Wag the Dog (1997) satirizes how the U.S. government and media collude to distract from scandals—like the fabricated "B3 bomber" crisis or a fake war with Albania—using lies that predate the Monica Lewinsky scandal by weeks. David Mamet’s rewrite sharpened its dialogue, while Robert De Niro’s Conrad dismisses reality as "no war" unless TV says so, exposing media’s power to define truth. A CIA agent leaks the deception despite threats, contrasting modern misinformation’s sheer volume with the film’s artful manipulation. The episode critiques conspiracy theories like Sandy Hook denial and Epstein files, questioning whether staged distractions or systemic distrust better explain today’s political chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with Patrick.
Hello, everyone.
That's you, Patrick.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I brought it to you.
Okay, good.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Sorry.
So, yeah, we're going to do another one.
He was mesmerized.
He'd listened to the podcast so much.
He was like, oh, I know this part.
This is the part where he introduces the guests.
Yeah.
I get my role as viewer/slash participant mixed up at times.
Yeah.
So we're going to go into another movie today on this sub-series that we're sliding in as the part of the main main podcast feed.
And the movie we're doing today is called Wag the Dog.
It's 28 years old, but we're still going to do a spoiler warning in case anyone's worried that we're going to ruin the end for you.
We are going to ruin the end for you.
So if you're really looking forward to seeing this movie at long last after 28 years, it's on your list and you just haven't got to it, then stop now and go watch it or whatever.
But I'm almost thinking that for these films, it might be fun for some people to get our takes and then watch them and watch for the things that we're pointing out because maybe people on Reddit or wherever go through these and they point these out.
But I don't think.
I mean, maybe, I don't know.
But I mean, if that's true, someone send me the Reddit link for, you know, how I'm a ripoff and a fraud for, you know, attempting to pop the outcome of their viewing.
Yeah.
Reddit through Reddit tab for Wag the Dog.
And I'm like, no, no, everyone mentioned all this stuff like 15 years ago, man.
You're way behind.
Yeah.
So this movie, as I mentioned, is 28 years old.
Do you remember watching this back in the day, Patrick?
This movie?
No, no, I'm sure I did.
Watching it recently.
I don't remember.
Yeah, no, it was.
In case your kids ever listen to this, we're not going to mention all the things you did that might cause you to forget.
Oh, my word.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, confessional.
That's a different episode.
It's a different series.
So this movie was released in 1997, but I didn't watch it until it came out on, you know, video, essentially, DVD or whatever I was watching it on in 1998, at which point the Monica Lewinsky scandal was in full, full force, right?
It was everything in 1998 was all the Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky stuff.
And Bill Clinton went on a bunch of military adventures, and a lot of people felt that he did these because he needed to distract attention from the ongoing Monica Lewinsky scandal.
So this movie was around at the same time.
And in my memory, I had, you know, mixed up dates and everything else.
And I thought that this movie was satirizing the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But it was made, it was actually released three weeks before the first moment of that Monica Lewinsky affair.
So they were just lucky.
They were just lucky they had this.
It's based on a book.
The book was actually written about the entanglements in the U.S. government involved in the first Iraq war.
The novel itself wasn't like making a direct accusation of anyone doing anything wrong.
It was more like a fictional accounting of events to satirize the way the media and the government intertwine each other, right?
And the way that, you know, in that case of the book, the way, and obviously the movie, the way that the government misleads the media intentionally for its own benefit.
So a couple fun things about this movie, Patrick.
You might, when I was perusing some of the info about this, I picked one out just because it turns out that when Wag the Dog was being filmed, the StarTack cell phone was new on the market and was used for the first time on camera.
You being a person who famously, among our friends, was the first person who had a cell phone and it was a StarTack, Motorola StarTack.
I thought you'd appreciate that.
I thought you'd appreciate that.
Used to be a big fan of that phone.
I glossed over that in my recent viewing.
Well, it was a very subtle thing in the movie.
It was just cell phone.
Oh, I need to, you know, you know, but that's interesting.
It's so ubiquitous in our minds now.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
We would think back, oh, you know, a flip phone, some flip phone, right?
Like who keeps track of what those are?
Yeah.
It's in this fictional universe in which this movie occurs, the population at large essentially has to have only one source for their news, right?
It's got to be the American press.
And even further from that, this has to get squeezed into that the American press itself has only one source of information about government business, which is the government, which I think is generally how conspiracy theorist people think about the news, as having only one source spoken to them through one microphone coming from one press office in Washington,
and they never double check anything.
They never have any other way.
They don't know anyone else in the administration or in the military or anywhere else who can corroborate anything.
And that's the only way in which this plot line makes sense, I think.
And this is sort of directly why this film is so relevant to people who have this mindset, is because they think that this mass that we call the media and the government is just one person in an office somewhere that's coming up with it and telling people what to do.
And then they all do it mechanically without question.
Which is interesting.
It is an interesting way to look at the world, but of course it's just not factual.
It's a film device used to tell sort of a dark satire, right?
What did you think of this movie?
Yeah, if you place it back then, it's harder to draw the comparison that I'm about to, but I know that I have seen several things.
It would probably be on The Daily Show or John Oliver or something like that, where they will show how a very impressive array of different newscasters will say the same thing verbatim.
Like they're just reading off of that, whatever the Reuters or the scripting that a lot of the news find their source at.
And so when people see something like that happen and they don't really kind of try to quantify like, why is this something that's just being rolled out through every channel?
Whereas other forms of reporting will attempt to examine things more closely or with more qualifying statements.
It's easy for people to paint their distrust of general mainstream media because they have a few of these examples where something was just read off by like every stream in the exact same way.
But for me, that's obviously not the end of the story.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is a thing that has been sort of poked fun at.
There are a large number of what used to be like independent stations, news and TV channels and whatnot in each city, like a number of them in each city across the US and even in Canada.
But this has gone away for the most part.
It's been, you know, they get bought up into groups and then those groups get bought up and bundled up into larger groups.
And so there's a situation where it looks like they're all independent, but they're not really.
I can't remember the names of all the different companies that do this, but there's really like last time I looked, there was only like two or three.
And they sort of let everyone keep their own branding because it looks like they're independent, sort of, but they're not really independent.
They are getting fed stories and this sort of thing, which is sort of what the Daily Show is pointing out when this happens is that a thing that you think of as everyone coming to this conclusion independently isn't really the case.
It's a news source somewhere that has an agenda and they want to get these messages out, right?
And agendas do happen.
Biases obviously are a thing.
But that's not really what this movie is about, really, right?
This is a movie about the government directly misleading both the media and the public to get its way, right?
So I'm going to point out a thing that's happening with the two main characters.
A thing that I noticed that's happening with the two main characters.
And it's probably not something that went into the writing.
You know, conspiracy theories were a thing that was known and becoming part of our zeitgeist then.
I think around this time, I have to double check the dates, but I think around this time was actually a movie called Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson, late 90s.
I should double check that.
And that was a moment where that term kind of came much more into the general conversation, right?
But more and more since that time, certainly since 9-11 was a big, you know, a couple years after this was a big moment where everyone kind of got involved or exposed to conspiracy theories to some extent.
But since then, there's been a sort of a thing that's happened among people who look at not just the conspiracy theories, but the personalities that tend to come up with these conspiracy theories, these conspiracy notions.
So when we discuss what I call conspiracy, maybe I call them like authors or storytellers like Alex Jones or David Icke.
Are you familiar with David Icke?
No.
He's a British guy who was doing conspiracy theories even back in the early 90s.
He has his main theme is that there's lizard people that have are shapeshifting lizard people that have taken over elites and everything.
The royal family in Britain is lizard people.
It's real story.
I've heard of the lizard people, of course.
I just didn't feel that.
He's the guy who's responsible for that.
He's the guy that's kind of more responsible for that than anyone else.
So when we look at people like that, we often ask how much of it do we think they believe?
Among people like cult leaders, sometimes the question is asked, is the cult leader the first cult member?
Do they buy into all the bullshit that they're spewing or are they the only one that's aware of what the truth is, right?
So do they understand the difference between reality and their rhetoric?
And therefore, like, are they consciously lying when they say these things?
Or are they like believing it as they say it?
Do they really believe the things they say?
Are they as unhinged as they appear to be to us who are watching them, right?
I mean, this is a question that's always constantly asked about this.
So this movie, that question isn't answered in this movie, isn't even attempted to answer in this movie.
But it does give us two types of people and lets us sort of sort through them.
So we have two main characters, right?
Stanley, which is the guy, Justin Hoffman, he's the movie producer.
And Conrad, which is the mysterious agent.
You're never told what he does or who he really works for or anything like that.
You just see what he does.
Yeah.
It's apparently not the CIA because the CIA is a separate entity in this movie.
But it's played by Robert De Niro, and he's the two that are coming up with the story that's happening here.
So these two represent two sort of people in this conspiracy space, right?
So when we look at him, Conrad is at all times aware of reality.
He knows he's lying and where the line is between truth and fiction.
And he knows what's bullshit and what's real.
He has open disregard for the public, and his main goal is to distract from a specifically true thing, right?
That's his goal.
There's, in the context of this movie, there's a scandal.
His intent is to be anything but that scandal.
And Conrad doesn't really care much about what the public believes as long as they don't believe in the scandal.
But Stanley, on the other hand, appears to be less aware of the line between truth and fiction.
He's often seen explaining the real things that happen behind the curtain, like to Conrad, not as they are, as Conrad explains them and as he knows Conrad knows, but as they relate to the story that Conrad and Stanley are collectively telling.
Stanley's goal is to entertain, to engage some feeling within the audience that even though it comes as a result of some fictional narrative, represents or evokes some truth about humanity.
Stanley wants the story to become like a lived experience for his audience.
And this represents, when we look at, you know, when we look at a person like Alex Jones, we wonder whether he believes the thing or not.
You know, this movie becomes sort of an interesting thing because we have both aspects of that.
One in Conrad who knows that he's lying all the time and Stanley that's just sort of living the lie almost, right?
He wants it to be true.
And so I thought that was really interesting when I watched it this time, knowing more about how these things fit together.
What do you think about that?
Am I way off base or am I?
No, no.
And I think that like Dustin Hoffman does a really good job of portraying that because you can see his character, Stanley, really like acting as though he's describing it, but it's almost like he's also discovering it at the same time.
And you're there with him, right?
And it's this wonderful blossom of plausibility, right?
And he knows that that is the lifeblood of what they're doing is the plausibility to just insert these ideas to, like you said, make it a lived experience for the people who are witnessing it unfold.
Make it believable for the audience.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not just believable, but entertaining at the same time.
He wants them to enjoy the experience of whatever this is, where Conrad doesn't care whether they enjoy it or not.
He just needs them to believe it.
Yeah.
And they both definitely take a different job satisfaction out of this endeavor, right?
Like for Stanley, like it's just, this is his wings unfurling, right?
Whereas whereas Conrad, for him, it's about, you know, like you said, just the efficiency of getting the job done.
And nowhere is he drawn into the joy of having it done.
It's just he's got that killer efficiency.
Work ethic thing.
Yeah.
Straight to the point.
Yeah.
So I have a couple clips.
We're going to do them here.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's do the first one.
This first one is early in the movie.
It's basically the first scene.
Stanley's not in it.
Conrad is there.
He's describing the situation and what they're going to do.
So here it is.
Yeah, well, all right.
He stays on the ground in China at least another day.
Why?
You're the press office?
Yes.
Earn your money.
He's ill.
The plane is sick.
When do we bring him back?
I'm going to need a day, at least a day.
He's sick.
Get that out right now.
Get him on the phone and tell the Jackals how sick he is.
We got to get that out before the story breaks.
So we aren't, quote, responding to it.
His short is a bullet when he's got some rare strains.
Don't hold it.
I need a day.
I need some running time.
It won't even hold a day, Conrad.
Yes, it will.
You know why?
I'll tell you why.
Why is the president in China?
Trade relations.
You're goddamn right.
Then it's got nothing to do with the B3 bomber.
There is no B3 bomber.
I just said that.
There is no B3 bomber, and I don't know why these rumors get started.
So that's, of course, Robert De Niro leading the press, the what must be White House press people or the campaign press people or whatever through how to generate this lie from nothing.
And I mean, really, what he's using is like reverse psychology, but I also call it the explicit paradox, where he's saying it explicitly so that they will disbelieve it.
He's saying the truth.
There is no B3 bomber, but he's saying it in such a way that they're going to be like, no, this guy lying to me.
I need to go find that B3 bomber.
That's the way it's set up.
I mean, this also, I should mention this script was, they started making the movie and then the producer didn't like it.
And he hired none other than David Mamet to come in and change a bunch of stuff in the script.
And that's what many people feel is why it has a lot of these moments in it like this, where it feels so natural because famed screenwriter or playwright was what he was originally.
David Mammet was doing a lot of the script moments like this.
And yeah.
So, yeah, there is no B3 bomber.
There's no B3 bomber.
Like just.
Say it as guilty as possible.
But of course, this would only be possible as a lie if none of the press corps ever looked at anything other than what they were told and none of them had any sources in, you know, the military or any place where they might be designing or building a B3 bomber.
But the press, like good journalists work on that for their entire lives.
That's the whole reason why they're more useful as they get older because they build up a lifetime of contacts with which they can try to verify these sorts of things, even if it's not a direct thing.
So, right.
I mean, you get this idea that people who don't know how any of this stuff works think, well, yeah, of course you could just dangle this new idea that's fake and distract everyone for an extra day or two, right?
But that's, it's not real, it's not realistic.
I mean, we buy it in the course of the movie because we just want to follow along with where they're going with this.
But people, some people really think this could really happen.
What do you think of that, Patrick?
That someone could really think you could just lie like this and it would fool real journalists.
Maybe some of them.
I don't think it's like that implausible, right?
It's just because we've seen enough of the, I mean, we've seen it completely, I think it's weird to put it, try and put it into context now when we're looking at a presidency that's categorized by just the sheer blatancy of being out front in the open with things and saying, nope, nope.
Like this movie puts us at a time in history where there was actually some artistry to any sort of deception that the government might run where they might try to introduce things to work as a distractionary element,
But it's become, you know, the question it raises now and today is a different one, because to try and fact check the sheer amount of garbage that comes out non-stop, where nobody even bothers to fact check anymore because there's been so many fact checks that have failed that we just assume everything's garbage right.
So I guess maybe my, my struggle is to try and put it into a frame where i'd be like yeah, I remember once upon a time where you just you weren't so shocked numb, by the dazzling amount of of of stuff coming through the news where, Like every day, it's something bigger.
I don't know.
It's just so easy to believe that people will get distracted, though.
I think, which is what the underlying premise is of this particular plot device, is that we can just dangle something and then the hungry, snapping dogs of journalism will chase it down and they'll forget what they were even chasing in the first place.
I mean, what you say is true.
If this movie were remade about our current political moment, right, this wouldn't be Robert De Niro or nameless person.
This would be Steve Banning getting called in, and he wouldn't be saying anything about a B3 bomber.
He would just be like, flood the zone with shit.
Yeah.
That's his move, right?
So you're right.
It's more things than could possibly be debunked in any one short enough span, right?
So let's do the next clip.
All right.
And taking medications.
No.
Why did it skip ahead?
There we go.
Here we go.
For real this time.
I've received more details on the young Albanian girl seen running for her life.
The young girl was trying to escape after hearing her family was killed.
Apparently there was a family connection in Canada.
Two things I know to be true.
There's no difference between good flan and bad flan.
And there is no war.
Guess who I am?
I would like to point out that I am under medical care and taking medication side effects, which have rendered me a little bit.
Well, I also take this opportunity to suggest that equally, I admit to nothing, and I would like my lawyer present.
We show, and NSA confirms, there are no nuclear devices on the Canadian border.
There are no nuclear devices in Albania.
Albania has no nuclear capacity.
Our spy satellites show no secret terrorist training camps in the Albanian hinterland.
The Border Patrol, the FBI, the RCMP report no, repeat no untoward activity along our picturesque Canadian border.
The Albanian government is screaming its defense.
The world is listening.
There is no war.
Of course there's a war.
I'm watching it on television.
So that was our CIA agent.
Almost hilariously now in the way that we look at the CIA now, now we would look at this as the CIA is the one doing this.
But in the context of this movie, this is a CIA agent attempting to bring objective reality to the situation, right?
And he lays out all the facts of why this situation is complete bullshit.
And then at the very end is Conrad saying one of the satirical bits of the movie is that, of course, it's real.
I'm watching it on television, which is this idea that it becomes real once it's on television, right?
It becomes real because the people see it and they believe it and it's on their screen in front of them.
And this is the way in which they come to know things about the world is through this magical little blinking box in their living room.
You know, he's not wrong, really, that this is a true thing.
I mean, that, you know, 97, the internet wasn't big then.
We had heard of it.
Some people had it, but most people didn't.
No one could look anything up independently.
Even if you had the internet, you weren't looking anything up.
There was no news to be had, really.
So it was your television and the nightly news that would tell you the things that were happening.
And if they told you that there was a war in Albania, you probably believe there was a war in Albania.
But this idea leads us to the idea that is it then also true just because many people believe it?
Like truth isn't democratically determined.
So, you know what I mean?
Like, like why they are running a satirical thing here, but it leads to a fundamental question.
And it's something that has been weaponized by people that try to do conspiracy notions is that if it becomes real when it's on your TV, then all you need to do is just not believe what's on your TV.
Just tune out the news.
The mainstream media is all bad.
All that stuff.
Just believe the opposite of what it says.
In fact, somehow that'll lead to some useful conclusion to someone, maybe, is what they try to put out.
But that's also not, you know, not useful because you need to get information from somewhere, right?
Like, what are you going to know?
You only going to know the things you look at.
Like, how do you know that the groceries you're buying in the store are real groceries?
How do you know they weren't made in a lab instead of a garden?
Right.
Like, you don't know.
Most people don't know.
So how do you do things?
You know, you're going to, well, this is the idea of knowing how the sausage is made, right?
You know, uncomfortable as soon as you know how the sausage is made.
You don't want to know what goes into your, you know, hot dogs, right?
I was fine getting as far as knowing that I don't want to know what the sausage is made of, right?
I'm not going to look behind that door.
Yeah, but I think we don't have the same luxury as far as media, like our news goes.
We need to be informed voters at the very least, but also informed citizens, ideally.
And how do we become informed?
Well, someone has to tell us.
The world's too big for us to discover it all on our own.
So, you know, journalism is the best we have, probably, except that now journalism is in a shambles and we have many other people pretending to be journalists online ready to tell us all kind of things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But is the world real only because it appears on TV?
Yeah.
Like this is a this is the thing they're trying to ask is is is the world only real once it's presented and packaged and meant for you to view on your television well that's kind of like a comment on the amount of trust I think that was kind of normal around that time.
Like you said, we didn't have internet.
We didn't have to after that broke down.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
We started to introduce more conflicting channels, right?
And then the more conflicting channels, because they existed, seemed to be given the same weight of consideration just because they occupied space for some people.
For other people, there were times that those channels became legitimate challenges to entrenched power.
So, you know, the freedom of the media always being called into question.
What this movie at times calls into question, you know, is something that I think to even start with that is it becomes a very useful tool for misinformation because It can be so easily delivered with like this derogatory slice, like, oh, you just believe what's being spoon-fed to you, right?
It's like, yeah, but you're not a journalist, you're not a reporter, you're not so-called boots on the ground.
What are you?
What makes your line so special, right?
Because it's off the beaten path, right?
It just means it's you know, with less people verifying and putting work in with that.
It's, I don't know, it's easier to see that stuff go off the rails.
I feel like I'm going off the rails here, but yeah, I don't, I, I do, I do like, and what comes up after and during that process, what he's talking about is how afterwards, when that when the tables turn on him, because that whole point of that commentary is for him to say that the battle for our way of life is clip, actually, it's coming up next.
Yeah, oh, where he realizes the next play to take place, or no, like that, that um conversation with the CIA agent.
Oh, I mean, this is the first part here where the CIA agent uh uh tells them what what's really not happening, essentially.
And then he says, Well, of course it's happening, it's it's on my TV.
It's so it's so wonderfully and then there's then there's the next part where they they talk about why they go to war, you know, this sort of semi-philosophical discussion of why they go to war.
So, let's let's skew that up.
Let's listen to it.
I'm doing my job, Mr. Breen.
That's what you see me doing.
I'm doing my job.
I'm doing my job too.
And let me ask you something.
Let me ask you a simple question: Why do people go to war?
Why do they go to war?
I'll play your silly game.
Okay, why do they go to war to ensure their way of life?
Would you go to war to do that?
I have.
And if you went to war again, who would it be against?
Huh?
Your ability to fight a two-ocean war against who?
Who?
Sweden and Togo?
That time is past.
It's over.
The war of the future is nuclear terrorism.
It is, and it'll be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst, perhaps to their own governments, have blah, And to go to that war, you have to be prepared.
You've got to be alert.
The public has got to be alert because that is the war of the future.
And if you're not gearing up to fight that war, then eventually the acts will fall and you're going to be out in the street.
And you could call this a drill.
You could call this job security.
You could call it anything you like.
But I got one for you.
You said go to war to preserve your way of life.
Well, Chuck, this is your way of life.
And if your spy satellites don't see nothing, if there ain't no war, then you can go home and prematurely take up golf, my friend, because there ain't no war but ours.
So, yeah, he says a lot there, right?
He's saying that you need to, he's telling the CIA agent, you need to go along with this.
You need to go along with our quote-unquote war that we created, fake war, not even really any war.
There's no just the perception of threat.
The perception of a threat, because it's that perception of a threat that keeps you in a job.
You even having a job.
And if this war goes away and we don't have wars, you might as well not be a CIA agent.
You might as well retire.
You'll get no job.
Your livelihood is done.
And I think, I mean, this I wouldn't be persuaded by this.
And actually, in the plot line of the movie, the CIA agent is also not persuaded by this.
He leaks to the media that, you know, what's really happening isn't happening.
And Conrad has to concede at that point.
He's like, well, it's on TV, right?
Well, yeah, yeah.
That was the beautiful kind of like loop around.
It was just like what he used in the first place to try and advance his point.
He had to use to concede the point afterwards.
Yeah, but I think that people who conjure the ideas that there can be these large conspiracies that include multiple law enforcement agencies at many levels and all this other stuff.
They think that CIA agents would be swayed by an argument like this.
Like, you know, you'll lose your job, dude.
If you don't let this massive lie occur, there'll be no paycheck for you.
Like, you know, that wouldn't sway me.
I mean, the idea, I mean, that the scale of some of these conspiracy notions, especially like the grand conspiracies, where you have to imagine that in order for the vaccine to be as dangerous as it's portrayed by someone like RFK Jr.,
you have to imagine that almost every healthcare professional anywhere across the world, millions of people collectively are hiding the idea that it's dangerous.
Like they work in a hospital, they've seen it be dangerous, but they're hiding it.
And you think, why would they do that?
Well, for their job.
Like, I wouldn't participate in the killing of many people just to keep my job.
My job, I don't get paid very much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A couple.
I mean, a few that I really already hate.
Like, you know, yeah, okay.
Well, yeah, let's make a list now.
Like, you know, we'll agree beforehand.
We'll agree beforehand who it's going to be and then I'll sign on to this conspiracy, right?
Yeah.
But, you know, I'd indiscriminately, you know, let these things happen.
That's not realistic.
That's especially with healthcare because these people take an oath to do no harm.
Don't take an oath.
Like, and they get into it and do all the crazy schoolwork they do, mostly because they want to help people.
They get paid a fair amount, but they don't get paid a lot compared to like the people who are really getting paid a lot in like tech, right?
Yeah.
So, I mean, yeah, it's a good job.
It's a really good job.
But people act like healthcare professionals can be swayed to the dark side or something.
Yeah, yeah, just by bigger paychecks or whatever.
And it's like most of them, half of them are throwing paychecks aside so they can go save a larger number of people on other continents.
Like to think that these people would take bigger paychecks to kill that many people instead of save them is not realistic, right?
Yeah.
But they people will conjure the idea that conversations like this might happen and the CIA agent backs down and then carries on and lets the thing occur.
Even in the context of the movie, he doesn't.
Like even in the fictional replay of it, he doesn't play along.
Yeah, he's got enough to do, obviously.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's got to put out their fires too, right?
Yeah, but I thought that was an interesting moment because he brings it from a way of life thing as in a way of life for our people, our society, right back down to a way of life for you, the person.
You, the person, CIA agent, your way of life as one agent on the ground doing one thing, that will go away if you let us, if you don't let us have these, you know, fake wars that he's, Conrad is claiming are all fake, right?
That he personally did.
Yeah, which is, I don't think it's persuasive.
I think a fair number of those CAA agents would say, okay, screw it.
I don't need this job.
I'll go, you know, I'll go do road construction or something.
Like, you know, like other jobs, there's other jobs, right?
Like, yeah, I'll go back to school, get my master's degree or whatever, in psychology, whatever it is.
You know what I mean?
Like, they'll, there's other things they can be doing other than that if that wasn't available, right?
Well, that CIA agent obviously also did a lot of coordinating before they approached Conrad.
Right.
He knew enough to be like, yeah, I don't know what you guys are up to, but this is all bullshit.
And he doesn't want to be doing extra work.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got enough other real thing, real problems to deal with, except for I don't have to deal with your thing.
Yeah.
So let's get to the, I have two more clips.
All right.
I'm pretty sure we'll have time for these.
Okay.
So set up here.
This is the clip that demonstrates the intro part I mentioned before about the two main characters having sort of two outlooks on this.
This is this is fun.
You can't tell the story.
He's not kidding me.
You can't tell the story.
You knew that.
The deal is you would get to it in an ambassadorship.
I mean, what the fuck kind of story are you going to tell anyway?
The guy's a nut chase.
Well, you would be too if you went through what he went through.
He raped a nun, what he went through in Albania.
Go to the guilds.
That's my little girl.
Show some compassion.
Spent the last 12 years in a military prison.
Yeah, how are we going to explain that?
How are we going to explain that?
Hey, am I worried?
How are we going to explain that when the world is watching?
Paul, fuck the world.
Try a 10 a.m. pitch meeting, coke to the guilds, no sleep, and you haven't even read the treatment.
Connie, how are we going to explain the fact that he was in prison?
How are you going to explain that?
Well, you see, Winifred, this is where you've never been at a pitch.
You see, his records say he was in prison, as all the records say, for all the men and women of Group 303, as they must, because of the secrecy involved.
Yeah.
So you see there, Conrad is continually bringing up the facts, the reality of the situation.
This soldier that they've dredged up essentially as a crisis actor for their conflict, imaginary conflict, is, you know, he's been through a lot.
He fucked a nun.
I mean, this is why he's in prison.
You know, he or he raped a nun or whatever.
But he, he, you know, he's, he's insane.
He needs his meds.
He's he's got a prison record, which, you know, like is also interesting the way that they can make a war that's fake be apparently real, but they can't do anything about this man's prison record, right?
Like, you know, okay, you know, whatever.
Someone will compare his picture to something and they'll find him somewhere and they'll look it up or whatever.
Some journalist, I think, is going to do some kind of work here at some point along the plot line if it carries on past these few couple days.
But yeah, this was a good illustration of exactly that.
And Stanley, the entire time, veering back to, no, he's been through a lot.
Yeah, he's been to a war.
All the members of this Group 303 are Said to be in prison because that's the thing that erases them from society and allows them to do the clandestine operations they do overseas or whatever, these black ops or whatever we call them.
And this, you know, like, of course, of course they are.
Nothing, nothing gets them.
Of course, it's real.
Of course, everything's real.
That's exactly the way it should be.
And this is a thing that we see among the people who, you know, the Alex Jones of the world who continually have to reinterpret everything to fit their storyline that they already chose in advance, right?
Yeah.
So I always find it interesting when people act as though things are self-evident, but they put so much energy into explaining how it all works together, right?
Yeah.
It's just, I always think that self-evidence requires like very little commentary.
Yeah, like a rose is self-evident.
You know, it just put it in a jar and you put it on a table, and you never have to point out to anyone that there's a rose there or that it looks nice or anything like that.
It's beauty is self-evident.
It's just there.
You know?
Though, you know, something, you know, there are things that are not that aren't self-evident that people try to point out.
They try to interpret for you what it is, right?
Like, isn't that terrible?
Isn't it terrible the way the neighbors are doing that thing over there?
Isn't that terrible?
As though it's self-evident.
Whereas what they're trying to say is, this is the thing that you should find also true in order to get along with me.
That's sort of what they're saying when they say that.
This is the social expectation of this part of the conversation: to agree with me about this thing that I'm saying is an interpretation.
I'm putting an expectation upon you to also agree with.
Usually that we dislike some other thing that's happening or whatever.
Yeah.
Or find it questionable at the very least.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I guess I already put in a bunch of words about that at the start, but I just wanted to have the moment in there.
So we'll get to the last one.
The last one is right at the very end of the movie.
i call this clip stanley's exit I'm talking Paris.
I'm talking to a secret account for your extra expenses.
You can laid whenever you want.
Share gods will salute you all the time.
No, it's tempting, but I got to answer to higher calling.
Art.
Money?
Okay.
Money.
You think I did this for money?
I did this for credit.
But you always knew you couldn't take the credits.
That's one thing, but I'm not going to stand here and let two dickheads from film school take it.
Stanley, listen to me.
What are you talking about?
Are you not?
No fooling.
What?
You're playing with your life now.
Oh, fuck my life.
Fuck my life.
I want the credit.
The credit.
Do you know what the New York Times said about my last picture?
They call it a thrill ride for the ages, but they didn't mention the producer.
They talked about the costumes, but they never talked about the producer.
Do you know what that picture grows?
And I don't understand here and let some limp dick film school pansy take the credit.
Don't you tell me that.
Don't you ever tell me that.
I'm the producer of this show.
If I didn't step up, you're nowhere.
I put this thing together out of spitting polish.
Look at that.
That is a complete fucking fraud, and it looks 100% real.
It's the best work I've ever done in my life.
Because it's so honest.
Yeah.
So It's the best work he's ever done because it's so honest.
Yeah, that's very nice.
I thought that was a nice touch from the script writers there.
And it does say something about him as a character in the same way.
He wants it to have honesty, but not in a factual sense.
He wants it to be honest as in like an honest feeling, you know, like an engagement thing, like, uh, yeah.
Yeah.
And.
He's considering it differently.
Yeah, right.
But it's, it's, of course, it's this twisting of reality throwing right on its head.
They've, they have wagged the dog.
They have, you know, given someone who probably didn't deserve it a second term.
And they, you know, Stanley wants credit.
So first, I'm thinking about this that, I mean, I didn't include it because it's just a much longer clip.
But what happens immediately after this in the movie, of course, is that Stanley disappears.
He's a signal is given to a man who's dressed all in black clothing and got a little earpiece in his ear.
And he follows him out the door and then you never see him again.
You hear later that he died tragically in his swimming pool or whatever.
And so they kill Stanley off because Stanley won't be quiet.
He wants credit.
But despite all their ability to manufacture unreal things, another subplot that's going on that I didn't have like a single clip.
I couldn't fit into a single clip, but it's so funny.
This third person is kind of a third main character in with them is Anne Hesch's character.
She's worried about the bus driver who's bringing the hero, the crisis actor hero back to the public eye.
She's worried that he's not an American citizen.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
That the whole thing will fall apart and it won't be recognized and it'll be a new scandal of some kind because this man is a Mexican man who's not an American citizen.
Yeah.
And everyone's ignoring her.
No one cares about this.
This is a small problem.
Everyone's worried about the big problem.
And just at the moment where you're hearing about Stanley being dead, you see that her solution is to have a Justice of the Peace or whoever is in charge of that thing swear this man in as an American citizen.
And he is an American citizen now.
And this fixes the problem.
And I thought this was a nice touch.
She's got her own crisis.
Yeah.
Like, interesting too, right?
Like, they could have also disappeared this man.
He's not even an American citizen, right?
Like, you know, if you're in a murdering mood, then just nod at this guy, too, right?
Like.
But no.
They're not going to do that.
They're not monsters.
This man can live a full life.
He doesn't really know anything.
He just drove the bus, right?
So you just make him an American citizen.
And then it's, you know, it's an American story after that, right?
Like, it's a weird need for utter legitimacy in that one regard.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I thought that was a nice touch.
But the bigger point here is that this, what's being demonstrated by Stanley in this moment, and ultimately in the context of the film, why they have to kill him, is because this is what's called the crisis actor problem.
So we haven't talked about it, Patrick.
Know how much you know about a thing called violent event denial.
People who say that violent events didn't occur.
I've heard, I've heard of this, right?
Right.
So, Alex Jones famously did this with Sandy Hook.
There's a whole other, many other people who also believe Sandy Hook was not real, that all the people who appeared on television, the parents of children, were, as they were called, crisis actors.
Yeah, I had never heard this term before then.
Right, right.
And so that the idea, this is a this crisis actors are a MacGuffin.
They are meant to allow a person to believe that a thing could be happening that otherwise would be unbelievable, would be impossible to believe, right?
The idea that these people could get on camera in this way, do interviews and this sort of thing, and show that kind of emotion about their children when their children in the mind of these people who believe this didn't die.
They need to be able to act, obviously, because they look believable.
So they're just people who are hired to do this.
They're actors who are hired to do this.
Actors have this magical ability to just turn this on, to make us believe these things.
Of course, not all actors have this ability.
We've all seen Keanu Reeves at his lowest, right?
He's a good guy, but there's a bunch of movies he made where he's just kind of flat.
Are there?
I watched Johnny Mimonic, man.
I watched that movie.
I watched the whole thing.
Yeah.
And yeah, right.
And I pick on Keanu.
There's an easy bar for him.
Sure.
There's a lot of other people who are in this place.
Like, I can't remember his name right now, but the young man who played Anakin Skywalker in episodes two and three, Christian.
I can't remember his name right now.
Yes, Hayden or something.
Hayden.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, that's right.
He just wasn't that good.
He wasn't able to show the emotion, really, that the other, certainly not that the other actors on screen with him.
I mean, he's with you and friggin McGregor.
You know, he's just not holding up his end of the board, you know what I mean?
Like compared to Ewan McGregor.
So this was an unfortunate, almost an unfortunate sort of pairing to be against much bigger heavyweights who could, who could act much better than him.
But, you know, he was cast for the role and he did it and he got paid, but he just wasn't that good.
Sorry, Christian.
I didn't think you were that good.
A lot of people also, you know, you did what you could, man.
But like, if you were hired as a crisis actor in Sandy Hook, man, no one would believe it.
It just, to me, the whole idea seemed preposterous because if these people don't then report to their normal lives in the community that they're surviving and wouldn't that be exposed?
Wouldn't all the neighbors be like, we don't know who this person is?
They never showed up to a parent.
Like it was just like, it wouldn't be fringe conspiracists hundreds of miles away that would crack this.
It would be people in the community that'd be like, we've never seen this person before.
Yeah, well, this leads to people going to Newtown, Connecticut, and bothering the people in this small town to ask questions about the pasts of the people who there.
And that's a bit, you know, Alex Jones encouraged all of these things to happen in that specific incident.
And that's a big reason why almost everyone who was affected in that way, all the parents pretty much had to leave because they couldn't be there.
They would be found.
It's too small a community.
If you went there and were there for more than a week, they would spot you, right?
They'd just have a list of all the people and they'd spot you.
So they were just hounded out of town, most of them.
And I mean, that's the bigger reason why he was sued in this way was because they were just so bothered by this.
All their lives were not only disrupted by having their children murdered in school, but also further for years after that in this other way.
Yeah, tragic.
But this is the problem is that if you had people who were trained to do this, they're going to want credit.
They're going to want to do other things.
They're going to want to, you know, there's the idea that you could pay them enough for this one moment and then have them not want to do their craft again.
That's that's a that's a sign that you don't know any artists.
That's really what it is.
Because yeah, the artists want to get paid, but they want to do the thing.
Like they want to do their thing.
You know what I mean?
Like that's like artists who get paid enough.
Daniel Radcliffe got paid so much for all the Harry Potter movies.
He doesn't need any money.
He just volunteers to act in movies that he wants to act in.
Basically working for free or just minimal pay or whatever.
The payment is just a means to do more of the thing.
More of the thing that he wants to do, this craft that he does.
And yes, also, sorry, Daniel, you're just average.
You're okay.
But you're no Ewan McGregor.
Sorry.
Maybe someday.
Maybe someday you'll get there.
You got time, man.
You can work on it.
There's no stopping you.
Yeah.
Well, reach for it.
Reach for the stars, man.
But right now, you got some work to do, man.
Keep at it.
You're not getting hired as a crisis actor anytime soon, man.
I'm telling you.
No.
Yeah.
But this is the problem: crisis actors are going to want credit.
So what?
Then you have to disappear them?
You have to, like, what do you have to do to keep them quiet after that?
I mean, many parents from the Sandy Hook Massacre have done subsequent interviews.
One of them runs a non-profit network.
I mean, they're almost public figures now in some respects.
Thanks mostly to Alex Jones and his work.
But it's not feasible that this could work.
And by the way, your thing that you mentioned about, you know, the people of the town would know because they lived in that town and they knew them.
There's people who will actually float the idea that Newtown, Connecticut itself is not even a town.
Right.
You know, like it's just a, you know, no one ever goes there, so it might be not even real.
It's like neverland.
Well, how hard is it to just hire a few thousand actors?
How hard is it to just convince the encyclopedia people to just put an extra dot on the map between these other two little places, right?
Just call it a thing.
Yeah, like this old shoe.
Yeah.
So, yeah, what do you think?
What do you think of this, these conspiracy ideas, Patrick, in the way that they are the ideas from the movie lend themselves some strength to people who are willing to let some facets be loosely connected?
What do you think?
I think it's like somebody who is already kind of of that lean uh will find more kind of reinforcement for that tendency in them from watching something like this, because this is kind of just um, really on point uh theater of how that particular thing uh takes place.
They could say that oh, this is just, this is the truth of it hiding in plain sight.
Right, and of course it's going to be.
It's always going to have some connection to what's plausible.
It's easy to understand simple motivations like wanting to conceal the truth when the truth either makes us look foolish or threatens something that we're holding on to, like the chance for another presidency.
Right, and in a position like that, having all the power and resources to to channel at your disposal, you know, coming up with the idea that there is a war erupting to distract from whatever the the subtext of of what, what the threat was.
Right, it's just.
It's easy to take that model and apply it to basically everything that your government that can't be trusted is trying to conceal from you.
Right is just, any time that you you buy into something coming at you from uh mainstream media is a way that you are buying the government line.
So you know that makes you a sheeple or something to that effect?
Yeah, but then, wherever you, you know, if you're going to be uh, not listening to the mainstream media, you're still going to get your information from somewhere else.
Nobody ever wants to confront that.
And if you're just going to believe that person, that just makes you a sheeple for something else right like well no, that's not convenient for me to confront as somebody with a conspiracy.
Right like, i'm going to point out that you're a sheeple.
And if you confront me with the same oh, i'll be like well no, but I like my sources.
So yeah yeah, so my sources I can trust right yeah okay so um, I wanted to bring this episode up sooner than later and uh, just after we decided to do it, there was uh, many other things happening at the same time.
I'm just gonna time stamp them a little bit here.
We're not gonna say which date we're doing this episode on because uh, I don't know exactly when it's gonna air.
But um yeah, I mean, the Epstein files have been in the news and coming out and at the same time as this is going on, we have uh, over the same time scale, we have uh, what looks like something ramping up off the coast of Venezuela including, as of now, almost 20 different uh Venezuelan boats that have been attacked and or sunk.
Uh, most of them just looked like fishing boats, is what seems to be the case.
They're just claim that they're drugs, but of course you're just kind of blowing them up with a missile from far away.
You're not confiscating anything, so you could say, anything is on that boat um, because now it's sunk.
Uh yeah I, you know, we don't know.
Maybe, maybe this is uh a thing where the uh current administration is trying to do something as a distraction from another thing.
That's a major scandal.
I can't tell.
I can't tell, but i'm sure there will be a new round of uh conspiracist notions that are attached to this as we carry on, and we'll have to parse through those just as much as we had to parse through all the others previously.
And won't that be fun.
Yeah, it's interesting.
It's an interesting little juggle that as we look south and watch the U.S. political situation unfold, especially with the Epstein files.
I've seen Donald Trump talk a lot of the time, like his attempt to sweep things under the rug is we have more important things to look at.
So it will be interesting to see what he tries to compel the focus of the current narrative around because it's anybody's guess what really the full impact of this whole Epstein files thing is.
We've just watched him for years basically get away with outlandish shit.
So are we, where are we actually going to draw a line?
I don't think we are.
I think it's.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know either.
I don't know.
But yeah, I failed to do it at the beginning of the podcast, so I got to do it here.
If anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything that they hear on this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
You don't have any like, you know, you don't do like your own podcast or anything.
Any like, you don't create content, but do you have anything that you want to plug?
Any social media thing you care enough about that you want people to know?
Not really.
No.
No?
Okay.
All right.
I exist in social media, but that's enough.
Whatever channels I'm in are the channels that are relevant to.
Okay.
I will ask before we before we close, do you have an idea of what the next movie we might be looking at for the viewers?
All right.
Thank you for queuing that up for me.
Yeah, we didn't talk about what would be next the last time we did this.
The next one has to be, I've thought about it a lot and I've gone back and forth.
The next one has to be Inception, right?
We have to do Inception high up on the list.
Got to get to it next.
The whole idea of what is and isn't real, that's a theme that hits hard in Inception.
So that's next.
So if anyone wants to keep track of this, watch Inception between now and the next time we do this.
I'm trying to try to see if we can do one of these every other week.
Or, you know, across Christmas, it might drift to even further, but probably not each week.
Yeah, watch Inception and then you can maybe get more out of this as we're doing this.
So yeah, I know, I think this at the time we're filming now, there was not a lot of lead time between the last episode rolling out.
So by now, we might not have gotten emails, but it would be kind of hopeful that people, you know, if they're keeping up with the movies, that they feel like, you know, there's a level of engageability to bring stuff to the discussion.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, if I ever get any constructive feedback, aside from people just trying to sell me things, then, yeah, I'm going to get some feedback sometimes on Twitter.
Maybe I'll try to get some more there from that and see what people say.