It’s kind of a trick question.  Because if you control the culture, the government will follow.  (And no, the converse is not true – unless your government is a totalitarian state and your tastes run toward socialist realism.)

Anybody who believes movies and TV shows have no impact on our behavior ought to go tell the $800 billion advertising industry, because they’re just wasting their clients’ money.

For too long, supporters of a freer society have done little but grouse about the messages infused in our entertainment, while Hollywood has just calmly gone about its business, making the culture we all consume.

Well, if you want to influence the culture, you’ve got to create it.  Nobody should understand that more than those who champion free markets and individual liberty.

“It is not the critic who counts,” Teddy Roosevelt said.  “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…, who does actually strive to do the deeds.”

Last August, about two dozen young, up-and-coming filmmakers from all over the U.S., some from prominent film schools like Columbia and USC, strode into the arena we call The Filmmakers Workshop.  There was very little sweat, and no blood to speak of.

But the students weren’t given much time to just kick back and listen (or nap).  They dove right in, participating in a series of rigorous interactive sessions that roughly simulated the experience of working as a Hollywood filmmaker.

The focus wasn’t on woolly-headed theory but on practical, hard-nosed coaching, covering the gamut from concept development to distribution, dished by experienced professionals taking a brief respite from the trenches of Hollywood.

The workshop was organized by the Taliesin Nexus, a new nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the diversity of Hollywood – diversity of thought, that is.

Classes took place on the UCLA campus, and students stayed in dorms and ate on campus.  Add up tuition, room and board, plus travel expenses, and how much did it cost each student?  Not one ruddy cent.

I can see you sitting there, thinking:  “That sounds really fantastic, Mr. Leigh.  I’m an aspiring filmmaker who has a short film or a screenplay under my proverbial belt, who also has a passion for liberty.  How does this affect me?”

Well, today is your lucky day, my proverbial friend.  This year we are opening the application process to the public.  Read to the end and find out how you can apply.

Our faculty last year featured 18 experienced professionals including:

Daisy Gardner:  Screenwriter and producer whose credits include South Park, Californication, and 30 Rock (for which she earned a WGA Award).

Josh Rader:  Development executive at MPower Pictures which is founded by Stephen McEveety, who has produced such great films as Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Immortal Beloved.

Jennifer Simpson:  Producer who headed up Reese Witherspoon’s production company and prior to that helped to develop many terrific films including The Sixth Sense and The Royal Tenenbaums.

David Steinberg:  Writer and director who penned American Pie II and the upcoming Puss in Boots (a Shrek spinoff), is writing Howard Stern’s reboot of Porky’s, and recently directed the comedy feature Miss Dial.

Craig Titley:  Screenwriter whose credits include Percy Jackson & The Olympians, Cheaper by the Dozen (with Steve Martin), and Star Wars:  The Clone Wars.

A few other faculty:

Ted Balaker and Paul Feine, who produce documentaries for Reason.TV, home of the Drew Carey Project and “free minds and free markets.”

Paul Guay, whose writing credits include Liar, Liar (starring Jim Carrey) and Hearbreakers (Sigourney Weaver).

Big Hollywood’s own Leigh Scott (no relation), who has directed 17 movies to date, including Transmorphers, The Dunwich Horror, and his latest opus, The Witches of Oz.

(For a complete list of last year’s faculty and schedule, go here.)

A major benefit of this kind of event is the networking, so Friday and Saturday nights of the workshop weekend were each capped with a party (or “conviviality,” as my co-director Patrick Reasonover likes to call them) where the students got to mingle with their colleagues, faculty, and other invited industry pros.

So what are we looking for in an applicant?  You should be able to demonstrate a genuine commitment and aptitude for a career in filmmaking.  (“Filmmaking” to us subsumes movies, TV, documentaries, video – any motion picture medium.)

You must have a film-related creative sample you can share with us, whether it be a short film, screenplay, documentary, or even a YouTube video.  You don’t have to be a film school student or graduate, though it helps.  It’s also advantageous to have worked in a creative field, either now or in the past.

So how do you apply, you ask?  Simple:  just go here and follow the instructions.

Good luck.  And welcome to the arena.

Their explanation: thinking about so many alternatives makes you less likely to support policies that help people.

According to a Science Daily scribe, who seemed somewhat enamored by this research, “Simply thinking about ‘choice’ made people less likely to support policies promoting greater equality.”

Their examples of such well-meaning policies that get screwed: affirmative action, taxing “fuel-inefficient cars,” and banning violent video games.

Now, you might find this funny.

But to me, it’s creepier than a shopping mall Santa in cut-offs.

These researchers seem to have concluded that a free society makes it hard for these same researchers to force their beliefs on the rest of us dumb people. Let’s remember, they assume the policies they favor are the helpful ones. Never mind that they have their heads so far up their asses they’re eating last night’s dinner.

I mean, aren’t they condemning consumerism, because it allows the freedom to buy stuff? That kind of mindset only leads to really ugly places. Google old photos of East Germany. Or current ones of me in a Speedo.

Relating the concerns over consumer choice, held by researcher Krishnam Savani from Columbia University, a Science Daily writer uses a secret phrase.

“He wonders if, in the long run, all those consumer choices might have a cumulative negative impact by making people less sympathetic towards others and less concerned about the collective good.”

Ah yes, the “collective good.” The two words that are but a single bud that flowers into fascism. The only way to ensure the collective good, is to limit choice, through coercion.

If only someone could enforce such an idea.

Is that a Columbia researcher raising his hand?

Thank God we have the choice to say, “up yours, jackass.”

And if you disagree with me, you’re probably Hitler.

Tonight:

Mike Baker

Lauren Sivan

Newcomer funny lady Veronica Mosey

And that would be very wrong.

But when I saw this video, I couldn’t resist. It’s of a panel, in which students are pointing out how predictable cover letters won’t help you get a job in the post j-school world. So what would? How about a rap?

And so it begins, as one student unleashes his inner Jay-Z, listing in all earnestness a lengthy promise of his many qualifications.

Roll tape, roll-tapers:

So, no surprise: the student raps benign pap that his professors and like-minded dorm-rats would applaud – from railing against complacency, to never losing touch with “his humanity.” But I’ll repeat the part the kid really wanted them to hear:

“There’s no need to hear crazy, or create a false sense of parity, like Fox News and Hannity.”

And that’s the big point: That when applying for a job, the student knows to regurgitate the shared assumptions of the elitists around him. In short, if you bash Fox News, you might land an unpaid internship at Mother Jones.

That still exists, right?

Now, it wasn’t a bad rhyme, but it was a bad idea – emboldened by the present comfort of conformity and driven by the need to prove to those hiring that the applicant holds the “right beliefs.” It’s silly and stupid, but also sad: these beliefs are cemented even before they enter a paying newsroom.

And what’s the crux of these beliefs?

That Fox News is evil.

Which to me, is pretty cool. I like being considered evil – especially when those doing the considering are sheep who can’t rap.

And if you disagree, then you’re probably racist.

Tonight we’ve got the lovely Juliet Huddy, the hilarious Brad Morris and Blood Manor’s sex and deadly, Rachel.

For the next five decades (pseudo)-intellectuals, hiding behind tenure and “Academic Freedom,” have been spewing greater and greater nonsense designed for one purpose and one purpose only: sabotaging and eventually destroying all of Western Civilization.

 
Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

Don’t think so?  Simply consider the fact that one of the most oft-repeated chants of the Modern Liberal movement is “Hey, hey, ho, ho. Western Civilization has got to go.”

With control of the “education” system, the Leftists turned what had been a place of scholarship into a Leftism factory with a curriculum and modus operandi designed to facilitate their Utopian dreams which first required the demolition of the great (but imperfect) Western World.

With America’s children in their hands, from the moment they enter kindergarten barely able to read or write, until the moment they graduate from Ward Churchill’s “Ethnic Studies” class (still barely able to read or write), the Leftists were able to instill their agenda into the minds of those too young to be able to stand up to these moral and intellectual bullies and fight back with the facts.

Further, in the era of unprecedented prosperity (thanks to the efforts and the values of those who came before them), when suddenly virtually everyone went to college, the indoctrination process stretched on (and therefore, so too did childhood) often well into one’s mid-twenties and even into their thirties. Think about that!  If a person retires at the age of sixty, having first left the unreal and perverted world of post-coup schooling at thirty, that means they will have spent half their lives – their most formative years – in an indoctrination process of misinformation and lies.  Many Right-Thinkers are stunned at how immune Leftists are to facts and reason but, in reality, they are no more so than members of any other cult and, in fact, their response to factual and moral challenges are exactly those of the cultists, seeing the other as the enemy and attacking with vitriol and violence. 

Lefties love to tout their superior intellect, often pointing to the number of years they spent tramping the bucolic campuses of major universities.  But staying longer in the school system only makes one smarter if what they’re being taught is true.  If what they’re being taught are lies, then the longer they stay in the schools the stupider they become which is, in fact, exactly what we see.  This is why Dennis Prager will (paraphrasing George Orwell, I believe) end a conversation with a particularly stupid caller by saying, “Sir, that is so dumb you must have gone to graduate school.”  It is why those who have never known any life other than school – the professors – are stunningly stupid and so morally inverted that, in order to be made head of the “Ethnic Studies” department, one must believe that the Islamic fascists are the good guys (for killing Americans) and that the victims of 9/11 were nothing less than “Little Eichmanns” (for nothing more than being Americans.)

In fact, let’s call these adult students the “long-schoolers,” and the long-schooler is doubly denied real education, first by the misinformation campaign that masquerades as intellectualism these days, and then by the years of real world experience lost in their cartoonish world of binge drinking, projectile vomiting, girls going “wild” for the cameras, with whatever attempts at scholarship being little more than regurgitating the anti-Americanism that pleases their teachers but bears no resemblance to the truth.

Ward Churchill

And it’s getting worse (this is why Americans believe we’re on the wrong track no matter which party is in power.)  This is because the first several generations to enter the schools after the coup at Columbia, had the opportunity for what I call “residual intelligence,” things learned from being in contact with members of The Greatest Generation and those who came before them.  As we moved into the late seventies and early eighties – as those who held true American values began to retire and therefore move out of positions of influence – moronity became both wider and deeper so that by 1987 Professor Allan Bloom could write The Closing of the American Mind - his masterpiece detailing the abject stupidity of the students then first entering the universities.

It is far from a coincidence that Bloom’s book was published in 1987 for that would be almost the very second when the first children of the children of the Sixties – the first generation wholly raised by people who came of age in the post-coup era – were beginning to matriculate.  

And since then, as the Greatest Generation began to die off, things have only gotten worse still.

Meanwhile, as those with real American values (and real accomplishments) began to leave the stage, their jobs were taken by those reared in the schools and universities of the post-coup 1960s.  Suddenly, those indoctrinated into a cult of mindless hatred for Western Civilization in general (a bunch of dead, white men all) and America in particular as the perfection of that civilization, began making movies and reporting the news and taking up other positions of cultural influence and power.

Here again, we see the destructive nature of post-coup education and the unprecedented long-schooling of Americans.  In days of old, journalists worked their way up the ladder by doing real work in the real world.  They likely started as a stringer, or a reporter covering the night courts in some small town.  With good work perhaps they got a promotion and after many decades of learning their craft and testing their childhood (and childish) theories against real world realities, they might, if they learned their lessons well, finally find themselves in positions of power and influence as an editor or a White House correspondent or an anchorman.

Sadly – and devastatingly –  this paradigm has been replaced in the Modern Liberal era by decades of schooling (indoctrination in an unreal setting where childish theories remain forever untested by the real world) followed by high profile positions at prestigious media outlets.  After all, with that much “education” and with that neat-looking diploma from the Columbia School of Journalism, you don’t think this thirty-year-old is going to accept an entry-level position, do you?  If you’ve ever wondered why it is that the Leftist news media cares so little about the truth, it’s because they have never spent even a second of their lives where the real world butted up against their infantile fantasies.

This same pattern is clear in the new and old Hollywood.  Prior to the Modern Liberal era those with power and influence in the entertainment world came to their positions with a lifetime of real world experiences.  Many were immigrants, all were risk-takers and pioneers and each and every one of them worked their way to the top.  Suddenly, in the early post-coup years – with the advent of “film schools” — “wunderkinds” like Steven Spielberg were handed the keys to the studio without having spent even a single second in the real world.  They went from mommy’s house, to the cloistered world of the university, to the gated communities of their Hollywood mansions without having ever experienced the real world for themselves.

Steven Spielberg

So, then, by what measure does a Spielberg pick the material he seeks to turn into a movie?  It can be on no other basis than the lies he’s been taught by radical Leftists in the world of academia – and remember, the word “academic” is a well-known synonym for the word meaningless as in “It’s all academic, anyway, let’s go do something important” — who, themselves, have never lived in the real world. 

The result is Spielberg’s Munich a morally and factually retarded effort (retarded at the level of the five-year-old, the time in their lives when they first entered the indoctrination process on a full-time basis in kindergarten).  Since truth is of no import, then, Spielberg is comfortable making a movie that upholds the orthodoxies of the cult despite having to employ one half-truth or outright lie after another.  Making clear Spielberg’s agenda is that each of these half-truths and lies served the agenda of the cult by either denigrating the more Western culture, the Jews of Israel or acting as an apologist for the non-Western culture of the Arab/Muslim terrorists.

If you doubt that this is the mentality that permeates all of Leftist Hollywood, simply consider that, despite being at times laughable in its depictions, Munich received an Academy Award nomination for “best picture,” along with four other movies that had but two things in common, they were all box offices bombs and they all promoted anti-Americanism and anti-Western values.

More recently, the Hollywood Leftists showed their allegiance to the cult by making close to a dozen anti-American movies about the Iraq war all either in utter contradiction to the facts or, like the story about Haditha, before the facts were even known.  On the Left there is no reason to know the facts because their agenda isn’t truth, it is the undermining of Western Civilization.

Tellingly, within the groups that we most associate with Modern Liberalism – celebrity and academia – there are subgroups to whom facts are cherished and essential and, by no coincidence, they are the ones who reject the brain-dead ideology of Modern Liberalism and tend to support the mature and thoughtful (if not always right) policies of the Republican Party.

In the world of celebrity there is one group, then – just as beautiful as Hollywood stars, just as rich as Hollywood directors, just as adored as Hollywood rock stars, their posters up on the walls of youngsters just as often as any Hollywood starlet in a bikini – who tend to reject the morally and intellectually retarded world-view of the Democrats and that group is comprised of professional athletes. 

Similarly, in the world of academia there is one group that does not follow the lemmings in the world of education and therefore rejects the stupidity of Modern Liberalism and these are the professors who teach about the hard sciences like chemistry and physics.

What do athletes and professors of physics and chemistry have in common – and what is it about them that makes them different than the others in the world of celebrity and academia?  Unlike their professional colleagues, the athlete and the chemist live in a world where truth both matters and cannot be fudged by rhetoric.  In sports, the player either catches the ball or drops the ball and no amount of pseudo-intellectual prattle changes the facts or makes a bad athlete good.  So, too, with chemistry where either the titanium and the einsteinium react to each other or they don’t.  There, too, no amount of fevered rhetoric about how the Einsteinium is part of a neo-conservative conspiracy to control the world, sees the failed chemist elevated to the level of chairman of the department.

America is on the wrong track because, over the past fifty years, no matter who was in the White House, the Leftists have held the reigns in the culture-creating industries of education, news and entertainment and they have used their powers not to advance truth, beauty, justice, morality, decency or anything else that is good.  In fact, good is the enemy of the Left because Western Civilization is not only good, it is the last best hope for man on earth.

For decades, these people have been using our children to wage war against America and the majority has remained mostly silent.  I suspect this is out of both a certain sense of complacency that comes with unprecedented comforts and also, ironically, a deep and abiding tradition of true liberalism (lower case “l”) that makes good Americans extremely tolerant even of their enemies. But we have reached a tipping point, a time where either we will enter the battle and fight for America against our internal enemies (both witting and unwitting) or we will end up in the dustbin of history with a return to the dark ages that Western Civilization pushed into only the darkest corners of the world.

The bad news is that the hate-America-always crowd is deeply entrenched and have decades of battle-hardened soldiers who feel no allegiance to truth, justice, beauty or anything other than the orthodoxies of the cult.  The good news is that we have the majority and, most importantly, we have the truth.  If we enter the battle and fight back we will win.

I do believe I am witnessing that rousing of the sleeping giant.  I think, in some ways, the disaster of having an enemy-of-the-state as President of the United States has gone a long way in making clear to the good guys that Modern Liberalism isn’t just a fringe cult located on college campuses and at Hollywood pot orgies, and that enough is enough.  To them I say “Welcome to the fight.”