VDH Has a Conversation with Filmmaker Michael L. Pack

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Hello, everybody. This is Victor Hansen, and I'm going solo today.
Jack and Sammy are not with me because we're doing one of our interviews, and we're having Michael Pack return.

He's the documentary filmmaker you may remember during the Trump administration. He ran the Agency for Global Media, which includes

hallmarks like The Voice of America. He was the CEO of the Claremont Institution, and he's produced over a dozen recognized and award-winning documentaries.

Most recently, or one of the most recent ones, was on Clarence Thomas. I think a lot of us saw and appreciated.
Michael, thank you for coming on today with us.

It's great to be on again with you, Victor. And you've got a new project.
Why don't you just start out by explaining what it is?

Well, as you just mentioned,

I've done about 12 to 15 long-form documentaries, one or two-hour documentaries. And we're still, my new company, Palladium Pictures, we're still doing those, but we're also doing short documentaries.

And we're now doing a series with the Wall Street Journal opinion section.

It's sort of modeled on the New York Times Optocs and The Atlantic and The New Yorker have a similar series, but there's nothing that's right of center that tells stories that have been misreported or ignored by the media, the mainstream media.

And so this is an opportunity to do that and to reach that audience.

And this one is what is

in the sequence of these, is this your inaugural documentary or what number it is?

It is, yeah. Yes.
And it's going to be, it is, because I've watched it, it deals with the resurgence. I guess that's the right word, resurgence of anti-Semitism that was latent, we thought,

and then

It just exploded again, or it was there, but October 7th, everybody thought, at least sane people thought, that it would be a reminder that it was no longer there.

And yet it seemed the massacre of Jews in Israel seemed to encourage it.

That's right.

Why don't you remind all of our audience how you did this documentary, who you talked to, and what were some of the themes?

Good. Well, this documentary, which you're right, is our inaugural one with this partnership with the Wall Street Journal Opinion Section, is called Get the Jew, The Crown Heights Riots Revisited.

And it is up on the Wall Street Journal opinion page for free, not in front of their normal paywall.

So anyone can go to Wall Street Journal.wsj.com slash opinion or their YouTube page, youtube.com slash at WSJ opinion, and it's free.

It's only 20 minutes, but it tells one of these neglected or forgotten stories, really, for many people about the worst anti-Semitic race riot in American history, which happened in 1991 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Just to recap the story quickly, but I encourage your listeners to see the whole film.

It happened in this Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn,

where a Hasidic community, Chabad Lubavitch, was living in what had become a black community. And

their rabbi, their grand Rebbe, was coming back from a visit to this cemetery

with a police car escort. And

the following car, his third car in his motorcade, got into

an accident, an intersection, hit a car, and careened off that car and accidentally killed a young black boy, Gavin Cato. And that sparked three days of riots,

including

gangs of black people looking for revenge

went through the neighborhood. And at at one point they stabbed and killed a a young Hasidic student,

Yankel Rosenbaum. But it went on for three days and the film asked the question, why did the mayor and the police let it go on for three days?

Almost as important a question as why it started in the first place. And the mayor was to remind everybody, David.
He's the first black mayor of New York, David Dinkins.

And we had a, was that the first time people became aware of Al Sharpton?

It was just after Tawana Brawley. So it was kind of his heyday.

It was a second act.

Yes.

But it was a big one. He came the second day of the riot and he led marches and he came in with others,

Alton Maddox and Reverend Herbert Daughtry.

And they whipped up the crowd. I mean, they said this is a symbol that, you know, Jews are getting everything, Jews are getting away with things.

And

the crowd, you know, continued on through, you know, night after night, Jewish stores were burned and looted,

police cars were set on fire, people were beaten.

And it didn't stop for three days until the

rioters actually attacked the police chief.

um lee brown and david dinkins personally and then they turned to their deputy police chief ray kelly and told him to stop it and he was able to stop it within three hours through normal anti-riot police tactics.

Why do you?

I just saw, just not, it's not off topic. I just saw that Kamala Harris praised Al Sharpton on his 70th birthday, and he said he was a man that always spoke truth.

How did he become rehabilitated after I didn't he, you know, when he said, put on your

yomaks and come over to, I'm going to meet you. He was almost a dare to, he wanted to fight people that had Jewish identification is what I'm saying.
That's right.

He made that comment, you know,

and

yeah, I mean,

he, he, he told me in the interview, but it's not in the film, and he's said it many times.

He said that in a conversation with Coretta Scott King, she convinced him to be more moderate, be more, to stay in the tradition of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

But He, you know, the fact is he did all these things, and he hasn't always spoken the truth, as Kamala Harris says. But he's really been mainstreamed.

It's amazing that he's ⁇ I guess it's been a total makeover. He lost weight.
He became a health

addict. But I don't think he's ⁇ I don't believe that he's really changed sincerely.
He had a special entree.

He kind of nosed out Jesse Jackson with the Obama administration and had a direct line to Obama.

I remember that there was reports that he had almost 100, if not hundreds, of visits to the White House during that eight-year period. But

why, and the large, after watching the document, why do you think of all the various communities in the country, the black community has this,

and I'll just give you some examples, this fixation on Jews is prone. I mean, if you think of all the major black leaders, Al Sharpton, we've just discussed, had said a lot of anti-Semitic things.

We had Jesse Jackson who talked about he was going to come to Jaime Town. That was when he was running for president.
There's no need to mention Louis Farrakhan and gutter religion.

He took a picture, as we know, with Barack Obama smiling. And then we've just had Todd Nahisi Coates write this new book, The Messenger, where he

doesn't, I just skimmed through it.

I mean, he doesn't mention anything about Hamas or killing, but it's really an eliminationist argument that Israel has no right to exist and the Jews of Israel caused caused all these problems in the Middle East.

Why do you, is it because

the black community feels that Jews are successful and affluent? I'm stereotyping, but perhaps more affluent than

the mean per capita income. They've been very successful well beyond their numbers and the professions and contributions to literature, science, et cetera.
And somehow

They are a minority as well. And it seems to me that they they resent their minority status, or they're saying the Holocaust doesn't matter, or the Holocaust wasn't that big thing.
And

you're really white. And that has been something that we've watched unfold after October 7th, that the DEI industry has been,

it's done two things.

If there was any doubt that they were not fused, it has... convinced everybody that anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are the same thing.
And then number two, they've put

Jews as sort of the white model par excellence of exploitive whites.

And I don't quite know why that is, but I think it has something to do with a rivalry, or they think that they should not be considered an oppressed group, or they have greater claims on victimization than the Jews do.

I don't know. Do you have thoughts on that?

Well,

it is true that in Crown Heights at this time, you know, blacks, this had been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood for many years.

Blacks moved in in the 60s and then white flight, most Jews moved out to Long Island or wherever. And the Chabad Lubabitch group stayed.

And then they were a Jewish group in this island of poor black people. And there was a feeling that they got more from the city.
You know, they're doing better. They're running the stores.
You know,

why is that? There must be an explanation.

And just before the riot, we talk about this a little in the film, there had been a resurgence of Farrakhan and this black anti-Semitism, most notably from Leonard Jeffries, the uncle of Hakeem Jeffries.

Hakeem Jeffries. ICE people.
He gave us ICE people and sun people. Yeah, that's right.
White people. And he was the nemesis of Mary Lefkowitz at Wellesley.

He just tormented her for years when she wrote Not Out of Africa,

debunking the whole Afrocentric creation of Western Sioux. And he was completely discredited.
And for a time, Hakeem,

albeit when he was young, but he voiced a lot of the arguments of his uncle.

I believe he invited him to speak to his college when he was

wrote about it in the college newspaper. So

yes, it's hard to really understand that. And I'm Jewish myself and I'm conservative, obviously, but I have many liberal Jewish friends.
And lately, once again, they feel betrayed.

They feel they were a core component of the civil rights movement. They feel they've supported black rights, black equality forever.

And now they're now post-October 7th, especially, and post-the stuff on college campuses, they feel betrayed by black people who they think they were helping.

Did you have people that you wanted to interview that didn't want to come on film, but have gone through that metamorphosis politically that you just mentioned?

Yeah, I mean,

it's very hard for a constituency that's been liberal their whole life for a variety of historical reasons, and then all of a sudden to see that the party they thought was their shield is actually the spear that's threatening them.

But I think that's what's happened.

Well, one of the things I think notable about Crown Heights, this was back in 91, that a lot of the mainstream Jewish organizations did not support Chabad

at the time.

For example, the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, then run by Abe Foxman, who later apologized for not supporting Chabad Lubavish, a very unusual thing.

But I think there was a feeling on these mainstream Jewish organizations that these Hasidic people with black hats and black jackets and looking like they're in the shuttle in the 18th century, they're not us.

They're not our Jews. And that riots will never come to us.
You know, this is way off in Crown Heights, a poor section of Queens. It's not us.
We don't care. And

however, after October 7th, and especially after the

demonstrations on these college campuses last year, now they see see they are coming for them. You know, they're at Harvard and Columbia, not just Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
And

I personally know lots of people

whom they woke up when their children felt threatened on a college campus in a way that they just didn't in Crown Heights in 1991.

And this is, I think, an interesting fact, Victor, that Elliot Kaufman, our Wall Street Journal reporter, points out that, all right, so this happened.

And then the election, David Dinkins, the black mayor, ran for re-election. He had failed to stop this riot, but he did not lose much of the Jewish vote, 3% less than when he ran the first time.

The vote that he lost were in places like Staten Island and the Outerboroughs, poor white ethnics that didn't like to see riots, whether they were against Jews or anybody else in their city.

And that's one of the reasons Rudy Giuliani won that election. Yes,

I remember that. You know, it's very historically, in a very eerie way,

it reminds me the reaction of Western European Jews in the late 30s in countries like France and Germany, especially after the German occupation or the impending war against Western democracies after the invasion of Poland.

There had been rumors that

when Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939 and then finished the job with the help of Stalin by October 9th,

that Jews were being rounded up in the thousands. And people in Western Europe were much more assimilated.
They were wealthy. They were cosmopolitan.

Vienna, the whole professional, and they just didn't believe that this was going to happen to them.

They thought, well, you know, these are impoverished Eastern European, and they're kind of the stereotype Russian Jew poor. They're easily identifiable.

But we are intermarried, some of us, and we're a different strain of Judaism. We're fully assimilated, and no one, they would have to check our genealogy to even know.

And what they really didn't realize that already at that point, people

like Himmler and the people later at the Wasseni conference were saying that exactly what they said. They said, well, we can handle the Jews of the West because we'll give them yellow stars.

And we don't have to do that in the East because they're easily identifiable.

And people would argue and say, well, if you have to give yellow stars and you can't identify them, then doesn't your whole racial topology just collapse?

Why would you need, and they had a big argument about this, but it's the same idea that these Eastern European or ritualistic Jews

are not us. And

it's the same thing with the Israelis, too. People will say, well, you know, they're just anti-Israeli.
They're not anti-Semitic.

But I think October 7th has really did when was the first filming that when you first started the documentary what was the genesis date-wise um how long have you been working on it we've been working on it before october 7th uh

and just to you know put a fine point on it you know the film ends with another stabbing by a jew of a jew in crown heights this time it's a black man shouting free palestine and do you want to die so free palestine this time you know jews are in the diamond trade and responsible for the slave trade last time, but it's the same argument.

You know, it's the same thing. And I think that the point of the people in Staten Island who didn't vote for David Dinkins would maybe understood is it isn't even just the Jews.

You know, Hitler goes after the Jews, but it's not going to be a good world for anyone else to live in too. You can't even say, well, who cares about the Jews?

You know, pretty soon they're coming for you too. I think that was what was scary about October 7th and its aftermath, especially that 21-day period before Israel had even reacted.

Because where I work at Stanford, we had a lecturer. I don't want to call him a professor, but he was hired from the Black Studies Program at Berkeley.

And he almost immediately, before Israel had done anything, he separated his class and he said, all the Jewish students, go to that side and leave your possessions on this side, and then you'll see how it is to be displaced and disowned.

Of course, we had that African-American professor at Cornell said he was exhilarated.

And he was the son

of the person who first

coined the idea of black English, or there was a special patois that had to be taught as equal to traditional English grammar.

But what I'm getting at is there's something about the intersectionality that if you

identify as part of the oppressed or victimized class, then these theories that they embrace say that you cannot yourself be an oppressor. And then that takes away all shame or stain or deterrence.

And then that group, because I was looking after I looked at your documentary, I hadn't realized that the hate crime statistics nationally, but especially in New York, are just overwhelmingly

people in the DEI community are overrepresented. And Jews make up about 3%, but they're almost 50% of recent victims of hate crimes.

And the perpetrators in the black community are double, at least double their numbers of the demographics, and so are Latinos. And it seems to me that when you take a group of people and

you declare them, regardless of income or individual circumstance, as a victim,

and then you demonize whites in general, but also Jews, or especially Jews, then you're asking for the type of

hate crime statistics that you see.

I think that is very true.

And Jews are usually seen, I think it's hard to understand anti-Semitism.

It's gone on for hundreds of years, but I think lately it's really tied to a fear of the West, a fear of capitalism, and a hatred of America. I mean, big Satan and Little Satan, as Iran likes to say.

In the end,

they're connected. I mean, who knows how they're connected, but they're connected in the minds of people who hate Jews, I think.
It's funny, but the Crown Heights is similar in some ways.

It was not nearly as horrific as October 7th, but it seems that once, and this is crystalline in Germany, but once you go past that barrier, or once people are audacious enough to start killing Jews, rather than winning universal condemnation, it almost frees everybody to say this is now acceptable.

And that's what happened, I think, on the campuses. They first, after October 7th, I noticed at Stanford,

there was just

isolated the first hours, not universal condemnation, but isolated for a first hour. Well, they had it coming, or this is how the Palestinian.

And then as that was tolerated and accepted, and then it got out of hand, and there was a Palestinian Hamas camp, and then it was rivered to the sea every day.

And then you started seeing all these people come out of the woodwork because it was considered acceptable.

I think another connection, I think, to college campuses relates to the behavior of the mayor and college presidents. Dave Dinkins failed to condemn it.
It's not because he's anti-Semitic.

He's obviously not anti-Semitic. He failed to condemn it because he was afraid of losing that wing of his support, that they would turn on him.
And he needed those people.

So he did things to send the messages early on. Like he would go to, he went to Gavin Cato's funeral, but he did not attend the funeral of Yankel Rosenbaum, who the murdered Jew.

He was just afraid of losing those, losing that support. So he just was too weak to respond.
And it's just like these college presidents. It's not like they're anti-Semitic.

I'm sure not a single one of them is actually anti-Semitic. They just can't take on the violent left-wing part of their party.
And you see that in many issues, even beyond anti-Semitism.

And it's really a problem. You see it in the Democratic Party.
I mean,

if we were not in an election year A, and B, if we were not in a close election year

B, and C, if Michigan was not considered a swing state with its quarter million Muslim voters, I don't think you would see Harris go on TV and brag about cutting 2,000-pound bombs to Israel in the middle of a war with Hamas and Hezbollah.

And it seems to me that the Democratic Party is terrified of the new demographics. And

one of the things that we don't talk about when you mention campuses, that since 2020 and the George Floyd riots, we went into what I call not proportional representation, but repertory admissions at these universities.

So African American, Latino representation, Native Americans, women, was much larger than their demographics.

So at Stanford, for example, if you go to their website of last year's admittance, 20% were white, 9% were white males, even though that you could argue that 67% to 68% of the national demographic is white.

And so what I'm getting at is in the 1960s, there were still at the Ivy League exclusive campuses 25 to 30% Jewish students, way overrepresented because it was purely meritocratic.

That was one of the arguments of the SAT. You couldn't be anti-Semitic if you had this blind test.

Now there's no, well, they're going to restore it probably, but for four years there's been no SAT at these elite campuses.

And the so-called white representation on campus is well below their demographics.

And one of the results of what I see on these campuses when I visit them is there's not that many Jewish students there anymore.

Their numbers have been more than half. There's only about a third or a fourth of them.

And I think there's been a great increase in people from not just the Middle East, but places in the Middle East that are quite radical, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Egypt,

the Gulf states, gutter.

And

the combination of that means that the average, if I don't want to be too deprecatory, but the useful idiot student who doesn't know anything about anti-Semitism or the history of Israel or anything, looks at the dynamics on campus and they see a camp, say, just to take Stanford, that's huge, and then they

protesting against Israel and quite anti-Semitic in its expression. I'm just, that's not my opinion.
They just issued a 900-page report at Stanford, and

it was absolutely amazing, the tolerance for anti-Semitism. And this faculty, it was a faculty group, most left-wing faculty, because they're all left-wing, and they were shocked at what they found.

But my point is that

when you looked at that camp, right next to it, there was a pro-Israel camp. It was minuscule.
There was about six people.

And it was polite and they followed all the rules of assembly and the other group violated them with abandon and they were, it was huge. And I think that makes an impression on faculty and students.

And I don't know what the future is, but there are definitely much more students from the Middle East that hate Israel and much fewer Jewish Americans.

And that's aside the question that the Jewish community is being, as you know, secularized and assimilated.

I don't know what the future will be, but the idea that if you're a secular Jew and you're not observant or

you don't identify as Jewish, that that's going to save you from anti-Semitism, I don't think that's true. Well, as you say, it didn't work out for the European Jews at World War II.

It does not work out. No, it does not.

Anti-Semitism on college campus is so shocking. Who knew that people would be selling the protocols of the elders of Zion on Ivy League schools?

I mean, even 10 years ago, you'd have to be a nut to think that could be possible.

And now,

you know, daily occurrence. I don't really know where it's going.
That's sort of beyond my pay grade. I leave that to deep thinkers and historians like you, Victor.
But I know it's not good.

And

it's really concerning. And it begins with it,

this toleration for the Crown Heights riot back then. We can't let these things enter our

national consciousness without affecting it forever. I mean, we have to take a stand against it.

I thought that that would, after the

Tawana Brawley

and the Crown Heights, I thought that Al Sharpton was,

if you remember Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, he has a character like Al Sharpton in there. It's a caricature.
And

he was considered indiscreet, vulgar, anti-Semitic, racist, loud,

uncouth.

And all of a sudden,

at the end of the 90s, he was a non-entity. And then he had this

non-profit that had violated all the tax codes, and everybody thought he was going to go to prison. And then he came, he was very wisely did something that

was actually a stroke of political genius he went to the Obamas and said look

Jesse Jackson is the traditional moderate and you people all deal with him and remember Jesse Jackson had attacked Obama

and I can be more authentic and represent the real black community and I will rehabilitate myself if you give me special access and I will support you and not say you're a Kenyan and not a Kenyan American and not an authentic American black or that you're not radical enough.

And that he gave them D-Days in the black community. And all of a sudden, as you remember, the government under his administration gave him a sweetheart IRS solution to his problems.

And all of a sudden, Hillary Clinton, everybody was courting him as they are today.

It's amazing.

Has he ever come out publicly and apologized? No. And

I'm very grateful to Al Sharpton for letting us interview him for the film. He was very gracious in the film.

And we, I mean, even though these are done with the Wall Street Journal opinion section, both we and the Wall Street Journal want them to be straightforward, fact-based stories and not express the opinions like you and I are now doing on the podcast, but tell the facts.

And we give Al Sharpton a chance to tell his side of the story, I think, very fully. But he hasn't apologized.

I mean, the I asked that because the film he doesn't, but I was wondering if he did privately.

He does say, so the most notorious thing he did, which is just outside the frame of the film, is that he gave the eulogy for the young boy who was killed, Gavin Cato, at his funeral.

And the news media, even at the time, reported it as very anti-Semitic. It had all the black nationalist tropes that you outlined earlier, Victor.
The Jews run the diamond trade.

They're in charge of the slave trade. They run everything.

They have too much power. They're an elite.
They're controlling controlling, you know, all these different institutions and on like that. And

he did say to me that he wouldn't do that quite the same way again today,

which was something. And he's actually, you know,

if this may be faint praise for me, but I hope, I hope not, that among

you know, progressive left Democrats,

he's pretty good on Israel. He's made a mess.
He's built bridges with the liberal Jewish community. And

he is not the most radical pro-Hamas person. He's been careful about that.

So I think what he did, Victor, is learned his political lesson, that that was not, that in his current political position, that's not a smart thing to be. So he has done that.

Not exactly an apology, but a shift, a strategic shift.

Well, I think you're seeing a strategic shift, at least temporarily, from Kamala Kamala Harris and Joba, all of them, and the Democratic Party in general, because

I don't know.

I think when the Arab American community sort of said, well, you weren't strong enough pro-Hamas, so we're not going to vote for you, they took that seriously, that some of them won't show up, and that a lot of Jewish traditional contributors to the Democratic Party have defected.

And then there were, as you say, there were a lot of Jews whose kids and they don't want to go to these elite schools anymore.

And all that calculus put together, I think, explains why suddenly at least Kamala Harris is saying that, you know, she's 100% pro-Israel, even though Joe Biden just said that they couldn't react in a way that would probably be in their interest against the nuclear facilities.

But again, again,

they're reacting to

the political

realities. The political reality is that for all the talk about

Israel's unpopular, 65 to 70 percent in most polls

poll that they favor Israel in the Middle East struggle and they want to support it fully. And it's much, much higher support polls than for, to take one example, Ukraine.

And I think that they look at those polls and they understand that.

But it'll be, do you...

Just to, given your experience when you were filming and talking to people in the production aspect of the documentary and its genesis after October 7th until recently,

do you feel that there's going to be a sizable defection of Jewish voters in November? And this is not anything to do with the documentary.

I'm just asking you as a person who's been out and talked to people in the public realm.

I hope so, but I fear not. I mean,

maybe

a 5% or 10% shift. I hope so.
And to your earlier point, I believe myself personally, that

Kamala Harris, if she's elected president, will shift back and will

have to support the, will have to propitiate the progressive wing of her party.

I would go further and I would say that on November 6th,

if she's elected, she will do as you said. But if she's not elected, she will do it anyway.

She'll finish her three-month tenure as vice president and go right. And that's not just on Israel and Jews, it's on all the issues that she's

ascended or evolved, she says. It'll go back.

And

what is the future? So are we going to see

there was a riot here in Oregon where people went in and trashed the school library. There was a demonstration.

I guess it just happened in Columbia

as October 7th comes.

And

I think that there will be a lot of demonstrations on October 7th and beyond.

I think it's going to be bad. I do too.
How are you going to, so everybody knows, how do they, when is the documentary available

to the general public? Where is it going to be? How do they get access to it? Well, it's going to be available as of October 7th

to Miss Day. And they can go to wsj.com/slash slash opinion

or the youtube page, youtube.com slash at wsj opinion. And it's free.
It's not, it's outside of their paywall.

And it'll be available, I think, the morning of October 7th, which might be a good day to look at it when you're thinking about.

You know what I think we should do before we end is would you mind just giving us a minute or two

a plot outline or what the what the the documentary entails so people get some idea without giving it away Then we should do, I would like to tease the next one, if you don't mind, Victor. Yes, yes.

Okay.

Well,

the film tells the story of the worst anti-Semitic race riot in American history, Crown Heights, 1991. And the plot, in short, it starts with

the grand Rebbe, the Rebbe, the grand rabbi of the Chabad-Lubabitch sect of Hasidim in Crown Heights, was coming back from

a visit to

the cemetery to look at the grave of his wife and his predecessor. And he came back with a motorcade with police in front and him in the middle and a following car.

And they went through a light and the last car either went through a yellow or a red light. And

that car accidentally hit another car, careened off that car and hit two young Guyanese boy and a girl that were playing in the street. One of them was hurt and the other one was eventually killed.

And that sparked a three-day riot.

Gangs of black people looking to revenge what in fact was an accident went through that neighborhood, burned buildings, smashed windows, set police cars on fire, and a gang of black kids set upon a young Australian Hasidic student, said, get the Jew, there's one, let's get him, beat him up and stabbed him and he died of his wounds in the hospital.

And the riot went on for days, and the police chief and the mayor did not stop it for three days until finally they themselves were attacked.

Then they called an end to it. They got in their deputy police chief, Ray Kelly, and he ended with hours using standard anti-riot techniques.
So

the film is about how did these anti-Semitic things happen? And why do some political leaders let them go on and not stop them?

Just to finish,

either who did you interview or what type of people did you interview? Either that appear in the film or gave you background commentary?

Well, we tried to interview people from all sides and we talked to, as you imply, Victor, people, way more people than we actually filmed.

And it's based on the reporting of a Wall Street Journal opinion writer, Elliot Kaufman, who wrote a long piece about it and interviewed even more people than we did.

And we were benefited by the fact that there had been New York State had done a report, the Giorgenti report, that interviewed thousands of people and has sort of the definitive record of these events.

So that was also extremely helpful. But we interviewed Al Sharpton, who played a prominent role in the subsequent days of the riot.

We interviewed Ray Kelly, who helped end the riot and was deputy police chief, later police chief in New York. We interviewed Elliot Kaufman, whose reporting was essential to the film.

We interviewed Shia Hecht, who is a spokesman for the Chabad Lubavitch community.

We interviewed one of the policemen who was there at the scene and when the first accident happened and actually arrested the guy who, in fact, stabbed Yankel Rosenbaum, Lemerick Nelson.

So we got a variety of people.

And I think we've cut, you know, it's hard to tell the story in 20 minutes, but the idea here is to give people something without taking that much time where they can really get the facts in a short, condensed way.

Last question, question.

And to wrap up. So this is a series of 20 minute or so documentaries.
Do you have any

you can tell our audience what you're working on now or what might be the next one or the next one or two? Well, the next one will be in a month or so.

And it's about the prime minister of Liz Truss, the shortest lived prime minister in British history.

And it's called the Prime Minister versus the Blob, because it is basically, we have a long interview with Liz Truss, as well as people who agree with her and disagree with her.

But she feels strongly that she was ousted

because of the opposition of their version of the administrative state or the swamp, which they call the blob, a good name for it, really.

And she talks about how that happened. I mean, it's true that, you know, she announced a mini budget and the pound crashed, but who's responsible for that? And then why was she out in 44 days?

So it's a really great political story and it involves betrayals and backstabbing and just, you know, know British politics. But it also has this underlying issue.

I mean, she feels she couldn't govern because of the professional class. They didn't like her ideas.
She's sort of a Thatcherite and they're sort of Keynesians.

And they wanted her out and they got her out. And

it goes to the point that Donald Trump is often making. You know, you get elected, you have to be able to govern, or it's not democracy.

And this is a particularly strong version of it because she's so unlike Donald Trump. She's been in government for, I don't know, 15, 20 years.
She's a

moderately kind of a

woman who sort of speaks without Donald Trump's flamboyance. And she, too, feels she couldn't govern.
So it's a problem throughout the West. We tend to think of it as a U.S.
problem.

And it's very enlightening to see it from the British perspective.

So it's...

really unique then that you're going back through mostly recent history of the last 50 years and looking at underappreciated historical incidents that turned out to be much more significant and have influenced us today in a way that we don't really appreciate or notice or even remark about.

That's right. Most of us, you, Victor, probably know plenty about all of them.
But

the average, those of us that are more less informed, myself included, learn a lot from these things.

And then we have something we talked about with you last time, our incubator to train young right-of-center non-woke filmmakers. We have our first class of four.

Their films are coming out also in the next month or so. So I hope we can come back and talk about that.
Yes. Well, everybody, I've been talking to Michael Pack.
He's the documentary filmmaker.

He has this very substantial, huge project with a Wall Street Journal, and he's going to be producing these 20-minute documentaries on historical events of the last half century that turned out to be a lot more significant than we ever imagined.

And the first one comes out on October 7th, Get the Jew by Michael Pack, the director, former head of the Agency for Global Media, and the CEO of the former CEO of the Claremont Institute.

And Michael, thank you for being with us today. Thank you, Victor.
It's always a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you.