July 14, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:53
3742 Fake News Industrial Complex | Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux
Fake news starts wars, creates economic depressions, and ruins lives. Yet who his holding the fake news media accountable? Someone needs to tell the story about fake news: Mike Cernovich, the producer of Silenced, is bringing you Hoaxed: The Media's War on Truth.Hoaxed will take the viewer on a full-throttle visual plunge into the history and future of fake news, uncovering their techniques, unveiling their agenda, chronicling the rise of the New Media, and showing you how to fight back against their lies.Mike Cernovich is a lawyer, filmmaker and the bestselling author of “Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms” and “MAGA Mindset: How to Make You and America Great Again.” Cernovich is also the producer of the film documentary “Silenced. Our War On Free Speech” and the upcoming film “Hoaxed: The Media's War on Truth” which you can help fund and support right now at hoaxedmovie.com.Follow Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CernovichRead Danger and Play: http://www.dangerandplay.comRead Mike on Medium: https://medium.com/@CernovichFollow Mike on Periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/CernovichFollow Mike on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DangerAndPlayOrder Gorilla Mindset: http://www.fdrurl.com/gorilla-mindsetOrder MAGA Mindset: http://www.fdrurl.com/MAGAYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
As a fake news story has turned into something very real.
Oh, and when they say fake news, that includes any reporting that contradicts their leftist narrative.
You are fake news.
Very dishonest.
Relentless left-wing bias.
Blatant lies.
It is an agenda.
What you've just seen are two different definitions of fake news, but both of them can't be true.
What is real news and what is fake news?
That's what you're going to learn in HOST, the Media's War on Truth.
Fake news created the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression.
It causes wars and is now causing domestic terrorism in America.
The White House used the New York Times to make the case for war in Iraq.
The United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack.
Bear Stearns is fine!
I've been a journalist for 25 years and I was educated to lie, to betray.
What CNN is doing is they're essentially creating infomercials for dictators.
And that's why we're doing HOPES, the media's war on truth.
But we need you to be part of this.
This is a project for the people, of the people, by the people.
We are going to take down the fake news media.
No more of this basic, boring, oh my God, there are double standards going on.
This is going to be a full frontal attack on the fake news media.
We're going to expose the frauds, the people who are robbing the nation of money, the people who are causing wars, the people who are destroying This country and this entire planet to join me and be part of this.
We'll fight them together.
we will take down and destroy the fake news. - Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio, back with a good friend, Mike Cernovich.
You know him, I'm sure, but just on the off chance you don't.
He is a lawyer, filmmaker, and the best-selling author of Guerrilla Mindset, How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms, and MAGA Mindset, How to Make You and America Great Again.
He is also a producer of the film documentary Silenced Our War on Free Speech and the upcoming film whose trailer we just saw.
I hope you have goosebumps just like I do.
Hoaxed the Media's War on Truth, which you can help fund and support right now at hoaxedmovie.com.
Mike has an alphabet soup of ways you can follow him online, which we will put in the show notes.
Mike, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Yeah, always my pleasure.
You know, appreciate the support and hopefully you're in hoax.
You know, I gotta send you guys a proposal, but we want to have an optimistic sort of finish to it rather than just do a polemic on the media, which is, you know, creating fear and hysteria.
There's enough of that in the world where I only want to create a little bit of fear and hysteria to say, but here's the good guys and then bring in the good guys kind of later on in the film.
Well, the opportunity to break the monopoly of propaganda that has dominated human thought throughout history.
You know, I mean, ever since the days of Socrates, when speaking truth to power got you killed, philosophers or thinkers have generally done like one of two things.
Either A, they have buckled down and supported the dominant narrative of the existing powers, or B, they've kind of isolated themselves in these polysyllabic ivory towers of inconsequentiality, taking a good pension and, you know, summers off as professors in order to not disturb the status quo.
But now we have, for the first time, I think, in human history, certainly since the invention of the printing press, we have a chance to bypass this chokehold of propaganda that seems to run civilizations into the ground with depressing regularity.
Yeah, it's interesting because CNN actually just called me right before I did this.
And I said, oh, John McCain got mad about one of your videos.
And in one of the videos, I talked about how he has connections to the so-called Russian lawyer.
And he goes, well, I have no connections or whatever.
And I told the CNN guy, well, isn't it funny that now John McCain has to respond to my stuff?
And then, of course, the more interesting conversation, too, is why is CNN coming after my stuff on behalf of John McCain?
Right.
How does that make any – that's why people go, oh, Cernovich, you claim that the media is owned and everything.
And I go, well, yeah, foreign policy came after me.
He wrote an article a couple of days ago, and they had people in the CIA who said Cernovich is such a mean guy that nobody wants to work for McMaster because Cernovich might write about him, and I'm like a bully.
And I asked a woman from – actually, three people wrote the article, and I said, wait a minute.
So let me get this right.
The CIA is coming to you.
To complain about me and you're going to actually – you're going to do that and you realize that the media is nothing but a PR agent for the deep state.
There is no real free press in America other than people like you, Paul Joseph Watson, social media.
That's the real free press in America.
Wow.
Well, it is fascinating, too, because not only, I think, are they doing the bidding of the powers that be, Mike, but also they are ruthlessly attacking and suppressing dissent from the dominant narrative.
I wonder if you could help people to understand how much we see this happening in Europe, where people are being threatened with jail and massive fines for questioning government policy.
They're It's very overt.
Now, of course, the challenge in America for the dominant narrative generators is the First Amendment, but they can bypass that in some ways by creating this chilling effect of just personal attacks and slander and character assassination and so on that has people veer back from particular topics that are inconvenient to those in charge.
Well, I mean, that's exactly right.
So the old media model was, we're the gatekeepers, we decide what people talk about, blah, blah, blah.
And then what happened is social media came around and now people can talk about the truth.
So what they do to silence people is they attack you in several ways.
They destroy your reputation.
They dox you just like CNN was going to dox a guy on Reddit for posting GIFs, right?
CNN hired four people.
It's worth a $20 billion company, CNN is.
And they're going to dox some like poor schmuck who says something they didn't like.
Bullied him, right?
So what they do is they want to character assassinate you because if there's only a couple Google results for your name and you're a racist, sexist, homophobic, you're over.
Your life's done, dude.
Look what they did, for example, to Pax Dickinson.
They completely ended his career.
They're going after other people in Silicon Valley, of course, now too.
And that's how they do it.
They name and shame, form an outrage mob.
That gets written up and then forever you're known as a Google or bigot.
So now you apply for a job HR, you know, they're idiots, and they don't want controversy anyway, so HR Googles it and says, oh, this guy's a racist.
They don't look into it.
You'll never get another job for the rest of your life.
Well, the funny thing is, is that I think that used to work, except now I think what it's doing is it's having people double down and say, okay, well, if the media have attacked me to the point where I can't have a normie life, I guess it's like truth or bust, it's alternative media or bust.
And I think that they're actually at this point, whereas before they could get you to fold, now I think they're cornering people and hardening the opposition in a way that has been impossible before.
Well, that's where the rancor is coming from, is the collective people who do feel – my first documentary, Silenced, was about how the real threat to free speech in America right now, the government isn't shutting anybody down.
The real threat to free speech is the culture.
The culture where it says, oh man, you tweeted a joke, and I'm going to interpret that joke in the most terrible way that I possibly can.
And I'm going to crush and destroy your life.
Or So You've Been Publicly Shamed, a great book about outrage mobs and public shaming.
So all those people have been silenced, and they go to anonymous boards and everything, and they're attacking.
And then, of course, with people like me and people like you, the media did a great thing by libeling us because we know that there's no incentive for us to play by their rules.
What are they going to do?
They're going to call us that anyway.
For public figures, Milo's book hit the New York Times bestseller list.
It just hit today.
Nassim Taleb, I hope I'm not mispronouncing his name.
People are just saying, hey, you guys are going to lie about us anyway.
In the past, they could have manipulated us a little bit.
Like, hey, Stefan, he's a pretty good guy, complicated, but we like Stefan.
And then you're thinking, well, they like me.
I don't want to attack my friends.
I don't want to attack the people who like me.
But instead, when they go all in and call you these terrible things and lie about you, you say, okay, that's off.
It's war now.
So it's actually good what they did to people like us.
Well, and now they seem to be in the business of inventing terms that they can affix to your visage like some cursed object.
You're alt-right.
You're an extremist.
You're a white nationalist.
They just keep inventing this new stuff to stick on your...
Public persona in order to try and just scare people away from you.
But I think, again, that's starting to backfire because when, like you and I, you make sort of reasoned argument from first principles with carefully detailed notes and sources, and someone comes back with racist or something like that, I think people can instinctively see the difference in quality, the difference in thoughtfulness, and the difference in integrity.
Sure.
In the numbers, I'm a big data guy, right?
I'm big in the analytics.
I can go onto your social blade.
And say, okay, you're a social blade.
You're still growing Twitter rapidly.
You're still growing YouTube rapidly.
PJW, still growing up.
People are all still growing rapidly.
So these attacks and those little ones, I call it the parenthetical of, the scarlet parenthetical is what I call it.
So they'll go, Stephen Molyneux, comma, a terrible, horrible, no good, son of a gun, comma, said this, right?
Or Mike Cernovich, right?
They want to, that's what they do.
parent they don't they just need to be there they don't say the new york times comma which lied about weapons of mass destruction causing unending destruction and death comma said this right they don't get that little scarlet parenthetical so for us they try to give us that scarlet parenthetical and people are just they're sick of it really right right Now, let's talk about some of what's at stake with regards to the media.
Because when we're talking about sort of character assassination, people say, oh, well, you had a bad day on the media, but it's going to pick up and it's actually going to make you more famous.
But when we look back just at recent history, and we could go all the way back to the First World War and even before that, but if we just look at recent history...
Mike, let's run through some of the things that the mainstream media has been responsible for and continues to be responsible for, for which no heads rolled, for which nothing changed, for which there was no fundamental alteration of culture or approach, and they just keep doubling down and continuing.
I mean, we could start with, I mean, the Iraq War, of course, is the huge one.
I think younger people who weren't around for it may not be as fully aware just how nasty and destructive that whole media cycle was.
Yeah, the younger people especially don't get it.
I remember I was in law school at the time, Pepperdine Law School, and I was in the Army Reserves, second lieutenant.
People in my own class would say, oh, you're a coward.
You're just afraid to go to war.
And I go, well, here's my military ID. Where's yours, right?
Where's yours, buddy?
But that was a climate we lived in where anybody who said, no, I'm against interventionism, well, you're obviously a coward.
People like Ben Shapiro will call you a coward.
It's like, bro, where's your enlistment contract?
Max Boot went on Tucker Carlson last night, was decimated.
When did they ever serve?
So the younger people, under 30, they don't realize that not only do the media lie about the weapons of mass destruction, But they created an entire climate and culture where if you were a non-interventionalist, your own friends would say, well, why are you afraid to go to war?
Because nobody on the media would call them out.
Nobody would say, what kind of moron are you saying that people are afraid to go to war when you're not in the military?
You're obviously afraid to go to war.
Why don't you sign the contract?
So they created that climate of hate and climate of paranoia, which people now, especially if they see Trump supporters, they see.
I'm a big guy.
I don't wear a MAGA hat out in public because I know I'm going to get in a fight.
I can handle myself in a fight.
But a guy got hit with a beer bottle the other night.
The media has done that.
Fake news has created hysteria.
And then in terms of other fake news, and this is what, in a hoax, we're going to cover a lot of things younger people don't realize.
I had friends who had to plead bankruptcy because of the housing bubble.
The media said, I mean, housing is going up.
You're a fool not to buy it.
They brainwashed people in the housing bubble, right?
So then people, of course, lost it.
They lost it.
Their lives were decimated financially.
They had to completely start over.
And then Walter Durante of the New York Times won a Pulitzer for false coverage about Stalin.
50 million people probably died because of that fake news.
So fake news has always existed, right?
But before social media there was no way to call it out.
Right.
I mean, other than sort of grinding lawsuits that would never be reported in the mainstream media, a lot of people don't remember.
But Joseph McCarthy both pursued and won a lawsuit against a newspaper for libel.
But of course, it doesn't matter if nobody's going to report on it.
It's down the memory hole.
It might as well not exist.
So the option of lawsuits against the media, especially if you're a public figure, people don't understand this weird thing in American law.
Perhaps you can break it down for people.
Just if you're a private citizen and you get slandered, well, you know, if you prove your losses and so on, But if you're a public figure, there's this weird thing where they have to have known it was false and decided to publish it anyway.
And of course, since the media knows that rule, they simply won't record anything or write anything or type anything that would admit that as a motivation.
So it is really hard to try and get the record corrected if you are a public figure in America in particular.
Yeah, I mean, 10 years ago, what did you do?
Write a letter to the editor?
Maybe they published it.
That's the thing.
Kids don't appreciate it, how bad we had it.
Which is that if they lied about you, maybe you write a letter to the editor.
And that's why they want to get banned on social media.
But you'd write a letter to the editor and maybe they'd publish it.
Maybe 5% of people read it who read that big headline.
So in American law, for a defamation lawsuit, first of all, they're very expensive.
I have viable defamation lawsuits I could bring against people.
People go, why don't you sue that guy?
$150,000.
You know what I can do productively for $150,000 other than file a lawsuit with a speculative chance of winning so that maybe I win a little vindication or whatever?
$150,000, dude.
I could fund the whole operation.
I could hire two reporters for $150,000, right?
But...
I still can't sue for most things, I'd say, because in America it's called actual malice, which means they have to show by clear and convincing evidence that they acted with reckless disregard for truth or falsity, which means they had reason to believe that it wasn't true.
So that's for a statement of fact.
And then for a statement of opinion, you can get away with anything.
So for somebody like me, they can say, well, Cernovich is a pro-rape, alt-right neo-Nazi.
I can't even sue for that, right?
Because, well, I mean, well, one time I said this and you said that and we can spin it that way.
There's no real lawsuit to have there because that's more hyperbole.
It's more a statement of opinion because what does it even mean to be a neo-Nazi?
Is that a factual statement or is that opinion?
So if you're a public figure, you got it bad.
even if you're a private figure, I mean, in a way, I mean 100%.
I would rather be liable as a public figure than a private figure because I'll just get to my platforms, rally the troops.
I've actually had corrections issued because I'll get a thousand – if you lie about me now in the media, I'll have a thousand people email you.
I'll email the public editor, email the legal – so I can get corrections now.
But if you're just like a private regular guy or a gal and the media lies about you, what's your recourse?
You don't have none.
I mean think about it.
Media is the only business that doesn't have a person that you can reach out to for product safety.
So let's say I'm drinking coffee out of this and the glass breaks and it cuts my mouth.
Well, there's people I can email at the coffee.
I can actually reach out to people.
If you're lied to in the Washington Post, there's no public editor, or at least there isn't one prominently known.
Who do you contact?
What email?
What do you even do, right?
CNN lies about you.
What do you do?
I know how to get a hold of the PR people because I know the game, but if you're just a regular guy, there's no hotline.
Do you feel that you've been wronged by a CNN call here?
If you're a private figure, it's even worse too because also if you're not making a living doing what you and I do, then there's no option.
It's terrible.
Quite frankly, and I don't hope this happens because this would be bad for everybody, but I'm shocked that there hasn't been actual acts of violence by people whose lives have been ruined because you take away somebody's livelihood forever and you make them think that there's nothing to live for.
That's me.
I don't dox people Not only because it's morally reprehensible, but if I dox some guy and then he gets fired and he can never get a job again, that guy's going to come after me and try to kill me, right?
Or eventually, maybe not that one eventually, but the media, they're so drunk with power, they're just doxing people left and right, destroying people every day.
And I think, first of all, it's morally reprehensible.
It is the true definition of bullying because you're punching down.
It's dumb.
You're inviting people to have nothing to lose by taking you out.
I don't know why anybody would want to make that a possibility or a choice for somebody.
Right.
And they shut down such essential and necessary debate, which has us, as a society, as a culture in the West, driving ever faster blindfolded.
We can't have rational discussions about things.
Like, anytime you talk about cutting back on entitlements, well, you must want old people to die in the streets.
You must want sick people to cough up their lungs in a ditch.
You must want poor people to starve to death.
Anytime you talk about controlling government spending, reducing government spending, immediately they will go and find someone who's dependent on that program, who's going to suffer enormously and tear-stained.
It's all emotional stuff.
And of course, what's not seen is all the people who are going to be thoroughly harmed when the government inevitably just runs out of money to put into the bank accounts where the checks go out.
And so there is this titanic wall of silence where anybody who tries to come up with some sort of sane fiscal policy is immediately branded as somebody who just wants to giggle on a golden throne while the poor expire in droves around them.
And therefore you can't have any debate about ethics, about numbers, about inevitabilities, about mathematics.
And that is incredibly frustrating to know that society statistically and mathematically is heading in a very bad direction, a completely unsustainable direction.
But you can't have a conversation about it because the media just whips up victim hysteria.
It's a trend of no platform, which has led to political violence.
Even though I play things up online, very few people in the media, I believe, are actually evil, like 10%.
The rest of them are misguided groups.
There are some real legitimate sociopaths and pedophiles for sure, but I would say that Most people wouldn't kill me if they could.
If they could get away with murdering me, would they do it in the media?
Most people wouldn't actually murder me.
Maybe more than 10%, maybe 30% or 40%.
But the point is, I'll sit down and debate anybody.
The minute, though, you no-platform people, you are now un-personing people.
You're dehumanizing people.
And then once you've dehumanized them, it is not much to say, oh, well, maybe we should just start hitting them with bats or shooting them or hitting them with beer bottles.
That's why the media has created this climate of political violence because they've said there are people unworthy of being spoken to.
I mean, think about the punishment in ancient Greece was ostracization, right?
You would be removed from the community.
Man is a social animal.
Ostracizing somebody, saying that somebody is unworthy to be spoken to, unworthy to be untouchable.
It's a new class of untouchable.
That is, I mean, again, it's not only reprehensible morally.
It's creating a massive powder keg in America where people say, oh, that's an untouchable right there.
Deplorable is just another way of saying untouchable.
So what's it if you go kill the guy, rape the guy, kidnap their children?
They're not really people anyway.
They're not really human beings.
And the media is responsible for that.
So that is where no platforming has gotten us.
And that's why I don't know platform people.
People want to talk to me on Twitter.
I talk to everybody.
But the media is so bad, they'll go, you retweeted a neo-Nazi.
And I'm like, well, yeah, and I've retweeted a left-winger.
I've retweeted Jacobin Mag.
I retweeted Max Blumenthal the other day, alternate, right?
I retweet a wide variety of people because I don't like the idea, you know, I'll retweet Ramsey Paul.
People say, oh, he's so controversial.
I'll retweet Jared Taylor.
Like, well, you can't do that.
It's like, no, that's BS. If somebody has something interesting and intelligent to say, you go debate the guy because the minute you've decided that there are people that are untouchable Then you're saying that they're actually not human beings.
You're part of the climate of violence.
And it's cheating.
You know, I mean, it's the old free speech argument that if somebody's ideas are really bad, give them maximum exposure.
Let intelligent, well-intentioned people oppose the points that that person is making.
And that's the way that you defeat bad ideas.
You don't just drive them underground.
They don't disappear.
If you drive them underground by making them horrifying to be discussed in public, you don't get rid of them.
It's like saying, well, we can get rid of the black market by imposing price controls.
It's like, no, all you do is drive more trade into the black market.
And this double layer of conversation that's happening, like the Overton window, this sort of acceptable things that you can talk about.
And anybody who even brings up other topics, you know, these days is like nationalism and patriotism.
Anyone who brings up these other topics, immigration control, whatever, boom, immediately, you know, far-right, fascist, neo-Nazi, no platform.
That doesn't make the debate go away.
That just means that people say, okay, well, we can't talk about this publicly, so now we're going to talk about it, or at least in the mainstream media, now we're going to use social media, now we're going to do it privately, now we're going to organize outside the realm of And the bad ideas in those subcultures remain unchallenged, unexposed, unexamined, and therefore it causes, I think, a toxicity to form in all of the subcultures because they're being driven underground, and therefore they're not getting exposure to the best critical thinkers who can help them improve their ideas.
And since everyone likes to talk about Hitler, it's worth pointing out that Hitler never won A majority of voters, how he took power, right?
So people go, oh, free speech.
I bet you Hitler would have loved free speech because then Hitler was never able to actually convince people to do what he did.
He actually silenced free speech.
That's how the Holocaust happened because you can't speak up.
If you speak up, you're a traitor.
You go to prison.
Your children will be murdered.
You'll be put in a concentrate.
Same thing with Stalin.
No free speech in Russia.
No free speech in Cambodia.
There are Cambodian genocide.
No free speech in all these – in Cuba, Venezuela.
So you look at a – and you and I have talked about this.
What a coinkydink that all of those places that silence free speech are massacres and they're all left-wing movements, which is, of course, fascinating too.
People don't want to talk about that ever.
So the idea is I guess – because I want to go deep in terms of free speech and Fundamentally, I think people want to do the mostly right thing.
None of us are angels.
But if you put 100 people in a room and you said, hey, we're going to go kill this, murder this person, most people are going to not want to do that.
Now there's mobs and stuff.
It's not that simple.
But fundamentally, most people don't want to harm other people.
But if you're the left, you have an evil heart because that evil heart shows because they want to silence people because they think, oh, my God, if people are exposed to these ideas, then they'll go do these.
But most people wouldn't.
I mean, a good example is that David Duke gets way more media coverage than I do.
Right.
He's a nobody.
If that guy if that guy tried to have an event, maybe 100 people would show up.
50 of them would be media.
45 would be feds and five would actually be fans.
So the idea that, oh my god, they're these terrible people, and the people are exposed to their ideas, then the people are going to be persuaded is actually, that's counterfactual, it's empirically false.
Because you can see it, the people on the right who are the most easy to vilify because they're dancing monkeys, they don't have a real presence, right?
Right?
Because the people aren't buying it.
So to me, that suggests that the left wants to really censor people.
That tells me that their own hearts are dark.
Well, and they're not competent.
As I said, it's a form of cheating.
You know, if I say I'm going to have a boxing match with someone and then, you know, like I hit him in the arm with a pipe the day before and say, ah, you know, I won because he didn't show up or he didn't win or whatever, it's cheating.
And this to me is very frustrating.
Again, if people have bad ideas, they're welcome to come on my show.
I do hours of debates with listeners every single week.
I get people in I disagree with.
We have conversations.
I'm pretty good at having a debate and more than happy to be corrected if I've gone astray.
Because I have no ego investment in any particular position, my ego investment or my rational investment is in the methodology of reason and evidence.
The conclusions can come and go as the data changes.
And so because I have competence in the realm of debating, I'm comfortable having opposing opinions front and center in front of me.
But if you're not particularly good at debating, then what you want to do is cheat by silencing the The opponent.
And that, I think, is starting to become pretty obvious when you look at CNN or these others.
They don't bring competent people on to debate them.
They don't bring well-informed, articulate, energetic, charismatic people on to debate the opposite side.
They demonize, they silence, and then they try to move on like they didn't hit anything on the road.
Yeah, there is that, too.
They are afraid.
It's the infantile, the cry bully.
Mindset, which is they attack people and then when you hit back, they go, my God, you're bullying me.
Ben Garrison, of course, had a great cartoon with that as he has with other issues.
It is cheating and that is why the left is – I mean what do they have today?
Russia, taxes.
They can't sell people their actual ideas.
All they can say is, well, Trump is bad.
Vote for Hillary.
It's her turn.
It has actually weakened them because me, when I went to college, it was me versus 30 people in the room.
And it's you versus 30 people in the room.
They're going to come up with things you never thought of.
And you leave that like a gladiator school.
You're like, alright, I'm pretty.
That's what people are like, oh, how come you're so quick on your feet?
I'm like, walk into a room where everybody thinks you're a monster and defend your ideas.
And do that for, you know, do that for a little bit and you'll figure things out and you'll get quick on your feet.
So that's why the right actually has better ideas than the left right now.
Their only ideas are Trump bad.
Trump mean man.
Russians.
And it's Hillary.
It's her turn.
How could you not vote for her?
Why is she not 50 points ahead?
Here's something that I've noticed.
I think you've talked about it too, Mike, and it's really fascinating to me.
Let's just take this attack on Don Jr., right?
Donald Trump Jr.
And I did a video on this.
We can link to it below, so I won't go into the whole backstory.
But basically, by saying, oh, he may have talked to someone overseas trying to get oppo research for the election.
What happens is this kind of blows up and everyone's attention is drawn to this idea.
Well, it's really bad to talk to people overseas to get political ammunition in an election and so on.
And then what happens is because this conversation is sparked, people come in with like, boom, you know, Hillary talking to the Ukrainians.
Boom, this happened.
The Saudis are funding Hillary and, you know, all of this kind of stuff.
And so what happens is by bringing up this supposed principle, well, foreign influence in an election, by focusing like a laser on one thing, The crimes or the dysfunctions or the hypocrisies of the left come floating up.
And it's almost like in attacking the right, they expose their own flank to an endless amount of counterattacks that actually overwhelms the initial attack.
And so this is one of these horror movies from Japan from the 1950s.
Sir, we're shooting lasers at the monster, but it's only making him stronger.
And they don't seem to be up to this pattern yet.
Yeah, they don't get it, and that's because the media isn't used to being attacked.
So me, before I say something, I go, ah, you know, that might be the wrong line of attack because that person can kind of flip that on you.
You kind of use that as an example.
If I ever get into a JK Rowling, I'll never get into a tour with her about book sales, right?
So the average verified liberal on Twitter, they've never written a book, never sold a book.
So I can be like, oh, where's your book?
Oh, it must suck.
You can't sell books or whatever.
But if it's J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, I'm not going to do that because you'll get crushed, right?
Because I've been used to being under attack and I'm attacked every day.
Well, the media, they've never been under attack until recently.
Even before, like with conservative media, they would be like, oh, the media is so unfair, they're biased.
But that is more about crying.
They've never had people actually say, look at this.
Here's people filming your footage.
Here's CNN staging a protest.
Here's CNN making up stories out of whole cloth.
Here's the New York Times falsely accusing Sarah Palin of a shooting.
They've never actually had people fact-check them and attack them, so they're completely unprepared for this.
So they don't realize that, oh, hey, we're just going to lob a bomb at Don Jr., and he's going to take it and apologize, and we're going to win again.
They don't realize, no, now we're going to bomb your candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Right.
Right.
And this, I think, is such a fascinating development to see.
I mean, there was this New York Times article, and people were posting about this on social media, the New York Times article about the Don Jr.
thing.
And I think there were, like, within an hour or two, there were, like, four hidden corrections that weren't noted.
And it's just, like...
This makes you look terrible.
And you can't hide it anymore.
I mean, the lack, you know, back before the internet, you know, the lack between, oh, somebody wrote a bad article, and then 18 months or two years or five years later, there's some retraction and some other lawsuit that's barely written about.
I mean, it doesn't really mean anything.
But when you can see this 1984-style rewriting of history in real time, Oh man, it just, it shows the agenda and it shows the lack of honesty and integrity and that leaves people adrift looking for someone to trust and I think that's where the alternative media, if you have good integrity, can really be a lifesaver for people.
Yeah, there's now people, watchdogs everywhere.
Most of what I get, 90% of what I get is from the crowd.
Which is another thing I think is funny.
The liberals go, we're pro-democracy and we're pro-people.
But you close the comments.
My DMs are open.
And a lot of my DMs are terrible.
Appalling stuff.
Whatever.
And most of them are just boring and unhelpful.
But you get a couple good ones in there from time to time.
So 90% of what I get is actually...
Source from the crowd, and that's not something the media is prepared for, which is why I play it straight, too, because I've said things that I didn't even mean to be a lie, but I just worded them improperly.
My own followers were like, da-da-da-da-da, up my ass in a second over that.
I was like, oh, I didn't mean it that way.
Let me reword it.
But I'm used to it, and you are, too.
You do a video, you get Feedback right away, you get comments, you read your comments, and a lot of the times, you've got to learn when to disregard them.
But the media, they're used to, they write the article, and it's like a lightning bolt from Zeus, and that's the end of the conversation.
Article is only the beginning of the conversation.
This video we're doing is not the end of a conversation.
It's only the beginning.
And then on social media, and in the comments on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere, that's where the real conversation is going to happen.
How on earth is CNN a $20 billion company?
I mean, what am I missing?
What do I not understand?
I mean, they don't seem to get a massive number of eyeballs.
They, of course, any outside investor would say, well, they seem to be messing with the value of the brand, like whoever's making these decisions, whether it's from the top down or just kind of horizontally flooding its way across the organization.
They seem to be doing significant damage to the brand.
How on earth is it worth so much?
I can't quite figure out the economics of that.
Well, I'm flabbergasted because I don't know.
That's the whole thing.
Like when I'm out walking Cyra, my dog, this is what I think about.
I was like, where is the money coming from?
The advertising doesn't convert.
You're buying an ad on CNN and some guys at a sports bar taking a leaker.
Everybody's at the airport and everybody's like this and talking.
Nobody's watching the TV. So their viewership numbers are inflated by being on sports bars, TVs, airports.
Even then they can't do a million viewers for their shows, right?
So yeah, this is endlessly perplexed.
Actually, when I looked into the valuation of CNN, I saw $20 billion.
And I thought, you know, that can't be right.
Better fact check it.
No, under the proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner, that's what CNN would be valued at.
$20 billion.
So I have no idea, man.
And that's what I'm going to explore in a hoax is...
Their ratings, because hoax would be an attack on their advertising, because if advertisers actually understood anything, they would realize advertising on TV is the dumbest thing you can do right now, because it doesn't convert.
Well, and the other thing too, if you look at the demographics of the alternative media versus the demographics of the mainstream media, I mean, the mainstream media, like they're halfway to just being funeral directors when it comes to the age slice of their audience, like in the 60s and in the late 50s and so on.
And so those people are heading into retirement.
Their spending is going to go down.
But if you look at some of the alternative media demographics, I mean, you know, I'm not sure what yours are.
I'm big in the sort of mid to late 20s, 30s, and so on.
I mean, this is a rising generation of big spenders and ambitious people who are going to Go out and blow money on useful things for their career, for their family and so on.
That's another thing.
I mean, valuation is supposed to have something to do with the curve of valuation in the future.
And we got a whole bunch of people who are, I guess, tuning into this stuff because they don't know any better, but younger people, much more savvy.
And the idea, to me, the idea like something big is breaking in the world.
I better turn on the television.
It's completely incomprehensible to me.
Yeah, our people spend money.
I learned that by I hold events.
They sell out quickly.
If anything, you know, I just need to get bigger venues and do bigger events.
But that's the reality.
Our people spend money.
Hoax raised $70,000 in two days.
I haven't even promoted it heavily.
I haven't sent my email list out yet.
So I haven't even promoted it.
I'm really going wild on it.
Already 70 grand, you know, two days.
I get a seminar on Saturday for Gorilla Mindset.
That is sold out in like 36 hours.
Every event we have sells out really quickly.
And it is an audience that is involved.
Whereas in TV, it's a passive consumer audience with pills for drugs for conditions they may or may not have.
Again, it is like literally when I think about it, I'm just like The only time I'm triggered is when I try to think about how these media companies actually have these inflated valuations because the math doesn't add up.
Nothing makes any sense.
It might be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of our generation.
It strikes me as a bubble that puts the 90s tech bubble to shame just in terms of what the actual revenue is going to be.
And, of course, we now know that if a network like CNN or some other, if they do something egregious, then their advertisers are going to be targeted and it's going to become challenging and costly for them to defend their association with a tainted brand.
And so there's a vulnerability in the organizations as well that I'm not sure.
Maybe it's just a bunch of older investors.
I don't mean to sound sort of ageist, but maybe.
Because I don't understand.
Not only is their audience going to die off in the next 10 to 20, 25 years, but also there's a huge vulnerability in the targeting of advertisers for negative actions on the part of the network that is going to cause a drop in valuation that could be like an egg off a cliff.
Yeah.
I don't see how they have a future.
Cord cutting is setting in.
staff they are the advertising um is a good fulcrum point i don't again i don't get it every time i think about it it just doesn't make sense other than it's a collective delusion and as you said you know again not to be ageist because i have a pretty big audience who's over 65 surprisingly enough but most people they're just throwing money at this old stuff and the same thing is true of like super packs right
you know my facebook and your youtubes and other people's YouTube's do millions of views, and the content comes out every day.
Well, these super packs, they're taking in maybe 10, 20 million in revenues a month, or not a month, but a year.
Some of them a month.
And they do like an ad, like a 30 second ad, every couple of months.
And maybe 5 million people see the ad.
And I'm like, why would anybody fund a super pack?
They have big offices and lines and secretaries and everything is really fancy.
It just comes down to people fundamentally do what they know and most people never grow and evolve.
What most people who are very old know is that, hey, TV. TV is where it's at.
You need to have TV advertising.
Most people who are in politics go, oh, super PACs.
Super PACs are what you need.
The truth is that social media...
Content creators and daily content is what you need, but it hasn't caught up yet.
But as our people get older and everything, then we'll figure it out.
Then, of course, the challenge for people like you and me and others will be, how do we not be dinosaurs like CNN is in 10 years?
What's going to be the thing under us that we're like, oh, why would anybody do that?
It's funny, too, because alternative media production values are often not the highest.
I mean, you know, hey, good job.
You got a mic recently.
That's fantastic, right?
But, you know, you're in your house.
I'm in like a white bubble in the basement and so on.
And this, of course, used to be a sign of, you know, amateurness and so on.
But I think what's coming out now, Mike, is it is a sign of independence.
You know, like I'm not dependent on people to build me a million dollar set who I then am kind of obligated to and who may adjust in some subtle or not so subtle ways what it is that I choose to talk about, you know.
And this idea, like can mainstream media outlets, particularly television, I mean, every other ad on American television is for something that's going to alter your biochemistry for a promised good.
Can they really be objective about government funding of, say, prescription drugs?
If they're getting so much money from drug companies.
It's like asking psychiatrists to be, you know, independent of the pharmaceutical industry and so on.
And so I think big flashy stuff, you know, capped teeth, makeup, massive sets and so on.
Well, that all costs money.
The money has to be paid more by advertisers.
Advertisers have objectives over and above just selling ads.
But also, if advertisers' business model overlaps anywhere with government power, then there's going to be a skewing of the media's reporting on that government power.
I mean, if you've got a bunch of – if Boeing is advertising on your site, are they going to be indifferent to the possibility of being able to sell a lot of weapons in a new war?
Is that going to affect your coverage?
So I think before, low production values, so to speak, were considered a sign of, you know, amateurish and so on.
But to me, it's very clearly a giant issue.
Flashbomb of independence that you and I are responsible to our audience.
We're not the puppets of any larger conglomerates that are funding our bills.
I think that is beginning to alter valuation and perceptions of integrity as well.
Yeah, it is a new sign now is that amateur is a new professional or amateur is a new honest.
People want live, unedited content.
And even the media, again, they're showing their hand.
They go...
How dare James O'Keefe edit us?
How dare anybody trust these edited videos by James O'Keefe?
And you're thinking, do you guys have a mirror?
Take a look at it.
It's a little bit off the beaten path of the stated topic, but let's go off book for a sec.
I think it's related, because when it comes to sort of establishment media or establishment orthodoxies, establishment broadcasts of ideas, there is, I think, a fair amount of criticism.
I know you've made some yourself, which I'd like to dig into here a little bit, regarding sort of the mainstream conservative think tanks and outlets.
I know you've criticized young Americans for liberty and so on.
I think this falls into a And I think that they look at existing conservative outlets and say, okay, well, you guys have been conservatives for five decades or four decades.
What precisely have you been conserving?
And I think that question of tactics regarding how to shrink the size and power of the state or reinforce borders or nationalism, patriotism, Yeah, the new, and I use this term carefully because people always take it out of context, but what I recognized about two years ago was what the right wanted was more militancy.
They wanted aggressive people who were hard-hitting and striking back.
Which intuitively makes sense.
What is the national view and all those people done other than they essentially cry that they're being treated unfairly.
And God bless Donald Trump as much as I like what he does.
The unfair New York Times, like who cares?
Guess what?
Life is unfair, President Trump.
It's unfair.
Nobody wants to hear that anymore.
What people want is attack, attack, attack all the time.
That's what they want to see.
So the National Review and all those people are like, oh, can't attack anybody.
We can't do what they do.
We can't sink to their level.
When Posobiec and Laura went to Shakespeare in the Park, oh my god, they freaked out.
And my response to that was, look, if our side is doing that every time, I'm going to have a problem with it.
I'm going to say something about it.
If our people are pulling fire alarms and having riots, I'm going to have a problem with it.
But if our people one time go do it just to show you, hey, this is what it's like to have your event disrupted and they do it peacefully, I'm like, what's the big freakout?
Why are these people freaking out that one time we did 10% of what happens to us?
I had a Gorilla Mindset seminar.
They got all kinds of threats.
The venue holder did just because people don't like me.
So, yeah, people are so tired of that where, oh, we can't do that.
We can't show them.
But meanwhile, you know, if you want to give a talk in Canada, they'll pull the fire alarms and turn on the sprinklers or something.
In the case of the pluriball, they wanted to put butyric acid in the ventilation system and cause a stampede.
So, yeah, people are definitely tired of conservatism.
As a brand, conservatism is dead.
You know, people are still calling themselves conservatives, but that's only because they don't have a better label.
They've conserved nothing.
They've had no wins.
They haven't won anything.
They couldn't stop Trump.
They were never Trump.
People forget that.
There's a whole issue of the National Review called Never Trump.
And they lost, right?
So they couldn't even stop.
All of the might, the might, and I put in quotes, of conservative media and the conservative establishment united with the entire might of Hillary Clinton's $1.2 billion and the entire fake news establishment wasn't able to stop Trump.
So it was no surprise then that conservatives, when they fight with the media establishment, never win.
Well, there's a funny thing too with the disruption of the Shakespeare in the Park play.
What I found interesting was there were so many people outside the sort of coastal elite bubbles who were like, wait, what?
They're taking tax dollars to simulate the assassination of the president every night?
It raised awareness in a way that no little article on some website or some magazine was going to do where people are like, that is really shocking.
Okay, maybe I don't agree with these guys going on the stage, but wow, the bigger picture is I'm being forced to fund this assassination porn in the guise of art that's going on every single night.
And that raising of awareness through these kinds of tactics is a time-honored methodology for getting the word out there because, you know, it dominated the news cycle.
And of course, what happened was, again, this sort of blowback.
The media was like, isn't it terrible that they interrupted this ritual assassination of Donald Trump?
And people were like...
Wait, what?
Ritual assassination of Donald Trump?
I think I'm going to focus on that a little bit more.
And so even the outrage that left through to Jack and Laura ended up blowing back because people were shocked at what they were interrupting rather than that they interrupted.
Exactly.
It was highly effective, highly coordinated.
And people, conservatives freaked out about it.
Just shut up.
That's kind of...
Why don't you guys just shut up?
You lost.
You haven't won anything.
Other people here are doing great things.
Nobody got hurt.
It was a 30-second, 60-second thing.
It got an incredible amount of earned media.
Any PR from the world would charge you $500,000 for the kind of coverage.
Plus, quite frankly, and I've said this before, if somebody wants to come to my seminar and for 30 seconds yell at me, and then that's going to get me written up in the New York Times...
The Daily Mail, CNN, come on in and disrupt my event for 30 to 60 seconds.
I can handle it.
So the Shakespeare in the Park people, they got more PR too.
So it was a win-win all around, but that's just an example of how feckless conservative establishment is where anybody who wants to take a little bit of action, show a little aggression, attack a little bit, is backstabbed by conservatives.
Well, and it's so frustrating for me, Mike, when people have these lofty Queensbury rules, standards of boxing.
And it seems like what we've got these high standards is we don't want to sink to their level.
What, what?
And it turns out that they just want to stay inconsequential, cash the checks from their donors and not provoke a fight with the powers that be, which are both on the left and right, particularly in the media.
And I always really, really dislike it when people claim to have these high moral standards.
And in my view, at least, often it just turns out to be cowardice, which is fine.
You know, I mean, if you want to be a coward and not take on the media and not take on these fights, that's fine.
Everyone has their specialties.
Everyone has their own level of risk.
It's perfectly fine.
But don't pretend that you're doing it.
Don't pretend because what that does is it means other people think the problem is being taken care of.
You know, like if some guy's drowning and I say, I'm an Olympic swimmer, I'm going to go out and save him.
And then everyone else stays on the shore and I swim out there and just watch the guy drown.
I've kind of interfered with him being saved by claiming I'm going to save him.
And all the people who've claimed to defend classical liberal values in a small government free market and so on.
The fact that they have been claiming these high standards, while I think fundamentally a lot of times just not wanting to get their hands dirty in the necessary fight to save the West, that to me is really frustrating.
And I think now that there's a new game in town, which is the game of show me your wins.
Show me your wins.
Before I invest time, money, energy and thought space into what you're doing, show me what you've been able to do that's actually been effective, that actually has had a win.
And I think a lot of the traditional conservative media can't really pass that test at all.
None of them can, really.
I mean, at least the old guard.
The Weekly Standard, the National Review, they're irrelevant now.
I mean, it's quite funny, actually.
It's quite hilarious.
But, yeah, the new artists, the new people are here, and people will go hard every day, and there are big wins, and they don't know what to do.
I mean, Megyn Kelly tried to take out Alex Jones.
He's made a mockery of her, right?
Oh, man.
He made a mockery of her.
So they haven't adapted to the new landscape, which is going to be, ironically, more classically liberal.
The new media landscape is that You know what?
You might not like us, but you can't really ignore us.
And we'll debate you anywhere.
So you're going to have to debate us.
Or lose.
Because people now see...
Same thing with Brian Svelter, right?
So Brian does a show on CNN, Unreliable Sources.
And he goes, oh, you know, never been a more dangerous time to be a journalist.
And I said, well, hey, bro.
I'll wear a CNN hat through New York.
Any neighborhood you want me to.
And I bring a camera and a GoPro.
And we can see what it's like.
Go wear a Trump hat in New York and see what happens, bro.
You really think CNN is really under attack?
Go wear a Trump hat.
Why don't you do a real story on political violence?
And that stuff grates at them because it goes viral, right?
And then people are asking them why.
They can't control the narrative.
So the way they're going to have to respond to that is they're going to have to do a story on political violence against Trump supporters and then, surprise, surprise, people will trust them again.
If you turned on CNN and every now and then they go, man, look at what's happening to Trump supporters.
This violence is out of control.
We're going to have a panel on to discuss violence against Trump supporters and the panelists say, wow, this is actually terrible.
You know, we might not agree with these people politically.
We should debate them, but we shouldn't be hitting them and throwing gangers at them.
This is awful.
Then they'll regain the trust and they have all this money, but it just goes to show that's a really simple way to regain trust.
Actually cover stories that are true, that are happening, that are prevalent.
They won't even do it.
Right.
Well, they're not interested in a debate.
They're interested in control, not information.
And, you know, this is sort of a mind exercise that popped into what you were talking, Mike, which is imagine being a security guard or dressing up like a security guard and walking around with a CNN camera crew around New York.
I mean, would you find that to be at all dangerous?
Now, imagine being a security guard and walking around with you or with Laura Loomer or, you know, other people who are well-known public figures not on the left.
And imagine what your day would be like if you were that kind of security guard.
And I think that's just another way to understand that this fear that they have is entirely overblown.
And it is, you know, they have set up a situation where people like yourself and myself are in danger being out in the public.
and then they cry that somehow Trump is inciting violence against them.
I mean, I don't even know what to say with that kind of mindset.
It just seems so deluded as to be crippling.
I don't know how they get into bed in the morning and face the right direction to get through the door.
Yeah, I don't know if they're being deliberately dishonest or if they are just so soft that that is a threat to them, right?
Because I read an article today on CNN. Someone goes, it's the whole, I'm a media person, I'm quitting Twitter, right?
Who cares, bro?
Who cares?
Why is that newsworthy?
Hey, I'm Mike Sermich.
I walked my dog today.
Isn't that cool?
Why is that even news?
We've seen it done a hundred times.
But if you want to really get down to it, I've waited tables.
I've done customer service at a hardware store.
I've worked on farms.
I get a lot of nasty comments on Twitter my way.
This is the best job in the world.
If you can make your money reading and essentially sharing what you read and learn and live with the world and you can make – and you can pay your bills.
I'm certainly not getting rich doing it.
There is no better job in the world.
But that's because I've had the other jobs.
Like whenever I hear these people on Twitter cry, I go, have they ever been to like a Costco?
You know, there's like a person who their job is to stand there and check your receipt and they're standing on their feet all day.
How much does that hurt?
I know because I've had jobs like that.
Your knees ache after the end of a shift.
You go home tired.
People are rude to you.
I mean, if you think Twitter abuse is bad, go deal with customer service.
And they're so narcissistic that they've never thought, well, actually, you know, people have their real jobs out there that are hard.
A job of the media is not a real job.
It's a dream job that a select privileged few get, and people should be very grateful to have these jobs and not be crying about the abuse that comes with it.
Oh, yeah.
Now, I'm off to high school.
I didn't have any money to go to college.
And I went to work as a gold planner and prospector up north.
Man, that was some hard work, man.
Humping around giant drills through waist-deep snow and bushes and snowshoes.
And one night, a bear attacked the dog that was in our camp.
And we were all sitting there with shotguns, just hoping it wasn't going to come through the tent.
So yeah, I'll take typing of mean words over days like that to earn a buck.
So, Mike, let's close off with, you know, when people see, you know, you and I out there in the world talking the way that we do and surviving, if not flourishing, off the endless attacks of the lesser minded, there is, of course, we get people going.
And I know, I know for sure that the movie, I'll give the...
The title again, Hoaxed the Media's War on Truth.
And please everyone check out hoaxedmovie.com.
I'll put the links below.
They're going to get pumped up and they're going to want to join us on the barricades.
They're going to want to join us in the battle to save the West.
But they're scared and they're nervous, which again, I understand.
It's the kind of thing where it seems worse before it happens than looking back in the hindsight.
It was like, eh.
If I could choose for it to happen, I probably would because I'm better and stronger now as a person and as a thinker.
What is the best mindset that people should have if they do want to step into the essential public arena of defending Western values, knowing that they're going to be targeted by whoever?
What is the best mindset before and during this kind of decision?
The best mindset is the mindset I apply, which is, what the hell am I going to do?
Sit around, watch sports, have a hangover all day?
Live the life of I stay up too late on a Friday night.
I get drunk.
I wake up.
I watch sports.
I invest my emotional energy in people who don't care whether I live or die.
Instead of investing my emotional energy in my country, myself, to me, there's never really been a choice.
It's always been, well, what is the alternative?
The alternative is to sit back and do nothing while the country and the entire world is being destroyed.
Is that what you want to do and look back on your life?
Because we're all going to be too old one day.
We're all going to have to quit the fight.
You want to look back on your life 20, 30 years ago when there's moral decay everywhere, where pedophiles are allowed to work as teachers, where people go to jail for their thoughts, where people are being arrested like they are in Germany.
You want to look back 20, 30 years from now as people are being sent off into prison and say, I'm glad I went out and partied on a Friday night, had a hangover, and watched sports on Saturday.
That was the totality of my life.
And it was even, you know, I kind of called out that KFOL guy on CNN as I go, You know, you went to journalism school, you're in the media, and your legacy is you were going to dox some guy on Reddit because he made a pro wrestling gif about CNN. Is that what your legacy is going to be?
That's your legacy?
That's what I ask people every day when you're thinking back and you're thinking about the story of your life.
Is the story of your life, you sat home, you got drunk, you watched sports, you did nothing with your life, or that you were a warrior and you fought hard and we're going to win.
So not only that, but you can be part of the winning team.
Right.
So let's talk about more practically and directly how people can help you with the movie.
Because the input, the quality of the input, the amount of money that you get coming in is going to have a direct effect on the quality and thus the shareability of the product that comes out the other end.
So help people understand how important it is and what you're going to do with the money and what's going to come out of it, how it's going to help them in return.
Right.
So Silenced could have been a revolutionary film.
Budget was $85,000.
The director was what he was.
It was a good little CBS News Hour kind of special, like an NPR thing.
That was cool.
It was a little think piece.
But it is not going to have cultural impact.
The idea from Hoax, I want Hoax to be the pumping iron of new media.
Here's what I mean.
Everybody who goes to the gym, whether you know it or not, You go there because a documentary film called Pumping Iron was released by George Butler and it started on Schwarzenegger.
That created Jim Culture.
A charismatic figure created an entire new movement and now Jim Culture as we know it exists.
I want a new media culture and a distrust for the established media culture to exist.
The way to do that is more than anything films.
Books are great.
Books do not move hearts and minds, especially in a modern world like films do.
And the film's got to have a little pizzazz.
They've got to have flash.
They've got to have the expensive cameras and the cut and the music and the hype.
And that is why if anybody watches – well, I encourage them to.
If anybody watches a trailer for Silence, compare it to the trailer and host.
The production level is next level.
So where does the money go?
The first thing I always tell people is I don't get paid on the films.
I work as a producer.
I don't take a producer's film for it.
I didn't make a profit off of Silence.
The money I did make off of Silence is going right back in hoax.
And there's no fast and loose where I paid myself or I paid...
No.
Shauna doesn't get paid.
I don't get paid.
The money only goes to fund filmmakers and creators who are doing the work.
And they, quite frankly, don't get paid what they would be getting paid in Hollywood.
But they do Hollywood-level work.
So the money is going to go to...
Two directors I hired who are amazing, and you can see for yourself by the Kickstarter trailer the level we're going to play at, major league level.
Development of photography, some graphics for the title cards, a composer.
And realistically, the budget's going to be probably $200,000, $250,000 is what it's going to take to do right.
And just for people listening in, if you want to measure success, I want Silence to be on Netflix, okay?
That's the level that it has to be at, the kind of documentary, and it's got to have the kind of popularity and the shareability that it's going to get on Netflix.
That's how we measure success.
I'm making a documentary that is going to be a Get Me Roger Stone level kind of thing that people are going to be talking about.
It's going to make waves.
And to do that, we do need the support of the people.
I'm putting my time into it and putting hundreds of hours in the film, putting in my own cash, and I have put up my own cash for the red pill.
I was an associate producer on that, put up 10 grand.
So we do need people, if they want a great film, people always say, what can I do?
What can I do?
Well, that's one really simple thing you can do.
And if only people can do $1, that's actually useful, and here's why.
The Kickstarter, it'll say, you raised X number of dollars from Y number of backers.
So if it says, you know, we raised $200,000, For Hoax with 10,000 backers.
Well, that's incredible.
So even if 9,000 of the backers are only $1 each, that shows people, no, there's a lot of people who want to see that.
That's actually how you get traction.
That shows there'll be a strong demand for it.
So yeah, if there's anybody listening, and I know we all have different financial situations, but if there's an option on the Kickstarter for $1.
So if you got $1, kick it in because that $1 now is a vote.
You're now voting for With that $1, you're saying, I'm one backer.
I want to see this film.
And then distribution companies and Netflix and other people are going to see that, and that's going to be persuasive.
And what's your money going to be worth unless we can start having rational discussions about the value of currency?
You know, we've got hyperinflation down the road.
If people try and pay off their unfunded liabilities by money printing, there's devaluation, there's soft and hard defaults.
To me, this is a great investment to spend your money on in order to have the potential to retain the value of your money.
Because if this film works, then the mainstream media is going to step aside a little bit and an opening is going to occur among the general population for essential conversations that right now We're good to
go.
So thanks again so much for your time, Mike.
Look forward to hearing how the movie is going, and very best of luck with the fundraising.
