An anti-vax, COVID-grievance, climate-science denying, communism panic-generating film by Mikki Willis just won “Best Documentary Feature” at the Santa Monica International Film Festival.
Julian attended the festival in order to track how Willis’s latest paranoid pseudomentary, “Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening,” was platformed at this annual fete held in affluent Santa Monica alongside two other conspiracy films: “Shot Dead” and “We Will Not Be Silenced.” These three films include a who’s-who of conspiritualists: David Icke, JP Sears, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Brian Rose, Peter McCullough, and newer “medical whistle-blowers.”
This is the on-the-ground story about how a 30-year-old normie independent film festival got red-pilled into platforming such dangerous misinformation.
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Listeners, I'm here at the Santa Monica International Film Festival.
I am more powerful than they are.
And they freaking know it.
Wait, hold up a moment.
That's anti-semitic, reptilian, alien, conspiracy theorist David Icke.
What's he doing here?
This is the moment for us to activate our innate ability to create solutions.
That can only happen through the awareness of symbiosis.
Defined as a mutually beneficial relationship between different groups.
All of life depends on relationships.
Every living thing is in communication.
From the stars, to the planets, the earth, the plants, the elements, the insects, the animals, the humans, and every cell within us.
Real change out there begins with real change inside.
In case you're lucky enough not to recognize that voice, it's Mickey Willis at the end of a new film that spends its last third railing against collectivism and creeping communism in favor of individual sovereignty and framing public health measures as authoritarian tyranny, only to end on that hopeful note of unity and coming together.
Just when we thought the culture had passed peak conspirituality infiltration, that new movie, Plandemic 3 The Great Awakening, actually won the prize last weekend for Best Documentary Feature at the Santa Monica Film Festival.
You may remember that in 2020 the rise of conspirituality was turbocharged by the first installment of Plandemic.
It's that mega viral 26 minute video that featured an interview with a disgraced former research scientist who falsely claimed the pandemic was planned.
That COVID-19 was actually caused by the flu vaccine and that masks would just keep recycling self-induced infections so you certainly shouldn't wear them.
Well, it's four years later now, and this style of propaganda misinformation keeps making inroads.
What on earth is going on with the Santa Monica Film Festival?
Well, prior to the prizes being decided and announced, I went undercover to find out.
Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
As the world descended into synchronized tyranny, I began to ask myself, how did they get everyone to go along with this?
Obsessed with finding the answer, I began studying every moment in recorded history where masses of people devolved into a state of self-destruction.
The only mechanism that could explain what was happening in society was what is usually referred to as mass formation.
We had to start doing things for the greater good of society.
It's about how I love my neighbor.
They weaponized human compassion.
And they see it as a virtue because it demonstrates their complete obedience to the group.
Screw your freedom.
That looks great.
You feel great while you're being used.
That's Mickey Willis again in the trailer for this new film in the Plandemic series.
Like many of the legacy conspiritualists featured in our book, he rode the algorithmic wave of pandemic grievance mongering and conspiracy sensationalism into a resurrected career with a huge new loyal audience that has come to overlap more and more with the MAGA movement.
Amongst the other anti-vaxxers, COVID denialists, and censorship martyrs in that trailer, you may have heard the familiar voice of fellow former L.A.
culturally liberal spiritual influencer J.P.
Sears.
Both Willis and Sears are now ultra-right-wing heroes who have followed the Joe Rogan and Elon Musk trail to Austin, Texas.
In the online version of Plandemic 3, JP Sears cuts a lengthy infomercial set up as a newscaster sketch.
You may have seen him do this kind of thing before.
But it's an infomercial for Mickey Willis' latest all-natural immune support supplement.
Imagine that.
Santa Monica used to be a familiar stomping ground for both of these guys.
In the 90s and the early aughts, Santa Monica was something of a yoga mecca and home to the hugely popular New Age, science-of-mind inflected Agape Church.
You know the one.
Their founder and star preacher, Reverend Michael Beckwith, was a central character and force behind the Oprah-endorsed blockbuster spiritual hit and sort of updated prosperity gospel movie for the New Age set, The Secret.
And Mickey Willis's independent film company called Elevate was affiliated to Agape.
J.P.
Sears became well known on social media for his YouTube videos satirizing essentially the Santa Monica yoga and wellness scene from the inside.
The Santa Monica Promenade is a fixture of LA's West Side.
If you've never been, it's a tourist attraction on 3rd Street in downtown Santa Monica where, in 1965, the pedestrian mall Esplanade was created.
The street was paved over creating a broad walkway with marquee stores like Nike, Adidas, Apple, Urban Outfitters, Victoria's Secret, H&M, Anthropologie, Abercrombie & Fitch.
You get the idea.
Lined on either side with big display windows.
There are restaurants too like Johnny Rockets and Chipotle, Barney's Beanery and and more.
And movie theaters too.
The AMC 7 Santa Monica and the AMC Broadway 4.
That's right, there are 11 movie screens altogether.
Anyway, I parked a few blocks away from the promenade and hoofed it down to Broadway for the 11 o'clock showtime that kicked off the Santa Monica Film Festival.
My newly purchased grey, under-armor, wide-brimmed ball cap was pulled down low as a disguise of sorts.
After all, I was undercover.
Why?
Well, here in the heart of normie capitalist tourist trap affluent Santa Monica, in amongst the 21 mostly narrative films in total, this year's festival featured three fully red-pilled documentaries.
All three are grievance pieces about the COVID pandemic that allege outrageous conspiracies.
Brian Rose has a film called We Will Not Be Silenced and it tells the tale of his being censored on YouTube for interviewing David Icke.
As you may remember, David Icke is one of the earliest modern proponents of the reptilian alien mythology so popular amongst New Age channelers and QAnon cabal fighters.
In that interview, Ike wove the unfolding crisis of the pandemic into his truly insane anti-Semitic spiritual warfare panic-mongering.
And turned out YouTube didn't like that.
So the film focuses on the supposed censorship enacted in the mad scramble to stop the spread of misinformation on social platforms during the pandemic.
So of course, it's thick with clips from millionaire victims Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, and David Icke railing against the tyranny of being silenced on their huge platforms.
If you take that guy off, you just make him bigger.
What the hell just happened?
Have you ever lost the only thing that makes you feel alive?
You are only one piece of content away from termination.
This is the story about how we got censored.
There is no COVID-19.
How we put everything on the line for what we believed in.
They picked the wrong guy to fight with.
How we were betrayed.
Fuck the BBC.
How we fought back.
We are freedom!
And we'll accept nothing less!
And exposed the truth.
Who benefits?
He who most benefits from a crime is the one most likely to have committed it.
Now that was David Icke there at the end.
I was hoping to see Mickey Willis's latest installment of the Antivax Covid Denial Increasingly Right-Wing Plandemic series called, as you know, The Great Awakening, which, of course, is not an unfamiliar title.
But it was sold out way ahead of time.
And it turned out, to my disappointment, that the director would not actually be there for the Q&A.
So I opted instead for a film called Shot Dead, which is the third of these red-pilled documentaries featured at the festival.
But first, I sucked up my courage to see if any of the surprisingly small crowd, there were just about 20 people outside the theater, see if anyone would talk to me.
Are you guys here for the film festival?
Yeah.
Do we have to stand in line here?
I'm assuming.
I'm assuming that.
Do you mind if I ask you anything about it?
I have no idea.
Do you know anything about the festival and what the focus of it is?
I know a little bit.
What film are you going to see?
I'm going to see Shot Dead.
What do you know about it?
It's about vaccine injuries.
It seems like the festival is in a slightly different direction this year.
I've never come, so I don't know.
So it's about vaccine injuries.
Are the other films about similar topics?
I don't know.
I just came to see that one.
I'm sure it's a whole array of stuff.
Do you mind if I ask you what you're here to see?
The documentary that starts the thing.
Oh, is that shot dead?
Or is that Great Awakening?
That was shot dead.
Shot dead.
I've heard that's maybe about vaccine injuries?
Yeah, well, we'll see.
It could be.
I don't know.
I've seen the crowd here.
Oh, so you saw the crowd and you're like, I want to check this out?
No, no, no.
Oh, okay.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Thank you.
Thanks for talking to me.
I looked it up and it turns out that the Santa Monica International Film Festival has been going on since the late 90s.
Looking back over their recent years, I found no evidence of their platforming other conspiracy films.
It's mostly been run-of-the-mill, little independent features and shorts alongside documentaries like Punk Rock Vegan, about electronic music legend Moby, or The History of Coffee, or a documentary about big wave surfing, or about a traumatized firefighter finding healing.
2019 and 2020 saw no QAnon-adjacent material in the festival lineup.
No Pizzagate either.
Rather, there was the inclusion of several environmental documentaries.
That last point is ironic because their best documentary film winner this year, Mickey Willis' The Great Awakening, weaves climate science denial into his paranoid construction around COVID and vaccines, creeping Chinese communism, and how the World Economic Forum supposedly is seeking to erode all individual sovereignty and perhaps gender.
I've reached out to the festival office to ask about this shift in the films they're accepting and platforming, but they never replied.
So back to the story.
The film I watched was called Shot Dead.
Walking into the theater, I actually had this moment.
You're involved in the film?
Yes.
Can I ask you a couple questions?
Absolutely.
And this is my business partner, Brian.
I'm Dawn Jolly.
So this is Shot Dead.
Yes.
This is part of the whole film festival.
Yes.
Okay.
And so Shot Dead is about?
It's about the COVID shot and three children who lost their lives as a result of the shot.
Okay, so it focuses on these three kids.
Yes.
And it's told from the point of view of their parents who are involved in the film as well.
And one of the key doctors that we had speaking for the film, he's here as well.
He's outside right now.
We also had Dr. Peter McCullough, if you're familiar with him.
Yes.
So he was in the film as well.
Yes.
Okay.
And Dr. James Thorpe.
You're one of the producers?
No, I'm the president of the organization.
This is my business partner.
He's the co-president.
We funded the project.
Great.
And what are you hoping to accomplish with it?
Waking up as many people as humanly possible, yes, to the truth about not only the COVID shot but quite frankly vaccines in general.
Vaccines in general.
Yes, and as well as raising additional funds so we can continue to do the work that we do because what we primarily do is we're a non-profit litigative company and that's what we do is we file lawsuits.
So like we would love to sue Pfizer and Moderna over this so we're trying to raise the funds to be able to do so.
Okay, so the film is part of that fundraising?
Yes.
The film itself was really heartbreaking.
I have no desire to disparage any of the family members interviewed about their children or grandchildren who died in ways they believe can only be explained by the COVID vaccine.
They've suffered an enormous and unexpected loss.
I grieved with them and felt their searing emotional agony and the film does a fine job telling their story.
The cases, there are three of them, are of an infant who died within hours of being born, but the mother had received the COVID vaccine while pregnant.
Then there's the 16-year-old boy who died five days after receiving the shot, and his devastated and very earnest dad tells us what happened.
There's a 15-year-old girl who died three months after being vaccinated.
I do think that these family members are most likely wrong about what caused the deaths of the children in question.
But it's hard to say.
The film presents no direct causal evidence, relying instead on speculation, correlation, and inference.
The filmmakers also paint a bigger conspiratorial picture in which there is an enormous cover-up of vaccine injuries and deaths in order to make money from a medical intervention that was neither safe nor effective.
And the evidence for all of that is simply not on their side.
There are serious adverse reactions to vaccines and these are extremely rare.
Who knows?
Perhaps one or more of these three tragic deaths was actually such an instance and maybe in the future we'll learn from it.
But they have not demonstrated this to be accurate and they are in fact endangering the lives of thousands and potentially millions of infants and children by contributing to a zeitgeist that is increasingly suspicious and fearful of the childhood vaccines that save countless lives in countries with privileged access.
And this is the real tragedy.
I take these people at their word that they believe they're involved in a life-saving activist effort to open the hearts and minds of the public to something dangerous and unethical.
The truth though is that they're actually part of a misguided movement that will eventually lead to babies and children dying from diseases that are preventable by vaccines which have been shown rigorously some over decades to be incredibly safe and effective.
So that's what's coming down the pike for new parents in this destabilized cultural perception of vaccines.
And now with COVID, it's 17 diseases and now over 100 shots and more keep getting added.
Respiratory syncytial virus just approved in the routine vaccine schedule.
And it's even worse with multiplicity of vaccines when the vaccines are bundled together.
And so now children together may face an unbelievable assembly of vaccine.
And we have to look at as a population as a whole.
That if death is possible, which it is clearly possible after the agents on the routine schedule, we must have risk mitigation, that is steps in place to make sure it doesn't happen again.
And two, we must have freedom, unfettered freedom of parental choice in taking a vaccine.
This is a really critical element if death is an outcome.
That's a clip from the movie and you're hearing the anti-vax superstar, Dr. Peter McCullough.
As is so often the case with conspiracism, by leaning into personal anecdote, emotional outrage, and paranoid reasoning, they fail to get not only the facts and the evidence right, but also the context and the proportion.
Dr. James Thorpe was featured alongside marquee anti-vax star Dr. Petey McCullough in the movie.
Thorpe specializes in obstetrics and he paints a harrowing picture of massive increases in infant mortality and pregnancy complications in his practice.
He believes these are all the result of the COVID vaccine.
It turns out That he also sells naturopathic supplements.
So here he is in the middle of being interviewed in the film.
What we do know is that if we it does affect the immune system so if we use specific immune
naturopathic enhancing substances like for example the vitamin d3 and k2 cream
And I prefer the cream.
I think it's a superior product than the oral.
And we get your vitamin D levels.
You know, I'd put 10,000 units of that on your skin a day until we get your levels up to around 80.
That's very safe.
I'd encourage you to use zinc, you know, in a unit dosing preparation, either 30 to 50 milligrams.
I would also encourage you to use vitamin C. I would encourage you to use a few drops
of super saturated iodine a day.
Those are all very valuable.
The melatonin has been helpful.
Quercetin has been helpful.
But I would give you a lot of hope with those, with the tincture of time and eating well,
trying to stay away from highly processed foods, trying to keep your body as clean as
possible, no smoking, no alcohol.
It's not pretty.
It's very upsetting.
Fertility rates are down in every country in the world.
Next came the Q&A.
And it was really something.
The founding partners in We the Patriots, who you heard from briefly a few minutes ago, Dawn Jolly and Brian Festa, took the stage alongside Dr. James Thorpe.
So thank you, all of you who attended.
Thank you also, those of us Those of you who are watching live on our live broadcast there on Facebook and our Twitter page, WeThePatriotsUSA.
I'm Brian Festa.
I'm an attorney and the co-founder and vice president of WeThePatriotsUSA.
This is my amazing friend and business partner, Dawn Jolly.
She's been in the medical freedom fight for over 21 years now.
And when we set out to form this organization, we never thought that we would be doing something like this.
We never thought we would have to do something like this, and this is not something that we ever wanted to do.
It saddens us that we have to even be standing here today, but we are grateful for the opportunity to open minds and ears and hearts to the truth about what has I will be flying to Washington D.C.
taking place globally every day, every moment, I'm sure every second if we
actually analyze the data. It's disgusting, it's despicable, and we won't
stop, you know, we won't stop doing what we're doing to open the truth and allow
the truth to prevail and take justice for all these people who have been
affected. I will be flying to Washington DC along with Cameron Atkinson, our lead
counsel, and we will be making the case that any state that has eliminated
religious exemptions, including your beautiful state that they've ruined, your
beautiful state of California, has violated the United States Constitution,
the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and other provisions as well.
So we intend to make that argument.
Please consider supporting us at wethepatriotsusa.org, but I want to turn now The rest of the presentation, the rest of today, this panel discussion, over to Dr. Thorpe and Michelle Gershman.
They are the real stars of this film today.
Well, I'm Dr. Jim Thorpe.
I just want to thank you all for showing up.
585 million other global citizens that have been killed and injured by this lethal, alleged vaccine.
Masquerade.
It's masquerade.
It's gene therapy.
Also on stage with them was a registered nurse, who was also interviewed as a whistleblower in the film.
And this is where things took an interesting turn.
Because remember, we're not all God's children.
Remember what Christ said, John 8, 44.
You are children of your father, the devil.
Okay?
You've dishonored God.
So we need to hold them accountable.
And that's why our organization is fighting back to get them justice.
Okay, we're not gonna let this go.
I don't care how many years pass and everybody just, oh, it's just the new normal that a 16-year-old collapses while running across the parking lot, or an 18-year-old dies, or a baby dies 11 hours out of birth.
That's never going to be normal.
We're not going to allow it to be normal.
Okay, so my work was mad at me for copying and pasting an email.
They said I broke the rules, so they withheld a bonus check from me right before Christmas for
$6,666.
I said I don't want your evil money.
Bye!
But in rebuttal to that, Dr. Thorpe opened a fundraiser for me and I did get my bonus and more.
The amount was $7,777.
The amount was $7,777.
But we unequivocally showed that there was an underhanded blood contract under the table,
illegal, highly unethical, and unconstitutional for a government agency to capture a private entity,
the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and all of their 61,000 OBGYN doctors.
That's why nobody else is coming out.
They took $307 million Signed likely the same blood contract.
I term that, I term the name of that blood contract that they signed, I think, with everybody right out of Prophet Isaiah chapter 28 verses 15 to 18.
Three times it mentions in the end time covenant with death and God will overturn it is what they say.
So we want to thank our guests.
We have to clear the theater and get ready OK, so I was my mouth was probably hanging open there because completely unsolicited.
During that Q&A, both Thorpe and Festa quoted fire and brimstone scripture to rapturous applause from the audience as being in support of their cause.
And then Michelle Gershman, who's that registered nurse, evoked the numerology of 666, boo, versus 777, yay, around her paycheck amount.
And the amount that then Dr. Thorpe was able to raise for her.
So I went to the WeThePatriots.org website that they all kept mentioning and encouraging people to support and what did I find?
Not only is this legal project about vaccine injury claims, they're also involved in cases fighting against critical race theory.
And gender ideology.
And they host a kind of B-list MAGA conference featuring former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis.
And Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, who no doubt will be influencing a whole generation of young MAGA parents to not vaccinate their kids.
Now I was relieved to see that the turnout was so small.
I didn't stay for too long.
I was around the festival for about two hours.
I would say in total I probably saw 30 or 40 people.
It was fairly quiet.
It wasn't a big crowd outside.
The seats in the theatre were not full.
There weren't a lot of people in the lobby.
There was just one guy who was manning both the ticket counter and the concession stand.
It was quiet.
That's relieving.
But this is nonetheless in the heart of Normie, tourist trap, commercial capitalist Santa Monica.
And Mickey Willis' film won the prize for Best Documentary Feature.
So there's a level of normalizing of this kind of content that I think it's important we keep an eye on.
And I think it's important we keep tracking so as to be able to counter their false claims, especially when it has to do with kids.
Thanks so much for listening.
I will see you soon on the main feed or on Patreon where we have an entire archive of bonus episodes as well as a brand new bonus episode every single Monday.
We also do ad-free uploads of all of our main feed Saturday and Thursday episodes there.
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