“When Led Zeppelin had a concert you never knew where to buy tickets. You had to know somebody who knows somebody… that’s kind of the way we wanted to build it. Slowly, underground, grassroots, patient….”
Thus explained Mike Cernovich at the front of the stage just before Hoaxed began. The energy in the room was electric and palpable, I heard someone whisper, with full earnestness, that this was the best place to be in LA tonight.
Cernovich had disclosed the location, the Harmony Gold Theatre in West Hollywood, via a private email list, only 2 hours before the event was set to begin. This was done, Cernovich explained to the guests in attendance, to avoid negative press and angry mobs of protestors, who surely would have stormed the gates of the Harmony Gold. There were about 250 guests in attendance, including right-leaning Twitter personalities such as Laura Loomer and Lucian Wintrich. Cernovich’s wife, Shauna, pregnant with their second daughter, was also in attendance. For this reason, he explained via email, embedded security was going to be “extra high.”
As a lifelong liberal who voted for Bernie and Hillary and graduated from an Ivy League Institution, I may be the last person you would expect to write a review in favor of the latest documentary by Mike Cernovich, who, after all, is described by Wikipedia as: “an American alt-right social media personality, writer, and conspiracy theorist.”
This seeming paradox can only be untangled by watching Hoaxed itself. Cernovich has been made, seemingly, persona-non-grata by the media not because he is what they accuse him of, but because he is a very dangerous and outspoken opponent of an enormous industry, the mainstream corporate media. This industry is responsible for the deaths, literally, of millions of people via their willful complicity in leading the US Government into countless wars, most notably the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
I will make a bold claim here: Hoaxed will go down as the most subversive documentary, perhaps film, of the current decade. Cernovich explained in the Q&A afterwards, “I didn’t want to make a film that was just red meat for MAGA Trump supporters.” He clarified that he wanted to make something entirely non-partisan, and valuable to viewers on either the right or the left. While it will be shunned by the mainstream, Hoaxed has the potential impact of some of Michael Moore’s early work, such as Roger and Me.
For those resistant to seeing this film due to Cernovich’s support of Trump (which I get), I would actually argue that you need to see this documentary the most, and with an open mind. In a roundabout way, the media itself is one of the most direct culprit’s of Trump’s election. All press is good press, and the media’s constant attacks on Trump have only seemed to bolster him. Despite something in the vicinity of 90% negative news coverage, Trump’s approval ratings are still higher than Obama’s at about the same point in their presidencies. In other words, even if you don’t want a Trump Presidency in 2020, the mainstream media is not your friend.
And with that, enough of my ramblings, here is my review of the documentary itself:
The movie begins with close-up hi-fi noir images of a man staring at a computer screen, a frame of a single pupil dilating in response. Smoking a cigarette, loading an assault rifle. It was an allusion to Edgar Maddison Welch, a 29-year-old man who shot up a pizza parlor in D.C. over his false belief that said parlor possessed a dungeon filled with child sex slaves. This event was emphatically blamed on Cernovich by the mainstream media, something which, to this day, they have never been able to prove.
This leads into an introduction to Cernovich himself, which sets the tone of the film as a thorough investigation into the concept of “Fake News.” The central thesis of the film (from the author’s perspective) is that the mainstream media lies repeatedly, deliberately, and willfully to impose a narrative that is beneficial only to them, their profits, and the corporations and industries that they are in a symbiotic relationship with — such as the arms industry. These media corporations do not care that many of their stories are false, or that they serve to divide an already fractured and hurting nation. They do not care that their lies may lead to wars that claim the lives of thousands or millions of innocent civilians. Through myriad interviews and pieces of contextual background, Hoaxed goes on to prove, beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt, that this phenomenon exists, and that it has serious and lasting consequences.
Cernovich first interviews Cassie Jaye, former darling of Planned Parenthood and other left-leaning women’s groups, who was the victim of a vicious smear campaign because she dared to question feminist orthodoxy by exploring the issue of Men’s Rights in her film The Red Pill. Jaye’s impassioned and heartfelt description of these attacks and the effect they had on her. She said it felt as though she were being reviled for the last 4 years of her life, simply because the establishment disagreed with the viewpoint she espoused through her film.
Next, Cernovich travels to Austin Texas to visit radio host Alex Jones, who needs no introduction at this point. A hilarious montage of Alex Jones well, being Alex Jones, precedes his retelling of how NBC host Megyn Kelly, through manipulation and dishonesty, attempted to completely smear Jones. “I want America to see you as a father” she says, before going on to produce a purely negative piece on him. Jones grins impishly as he reveals he had secretly recorded Kelly, fully aware of her true intentions.
The ever rueful Gavin McInnes swills a frothy Heineken while comically bemoaning the life of a Trump supporter living in New York City. Co-Founder of Vice Magazine, McInnes has since become a proud far-right provocateur, perhaps most notably for his founding of the MAGA hat donning Proud Boys. McInnes’ buoyant humor provides some much needed comic relief for what is necessarily relatively heavy subject matter.
Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, appears several times throughout the film, interjecting incredibly pithy and poignant observations on America’s political and psychological landscape. Memorably, he remarks that we think we’re good at seeing into the soul of another person, when in reality we’re all “incredibly bad” at it.
Perhaps the most powerful exchange in the film occurs between Cernovich and Black Lives Matter leader Hawk Newsome — who go back and forth until they both realize the ways in which they have been played by the media to keep the country divided. Newsome was shocked to near speechlessness when shown the story of Sudanese-born Kidega Samson, who shot up a church in Tennessee filled entirely by White church-goers. Newsome was stunned that he had never seen this story on the media he consumed nor on the feeds of his 4,000 Facebook friends. Newsome, you may remember from a viral video, spoke on behalf of Black Lives Matter at a Trump rally. Hearing him describe how the fear dissipated and God gave through him sent chills not just through my body, I felt, but through those of the entire audience.
The film ends with Stefan Molyneaux narrating his version of the Allegory of the Cave, which comes from 5th Century BC Plato’s The Republic. For those of you not familiar with the Allegory of the Cave — don’t bother to look it up — just wait for Molyneaux’s rendition of it, which is utterly powerful and illuminating.
All in all, The film weaves in and out of several narratives, while never losing cohesiveness. The videography, carried out by directors Scooter Downey and Jon Du Toit, is cutting edge and visually stunning. And appearances toward the end by Professor Jordan Peterson the said story by Molyneaux left me moved and inspired in a way I have not felt for some time.
Whether you love or loathe Trump, you will not regret spending 2 hours of your life to view Hoaxed.
