1 March 2012 >> Much has been written already about Andrew Breitbart and his life at the intersection of culture, media and politics. So instead, I will tell you a story about how Andrew Breitbart and I ended up at a Devo concert. More >>

10 October 2011 @ 4:57PM >> InsideAcademia.tv’s Andy Nash recently interviewed me via Skype, and the interview is now available online:

We discuss the history of campus political correctness, what inspired me to make the film Indoctrinate U, and the effects of the continued politicization of academia.

19 September 2009 @ 2:14PM >> Jon Stewart is pretty funny going after the media in this clip:

Best quote:

[W]here were the real reporters on this story? You know what investigative media, see me on camera three: Where the hell were you?

[...]

You’re telling me that two kids from the cast of “High School Musical III” can break this story with a video camera and their grandmother’s chinchilla coat? And you got nothing? They did it for $3,000, and that’s Blitzer’s monthly beard Wetvac budget. It probably cost CNN that much to turn on their hologram machine.

I’m a fake journalist, and I’m embarrassed these guys scooped me. Let’s get to work people.

Journalists need to ask themselves, how did this happen? How could they miss the corruption at ACORN? President Obama was once an ACORN lawyer, so the group is certainly significant enough to warrant media scrutiny. Then how did all the seasoned professionals get scooped by two students—James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles—one of whom isn’t old enough to legally drink?

ACORN’s many problems have been well known for quite a while, at least to anyone venturing beyond network newscasts and liberal blogs. As an organization, ACORN doesn’t just limit itself to churning out forged voter registrations. It’s a full-blown racketeering enterprise worthy of The Sopranos, and it finances its operations with the help of taxpayer money.

So how could the major media fail to hold ACORN to account all these years?

I have my pet theory.

Political correctness has been slowly rotting the establishment media to its core, to the point where few professional journalists would dare launch a serious investigation into the exalted Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. Why? Simple: according to the tenets of political correctness, the racial makeup of the communities being “organized” automatically confers the presumption of moral superiority upon ACORN. So all those nasty rumors about ACORN must be no more than lies spread by racist propagandists.

To understand the mindset of the politically correct, there are a few rules of racial relations that you need to know. These rules establish the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism:

1. If a person is a member of a group guilty of past racial oppression, that person has no moral standing in relation to anyone in any group that’s ever been a victim of that oppression.
2. A member of an oppressor group is always assumed to be guilty in relation to a member of a victim group.
3. An oppressor can only avoid presumed guilt by making a display of his or her sympathy for the oppressed.
4. Members of victim groups can lose their moral standing by expressing a preference for individual rights as opposed to group rights.
5. Advocating on behalf of a victim makes one almost as unassailable as being that victim.
6. Coming to the defense of an oppressor is even more repugnant than being that oppressor.

This thinking is so common these days that many prominent liberals—from New York Times columnists to former presidents—believe that criticism of President Obama can only be motivated by racial bigotry.

That’s because people at a lower rung of the Multicultural Hierarchy are never allowed to challenge those above them. The purpose of this is to quell criticism and enforce thought conformity. Why break the rules and risk being thought of as a bigot?

Media coverage of Kanye West’s latest outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards illustrates this. Imagine the racial roles reversed:

It’s the Country Music Awards. A black female performer is accepting her first-ever award. She’s happy and a bit surprised; her style of music doesn’t usually win Country Music Awards. Halfway through her emotional acceptance speech, a white male country music singer runs up on stage, grabs the microphone from her, and announces that another woman should have won, a white woman—a “real” country singer—instead of the underdog black woman.

I’d bet my life savings that the reporting would be quite different than what happened in Kanye’s case. Sure, he was roundly criticized in the media, but we’re in an age when hidden motivations are attributed to every interracial interaction, so it’s interesting that few dared to discuss a racial angle to the Kanye West/Taylor Swift confrontation.

There’s a simple explanation. By the rules of the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism, when a member of a victim group is the actual victim in a real-world encounter, it’s an example of oppression. But when an oppressor becomes a victim in real life, that’s just karma, man. Any possible racial angle becomes irrelevant.

So forgive me if I don’t believe that the abundantly Caucasian and overwhelmingly liberal journalist class is capable of taking on a target like ACORN, no matter how apparent the criminality might be.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. The work of Giles and O’Keefe highlights the diminishing relevance of the establishment media. Despite the story getting no coverage on broadcast TV or in any major newspaper, it propagated online, then to talk radio and Fox News. And before any “mainstream” media outlet covered it, the political pressure grew to the point that the Census Bureau cut all ties to ACORN, and U.S. Senate voted by the overwhelming margin of 83-7 to cut off the group’s federal funding.

Even after these events, a vast majority of the media ignored the story. And yet the public kept getting the truth, which only made the media appear to be in the business of hiding news rather than reporting it. Realizing that this is not a winning business model for an ailing industry, a few of the more independent-minded reporters started covering the story, and now the White House Press Secretary is busy deflecting questions about the president’s former colleagues and fellow community organizers at ACORN. Despite the media’s best efforts.

James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles represent another massive power-shift in the age of Internet media. The first occurred when the Drudge Report broke Monica Lewinsky’s affair with President Clinton, a story that Newsweek got first but declined to run. The second was when CBS News got hoodwinked by documents that purported to impugn President Bush. After bloggers exposed them as forgeries, the documents ended up tarnishing CBS News instead. Long-time anchor Dan Rather was forced to retire in disgrace.

This is another huge embarrassment for Big Media—not so much because they look foolish, but because they’re beginning to look irrelevant.

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A version of this post appears on BigGovernment.com.

26 March 2009 @ 9:03AM >> Thanks to everyone who came to the Indoctrinate U screening at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival on Tuesday evening! It turned out to be quite a success, and undoubtedly, the festival organizers noticed the crowded theater and enthusiastic audience.

It was nice to meet a number of folks I knew only online, and thanks to the wonders of Facebook (yes, you can find me there), there was at least one member of the audience who I haven’t seen since 6th grade at P.S. 158.

Thanks also to everyone who bought me Black-and-Tans at the Telephone Bar afterwards, although it required me to ingest a couple extra doses of coffee the next day at work.

I was pretty surprised to get selected for this film festival. We haven’t had much luck on the festival circuit; the film industry isn’t much different from academia as far as groupthink goes. But because we had such a great showing, I’m sure that people in the business took note. So thanks again for the support!

P.S. Sorry for the late start on the film—I wasn’t aware that a half-hour short film was going to be shown before Indoctrinate U.

19 November 2008 @ 9:02AM >> London’s Telegraph reports on the latest developments in global warming, sorry, climate change:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Meanwhile, on the subject of global warming climate change:

A new Irish film claims that climate change guru Al Gore is an alarmist and that those who think they are saving the planet are only hurting the poor

IF THE ADVANCE publicity is anything to go by, Not Evil Just Wrong will do for Al Gore what Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 did for George W Bush.

“This is the film Al Gore and Hollywood don’t want you to see,” declares the website for the latest work by film-makers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer. The site even features a big picture of Gore, with his lips in the photograph seemingly digitally enhanced to make them look like Heath Ledger’s Joker from the latest Batman film.

The website goes on to say that their latest film - which takes on what are described as global warming alarmists - is “the most controversial documentary of the year”. Indeed, it could very well be the most controversial. And Al Gore and Hollywood may well not want you to see it. And in that respect, Gore and co are actually succeeding for the moment. Because there is no completed film. Not yet anyway.

McElhinney and McAleer have raised almost $1 million (EUR799,000) but need a total of $4.5m (EUR3.6m) to allow for a full cinema release. They say they were acutely disappointed at being turned down for funding by the Irish Film Board, especially its conclusion that it was “repetitive and creatively thin”.

Instead, they have gone onto the internet hoping to solicit donations in the style of Barack Obama. The finished product will be around 90 minutes long. Both film-makers rebut the Film Board’s criticism by pointing out that a near-complete version of the film has been chosen in the audience category at the Amsterdam Film Festival later this month.

I saw the couple’s previous release, Mine Your Own Business and found it quite illuminating.

I hope they’re successful in their fundraising efforts. I may try to raise money online to finance future film projects, and I’d like to see it work.

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.

18 August 2008 @ 8:07AM >> Chandler Tuttle, who did some great editing work on Indoctrinate U, is coming out with a film of his own.

2081 is his soon-to-be-released short film adapted from the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron. The film is set in a future society where everyone is finally equal. People who excel in any area are deliberately handicapped by the government in order to enforce equality. People with above-average strength are shackled to weights to prevent their strength from being an unfair advantage. Those deemed too intelligent must wear earpieces that emit loud crackles and noises to stifle coherent thinking.

In other words, the world has finally become the egalitarian “utopia” that today’s social engineers desire.

You can see the trailer for 2081 at the film’s website, finallyequal.com.

15 August 2008 @ 8:59AM >> With just weeks until the new school year, we’re busy preparing for the Indoctrinate U fall campus tour.

If you’re interested in a screening of Indoctrinate U at your school, contact the Moving Picture Institute.

MPI—which in addition to organizing the campus screenings also provided funding for the film—recently posted a look back at the many exciting developments since the film’s trailer was first released last spring. Here are some highlights:

On March 19, 2007, Maloney appeared on the Fox News Channel’s Hannity’s America, where he showed clips from Indoctrinate U and launched a grassroots effort to promote the film. A dedicated website, Indoctrinate-U.com, went live the day of Maloney’s Fox appearance; it featured the trailer, advance reviews, and information about upcoming events. Its most innovative feature, however, was a system for allowing visitors to sign up for screenings in their area, along with a map to track sign-ups by geographical location (our sign-up system has since drawn the praise of The Economist, National Review Online, and others who recognize its power to circumvent the closed world of Hollywood).

Throughout the spring and summer of 2007, Maloney did dozens of interviews on syndicated talk radio. He also made numerous television appearances on shows spanning the political spectrum, appearing as a guest on CNN’s Glenn Beck Show, CNN Headline News, and the Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto. Meanwhile, newspapers and magazines across the country regularly featured Indoctrinate U. The Washington Times ran a detailed story on the film, highlighting MPI’s role in ensuring that it got made and promoted. Noting that “it takes a movie to bring across the amazing, campus-wide power of even a single expertly conducted case of P.C. intimidation,” National Review Online said that the film has “real power.” A glowing review in the Weekly Standard attracted a link from the Drudge Report, one of the Internet’s most highly trafficked news sites. The New York Post ran an extended interview with Maloney—and the New York Times published a review that generated vigorous debate about free speech on campus.

[...]

On Friday, September 28, Indoctrinate U screened at Washington, D.C.’s prestigious John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The marquee event at the American Film Renaissance Film Festival, the screening, which MPI co-hosted with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, was a spectacular success. A sold-out crowd of 500 awarded director Evan Coyne Maloney a standing ovation. Cable outlet Home Box Office (HBO) attended the premiere to interview filmmakers and members of the audience for a documentary on the assault on the First Amendment.

[...]

These reactions tally with those of seasoned Hollywood veterans. At an October 13 event at the home of Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond) and David Hunt (24), the film was celebrated and distributed to 200 industry insiders. Glowing reviews followed from Heaton, Kelsey Grammer (Frasier), Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump, CSI: NY), Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy, Mission Impossible), and David Zucker (Scary Movie, Airplane, The Naked Gun).

Indoctrinate U’s impact has been felt in academe as well as Hollywood. Prominent professors such as Stanley Fish have grudgingly acknowledged Indoctrinate U’s timeliness and power. “Academics often bridle at the picture of their activities presented by Maloney and other conservative critics, and accuse them of grossly caricaturing and exaggerating what goes on in the classroom,” Fish wrote in an October posting at his highly trafficked New York Times blog. “Maybe so, but so long as there are those who confuse advocacy with teaching, and so long as faculty colleagues and university administrators look the other way, the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary.”

[...]

On January 29, Indoctrinate U kicked off its campus tour with a hugely successful screening at Duke University. Coordinated by campus groups from across the political spectrum, the highlight of the night was a sparkling discussion session with Maloney and Halvorssen that exemplified the ideal of free exchange that is so vital to the intellectual life of universities. “We promoted the event,” the organizers reported, “with an attempt to attract a diverse audience, ethnically, ideologically, and intellectually. We encouraged attendees to prepare to ask tough, penetrating questions during the Q&A. Evan and Thor were fantastic!”

Since then, Indoctrinate U has screened at twenty-seven college and university campuses around the nation.

[...]

Wherever Indoctrinate U plays, students rave about it. “The Indoctrinate U screening was a great success!” enthused a student at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University. “I was pleasantly surprised at how funny people thought it was—people were laughing throughout the entire film.” An East Tennessee State student agreed. “It was great to have the film at our school, and those in attendance will definitely be looking at their experiences on campus differently in the future,” he said. “It was refreshing to realize that there are people out there who realize that exposing the double standard in campus ‘diversity’ doesn’t make you a racist, a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi,” wrote a Cornell student. “I can’t tell you how many times I have been called a racist on this campus for talking about the same sorts of biased campus policies that appear in your film. Your film was a rare opportunity for validation.”

Meanwhile, public and private screenings continue. On April 14, MPI and the Manhattan Institute teamed up to co-host the New York premiere of Indoctrinate U. Held at the 500-seat Directors Guild of America Theater, the premiere thrilled the hundreds who turned out to see it. “The only thing that can be more gratifying to a filmmaker than having a packed house is having the house packed with a lively audience that responds enthusiastically,” Maloney said afterward. “It was truly a special night.” In the wake of the New York premiere, Maloney appeared on the Fox News channel to discuss the intrusion of politics into the higher education curriculum. In addition, John McWhorter, a former UC Berkeley professor who is now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, published a hard-hitting op-ed in the New York Sun. “[A] sense of the politics of the nation as intellectually unassailable is so unquestioned in campus culture that it becomes easy to forget the rest of the country thinks differently,” McWhorter wrote. “Hopefully the film will bolster efforts to bring faculty representing a wider spectrum of views to college campuses.”

As this brief summary shows, Indoctrinate U is having a profound impact on debates about free speech, individual rights, and ideological one-sidedness on our college and university campuses. By revitalizing a conversation that had stagnated beneath reams of print —and particularly by moving that conversation into the arena of film—Indoctrinate U is motivating a new generation to embrace and defend the fundamental principles of academic freedom, free expression, and unfettered intellectual inquiry that are vital to the future of our nation. Now available in DVD and as a digital download, Indoctrinate U will continue to raise awareness and trigger vital debate for the foreseeable future.

13 August 2008 @ 6:51AM >> From Scott Johnson’s “Driving Mr. Bin Laden” post at Power Line comes the Quote of the Day:

On Sunday the Guardian reported that Barack Obama’s Hollywood buddy George Clooney is planning a film that will provide a sympathetic portrayal of Salim Hamdan and Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, Hamdan’s military lawyer. Hamdan was of course Osama bin Laden’s driver. It’s a relief that Hollywood has finally found an American officer connected to the war whom it can lionize.

24 June 2008 @ 9:25AM >> Are you interested in film? Do you have narrative or documentary ideas that touch on themes of economic freedom or individual liberty?

Then you might want to check out the filmmaker’s workshop being held in Los Angeles from August 15th through the 17th.

If you’re interested, submit an application. Those who are accepted into the program will have all costs paid—including travel, lodging and food—courtesy of American Film Renaissance. The application deadline is July 9th.

15 April 2008 >> The only thing that can be more gratifying to a filmmaker than having a packed house is having the house packed with a lively audience that responds enthusiastically.

Thanks to everyone who made it to last night’s New York City premiere of Indoctrinate U.

It was truly a special night, and it makes me all the more certain that the only thing standing in the way of massive success for Indoctrinate U is making sure that enough people get a chance to hear about the film.

If you haven’t been able to see Indoctrinate U in your area, you can now download the film and order DVDs from the Indoctrinate U store.

4 March 2008 >> John K. Wilson, who founded an organization called The Institute for College Freedom (check out their site, if only for the nifty icons on the homepage), accuses me of “biases, distortions, and omissions” in his commentary on Indoctrinate U.

His critique was recently posted at Minding the Campus, which also allowed me a chance to respond. My response also appears below.

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I appreciate the thorough and thoughtful analysis of my film Indoctrinate U by John K. Wilson. It is good to be having this discussion about the state of academia, and one of my hopes in making this film was that it would bring this debate to a much wider audience. Academic insiders are already aware of these issues, but the public at large is not.

Mr. Wilson has some strong critiques of my work, and I must say that given his perspective as someone who’s been involved in academic battles himself, I can understand some of his complaints. But where I have a fundamental disagreement is that he makes some rather broad assumptions about why I covered certain things and not others.

In effect, Wilson seems to be criticizing me for not making the film he would like see about academia. What’s worse, without understanding my rationale for choosing the footage I did, he accuses me of making a film with “numerous biases, distortions and omissions.” More >>

27 February 2008 >> The Economist has a fascinating article on how the Internet is changing Hollywood. Indoctrinate U gets a brief mention.

23 February 2008 @ 10:03AM >> It no longer matters whether you live in a Western country that respects free speech. If you dare say anything critical of radical Islam, the long arm of Sharia law will still try to reach out and choke you:

Iran has urged the Netherlands to block a planned anti-Koran film, citing Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights as the legal basis for doing so. [...] Iran’s Justice Minister Gholamhossein Elham asked his Dutch counterpart Ernst Hirsch Ballin to use European human rights law to stop a European from exercising one of those most basic rights. Freedom of expression has been the rallying cry of those who defended the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten for publishing the Mohammad cartoons - and republishing the most controversial one (the turban bomb) this week after a death threat against the artist who drew it.

[...]

On Friday, Iran’s news agency IRNA reported on the letter, which the Dutch government told NRC Handelsblad it had not yet received. IRNA wrote the following [...]:

“You can stop the process of this satanic and highly intriguing move resorting to articles in European Convention on Human Rights ... We, too, know and respect the freedom of expression, but insulting the sanctities and ethical values on that pretext is totally unacceptable.”

Elham reminded Balin of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, where it states, “...On this basis, observing freedom of expression, keeping in mind the responsibilities thereof, can be restricted in order to avoid the occurrence of chaotic social conditions, commiting crimes, safeguarding ethical values, or the others’ rights.”

Iran’s Justice Minister at the end of his letter to his Dutch counterpart considers the movie insulting against the most sacred sanctity of the world Muslims, a satanic move that can intrigue social unrest, and violating the rights of the entire world Muslims, asking for immediate halting of the blasphemous film’s production.

If you assume that complaints like this won’t go anywhere, you haven’t been paying attention.

10 February 2008 >> Update: The review program has now ended. The offer below is no longer valid. If you’re interested in seeing the film, you can now download a copy from the Indoctrinate U online store.

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Within a matter of days, we will be ready to launch the Indoctrinate U online store, where we will be offering the film for download as MPEG-4 files and ISO DVD files. MPEG-4 files are playable on Windows, Mac and Linux, and ISO files can also be used to create your own DVD copies of the film playable on virtually all home DVD equipment. All you need is a computer with a DVD burner, software capable of burning ISO files, and a blank DVD.

But before we open the store to the public, we will be offering free downloads of review copies to a limited number of bloggers who plan on publishing reviews of the film. If you’re interested in reviewing Indoctrinate U, please send your name (or online pseudonym), the name of your site, the site’s URL, and the e-mail address where you’d prefer to be contacted to this e-mail address:

reviews (at) indoctrinate-u (dot) com

When our online store launches, this offer will expire, so if you’re interested, e-mail us soon!

Oh yeah, non-blogger media folks are welcome, too.

15 January 2008 @ 8:55AM >> In response to the post Court Closes the “Michael Moore Loophole”?, Terry Howard writes:

Was reading your most recent post about campaign finance reform and how it relates to private citizens generating “issue oriented” content. This is such a slippery slope, on all sides, that I think the judges and congress should be more worried about than us as private citizens. These guys are still thinking about content distribution and ad placement in terms of quaint methods they can wrap their heads around. How do they plan to apply such decisions to web distribution? What about hybrids like CurrentTV? What about YouTube on your TV via AppleTV? Do people have to give equal time on their blogs and social networks? Podcasts? RSS feeds? Twitter?

Further, as an internet marketer I am really curious to see how they ever plan on extending their reach into the numerous platforms of ad distribution: paid search, organic search, banners, email, pay for post, mobile marketing, embedded ads in video, viral marketing, guerrilla marketing, flash mobs... I could go on for hours, and that’s the point. Are these guys who think of the internet in terms of tubes really ready to delve into that world? They are ill equipped to wade into the pool beyond radio, TV and print, and quite frankly, two of those three are all but off the table for most promotional purposes and TV is quickly becoming unattractive as other methods offer vastly superior ROI. They are making bad decisions that won’t even apply to reality by the time they finally pass anything legislatively.

You can’t control political speech and advertising with today’s technology any more than you can lasso the moon. Whether it should be done or not becomes a moot point then.

I agree that political speech will be harder to regulate as media becomes more fractured and decentralized. But I wish I thought that meant politicians and bureaucrats wouldn’t try. If anything, the seeming chaos of the cacophony of individual voices in online media will probably lead some people to start arguing for tighter controls on political speech.

So as long as speech regulations are pitched as something else—such as campaign finance reform—it ends up getting supported by people who don’t pay much attention to politics but casually believe campaign finance needs reforming. And unfortunately, people have a tendency to care a lot less about free speech when it isn’t theirs being stifled.

It is interesting that, by and large, the editorial pages of the nation’s newspapers supported the McCain/Feingold political speech limitation bill. The fact that the legislation limited the speech of other private citizens—and not newspaper editorial writers—probably didn’t hurt. After all, in a world with less political speech, the power of a newspaper editorial writer is enhanced. Faced with a media environment where more people are getting news online and from independent voices, a cynic might say that newspapers saw campaign finance reform as the McCain/Feingold Endangered Editorialists’ Protection Act.

Being embedded in an old-media business, the ink-and-paper columnists might not have seen the regulations as a direct threat to their speech. But that’s only because they’re confusing their product—words and images—with the physical carrier of their product.

By encouraging the government to regulate political speech differently based on the employment status of the speaker and the medium in which the speech is conveyed, myopic editorialists have guaranteed that busybody bureaucrats will eventually try to tie down whatever medium those newspaperites flee to once the last inch of their sinking paper ship is finally dragged beneath the surface.

Whether they be political activists or not, if private citizens, like the folks who formed Citizens United, do not have the right band together to engage in political speech during certain times of the year, then the First Amendment is just a part-time right afforded to only part of the citizenry.

10 January 2008 @ 6:37PM >> A few years back, I interviewed Michael Moore and asked him if Fahrenheit 9/11 should be considered a political advertisement, and if so, whether campaign finance laws should apply. Moore admitted the film contained his opinions, but that his film should be treated like an op-ed in the paper.

During the 2004 election, neither ads for the Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11, nor the film itself were regulated under campaign finance laws.

But now that there’s a new film about Hillary Clinton, all of a sudden, campaign finance laws do apply to political perspective films:

The early reviews are in, and three federal judges appeared in agreement Wednesday that a movie lambasting Hillary Clinton seemed an awful lot like a 90-minute campaign advertisement.

Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group, is challenging the nation’s campaign finance laws, which require disclaimers on political advertisements and restrict when they can be broadcast. The group argues “Hillary: The Movie” and related television advertisements are not political advertising even though the New York senator is in the presidential race.

Attorney James Bopp argued that they should be considered “issue-oriented” speech because viewers aren’t urged to vote for or against the Democrat.

[...]

The movie is scheduled for two screenings in theaters, once each in California and Washington. It is also being sold on DVD. Neither of those methods are regulated under campaign laws. The advertisements, however, are scheduled to run during the peak presidential primary season and would be regulated.

Bopp, who successfully led a challenge to one aspect of the campaign finance system last year, compared the film to television news programs “Frontline,” “Nova,” and “60 Minutes.” That prompted Lamberth to laugh out loud from the bench.

“You can’t compare this to ‘60 Minutes,’” the judge said. “Did you read this transcript?”

The movie features commentary from conservative pundits, some of whom specifically say Clinton is not fit to be the nation’s commander in chief.

The content of the film is irrelevant; if the film merely expresses opinions, it is protected constitutional speech. And if it is factually inaccurate in a way that is defamatory to Hillary Clinton, she has legal recourse for that.

It shouldn’t matter whether a film is made by a Hollywood insider like Michael Moore or an issue-based outfit like Citizens United. Groups like Citizens United—on the right and the left—are formed by private citizens with a common goal of promoting their shared ideas. The speech of Citizens United should not be more regulated than the speech of any of its individual members—or any other private citizen for that matter.

All filmmakers—in fact, all citizens who value their free speech rights—should be concerned about this decision. Michael Moore should be concerned. Because even though he has the benefit of Hollywood’s infrastructure and support (and therefore has no need to become involved with an organization like Citizens United), his films are financed and distributed by corporations that may one day find themselves subject to the same regulations now being imposed on Citizens United.

Any attempt to regulate political speech is direct assault on the First Amendment.

2 January 2008 @ 8:57AM >> Two of my favorite creative minds in music—Thom Yorke and David Byrne—recently sat down to discuss the future of the music business. Last October, Yorke’s band Radiohead released its latest album, In Rainbows. But rather than releasing it through a traditional music label, Radiohead let fans download the music directly from its website. And rather than charging a fixed amount for the album, users were given the option of naming their own price—down to and including zero.

The sinking fortunes of the music industry establishment may have been instigated by technological change, but they are worsened by the industry’s unwillingness to let consumers buy music that isn’t locked to specific formats or media. It’s like peering into the future of the movie industry.

In both cases, you have industries whose fortunes have been protected for decades by the commingling of content and medium. Record albums weren’t just vinyl, they were vinyl with embedded music: the music couldn’t exist without the physical medium. As tapes replaced records and CDs replaced tapes, higher fidelity and increased convenience of each new format gave consumers a reason to re-purchase content that they already paid for in lesser formats. But when songs are stored as data and can be moved around like any other computer file, consumers will only ever need to buy one copy. As long as open formats are used, people will be able to play their music on any device devised in the future. There goes the upgrade gravy train.

Like the music industry, the film industry is rightfully concerned with piracy, because once music and movies aren’t tied to a physical medium, they can be copied endlessly. But consumers don’t care if this inconveniences the industry; people have shown that they want the convenience of digital content, and they are willing to pay for it. So the more that record companies lock down digital content in order to fight piracy, the less incentive legitimate customers have to buy the product in the first place. What good is the “music as a file” model if it is artificially burdened with the same limitations as physical media?

The movie business hasn’t been hurt by the shift away from physical media yet. But that’s only because technology hasn’t advanced far enough. It takes a lot more data to store a high-definition movie than an album’s worth of high-fidelity music. When a typical consumer’s Internet connection becomes fast enough to download high-definition full-length movies in a matter of minutes, the home market for movies will be subject to same technological dynamics affecting the music business today. And that future is only years away.

But that isn’t the film industry’s biggest problem right now. After all, people won’t pirate content that they don’t want to watch in the first place.

The problem with the film business is that too many insiders forgot that the rest of America doesn’t necessarily share the same view of the world as their friends in Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood has become its own echo chamber, which is why distributors keep pushing out flop after flop of military-bashing films. In Hollywood and at film festivals, such fare is highly praised. But in theaters around the country, the audience for films like Redacted is comprised mostly of empty seats. It’s almost as if Hollywood is producing films only for itself.

My experience in trying to get distribution for Indoctrinate U only confirms this. People in the film business just don’t take seriously the possibility that there’s a market for documentaries outside Hollywood’s typical Michael Moore/Al Gore worldview. I don’t know to what extent that’s out of political bias or the result of a simple Catch-22: they don’t see a market for anything different, but that’s because they’ve never tried distributing anything different.

That leaves us in the position of having to self-distribute Indoctrinate U. And because the Internet will allow us to put the film in people’s hands in the fastest, most cost-effective way possible, we’ll be able to conduct a little experiment of our own. Indoctrinate U will not be available on DVD right away. Instead, we’re going to focus our efforts on seeing whether the Internet can be used to route around the gatekeepers in Hollywood—without the shackles of physical media. (Although unlike Radiohead, I’m afraid, we’re not in a position to give our goods away for free.)

Who knows? Maybe the market can be proven without Hollywood’s help. I think it can. And once the market is proven, we’ll finally know who in the film business wants to serve customer desires instead of the dogma of Hollywood groupthink.

26 November 2007 >> “The dogma of multiculturalism holds that all cultures are equal, except Western culture, which (unlike every other society on the planet) has a history of oppression and war is therefore worse. All religions are equal, except Christianity, which informed the beliefs of the capitalist bloodsuckers who founded America and is therefore worse. All races are equal, except Caucasians, who long ago went into business with black slave traders in Africa, and therefore they are worse. The genders, too, are equal, except for those paternalistic males, who with their testosterone and aggression have made this planet a polluted living hell, and therefore they are worse.” More >>

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.

26 October 2007 @ 10:19AM >> Tonight, in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Indoctrinate U begins a week-long run at the Oak Street Cinema on the east edge of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus.

Stanley Kurtz of National Review wonders if this is part of a media revolution:

Maybe you’ve heard about Indoctrinate U’s DC premiere. The crowd went wild. Now, if you live in or near the Twin Cities, you can go wild too. In association with the Minnesota Association of Scholars and the Tocqueville Center at the University of Minnesota, the Moving Picture Institute is going to be putting on a full week of screenings of Indoctrinate U. [...]

Now for the “global” implications. Think about it. Something very interesting is happening here. The producers of Indoctrinate U are promising to arrange local screenings in areas where enough people express interest at their website. And now they’re holding a local screening. The idea of a local screening tour for politically incorrect films could become the cinematic equivalent of the internet—a way around the mainstream Hollywood blockade. And with luck, strong local interest might even break the Hollywood blockade and prompt a distributor to actually offer Indoctrinate U in commercial theaters. So we may be looking at a genuine “media event,” in the best sense of that term.

19 August 2007 @ 2:09PM >> Today’s New York Times profiles Thor Halvorssen, one of the producers of Indoctrinate U.

The piece quotes Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock as saying Indoctrinate U “could be a lightning rod.” Spurlock adds, “Movies that get attention and spark a dialogue, get people talking on news shows, can be profitable at the box office.”

Hopefully the Hollywood gatekeepers will give us a chance to prove him right!

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.

The first deleted scene is called “Columbia Quiz.”

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.

Sorry, Columbia!

10 July 2007 @ 8:48AM >> A film industry insider discusses what’s wrong with Hollywood today and relays a telling anecdote:

Not long ago I developed the story of a West Point cadet whose fireman father had been killed on 9-11. This was the same family President Bush praised in his 2006 West Point graduation speech. It was a service family -– a fire officer father who’d given his life, a soldier son, the soldier’s brother, himself an aspiring fireman, and a mother who’d been teaching school the day her husband was killed.

I called a well-placed Hollywood power broker to get the project launched. I told him the story, and pictured the family, rightly, as the best America has. There was a long pause. Then he blurted out, “Wait a minute! Those are the people who elected BUSH!”

Maybe if the powers in Hollywood remembered that not everyone votes or thinks like they do, they’ll be able to find an audience beyond what they’re reaching now.

20 June 2007 @ 5:33PM >> In today’s New York Post, film critic Kyle Smith interviews me about Indoctrinate U, which he declares “alarming and funny.”

8 June 2007 @ 6:13PM >> The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is an organization that defends the free speech and free thought rights of professors and students alike, regardless of religion, ideology, or the popularity of the opinions under attack. FIRE is to college campuses what the ACLU used to be to society at large.

Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s president, recently offered me the opportunity to post a message to The Torch, the organization’s blog:

When I came up with the idea to do a documentary about the suppression of speech on college campuses, literally the first phone call I made was to FIRE. That was before I’d ever even picked up a digital video camera, so I really had no business thinking I could make a film. A lot of people seemed to agree.

There’s more over at The Torch.

18 May 2007 @ 7:14PM >> Earlier today, The Weekly Standard published a nice review of my upcoming film Indoctrinate U. The review was also featured on Drudge Report.

30 April 2007 @ 6:47PM >> Two writers for National Review have commented on the film Indoctrinate U. Stanley Kurtz wrote:

Last week I attended the premiere of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary about campus political correctness. It’s a fun and powerful piece of work that deserves a wide audience. The film features plenty of encounters between Maloney and college officials who, after being embarrassed by Maloney’s questions, invariably summon police to have him evicted. These confrontations are entertaining, but the real force of this film flows from Maloney’s recounting of a series of incidents of campus political correctness. I had never heard of any of these cases. Yet each of them is remarkable.

[...]

The end result of this torrent of outrages is that foes of campus PC have grown jaded. That’s where Indoctrinate U comes in. This film hits you in the gut, in a way that no column or blog post can.

Meanwhile, Carol Iannone called Indoctrinate U “a terrific must-see” and added:

It is sound, shocking—even to someone who knows a lot about political coercion on today’s campuses—and also, amazingly, highly entertaining. It is both amusing and sobering at once. It deserves widespread distribution in theatres across America.

23 April 2007 @ 8:44AM >> In this Front Page Magazine interview, I discuss the inspiration behind my first video, Protesting the Protesters; politics, human rights, the global Jihad & the Middle East; McCain/Feingold and Michael Moore (there is a connection!); the one-party state of Hollywood and academia; and, finally, my upcoming film Indoctrinate U.

21 August 2006 @ 3:43PM >> The Washington Post profiles left-wing documentarian Robert Greenwald and his innovative approach to film financing and distribution:

Greenwald’s documentaries generate more heat than coin. Their take at the box office is tiny (mostly they’re seen on DVD). “We weren’t raising anything,” says Greenwald, sitting on a recent afternoon in his office, located in what appears to be a converted motel behind the Sony Pictures lot, as his team rushed to complete the project for its debut next month.

The usual bankers of political documentaries — left-leaning organizations and high-roller liberal donors — weren’t rushing to write Greenwald any checks. Greenwald doesn’t know why. “Maybe I’m a lousy fundraiser,” he says.

Then Gilliam had his idea. Robert, why not go on the Internet and just ask for the money? “I thought he was crazy,” Greenwald says. “I thought this would never work.”

On April 25, Gilliam — weak at home in Newport Beach, his lungs scarred and ruined because of earlier cancer treatments, but still able to type — sent out a mass e-mail to thousands of people who had purchased DVDs or expressed interest in Greenwald’s movies or causes through the company’s various Web sites.

The e-mail alerted potential supporters that Greenwald was committed to making “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers,” and though they had not shot a single frame, Gilliam promised “it will have an enormous impact when it comes out shortly before the elections this November.”

The pitch? Gilliam wrote: “To start shooting, we need money. Overall, the film will cost $750,000. We can expect about $450,000 to be offset by DVD sales, selling foreign rights, and an advance from our retail store distributor, but we still need $300,000. A generous donor just stepped up and will contribute $100,000 if we can match it with $200,000 from someone else. That someone else is you! 4000 people giving $50 each. We’ll put everyone’s name in the credits.”

They got $267,892 in 10 days.

[...]

Small-scale independent filmmakers, the kind who bring their documentaries to the Sundance Film Festival, put together funding however they can — with art grants, money from educational or journalism foundations or from relatives and friends — and in many cases by racking up hefty balances on their credit cards.

Gilliam and Greenwald say they know of no one who has ever raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Internet to make a movie. (Though this year at Cannes, a do-it-yourself director named Melissa Balin attempted to auction her finished movie — “FreezerBurn” — on eBay. It sold in one market: Lithuania.)

“For all practical purposes, this is the first time I’ve heard of raising money for a film this way. I’ve got to hand it to them. I’m very impressed. It’s clever,” says Lawrence Turman, a veteran Hollywood producer of over 40 films (from “The Graduate” to “American History X”) and author of the how-to book “So You Want to Be a Producer.”

Turman says the Internet funding seems well suited for “political and in your face films” like Greenwald’s documentaries. “You’re not going to raise $40 million, but you might raise $1 million,” he says.

“I think this is the future,” Gilliam says. Not for standard Hollywood fare, he admits. But for niche product, for indie stuff. “It is my dream to pull this off,” Gilliam says. “To figure out how to fund movies out of the control of corporations. Our goal is to fund and distribute any movie we want to make completely outside of the system.”