Conservative Documentaries and Our Government Media: Interview with Michael and Thomas Pack

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Hi, everybody.

I'm alone today.

Sammy and Jack aren't with us because I'm doing one of our interviews for the Victor Hansen Show, and it's with Michael Pack.

He was the former director of the U.S.

Agency for Global Media during the Trump administration, and he's here to talk about

the business of documentary films, but especially documentary films as a means of reaching people in a way that they haven't before.

And he's here with his son, Thomas Pack,

who runs an incubator program to attract young filmmakers, documentary filmmakers, and give them advice and an environment to produce and to distribute their films.

But before we go on, we'll have a brief break and I'll be right back.

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Thank you very much.

We're back with Michael Pat.

Michael, I've known you a long time.

One of the things

that's remarkable, you've done, I know you're on the conservative side with the rest of us, but you've done a number of films that are on wide topics that were sort of transcending Paul.

I know you did that.

very famous one just not too recently on Clarence Thomas, but you did one with Eli Wallach as a narrator, didn't you?

That's right.

My very first major film called Hollywood's Favorite Heavy back in 1987, which was about how Hollywood portrays business and businessmen, especially on prime time TV.

And we went and interviewed a bunch of film producers and talked to them about business.

And they had some interesting ideas, including like from Norman Lear to producers of Dallas and Dynasty.

And Eli Wallach hosted it.

But I've had since then, 1987, about 15 documentaries on public television, all nationally broadcast, all award-winning.

And I believe that it does prove that conservatives can reach the broad middle, which is what we should be trying to do.

I think if you tell a good story,

it's more possible even today to sort of reach an audience.

And that's what I've really dedicated myself to doing now.

We've launched a new company called Palladium Pictures.

I invite your listeners to go to palladiumpictures.com, where we're going to do way more documentaries, long and short, plus, as you just mentioned, an incubator run by my son Thomas that will train young filmmakers because there's really a dearth of films and television that are right of center, conservative, libertarian, and it's a problem for the country.

Why do you think that even more so maybe than Hollywood, why is a documentary film, if I could use that word, industry, why is it so dominated by people on the left?

And why is it used as a medium not to just enlighten or inform people, but to indoctrinate them?

Well, I did write a long piece in Real Clear on that in order to fight the culture of war, conservatives need to actually make films.

And I try to analyze that issue.

It's still in Real Clear, or it's on my Twitter feed, Michael Pack underscore.

But, and you make a good point.

I try to deal with both documentaries and narrative feature films, but you're right, documentaries are even more political.

They were political sort of from the beginning, from the 60s, and people go in them to be advocates.

I think part of the problem, part of the issue is the way that you become a documentary filmmaker.

In the piece, I try to elaborate the vast ecosystem that the left has created over the last 50 years in their efforts to take over the culture.

You know, as you know, Victor, they proposed a long march through the institutions beginning in the 60s, starting at the university where you have been, but quickly going to Hollywood and media and culture.

And they've been upfront and

open about it.

And they have been very successful.

But one of the ways, so the way the ecosystem now works is they have institutions all along the way to encourage young progressive filmmakers, beginning in film school, which is, I think, where it all starts.

There are 4,000 colleges and universities in America.

Every single one has a film school.

Every single one of those film schools is actually a progressive woke institution, often advertising in its admissions brochures that it wants to train activists.

Activists.

So that's how they define it.

And I think it's gotten worse.

I mean, I was thinking of the career of someone I know pretty well, Ken Burns.

And I don't think that he would or could make that epic Civil War movie documentary today, do you?

I don't think they'd show it.

I certainly do not.

And Shelby Foote, his key interview subject,

would be so politically incorrect.

And how would he

tragic references to Confederate generals like James Longstreet?

So something, I know it was bad.

It's like academia, it's been bad, but in the last 30 years, it's transmogrified into something that's just absolutely intolerant of any other voices.

I know

was the idea of appointing you sort of as the global czar of U.S.

media abroad, was that the idea to bring

balance back by the Trump administration?

I say that because when I actually looked and followed your tenure there, it was pretty, I thought it was pretty non-controversial.

I mean, people come in and they try to get a team they're comfortable with.

And I know that when I was on the

commission, the American Battlefields Commission that oversaw all of the, I thought it was a nonpartisan commission as a presidential appointee.

But when Barack Obama came in, I think I got even before he took office a letter saying I was relieved of my duties.

And I didn't really, I was on the 1776 commission.

That was pretty obvious I'd be relieved of my news.

But why was there so much outcry at the time that you did exactly what the left did, that you got a team that you were comfortable with?

I just looked at your Wikipedia page, and I was noticing that every reference there is either from NPR,

the Daily, Guardian, Washington Post, or New York Times.

What was it that you did that got them so enraged because you did what they did?

Right.

I even, when I thought,

I also thought my job was going to be non-political.

I was appointed to a three-year post.

It's not supposed to correspond to presidential elections.

But Joe Biden, a court

asked me to resign within 45, or the Biden administration, within 45 minutes of the inauguration.

Politico called it the Biden administration's first foreign policy move.

And I also thought what I was doing was not political.

We went in to try to make sure that agency fulfilled its legal mandate.

So your listeners may not know the U.S.

Agency for Global Media houses the five U.S.

international broadcasters, the biggest being the Voice of America, but also Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting, and Cuba broadcasting.

And they were all bundled under this new rubric, Global Media.

They were.

And they're together a very huge media enterprise.

They have a budget of $850 million a year, almost a billion dollars.

They're one of the biggest media entities in the world.

They had been largely controlled by the staff for many decades, and they had simply drifted left.

As Ronald Reagan famously said, in the government, when you take your hands off the wheel, the car drifts left.

And the hand had been off the wheel for decades.

So not only had they drifted left, but they had become corrupt,

you know, self-dealing.

bad practices and bad security practices.

And I came in, I simply wanted these broadcasters to fulfill their legal requirements, which is to be fair and balanced and to reflect the totality of views of the American people and not to advocate for one party or another.

And that

they

and that is the law.

And the attempt to do that met with intense opposition.

I was initially shocked by it.

I couldn't believe, I just saw the other day that

our notorious, infamous,

disgraced Senator Robert Menendez, he was one of the people who, I remember, went after you as if you were doing something that was not transparent or unethical.

That must have been pretty ironic on your part.

It was ironic then, but it's when he was already one vote away from going to jail, one jury vote away from going to jail.

Now it's really ironic.

Yes,

they, as you know, if you have the temerity to want to serve Donald Trump, who is president of the United States, even in non-political job, they pursue you.

And Senator Mendez pursued me, and he encouraged the D.C.

Attorney General to go after my nonprofit.

And on and on, I mean, they use the law to pursue their political enemies, and it's a horrible, horrible process.

And

you may have the law on your side, but you can go bankrupt defending yourself.

In this time when they were doing that,

were you

did you feel it was part of to tie you on court, to drain you financially, and then maybe not to make documentary films?

Yeah, I think that was his purpose.

And I mean, for someone like the D.C.

Attorney General, then it was Carl Racine, the new one now is still doing the same, up to the same tricks.

It's just a badge of honor to go after anyone connected to Trump.

You know, they gain it's a political job.

They gain political points.

They want to destroy your career, eliminate you as an effective maker of films, and also send a less warning to anyone else who wants to serve a Republican president that

you are going to be pursued.

So I would not advise anybody else to take that job if a Republican regains the presidency.

It's simply not worth it.

And that's what they want, isn't it?

To create deterrence that

if you come in.

Yeah, if you're going to be a head of global media, then we're going to do a Michael Pack on you.

Yeah, I mean, they take the media seriously on the left.

They thought of this as their own playground.

And you're right, especially the NPR and the Washington Post, but all other liberal media organizations who have friends in these organizations went after me.

The head of NPR was my predecessor.

The Washington Post is,

you know, used to be owned by the Graham family, and Don Graham is married to the former head of the Voice of America and the current head of the U.S.

Agency for Global Media.

So they had an interest in going after me.

They cared about it.

The Washington Post alone, I was there eight months in office.

They wrote 40 pieces about me, 40, including four editorials and four op-eds, including one by Amanda Bennett.

You know, four editorials.

The last one was Trump, Putin, and me.

I said to my wife, who you know, we're the three most powerful men in the world.

But she did not believe me, Victor.

So I don't know where, I know, just

something similar where I work is, and you probably know know Scott Atlas, but

he was one of the internationally recognized neuroradiologists.

He was an expert on health policy, and he had the rashness to suggest very early on that the meta-analysis of dozens of studies showed that mask wearing and social distancing, and especially an absolute quarantine, would lead

to

effects that could be in theory worse than the virus itself.

And that was the end.

That was all it took.

And then they destroyed his career.

And I would walk with him on the Stanford campus and people would walk the other way or they would sign petitions.

It was personally,

I guess the message maybe, Michael, is to warn all filmmakers, writers, professors, anybody in the arts and humanities,

you take out insurance if you're on the left.

And if you're not, you don't have insurance.

So if you're Joe Biden yesterday and you call an African-American boy, there's no consequences.

And that's true of everything you do.

But if you don't take out leftist insurance and join kind of like the nomenclature, then we're going to go after you.

And that, I guess, to young people,

that can be unfortunately persuasive.

That is really the message.

And I, too, not quite like Scott Atlas, but perhaps at a lower volume, I had lots of people counsel me and cease talking to me.

And we got

death threats, you know, and because, you know, it's really

it's a very shocking thing.

But

I, I, I'm undaunted.

I do not plan to stop making documentaries.

In fact, I am redoubling my efforts, which is where you have to go.

And I guess Scott Atlas is going there too.

What are you doing?

So, right, so

cutting to the quick, what are you, what's your documentary film project right now?

And then what are you and Thomas trying to do for the field in general?

Well, we, I've launched a new company, Palladium Pictures, that will do something similar to what we have been doing, but more of it.

More long-form documentaries, more short films.

And

I feel that

there's a problem.

My article addresses this, and that there's sort of a dearth of people on our side, not only because of this effort to harass and silence them, but because of this vast training system that the left has from film schools on to bring people, to nurture progressive woke talent.

So,

you know, who else?

We need other people making documentaries that could be on PBS.

On our side, we do a good job, or a pretty good job, of preaching to the choir.

People make films and documentaries that, you know, excite, you know,

excite the most passionate.

people on the right.

But we need to reach people in the middle.

And I've always striven to do that and that's why i've been happy to have my films on pbs but we need more people who are capable of doing that of telling stories through film so we have started an incubator to train the next generation of young filmmakers which is run by my son thomas who's here with me

and the the goal is to

well i will let thomas tell the goal but the but but the but the the overarching goal is to bring more people into this film and teach them how to tell stories the left does an actually better job at it than we do.

And we need to learn the techniques.

They're not that hard.

And we need to develop these people and find ways for them to

have a career.

So, Thomas, maybe.

Thomas, let me ask you.

So,

let's say Victor is a filmmaker.

I want to be a filmmaker.

Of course, I don't have that talent.

And I come to you and I hear about you.

And I said, I've got a great idea to make a film

about the political culture maybe of the san joaquin valley from the oklahoma diaspora to caesar chavez what what do you tell me good subject yeah i think victor you probably could make a great film i think yeah like you have a vast amount of knowledge in these things um well before i answer just one quick thing on what we were just saying is you know as you as you alluded to victor there was some attempt to go after our our company manifold productions that made previous documentaries um And we were fortunate, you know, that as a result of it, instead of being, you know, stomped down, we now have this,

you have more capabilities with this company, Palladium Pictures, and we're going to make more stuff.

So you had more after they went after you?

Was that a result that

because you were a nonprofit, you had more people interested in what they were doing and they were they stepped up and financially supported your nonprofit?

Well, we it well, Palladium Pictures is for-profit,

but we have been able to get grants to allied nonprofits.

But it's more like the people who supported my films in the past, they did recognize their merit and they did appreciate that we were fighting back.

And

fighting back.

Look,

they want you not to fight back.

They want you to declare, to slink away.

But if you fight back, it's true you make enemies, but you make new friends.

And some people respect you for doing that.

And because of that, our new company is, at least for the beginning, pretty well funded.

We will need more funds going on, but we have had support

because of that.

And I think also because of the success of the Clarence Thomas film.

Right.

So we're in a fortunate position that way, but what I was going to say about it is that it sort of has...

you know, opened our eyes to the fact that we can't really be alone in this space.

There just needs to be a lot more and there needs to be a lot more happening.

So part of the idea with the incubator is that it's a network effect you know we're committed to doing this every year to taking you know filmmakers that that need the career springboard and you know helping them build out a great short film uh and every year there'll be a couple fellows out of it and it will start to turning that flywheel um and and just create increasing the number

will they will they do you have a will they travel to you or do they stay remotely and then they send you versions of a and they're more short?

These young filmmakers then would submit shorter 10 to 15 minutes.

That's right.

Yeah, we say five to 15 minute films.

They're not coming to us.

These people will be making it on their own.

So we're only looking for producer directors, people that demonstrate in their application that they have some talent and that they have the ability to put together a crew.

Maybe not Victor.

Produce a film.

Maybe not.

Are you going to be a distributor?

Then you are sort of a distributor.

You handle distribution, public relations, advertising, that whole quality.

I think a lot of our listeners are baffling.

I am.

When you make a documentary film,

I guess unless you're Michael Moore of the past, it's hard to

have revenue to cover the cost of production, isn't it?

That's right.

And especially documentary shorts, which is what these are.

It's hard to figure out how to get them out there, which is why we're fortunate to have, you know, in our 40 plus years of existence, built out some distribution channels.

So what we'll do is we'll fully fund the film

for anyone that's accepted in the program, and then we'll executive produce it.

So we'll look at their cuts, you know, they'll get mentorship from Michael Pack.

And then the distribution, we will

use these channels that we've been building and try to get it out there so people see it.

And at the end, we will own the film, be a Palladium Pictures production.

You know, these aren't grants.

I see.

Is there still?

I know I've had some filmmakers ask me to speak at their, but is there still an audience for people to literally or concretely go to a film, to a theater and watch it?

Or is it going to be all downloaded and on internet, TV, all of that stuff?

Do people still go to the document?

Do they ever have a big crowd go to a documentary film?

Well, the Clarence Thomas film was released in theaters first.

I mean, it was a two-hour film, right, right before COVID.

It premiered in January of 2020.

We were in over 110 theaters before COVID came and shut things down.

And I have to say, Dinesh D'Souza regularly gets his films in movie theaters.

And I think you can.

Who knows what the future of movie theaters per se is?

But as Thomas says, these are going to be shorts.

There's some room for shorts in movie theaters, but not so much.

So

these are sort of early efforts by people, not their first, but their first maybe significant shorts.

So eventually

they might be able to make a long-form film for theaters, but not so much.

How many do you envision you would be able to produce and distribute each year?

I think, you know, the goal will be to get to a point where we're making, you know, four or five a year of these.

And it doesn't need to expand too far out of that.

I mean, I think, Victor, to be honest, if someone gave us the funding right now to make a film school,

we couldn't do it because there's not enough conservative film teachers or film students.

So this is step one to try to sort of start building out these institutions, of which the left has a lot of in the

seems like that would be really good because I know that Larry Arnt is a good friend of mine and he at Hillsdale, they've talked about having a film school, and they now have graduate programs as well.

I know that the University of Austin, this new university, has been talking about things like that.

And so I think what you're doing in film is

analogous to what they're doing in academia.

And I think

the same

kind of bewilderment arises, and that is

where I work at Stanford, part of me says it's hopeless, and you write it off.

And then

you go, and I teach at Hillsdale every year during my vacation, or Pepperdine, or another venue.

And then half of you say, well, wait a minute,

that wasn't their university.

My mother went there in 1939.

My aunt went there in 1937.

They both stayed on for seven years and got graduate degrees.

My cousin's sister went there.

My nephew went there.

I went there.

Who says it

belongs to a bunch of students that happened to be there for four years

or a bunch of Silicon Valley grandees that hijacked the Board of Trustees?

And

so

is there any chance that these film schools are that people, there's a concentrated effort where we say, wait a minute,

USC Film School does not belong to just a contemporary group of people that have hijacked it.

And we're not because the people who founded it may have not envisioned what it became.

And is there a chance that with this kind of thing?

I think we're in a kind of a counter-revolution.

I wonder.

So I think we need to have alternate new institutions like you're developing, but I think also we have to have a simultaneously effect not to write off the battlefield and say they won,

they hijacked all the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation.

It's not theirs to take.

I agree with that completely.

We have to do both those things.

We cannot simply write off in the university setting, we cannot write off Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, et cetera, and give it to the left.

That's like declaring defeat.

Much as I support both Hillsdale and the University of Austin.

Now, in the film world,

It's a little different in some ways because it's closer to a free market and we can more easily build our own institutions, find our own producers, get our own distribution.

Film schools are different.

You know, USC, UCLA, NYU, those are the three big ones.

And I think forever we should try to take them back.

But in the meantime, we need these other institutions further along the way.

I mean, they have everything.

As I say, there are 4,000 colleges and universities.

Everyone has a film school.

Every film school is on the left.

They start by getting these people who say they train

self-consciously.

they train activists, people who want to be activists.

So they're graduating hundreds of thousands a year and creaming off the top three or 4% that have talent.

We have no winnowing process, but then these people are encouraged all along the way.

There are training programs for them.

There are funding sources, as you say, Ford and MacArthur and Rockefeller, as well as for-profit companies that are dedicated to progressive values, as well as distribution sources like Amazon run by Jeff Bezos and Netflix with Reed Hastings that are consciously affiliated with the Democratic Party at the very least.

So we need, but unlike with the university, we can start some of these things from scratch pretty quickly.

In the case of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and USC Film School, for that matter, you can't start a new one.

They have established this vast reputation.

You've got to win them back.

Yeah.

Where are you going to be based?

Is it going to be in Southern California or Washington?

Well,

our company is based in Washington, D.C., but for the incubator program, people can do this anywhere they like in the continental United States.

So they will do some site visits, but really they need to be able to produce the film themselves.

That's why this is for write-of-center producer directors that know how to make a film.

And I'll also add to what you were just saying.

In education, there's sort of an instinctual feeling

that people have that education impacts culture.

Not just so people, so the reason we create these counter institutions isn't just for our kids, it's for the children of America.

And there's counter institutions all along the process in education, from high school through college, through graduate school, you know, for teachers and,

you know, alumni and

professors.

There's all sorts of right of center organizations trying to take back the education system.

And in some cases, it works really well.

And the path to be a lawyer, for example, I think because of Faroe Society and others,

you know, these alternative institutions have helped a lot.

But there's this tendency to give up on film and to give up on culture because there's a sense that maybe the right isn't good at it and they're not creative or something.

But we sort of reject that.

We feel like

you're saying

you have correspondence with, allies with in Hollywood, you know, in the commercial film?

Because there are, aren't there stealthy or

conservatives under the

there are a very, very few.

Very few.

But we're in the documentary business.

The documentary business.

Do they ever overlap at all?

Do people go back and forth between the two?

Not very often.

Documentaries and feature films?

Yeah, they do.

I mean, Werner Herzog, a very famous German filmmaker, also is a very famous and skilled documentary filmmaker.

Spike Lee has made both feature films and documentaries.

Ava DuVeray, she's made both feature films and documentaries.

It's not uncommon on the left to go back and forth, but they have a bigger pool to talk.

Would you ever envision a conservative documentary film festival?

Or is there one now?

Well, you know,

there's a libertarian one that's part of Freedom Fest called Anthem, but there are not enough actual, you know,

you know,

you get into sort of a chicken and the egg thing.

You know, you need a lot of content to justify it.

And then there's no content.

You need producers.

The producers need the festivals.

They need the distribution.

You kind of have to create these things with great simultaneity.

And I think that any effort in this area is to be commended.

There are a few little efforts.

I salute all of them.

And even though I have perhaps tried to differentiate our films from those that preach to the choir, I'm in favor of films that preach to the choir.

I'm in favor of more films that are right of center of every sort and every possible.

So I support the Anthem Film Festival, in fact.

When I looked at your,

when I remember your Clarence Thomas, but you were able to get that on PBS, weren't you?

Yeah.

How did you do that?

Well, I've had 15 films on PBS,

going back to the one that you mentioned earlier, Hollywood's Favorite Heavy in 1987.

Look, I mean, like The Voice of America, they too have a legal obligation to reflect the views of the American people.

And once upon a time, they had at least had,

you know, tokenism.

They had a token right-of-center television.

William F.

Buckley's Firing Line, for example.

Yeah, I remember.

C-SPAN has a little bit, has stayed more of all these public entities, they've stayed the closest to their mission statement.

I think C-SPAN has, and they are really to be commended.

But I think, look, conservatives could still get their programming on PBS.

But as Thomas said earlier, it's no longer the only choice.

There are many other ways to get out there, and we will kind of look and explore them.

I mean,

every newspaper magazine also makes videos, and we are in the process of aligning with one major news organization.

But they all need video content, and they particularly need these short videos, not my two-hour Clarence Thomas film.

And the left has done a good job job in that too.

My favorite example of this is the New York Times Op Docs.

The New York Times has these five to 15 minute or sometimes longer documentaries that they have gotten very prestigious documentary filmmakers to make, as well as newcomers.

And they're among the most successful videos on the New York Times website.

So they are very active in doing that.

I mean, another

example on the long form side is the New York Times has the 1619 project, and they've managed to get it into a book.

They have managed to get it a Pulitzer Prize, and now they have a multi-part Netflix series than the 1619 project, very well funded and very well distributed, and now nominated for an Emmy.

We can sort of do the same.

We could push these things forward.

I would like to see Victor, people, even though we're very happy to be doing our incubator, I would like it to be part of a renaissance of these kind of projects.

And it would take conservative donors recognizing this as important,

as important as their willingness to fund, say,

political campaigns or

academics or conferences.

It makes a difference.

I think Peter Schweitzer's Accountability Center, he was the first one really to show

that damning scene of Joe Biden talking about firing Victor

Sheikh.

I remember that?

He had a,

I don't know if it was a film documentary, but and he didn't, I mean, he wasn't that political.

He just said, look, this has never been examined before.

And then that brought attention to it.

Is there a certain project you guys are working on, Michael, now,

aside from the incubator project, a film that you're envisioning you might want to do?

Yeah,

we are working, our long-form documentary, we were working on a documentary on the events in Seattle in the summer of 2020.

Wow.

You no doubt follow that story, Victor, but a lot of people, especially

who are not conservative, sort of missed it.

You know,

the fact is, according to the Washington Post,

there are 12 documentaries coming out about January 6th.

For the left, that's what could be better?

They want to talk about it endlessly.

How many documentaries are coming out about what happened in the entire rest of the country in the summer of 2020?

You know, it just drives me crazy.

I finally get letters from readers who say, Victor, don't talk about it anymore.

You've beat that summer of 2020 because there were 14,000 arrests, $2 billion in damage, 1,500 police officers, maybe 35, 40 killed, arson, looting, and that crazy thing by Camilla Harris right before she was nominated, when she threatened and said, this is not going to stop, nor it should stop.

I just remember all the fact checkers were just terrified.

So they immediately said, well, she didn't mean any of the bad stuff.

She was just meaning that the,

and then that Molly Ball in February 2020, she wrote that incriminating essay in Time magazine where she outlined the entire strategy of winning the 2020 election.

And almost nonchalantly, she said, and then we reached out to people on the street and we were ready to wind down or start up the demonstration.

It really,

in your preliminary research,

it seems to be a lot more coordinated than we ever thought.

It wasn't just an ad hoc, as people suggested.

Well,

the bigger things that you mentioned,

you know, that's right.

I mean,

but I think that you're right, Victor.

This was really a seminal event in American history.

I think it is.

I mean, you know,

it's similar-ish to the

riots in

the 60s.

I had a colleague who got angry at me because I wrote about it, and he said, well, they didn't attack the Capitol.

And I said, hold on.

They tried to burn down a police precinct with people in it.

They attacked a federal courthouse.

They partly burned an iconic Episcopalian church across from the White House.

And then they wanted to storm the White House grounds to such a degree that the Secret Service took Trump underneath into the bunker.

It was almost analogous to the same, it was much more widespread than the January 6th and more byline.

It is

that is really true.

And

needless to say, they needn't even be compared.

This was a huge and highly significant event across the country involving a huge number of people.

So we are focusing in on the story

a tentative title yet?

We don't really, but we're focused on Seattle,

which is, I think, a good case to look at.

Yeah.

So

I stayed in Seattle

after that, during the COVID lockdown.

I went up to speak and I went over to the,

what was it called?

Chaz or Chase.

They changed the name.

Chas and Chop.

Yes, yes.

Chop and Chaz where the guy with the AR-15 sort of declared himself.

a king of his own little domain and they let him do it.

And

a Russian taxi driver drove me up there.

I could not believe it.

He had the whole area just

as, and I remember I was staying there and they were appropriating entire intersections at night to do Brodies with cars and people were shooting guns.

And I got a knock on the hotel window and they said, Mr.

Hansen, there was only about five people in the hotel, but it was overlooking it.

because of COVID, the intersection.

And they asked me to go to the other side of the hotel because they couldn't guarantee guarantee that shots being fired from the bottom of the street might not get.

It was complete chaos.

I hope you can.

It seems like a very ambitious two-hour documentary.

It might end up being longer, but it is sort of ambitious.

And I mean, it's a very complicated, complex story, you know, and it involves, I mean, yeah, it's true that they,

so that

the protests in Seattle were protesting in front of the East Precinct Police Station, and then the police deserted the station.

It wasn't under attack, but they feared it might be.

And they walked away from it and they allowed the protesters to control six square blocks.

Protesters didn't ask for it.

They allowed them to do it.

They allowed them to erect barriers.

The police and the fire would not go into that area.

So if you had a 911 call, you had to get out of the area to be treated.

It was an amazing moment.

And a lot of what happened to Mr.

What?

I forgot his name the the king of shops or whatever he wasn't really the king but he was it true it was raz simone he was hand he so what happened is you know they had this autonomous zone which they were they had to control and they the protesters had to set up rules and they very quickly they had their own medics they had their free food they had they needed security so that people volunteered to be security and would patrol this area with ak-47s Raz Simone among them.

And that happened for three weeks until there were two murders in Chaz.

Remember that.

The second one were two unarmed or two unarmed teenagers driving around in a

car, a stolen car actually.

And you're not supposed to be

in Seattle doing it and in Chaz doing it.

And they were shot and killed.

And no one knows yet who killed them.

So I remember that their father was murdered.

And then they shut it down.

Yeah.

We're going to be right back after a brief message, and then we'll conclude with Michael and Thomas Pack and more on their film projects in a minute.

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And we're back with Michael and Tom Pack.

So when do you think you'll start on this, I guess, summer of 2020?

We're working on that now.

Now.

And

everything is live.

People can go to our website, palladiumpictures.com.

And they can also apply to the incubator, right, Thomas?

Right.

And they can follow along on social media.

We're going to produce a lot of different

stuff, including that film.

That one, I think, is important to note that.

That one will really have a big audience, I think.

I think it will.

But, you know, we're going to tell this story from all sides.

And we're really interested, actually, in what the protesters have to say and being fair to their viewpoint.

So I think that there's that.

I think it's a complex story with a lot of different sides to it.

What do you think their viewpoint was that challenged people?

Well, we're going to have to get to the bottom of it and people are going to have to watch.

But

I think it's varied.

There's actually many different factions in that group

and they have a lot to say.

And I think part of our method with filmmaking is we try to make something that has a universal appeal.

So this is not just going to be for people who are upset about that, but just to show what happened.

to correct the record and do real journalism.

And we're going to try to teach real journalism.

They had kind of spin-offs, didn't they?

There was one in Washington, D.C., where you see that they actually

institutionalize it with the BLM corridor.

There was an attempt at one in Portland as well.

It was an interesting thing.

And there's not, I mean, you know, you're the historian, but I don't think there's a ton of historical precedent for

trying to do self-government within the country.

Yeah, they did it a little bit during the

bounty strike or a bonus strike after World War I.

The veterans were denied some of their promised bonuses for their pensions, and they took over Washington, D.C.

and they created a little individual town.

And then it was very controversial what to do with them.

And Douglas MacArthur got rid of them.

And he used,

he wasn't shy about using inordinate force.

But we've had a few of those things.

And we had that sort of poverty city, Ralph Abernathy, when we were, Michael and I were young, they took over the Washington Mall for a while.

But nothing that was

right was birthed from the beginning through violence like that.

I don't remember anything like that.

People like to mention Paris Commune here, but I think, like,

you know, there's a lot to it.

We're going to try to show people how to tell stories like this.

I mean, the compelling thing about that is it's a show don't tell.

It's not about saying our viewpoint or anything, it's about something that the mainstream media is ignoring and not telling the story.

And so,

which, you know, I mean, unfortunate for America, but fortunate for us in documentary film that so many great stories are not being told, which is why we need more filmmakers.

Just out of curiosity, how many

traditionalist, conservative, libertarian documentary filmmakers that

have

had success with films are there in the United States?

20, 30?

I mean, I think we're seeing increasingly more coming out.

There's a lot more.

There's a bit of a shake-up in the in the in film right now.

And, you know, streaming services are having trouble and right-wing, you know, streaming services are kind of thriving.

There's

major conservative films coming out, like What is a Woman and that type of thing.

But there's not a lot doing like what we do, which is trying to talk to the mainstream.

Very few.

I don't know.

Well, that's right.

I mean, and you're right, Thomas, to emphasize that we want all sides to speak in every one of our stories, including the Chaz Chop one.

But yeah, of ones that are

highly skilled documentary producers at the level that we are at, there are very, very few.

That's right.

We think there's a growing talent pool of people who have been maybe doing video for conservative institutions like Heritage or maybe even Hoover

and that could make a documentary and have developed skills.

So that we think there's a possible talent pool that we can develop and nurture.

But the ones that have so far succeeded are few.

And the efforts to do it, though, are not that great.

I mean,

we need to encourage people to understand what it means to tell stories.

You are really great at this, Victor, and all of your great works on

classical battles and the classical world.

You know,

you retell the story in the course of making your points.

And we need to develop that, as Thomas is saying, among filmmakers.

Now there are a few,

but there can be more.

And

I think it's really important.

I think on this podcast, we have this recurring topic that comes up.

And I say that from people who write in and want to discuss it.

And it's

in the conservative movement, or the traditionalist movement, as I use that term as well, there's almost a monastery of the mind where people have been so discouraged.

And we see it with these great exoduses and diasporas of people moving out to Tennessee, from California or Idaho.

And you talk to them, and I talk to them a lot out here in the San Joaquin Valley, and they just have a,

you say, have you been to a movie?

I don't go to theaters.

I'm sorry.

How about, who's the anchor person?

I don't watch any network news.

I haven't seen CNN in 20 years.

How about the Grammys?

I haven't, I don't even know the Grammys, the Emmys, the Tony's, the Oscars.

I won't watch it.

Do you watch

the Lakers?

I won't turn on the Los Angeles Lakers.

I do not watch football.

And they've completely dropped out of the culture.

And it's really reflected.

I was very curious about that.

And I wrote a couple of columns.

When you look at the audience for the Oscars, or you look at the NBA finals now versus 30 years ago, it's about 10% of its television audience.

So, a lot of people on our side, whether it's homeschooling or moving to rural areas or dropping out of popular culture, they've ceded because they feel it's so unfair, or

their values are ridiculed or stereotyped.

They've just seated it.

And I really think we need something in what you guys are doing to bring them back into the arena.

Because if we don't, I mean, one of the problems in California, as you know, is a Californian that when you directed the Claremont Institute, is when 600,000 of your top citizens leave, as they have the last 18 months, then you wonder why PGE doesn't work or Southern California Edison doesn't work or you can't get anybody at the government

franchise board to give you the right tech.

We're just draining, it's a brain drain in California.

And I wish people would stay and keep up the fight, at least, because the left is just, as you said before, corporate boardroom and K-12 and professional sports, entertainment, academia, foundations.

It's just amazing how they've, without a majority of popular support on any of these issues of the times, they've been able to project and enact an agenda without popular support because of their calculated aggrandizement of these institutions, one of which is, as you know,

is the film industry, what you've talked about today.

It's an amazing transformation of America, and we have to transform it back.

We have to.

And I agree with you.

You can't cede these institutions or whole states like California.

America is a great country with great principles and traditions, and

we have to fight for it and win it back.

To retreat from the battle is a tremendous mistake.

We made this point at the beginning of the

true now this way, too.

I think it is.

I got a call not too long ago, a conversation from a pretty important guy in Silicon Valley.

He said, Why don't you write about this?

I said, What?

And he said, We're into the third year of woke admissions at Stanford, and they're not woke admissions, they're repertory admissions.

So they're racial quotas, and they threw out the SAT and they expect me to hire people on previous fumes of meritocracy.

But if I look at the type of people who have come out of Stanford the last two or three years,

I would much rather hire a Georgia Tech electrical engineer.

And that university and all of these universities

are losing their cachet that they've developed over a century, and they can lose it very quickly when the employer sees that there are no standards.

And you see it everywhere.

I had another professor who said to me, if you're grading at Stanford a a couple of the first year classes, you either inflate your grading standards or you reduce your workload or you become a target if you keep standards up of systematic discrimination and you're going to be under the gaze of the DEI new czar.

So we're in a period of transformation, it seems to me, that the left has enacted this Jacobin revolution and it's really starting to take its toll on

institutions.

And I think there's going to be a counter push.

I'm glad you guys are.

I think film is a good place to start, and documentaries are a good place within film.

It's very hard to transform the university back.

It's been a conservative project, at least since Alan Bloom's book in the 80s, and maybe since God and Man at Yale.

But I think film is a relatively free market.

These other institutions are hard to win over, and the government is hard to change.

We can make these films.

We can tell these stories.

Let me ask you a final question of our interview today.

So Republicans come in and they're counter-revolution successful, and they take the Senate, they have the House, and they take the White House, and they said, you know,

Michael Pack did such a great job as a director of a global agency, a global, director of U.S.

agency of global media, and we want him back.

Would you do it?

I would be pretty reluctant to do it again.

I have been advising people who are preparing to do it another time.

That's a great idea.

You could have this sort of adjunct program where you could lend your expertise for people who could go into government.

And that's a very important thing to do, don't you think?

It's a matter really of holding those agencies to their legal mandate.

You know, we found a virtual Biden ad that they were running on one of the services.

They have to really, you know, at the very,

at least they want to be like CNN or MSNBC, who they think of as the peak of journalism.

But those are the products of for-profit companies.

This is a government agency.

It's funded by the American people at the tune of almost a billion a year.

It has an obligation to not be partisan and to promote core American ideas and values around the world and present

our worldview contrary to China's and Iran's and

Russia's.

But it is not doing that, and it is very, very hard to change it.

I am not super optimistic that we'll be able to do it.

The bureaucracy was so resistant.

It's so dug in.

I feel the next president has a very, very tough job, tougher than Thomas and my job in the documentary film world.

Do you think you'll ever expand on your real clear

recent essay and maybe make it a semi-autobiographical autobiographical account of what you saw there and what needs to be changed.

I consider it.

I might.

I know Roger Kimball at Encounter Books probably would be very interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

That would be a wonderful public service to write what you saw and how it could be changed.

Right.

Well, I mean, I think this whole, you know, doing the,

you know, it's easy to be a downer about changing things through the government, but I think

in the film world, at least, you know, as you're saying, Victor, these people that aren't watching anything, it's not like they don't want to watch something.

And we want to watch things.

That's absolutely right.

And we saw it with Sound of Freedom and in the music world, you know, we're seeing these country songs that

the project bursts through.

It really does.

Like there's a, you know, there's a free market in film.

And because the conservative story is the pro-America story, there's a lot of room there to tell stories that are especially compelling.

So, for us with this program, you know, we are offering full funding, mentorship for Michael Pack, and help with distribution for filmmakers that are already producer directors.

And we feel like that's that's step one.

You know, right?

And listeners should apply, or if they know anyone that might be a fit for this, they should pass it along because

I think

it's going to start moving that flywheel.

I think that you're right.

It's a wonderful time to launch this project because you can see

indications of it, whether in the weirdest places, the pushback against Disney or Target or the Los Angeles Dodgers or Bud Light or Jason Aldeen's Don't Try That in a Small Town or Oliver Anthony, which I thought was a really great song.

Richmond North of Richmond.

And it's a you can see it as you say about the films about child trafficking, it's there and

it needs to be sort of like an eggshell.

If everybody taps in their own manner and their own station constantly, at some point, this whole left-wing charade is going to crack and explode.

I think it's a modest project compared to what you were talking about with film school and film festivals, but I see all of it coming together.

And we're already seeing something breaking down on the left because people are not as interested in movies that are all about grievance studies.

And people are really interested.

They're not.

And you saw with Oliver Anthony.

He filmed his videos on his cell phone.

And he was the first person to be number one on all, almost all the charts.

And you could have a filmmaker who could do a 30-minute, who knows, but if he hit the right chord in the right fashion, it could easily go viral in the same technological landscape.

Anyway, thank you for coming on.

And when

you have,

I would really like to

see the first cut of your Seattle film.

And when you do, I hope you can come back on.

Absolutely.

Thank you, everybody.

We had Thomas and Michael Pack discussing their new film project, which is an incubator.

It's not an internship.

It's a way of distributing and marketing and helping out young documentary filmmakers, as well as Michael's illustrious career is continuing with an ongoing project about that design.

I don't want to, the summer of 2020 and what we saw.

Thank you very much.