Just Living Your Life... Under the Watchful Eyes of the Swamp

 “A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.”  Writing in 1928, John Shedd wasn’t really talking about ships. He was talking about life.

Years ago, my girlfriend and I went to see a movie.  What we saw, I’ve no idea, but I do know we had a terrible time, and it had nothing to do with what was on the screen and everything to do with what was going on in the theater. People were yelling at the screen, talking to each other, and smoking. My girlfriend mentioned the smoking, and I said that if that was the only problem we encountered, we’d be lucky, as I’d recently witnessed a bloody knife fight between two girls over a baby-daddy in a nearby theater.

I mention this because when you think your life may be in jeopardy, it’s hard to enjoy entertainment, and enjoyment is the whole point of movies. Movies require your buy-in for success, you must turn off reality and connect with the characters.

If you can’t do that, you can’t enjoy the movie. If you’re worried that someone’s going to pull a gun or set the place on fire, you’re going to be too busy scanning for danger to become engaged with what’s on the screen. You’d end up doing little more than wasting your time and money.

Just as movies require your buy-in and focus for success, so too does life. And that’s a problem with 21st-century America and the always-on-everywhere swamp. The danger is not so much that Big Brother is watching and trying to control our every move. He/it doesn’t have to. Our knowing that the state could be watching or listening is enough. It’s called the “Chilling Effect”, basically the government doing something that chills citizens’ willingness to exercise their constitutional rights for fear of reprisals.

Think about it this way: If you think it’s tough to enjoy a movie when you’re worried about what’s going on in the theater, imagine how difficult it would be to write a compelling, engaging movie with a critic holding a club looking over your shoulder the entire time. Well, that’s you trying to live your life.

How different would the script of your life be if you knew your every word might end up as part of some government dossier? How much could you embrace freedom and focus on having fun, sowing your wild oats, finding your passion, or risking failure to pursue some crazy dream if you were constantly wondering what some government bureaucrat with the power to throw you in prison or destroy your business or take away your kids might think? And that’s true even if you didn’t do anything illegal.

And that’s the problem. Since 2013’s Snowden revelations, we’ve known the government is actively collecting reams of data on virtually all of us. Back then, even the NY Times called it a “Threat to Democracy.” The government, against virtually the entire Bill of Rights, has and currently is looking at everything Americans do. (Want to see how much data they collect? Click here.)

Knowing our government is actively looking at emails, phone calls (or “just” our metadata, as we were assured), as well as our online surfing and purchasing habits, sends a chill down your spine. With 350 million people in the country, they’re probably not looking at you…but they might be.

And it’s not just the government. While, yes, it is the FBI, NSA, IRS, and other agencies in the alphabet soup of the state, it’s also Facebook, Google, Apple, and AT&T. It’s also the banks. Maybe the most relevant example of the banks is JP Morgan Chase—a company that recently paid $290 million to victims of Jeffry Epstein for empowering the pedophile—recently closing down the accounts of a prominent vaccine skeptic after closing the account of a religious freedom nonprofit last year. This follows a since derailed plan by MasterCard and Visa to track gun and ammunition purchases.

“But they’re private companies!” That’s technically true, but also false. They may be private but they’re often coerced by the government to do its bidding. What’s more, there’s often a revolving door with government officials that makes explicit coercion unnecessary and government service quite lucrative for potential regulators.

And so back to the life you’re living…

How comfortable are you going to be doing or saying anything that might cause the federal government (or state or local) to put you on some watchlist? You ask yourself “Should I wear this MAGA hat to that school board meeting, or should I wait until my building permit is approved?” “Should I write that blog critical of my senator, or should I wait until my nonprofit application is approved?” “Should I post pictures of my kids at the range, or should I wait until my bank approves my mortgage application?”

The reality is, citizens silencing themselves is a far bigger problem than the government censoring them. (Just think how unfunny “comedy” is today with the censorious woke scrutinizing every joke.) How many journalists or bloggers have avoided writing something or “toned it down” because they were worried they’d pay some price for offending the wrong bureaucrat?

It’s not just the words not spoken or the stands not taken that are the problem. It’s the fact that energy must be spent considering them in the first place. Living a successful life is challenging in the best of circumstances. Getting everything from an education to a job, starting a company or finding the perfect spouse and raising good kids. All take a lot of effort to do successfully, but the question is, how much harder would they be if you had to divert X% of your focus to constantly wondering what the consequences on them be if you exercised your First or Second Amendment rights?

Sure, you could simply keep your head down and not bother, but as we know from Fahrenheit 451, that actually harms society. And, even if you tried to keep your head down and go about your way, there’s no guarantee you aren’t going to end up on the wrong side of a government vaccine policy or tripped up by a school board’s constantly evolving “pronoun” policy.

At the end of the day, living a good life takes work and can be challenging, that’s particularly so in a free society. But it’s the freedom of ideas that the advancements of society, whether advocating for a legislative check on a monarch’s power, proffering a sun-centered system, or filibustering for a Bill of Rights. There’s a reason the US and the West have led the world in the growth of prosperity and advances in science and mathematics, and that reason is the freedom to exchange ideas, good and bad and otherwise.

Getting the most out of life, like enjoying a movie, depends on the ability to focus on the task at hand without fear for your safety as you do so. As the surveillance and control leviathan of the swamp grows, doing so becomes ever more difficult. Now might be a good time to start supporting candidates who vow to dismantle it before it dismantles what’s left of our freedoms.

What conservatives can to learn from Hollywood: Good stories told well can influence political perspective

Watching movies are one of my favorite pastimes. Our favorite movies say a lot about us… although I’m not exactly sure what. My top five (in no particular order) are Gladiator, Valley Girl, Galaxy Quest, Lost in Translation and probably Tombstone. Movies are a unique form of entertainment because they are touchstones, shared experiences which so many Americans have in common. Lines like “I’m walking here!” or “You had me at hello” or “Make my day, punk” have made it into the American lexicon and are often used in our everyday lives in order to call up certain shared understandings of situations between a speaker and their listeners.

Movies are unique in that most of the people watching them experience the same thing. Not that they always have the same reaction, which is obvious by the divergent reviews a single movie can get, but they are watching the same thing on the screen. The colors are the same, the actor’s faces are the same, the music is the same. Contrast that with reading a book. With a book the experience is yours as your brain takes the author’s words and creates its unique version of the characters, faces, colors, sounds, accents, landscapes, and basically everything in terms of bringing the author’s words to life. Contrast that with the way we experience movies. All of us instantly recognize the voice of James Earl Jones when we hear Darth Vader speak. All of us know exactly what Harry Potter looks like, and he’s the same for every one of us. We all have a vision of Jack and Rose flying at the bow of the Titanic, it’s exactly the same.

Movies have a unique place in American life because of that shared experience and its breadth. Your experience watching a movie is going to be essentially the same if you watch it on Miami Beach, in Brooklyn or Brownsville, Texas. And Hollywood has used that unique place to great advantage. From giant studios that produce hundred million dollar epics that earn billions around the world to art house films that gain critical praise consumer indifference, Hollywood almost has a monopoly on American storytelling. (And that includes its dominance of the small screen… “We were on a break” or “You’re Fired”.)

One of the most interesting aspects of this Hollywood dominance is the fact that it seeks to earn money while producing unabashedly leftist propaganda. Think An Inconvenient Truth, Erin Brockovich, or Gasland. The interesting thing is not that they are making money telling stories, but rather the impact that it has on viewers. Hollywood has learned what the GOP has never learned, that a good story told well can impact and perhaps change viewer’s political perspective. Researchers at Notre Dame found that “Hollywood movies are better able to change attitudes – in a left-wing direction – than advertising or news reports.” Essentially Hollywood has perfected the art of using movies to turn people into liberals. Whether it’s the Matt Damon character in Good Will Hunting or Sally Field’s character in Norma Rae, movies that grip us seem to impact us long after we leave the theaters. The fact that movies, particularly sob stories, impact us is definitely not news, but the fact that we keep the critical thinking switch turned off once we leave the theater is. We should know better, but we don’t… at least according to the research.

If conservatives hope to save the country from the liberal dystopia that the Democrats and the establishment Republicans are leading us into, they need to understand the lesson Hollywood learned so long ago… You have to touch people in order to impact them. You have to make them connect with something in order to understand it, appreciate it, take time out of their lives to focus on it. While it’s unrealistic to expect conservatives to take over Hollywood, they can at least begin to tell stories that reflect the conservative perspective.

The country is full of real life stories that are just as touching as anything Hollywood ever wrote. (see "Waiting for Superman" or "The Lottery")  As much of a boogieman Hollywood has created out of capitalism, big government is far scarier. As many lives as one company might have destroyed due to the duplicity of some employee or board of directors, government has destroyed far more families and communities simply by its catastrophic social policies. Kids stuck in failed schools in crime riddled neighborhoods are just as sympathetic as workers trying to form a union at some trucking company. An entrepreneur struggling to feed his family against the borg of government regulation is just as sympathetic as someone whose drinking water catches fire supposedly due to drilling. The difference is, Hollywood often has to use hyperbole, “artistic license” and sometimes outright lies in order to get its points across. In a world where the omnipresent tentacles of a dysfunctional government destroy jobs, gut education and undermine families, the stories of despair are legion, and very real.

If conservatives ever hope to win the battle of ideas, win over the hearts (and votes) of a majority of the American people, we have to figure out to do what came so naturally to Ronald Reagan… we have to connect with people through well told stories. We have to figure out how to talk about cold, sterile, opaque issues that are sometime counterintuitive, and do it in a way that really engage the viewer or the listener. Hollywood swayed the nation by selling liberalism wrapped in well told stories. If we want to bring it back we’re going to have to do the same. Maybe Dinesh D'Souza’s forthcoming “AMERICA” will be a first step in the right direction… although most of us won’t have two hour blocks in a darkened theaters to make our points... so we’d better get creative.