found myself nodding in agreement, and that was before I saw that the article contained a brief mention of Brainwashing 101.

18 November 2004 @ 10:24PM >> I will be on the Michael Medved radio show tomorrow afternoon (Friday, 19 November) at between 4PM and 5PM eastern time. We will be discussing Brainwashing 101 and political correctness in higher education.

Although the show is carried from coast to coast, Michael Medved’s website unfortunately does not list the affiliates. I do not know which stations carry the show, but you can listen in online, via KRLA in Los Angeles.

19 October 2004 @ 10:10PM >> The latest issue of The Weekly Standard has an article from columnist Andrew Leigh covering the recent Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The article included some nice words from Hollywood producer Douglas Urbanski—Michael Moore’s former agent (Douglas fired Moore as a client in 2000; Moore was apparently too difficult to work with)—and radio talk show host (and movie maven) Michael Medved:

Both Urbanski and Medved singled out videographer Evan Maloney as one who displayed real potential. For more than a year, Maloney has been posting his popular digital-video shorts on his website Brain-Terminal.com. He specializes in exposing the inanities of the antiwar left, especially at “peace” rallies. The results are alternately hilarious and frightening. Maloney is presently making Brainwashing 101, a feature-length documentary about political correctness and speech codes at college campuses around the country. He previewed the half-completed work-in-progress at the festival, and even in this rough state it proved compelling.

In addition to being available online, the article appears in the October 25th issue of The Weekly Standard.

8 October 2004 @ 5:09PM >> Ain’t It Cool News, the irreverent movie industry discussion site, has posted a review of last weekend’s Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The review included some nice words about Brainwashing 101:

If any of the films shown at this festival are going to breakout and become huge mainstream hits, it’s either going to be Michael Moore Hates America or [Brainwashing 101]. Directed by new, sharp-witted, gonzo-journalist Evan Maloney, 101 is an unbiased look at censorship and P.C. run amuck on college campuses. This is one of the most horrifying and hysterical documentaries I have ever seen.

There was plenty more coverage of Brainwashing 101 and the festival in general. Check it out if you have a minute.

5 October 2004 >> I spent the weekend in Los Angeles attending the Liberty Film Festival, which featured two short videos from this website (The Clinton Legacy and Peace Out, a special 16-minute compilation of protest interviews available only on the Brain Terminal DVD) as well as Brainwashing 101, my recent film on campus political correctness.

Despite being held in the heart of liberal Hollywood, the self-described conservative film festival was remarkably well-attended. The Sunday showing of Brainwashing 101 played to a packed house and elicited a standing ovation, which was very gratifying. (Unfortunately, I missed the screenings of my other two entrants.)

On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, I talked for several hours with the folks who came out for the festival. A number of readers of this site stopped by to say hi, which was quite nice. I was glad to be able to (finally!) put faces with some of the names and e-mail addresses I’ve gotten to know over the last few years.

Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, the organizers of the event, deserve a lot of credit for putting together such a successful festival. As with the recent American Film Renaissance festival in Dallas, I left with the feeling that there’s a movement starting in conservative film. I suspect that both of these festivals will be far bigger next year, and that in a decade, we’ll look back on these events as a turning point.

There is a huge market that’s been ignored by the film industry for years, and it has left opening for relative amateurs like me to build our own audiences. Rather than be upset by the liberal bent of Hollywood, we should be thanking them for providing us with such a big, gaping opportunity!

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 >> 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.

10 September 2004 >> 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 >> 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.