Persistence of Vision

So many people are jumping on the green bandwagon -- and so few really know their facts. Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, has made an environmentalist film that gets it exactly wrong. Alicia Colon of the New York Sun explains:

Earlier this year, I met a cofounder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, and found him to be the kind of environmentalist the world needs. In response to a new documentary co-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, "The 11th Hour," Mr. Moore wrote an essay for the Vancouver Sun under the headline "An Inconvenient Fact." In it, Mr. Moore trashes the anti-forestry scare tactics of the film promoted by Mr. DiCaprio and the founder of Forest Ethics, Tzeporah Berman, and writes: "As a lifelong environmentalist, I say trees can solve many of the world's sustainability challenges. Forestry is the most sustainable of all the primary industries that provide us with energy and materials. Rather than cutting fewer trees and using less wood, DiCaprio and Berman ought to promote the growth of more trees and the use of more wood. Trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Through photosynthesis, they absorb CO2 , from the atmosphere and store it in their wood, which is nearly 50% carbon by weight."

Of course, Mr. Moore is a bona fide scientist Â-- the only one associated with Greenpeace during his years there. Mr. DiCaprio is hardly an expert on climatology. Likewise, Vice President Gore is a politician who earned a D in natural science at Harvard, according to the Washington Post, yet he is regarded as the arbiter on global warming. Who gets the most attention from the public?

The bottom line? We need more viewpoints developed and expressed in our public sphere, and we particularly need movies that give voice to the imperatives of freedom rather than the default Hollywood position of social control:

This is not about being politically incorrect but about love for a free society. I urge those of like mind to visit the MPI Web site, www.thempi.org, to learn about the grant program for filmmakers and its mission, or simply to donate. Mr. Halvorssen is a prime example of how the foreign-born often readily recognize the gift of freedom that so many of us take for granted. When I asked him if he had a motto to live by, he answered: "I am in love with the American experiment and how it can liberate individuals who wish to take advantage of their talents so that they can create and produce. Most other places in the world are not like that. ... America is simply magnificent."

As MPI prepares to release Jared Lapidus' short film The Libel Tourist, its centerpiece, author Rachel Ehrenfeld, is speaking out against the manner in which the English courts are enabling terror financiers to suppress scholarly exposure of their actions. On September 16, at 1 PM PDT, Ehrenfeld will hold a global conference call to discuss her book, Funding Evil; the book Cambridge University Press recently agreed to suppress, Alms for Jihad; and her own legal battle to secure her free speech rights in the face of litigious efforts to silence her. Sponsored by Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Los Angeles, the call will be the world's first International Global Book Club; it will last one hour and there will be a Q&A. Email doris @ cjhsla.org to get a call-in number.

MPI exists to ensure that our understanding of freedom is as nuanced and rounded as possible. And a big piece of this is doing what we can to guarantee that our debates about controversial issues really are debates, and that they reflect a robust variety of viewpoints. That's why, for example, projects such as Stuart Browning's FreeMarketCure.com are so important -- his short films on health care provide a crucial, freely available counterpoint to the mass-marketed vision of single-payer health care forwarded by Michael Moore in SiCKO. Moore's movie is profoundly one-sided and even factually challenged in its portrayals of U.S. health care and of the contrasting systems in Canada, Cuba, and elsewhere. But you can't tell that from the film itself--which is why opposing cinematic viewpoints are crucial.

To their very great credit, the folks at Notre Dame get it: they recently held a screening of SiCKO that was followed by Browning's short films--and so made it possible for audience members to take both views in, and to make up their own minds about the issue. It doesn't get any better--or more even-handed--than that.

MPI executive director Rob Pfaltzgraff is profiled in the October issue of Reason, which calls MPI the "AV department for the vast libertarian conspiracy."

Excerpts:

Q: Is Michael Moore your nemesis?

A:: We like to diversify--if you'll pardon that overused word--the debate, to bring other points of view and messages to counter the very loud voices of certain people. Michael Moore is able to generate a lot of attention for his issues in films and for his side of those issues. Sicko just makes a single-payer system look like the answer to all of the problems in the U.S. We like to present a counter to those opinions in general, but we are also responding directly to Sicko in a series of short films at FreeMarketCure.com. They show the other side of the issue and what it's like to have health care rationed in Canada.

[...]

Q: Mining companies funded your latest film, Mine Your Own Business, a documentary about the impact of environmentalism on Third World communities. Doesn't that undermine its effectiveness?

A: To be honest, when we were thinking about getting involved with the film that was my initial reaction too: "Well, this will just be seen as propaganda from mining companies." But at the very beginning the filmmakers clearly state who funded it. There's no mystery, there's nothing hidden about that in the film. Their deal was that they would not proceed unless they were given complete editorial control. The filmmakers are very independent people, and they do not take direction well. Knowing them, they would have stopped the project if they were forced to present a specific opinion from the mining company. Because it's very upfront, it's not really a problem.

The film has taken on a life of its own. It has opened a lot of people's eyes to the fact that what environmentalism does in Third World countries is to keep people in poverty. That isn't to say that doing work to protect the environment isn't important. But there is a balance between protecting the environment and allowing economic development, and that is often overlooked.

Ken Burns has made a career out of creating gripping cinematic portraits of American history. Whether he is making movies about baseball, Mark Twain, or the Civil War, his work is meticulous, accessible, intelligent, engaging, and often enormously moving. Though his work on the past focusses heavily on still photographs, he manages to make history move and breathe with his use of sound, his gorgeous landscape photography, his dynamic manner of filming images, and his use of eloquent talking heads -- the most charismatic of which, most will agree, is The Civil War's endlessly watchable southern historian, Shelby Foote.

This Sunday, Burns' most recent project premieres on PBS. A fifteen-hour, seven-part documentary about World War II, The War promises to be another vital addition to Burns' growing body of cinematic Americana. Read about it, and learn more about Burns, who describes his latest work as an "epic poem," here.

When Jon Krakauer wrote Into the Wild, the carefully reconstructed story of how a recent college graduate journeyed into the wilds of Alaska and did not live to tell the tale, he made it clear that the story of Chris McCandless intrigued him because of how tightly and compellingly hooked up it was to broader currents of American history. Noting that McCandless carried Thoreau, Jack London, and other great figures in the American literature of freedom with him into the bush, Krakauer convincingly showed that McCandless' compulsion to strip his life to the bare essentials by owning nothing, living nowhere, confronting nature, and living off the land was not (or not only) an idiosyncratic quirk of a privileged, well-educated young man, but was also a conscious attempt to live out the romantic philosophy of freedom developed in such works as Walden and Call of the Wild.

Krakauer was able to make such an argument in part because his own history bears some striking resemblances to McCandless.' Though he lived to write about it, he, too, took untenable risks in the Alaskan wild; as a young mountaineer with more guts than wisdom, he more than once risked his life on climbs that he probably should not have undertaken. In the tale of Chris McCandless, Krakauer recovers pieces of his own youthful romance with the special kind of freedom that one experiences when one is alone in the harshest of natural environments; this freedom, he explains in the book, is distinctly American in its philosophical and geographical dimensions, and has as much to do with the comfy New England transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century as it does with the rugged, death-defying quest for new frontiers that animated the American push to the west.

Now Into the Wild is a film. The brainchild of Sean Penn, the movie is a labor of love that, according to Penn, attempts to convey what it means to live a full, free life: "What moved me about the story was I felt this kid had furnished himself with a very full life in a short time,” Penn told the New York Times. “He lived all the chapters, in a way that very few people do.

Indoctrinate U premieres in Washington, D.C., on the 28th. And gearing up for that is NRO's Deroy Murdock, who calls the film "fascinating and jarring" and describes director Evan Coyne Maloney as the "un-Michael Moore," and who has this to say: "Political correctness has sickened many American universities. The good news is that filmmakers like Evan Coyne Maloney and brave, conservative and libertarian campus activists are dragging this ailment into the open where it should dissipate beneath the Sun’s disinfecting rays."

Buy tickets for Indoctrinate U's Washington debut here.

The Singing Revolution has been a major part of this year's Kansas International Film Festival, wowing audiences, and earning strong praise from reviewer Alan Scherstuhl, who calls it "the festival's most compelling narrative ... and also one of the world's."

Writing in Pepperdine University's student newspaper The Graphic, perspectives editor Brittany Yearout welcomes the impending release of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney's hardhitting new film about censorship and ideological partisanship on American campuses.

Among the film's many topics, Maloney explores the issue of speech codes, controversial policies that aim to "protect" students from offence by restricting what can be said, displayed, written, read, and performed on campus. And speech codes are certainly an issue at Yearout's school. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which tracks speech codes in its comprehensive Spotlight database, has awarded Pepperdine a condemnatory "red light" because its policies so severely curtail student expression. Yearout explains:

More than 90 percent of colleges, both public and private, abide by restrictive speech codes and only about 9 percent of schools in the United States fully allow free speech, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education (FIRE), an organization that defends and sustains students' rights at America's colleges and universities.

"We surveyed over 330 schools and found that an overwhelming majority of them explicitly prohibit speech that, outside the borders of campus, is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution," Emily Guidry, the attorney and Media Director for FIRE, wrote in an e-mail.

Fire rated Pepperdine University as a "red light," meaning it has at least one policy that clearly and directly restricts freedom of speech. Although I can't speak for every student, and based on most of my classes I don't think that this is a huge problem at Pepperdine, however, there have been some cases.

Maloney said the question is: Does Pepperdine University make it clear to students during the admissions process as to what particular ideology or traditions are upheld. If the school is honest, then nothing is wrong, because the prospective student effectively knows what type of environment in which they will be learning.

"Part of the problem is that in the admissions process all the glossy brochures talk about the pursuit of intellectual enrichment and being able to engage in intellectual discourse," Maloney said. "But then the students get to school and find out they can't actually do that."

As a private Christian university, Pepperdine is not obliged to honor the First Amendment, as are all state schools. But by openly stating its beliefs "That truth, having nothing to fear from investigation, should be pursued relentlessly in every discipline" and "That freedom, whether spiritual, intellectual, or economic, is indivisible," the university creates a contractual agreement to respect its students' individual and academic freedoms, an agreement it then promptly violates with a speech code prohibiting the "exhibition, possession, or distribution of material or representations deemed to be obscene or contrary to the moral standards and/or mission of the University, including, but not limited to, pornography." Lest you think Pepperdine is joking, it recently disciplined Sigma Nu fraternity brothers for wearing T-shirts bearing the punning slogan "Get Nu'de in Malibu." When a university goes so far as to ban puns on the word "nude," it would seem that freedom is very divisible indeed.

More than 360 years ago, John Milton, that most profoundly Christian of English poets, argued in his polemical Areopagitica against the 1643 Licensing Order, a parliamentary ordinance that effectively gave the Oxford University chancellor the authority to censor any book deemed "contrary to ... the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England" -- wording that uncannily echoes Pepperdine's twenty-first century speech code. But Milton understood that Christian values are only truly Christian when freely chosen and vigorously defended in open debate, and not when protected through a regime of censorship. "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties," he thus wrote -- and his rallying cry for individual and intellectual freedom still has extraordinary resonance today.

When Indoctrinate U premieres in Washington, D.C., on September 28th, we hope it will inspire more students to investigate whether their schools are genuinely committed to freedom -- or just to good marketing soundbites. Visit Indoctrinate U's official website for more information about the film, and to request a screening in your area.

As the world recovers from the spectacle of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University--the centerpiece of which was Lee Bollinger's compensatory and probably historic tongue-lashing of said statesman--it's worth recalling that the event is not an isolated one and that Columbia is not alone. In recent years, Columbia has been a center of controversy regarding its failure to prevent controversial Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist from being shouted down and attacked, for its refusal to allow ROTC to return to campus because the faculty dislikes the military, for its problematically politicized Middle East Studies department, and for being home to Nicholas DeGenova, the professor who, as war broke out in Iraq in 2003, famously called for "a million Magadishus." Likewise, Columbia is just a typical American campus, where free speech struggles to stay afloat and where ideology dictates far too many decisions that should be made from a content neutral stance.

It's also worth remembering that there's a movie now that tells the story of the politicized campus, Evan Coyne Maloney's Indoctrinate U, and that this film premieres this Friday in Washington, D.C., at the American Film Renaissance Film Festival.

In a recent article, Maloney describes how he was treated when he tried to speak with college administrators about the ideological double standards on their campuses, with special emphasis on how dangerous his search for the truth was deemed at schools such as Bucknell. There, as at other schools, Maloney was threatened with arrest for the dire crime of coming on campus and asking people questions. Columbia was one of them. Which just goes to show that by Columbia's calculations, Maloney is more dangerous than Ahmadinejad.

Indoctrinate U director and star was interviewed on CNN's Glenn Beck Show last night. Here's the transcript:

Now we go to Columbia University. Despite the president`s tough words, inviting a dictator-terrorist to speak at your campus, probably not the best idea. Yeah, we want a debate. We cherish dialogue and free speech. But like all of our freedoms, there is a line. Would Fidel Castro be welcome on your campus? Don`t answer that. The answer`s probably yes. Kim Jong-Il, Osama bin Laden, you`d probably invite all of them, but you should really reconsider.

You have the right to give enemies of our country a platform to speak, but you have a responsibility not to give them a platform for propaganda. Unfortunately, the "Real Story" is our colleges have lost touch with not only that concept, but it seems like with the simple concept of common sense.

In a few weeks, Hofstra Law School, which is here in New York, right, hosting a legal ethics conference. I don`t think they`re going to appreciate the irony of that title. It`s one of the names of the speakers that are coming to speak at this thing really caught my eye, Lynne Stewart.

If you were here in New York and, you know, you remember 9/11, that name might ring a bell. She was the civil rights attorney who was disbarred and sentenced to over two years in prison for smuggling messages from her scumbag terrorist client out of jail and then delivering them to an Egyptian terror group. She`s been disbarred, disgraced, convicted felon, former attorney speaking at a university ethics conference. How exactly does that work? And people wonder why, you know, I`m freaked out about having my kids go off to college. Oh, no reason.

Evan Maloney, director of "Indoctrinate U," a documentary that will be released on Friday. Evan, I`ve got to tell you, I read about your documentary here a couple of weeks ago. I can`t wait to see it. Let`s just talk about this. What the hell happened to our colleges?

EVAN COYNE MALONEY, "INDOCTRINATE U.": Well, this has been something that`s been going on for about 30 years now. This is not a new development. And, you know, one of the things that struck me as very odd about Ahmadinejad coming up to Columbia is that Lee Bollinger kept talking about how this enhanced free speech.

But, you know, that`s a pretty specious argument. It`s not as though Ahmadinejad has no platform for speech, for one. And, for two, Columbia is a place that just last year ran a member of the Minutemen off the stage, actually physically assaulted him on stage and, just last week, renounced another invitation. They had invited him back this year, and just last week they yanked the invitation. And yet they`re claiming that they worship free speech up at Columbia. I don`t know. I`m not buying it.

BECK: Yes, it`s bull crap. You know it, and I know it. America knows it. Lynne Stewart, here she is, she`s a woman who was helping the blind sheik. She`s passing notes to known terrorists. And she`s speaking at this lawyers ethics conference.

Let me ask you this. Do you think there`s a chance that, when Compean and Ramos get out of jail, that Hofstra University would ask them to join them for a conference?

MALONEY: It certainly seems like it. You know, I mean, maybe the only reason they have Lynne Stewart is that they`re trying to illustrate ethics by showing you what not to do. Maybe this is an ironic title for their conference. I don`t know.

BECK: It seems like we`re living in an upside-down world. Tell me, it`s not true that there are now kind of underground reading lists that go along with some classes?

MALONEY: Yeah, this is something I found in researching "Indoctrinate U." A number of students told me that they would never get assigned Adam Smith, they would never get assigned Friedrich Hayek, they would never get assigned Milton Friedman, but they would read Karl Marx in four different classes.

So a lot of these students got together and started researching the types of views that they don`t hear in college. And so a lot of these students have formed groups -- there are actually some groups online -- where they recommend reading lists to one another because they know they`re not getting a balanced education from their institution.

BECK: I have to tell you, when I went to school, I was 30 years old, and I remember my professors saying, "You`re reading such and such, aren`t you?" And I said, "Yes, sir." And he said, "Don`t read that. Don`t read that." And he told me not to read it. He said, "You`ve got to read this." So I went and I read that, and I came back the next week, and I asked him another question. He said, "Are you still reading that book?" And I said, "Yeah, I read the one you told me to, but I`m also reading the one you don`t want me to." He said, "Why would you do that?" And I said, "Because I wanted to know why you disagree with him."

I mean, they don`t really understand how thought works and how you`re supposed to research and not shape people`s thoughts but show them different ways to find information. Thank you very much, Evan. We`ll look for your movie, "Indoctrinate U."

The Manhattan Institute's Anthony Paletta writes about Indoctrinate U in the Washington Examiner, noting that the UC Regents' recent decision to disinvite a scheduled dinner with former Harvard president Lawrence Summers reeks of the manner in which administrators today tend to cave to angry and politicized faculty constituencies. Paletta sees the film as a necessary antidote to the administrative spinelessness that has allowed campuses to become ideological fiefdoms controlled by agenda-driven faculty, observing that Indoctrinate U "eloquently demonstrates" that "what students and professors most urgently require is the assurance of a fair playing field — and only even-handed administrations can provide one."

Meanwhile, Human Rights Foundation program director Celia Farber blogs about the film at Dean's World. "Maloney directed the runaway underground smash hit documentary Indoctrinate U--a devastating expose of what is inadequately called 'political correctness' on college campuses," Farber writes. "I saw the film some months ago, and thought it was brilliant, shocking, infuriating, and above all else, a stupendous piece of investigative reportage." Lest persnickety readers think she's just mouthing platitudes, Farber clarifies: "Full disclosure: I am the Program Director at Human Rights Foundation, whose founder, Thor Halvorssen, co-founded MPI (Moving Picture Institute) which put out Indoctrinate U. ... However, I was on record as LOVING Indoctrinate U even before that was the case."