Jenny Beth takes over the Iowa studio of best-selling author, filmmaker, and BlazeTV host Steve Deace in this episode to talk to him about his new film "Nefarious." Steve's first feature-film is a powerful thriller that is not for the faint of heart and will make anyone with a conscience really think about their faith. "Nefarious" debuts in theaters across America on Friday, April 14, 2023.
Steve Deace is a best-selling author, a filmmaker, and a radio personality for BlazeTV. His film Nefarious - a thriller that you won't want to miss - hits theaters nationwide on April 14, 2023. In this episode (part 1 of 2) Jenny Beth takes over Steve's Iowa studio to interview him about the new film. Steve goes into detail about what inspired the film and what you can expect to experience when you go see it. Steve also talks about his latest book, Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting COVID Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again. Steve and Jenny Beth also touch briefly on some of the ridiculous polices that were forced upon the country during the COVID pandemic.
Part 2 will launch on Friday, April 14th, where Steve and Jenny Beth dive much deeper into some of the biggest challenges we face as a nation.
You can find more information about Nefarious at www.whoisnefarious.com and you can purchase tickets at www.nefarioustickets.com.
You can catch Steve's show at www.stevedeace.com
You can buy Steve's book at www.amazon.com
Twitter: @SteveDeaceShow @JennyBethM
John F. Kennedy (00:02):
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
President Ronald Reagan (00:11):
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
President Donald J. Trump (00:17):
Tonight. We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:26):
Congress, president Obama, can you hear us now?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:35):
I, for one, am bound and determined to keep this republic, and I know you are too. I will never give up. We can never give up.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:47):
Patriots, stand with us and fight for freedom. Fight for our constitution. Fight with us for the rights endowed by our Creator: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Fight for a better future. We're going to keep fighting. We will not stop until we get to the bottom of this.
Narrator (01:15):
The battle for America's soul rages on. A wide open southern border, crippling national debt, the constant onslaught of wokeism and creeping socialism, and the weaponization of government agencies against the people. Keeping our republics on the line, and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she is most proud of is mom to her boy-girl twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (02:01):
Today's episode is very special. I took over the studio of bestselling author, Blaze TV host, and now filmmaker Steve Deace. We switched up the microphones in his studio so that I could ask him the questions because Steve has a new film coming to theaters called Nefarious. It's quite the thriller, and I think you're going to really like the film, and I think you're really going to enjoy the conversation I had with Steve. Thank you very much to Steve Deace and Blaze TV for allowing us to take over your studio. So Steve, thank you so much for joining the podcast today.
Steve Deace (02:36):
You bet.
Jenny Beth Martin (02:37):
You have a new movie coming out. Let's talk about that before we get into to other things.
Steve Deace (02:43):
I guess, if you want me to promote my movie, I guess...
Jenny Beth Martin (02:46):
Yeah, please. Twist your arm.
Steve Deace (02:47):
Yes. I feel very pressured, all right, but I will comply. No, the first trip I ever took to Washington DC was to promote the first wide release book I ever wrote, Rules for Patriots, and I was in the shower at a hotel right off the Capitol Complex, getting ready to go do some publicity, and this voice pops into the back of my head in the shower. It says, this book is dedicated to all the useful idiots out there, for you prove to be the most useful of them all, Lord... Or those of you that didn't even know you were being used this whole time, you proved to be the most useful of them all, Lord Nefarious. And I thought, that's weird. And I get back to my room and I start playing around with it on my keyboard, and I'm on my laptop and I'm like, this is like a Screwtape thing, but next level, where now we're not talking about the takedown of individuals spiritually, but an entire culture.
(03:41):
And so from that little mustard seed, I created this character called Lord Nefarious, who was tasked by the Devil with destroying the United States of America over a century ago. And to prove to his master the Devil that his plan has been successful, he puts it all in writing, names names, connect dots, and the fact that we won't turn back from it, that we will ignore it, we'll think it's conspiracy theory, etc, that's how he'll prove to his master the Devil that it was successful. And I published this book, A Nefarious Plot, in 2016, and our show was very nascent, which is a nice way of saying small. And so it only sold about five or 6,000 copies, which is, only 5% of books a year will sell that. But still nothing compared to what is typical in our line of work. And I thought that was a cool thing I came up with, and I'll be done with it and move on.
(04:33):
And five months later I get a call out of the blue from a guy named Glenn Beck, whom I had never met before. And he says, hey man, a mutual friend of ours gave me your book to read and it blew my mind, and I want to have you on my show to talk about it. And I'm like, well, Glen, I don't want your 10 million listeners to know about this book I wrote, so I'm going to pass. I was on the very next day for an hour, and driving around Burbank, California that morning was a guy named Chris Jones, and he was with a new company called Believe Entertainment, and him and his two co-directors, Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman, all three of them worked for Pure Flix, and Cary and Chuck had written the script for God's Not Dead, and Chris had helped produce for Pure Flix, and they wanted to do maybe a little bit grittier material.
(05:23):
And so they formed their own company, and their first movie was going to be the adaptation of Abby Johnson's memoir, Unplanned. And so they were wondering, though, what would be our next movie? And they always wanted to do a movie about spiritual warfare. And so Chris hears me talking about this book and he gets to the office and goes on Amazon and gets the Kindle right away, reads it in two hours straight. Cary and Chuck get into the office, he says, hey, I know we're just starting with Unplanned, but I think I have our next movie. And he just opened the book, blindly opened it to a page, and said, now just listen, I'm just going to read this to you. And they were like, wow, that character could absolutely make for a great movie.
(05:58):
And they all read the book, then, that afternoon. That night, my wife is at a women's retreat. I'm down in the man cave. I just put the kids to bed and I'm playing Madden Football to unwind. And I get this alert on my phone, hey, we want to buy the movie rights to your book. And I thought it was like a Nigerian prince scam or something and deleted the email. And this little voice in the back of my head says, you might want to double check that. I did some research. These guys were real, and I got to meet them, we negotiated for about a month or so, and that's how we got the movie deal. And then we waited for Unplanned to get finished, and we were going to start right after that. But then COVID hit. So we had to wait, and we started story boarding the movie in June of 2020 as things began to reopen.
(06:47):
And I have to tell you though, Jenny Beth, the next two plus years, and I grew up as a kid around my grandmother a lot, I did not grow up in a Christian home and she was into the occult and horror stuff. And so I'm very familiar with movies like The Omen and The Exorcist. I watched all this stuff growing up and I know what tends to happen with movies where you are trying to realistically portray the demonic realm, and all kinds of tragedies and stuff happen. And so you know that that may happen, but to actually have lived through, over the last couple of years, of how difficult it was to get this movie made. And it's almost... So many times it felt like this is not going to happen. It's not going to get made. They're going to cancel us or something's going to occur.
(07:27):
To get to this point now that this movie's going to be in hundreds of theaters across the country on April the 14th, just absolutely blows my mind. I cannot wait. I'm very proud of the film that they made. Just as Unplanned was a step up in maturity from God's Not Dead, you've seen it. This movie is a clear step up in maturity from even Unplanned, and Sean Patrick Flannery as our demon Nefarious is... Is Nicholson in The Shining good? That's how good he is in this movie. And I'm very proud, and I think we made a movie that will look and sound like what your skeptical or unbelieving friends and family members are entertained by. So you can drag them in there without them knowing what's going to actually happen. But trust me, and you can speak to this too, having seen it, the worldview of the film, it will say what a lot of our people want a movie to say, and this movie will say it just in a different way and in a different setting than we've tried saying it in the past.
Jenny Beth Martin (08:28):
It definitely does that. One of the things that I found interesting is just how the protagonist is removed mentally from the evil that he commits. Mostly it's because society and culture has made those things acceptable and okay, and it highlights it in a very, very interesting way.
Steve Deace (08:57):
It's the most unique demonic possession film I think has ever been made, because we didn't put the entity one-on-one with a member of the clergy, or we didn't put the entity one-on-one with an unsuspecting family, like in Poltergeist or in, more recently, some of the found footage movies like Paranormal Activity. In this case, we put a secular left wing psychiatrist in there, because unless your name's Jordan Peterson, there aren't any other kinds of those. We thought it would be more impactful if, what if someone who is of this worldview, and thinks they have everything figured out, they're the enlightened one in every room, they have unlocked all of the cosmic secrets of the universe, and they are the people that we've all been waiting to rule us. What if we put someone like that in that room, one-on-one with this entity, where he learns what the true origins of his worldview really are, and what his reaction would be to learn everything I thought is completely wrong, all my premises, all my presuppositions are completely wrong.
(10:05):
And how would that devastate someone to come to grips with that, face to face? And so we chose a unique way of demonstrating it. And along the way, we've gotten notes from Pastor Greg Locke who's an evangelical, who does deliverance ministry, Father Carlos Martins, who's a Catholic, who hosts the Exorcist Files podcast that's very popular right now. And both of them have told us, this is the most accurate portrayal of what true demonic influence and activity in someone's life really looks like.
(10:39):
Not the climbing up the walls, all that stuff is for show. The real stuff where they mentally and emotionally try to wreck you, try to put you in a Kobayashi Maru where there are no good choices to make, so you might as well just align with us because you're trapped. And I think what'll be particularly effective is for people to take their unbelieving friends and family members, show them the trailer, they're going to be like, oh, that looks dope, that looks cool. But we are going to set the tone for them so that after the movie, now, you can go and have the kinds of conversations with them that you've always wanted to have, after we've slapped them around a little bit.
Jenny Beth Martin (11:16):
Yeah, it's really good. As far as psychiatrists go, I do know Dr. Mark McDonald, and he would be very upset...
Steve Deace (11:22):
I know Mark, too, yes.
Jenny Beth Martin (11:22):
...if I put him in a group of left wing psychiatrists, so there are some...
Steve Deace (11:22):
I've had Mark on this show as well, and don't tell him I said that, because he'll like, you forgot about me. Yeah, yeah, I hear you.
Jenny Beth Martin (11:32):
There's some good ones, so I'll make sure. So the film, now I've read a few of your non-fiction books, but I have not read the novels that go in Nefarious. How close does the film track to the novels? You've done two on this, correct?
Steve Deace (11:48):
On Nefarious, yeah. So there's A Nefarious Plot, and then there's A Nefarious Carol, which is a sequel to the first book, and I wrote to be a sequel to this movie. If this movie is successful enough that we can sucker, I'm sorry, convince people to give us the money to make again, that's the movie we will make. See the original book, like the Screwtape Letters, it's 230 page polemic. It is basically just a demon ranting at you for 230 pages. It is difficult to translate that into a film. And so what's funny, if not providential, when I wrote the book, like Lewis's Screwtape Letters, the only part that he wrote in his own voice was the preface. And so same thing with me. I wrote the preface in my own voice, and I literally put in there, I have no intention of telling you how I came upon this demonic manuscript. Who knows, maybe one day if we ever sell the movie rights to it, that's how we'll translate this book to a film.
(12:42):
Well, when we all sat down in Burbank, California in June of 2020 trying to figure out how we're going to translate this into a movie, we just opened the book up, started with the preface, read that part like, that's what we're going to do. Where did the book come from? What's the origin of the manuscript? And so you know from seeing the movie, without spoiling it, it takes you up to the publication of the book. And so you see where the true origins of the book come from. So the book more inspired the movie than the movie is an adaptation of the book. But there are numerous lines of dialogue from the book right directly in the movie.
Jenny Beth Martin (13:19):
So everyone should watch the film on April 14th and buy the books.
Steve Deace (13:24):
And it won't contradict or counteract. If anything, the book would maybe add to. You're like, oh, okay, that's why he said that, because he brings this up in the book as well.
Jenny Beth Martin (13:34):
So now I've got to go back and read the book before April 14th, so I can watch it in theaters
Steve Deace (13:38):
There you go. And A Nefarious Carol is about actually the Devil, and the Devil, now that he is convinced that Nefarious's planned to take down America has been successful, he decides to make America the last step of his dominionist plan for the globe. And so he is looking for a bride, a woman, sort of a dark Mary, that will give him an antichrist. But for the ritual to work, he cannot rape her, assault her, lie to her. He has to earnestly, of her own free will, she has to earnestly give herself to him. So one night he comes upon a young woman who ran away from a dysfunctional Christian home into the arms of her live-in boyfriend, who is an abusive drug dealer. She finally gets the gumption to leave him one night in the middle of the night, but she doesn't have much money, doesn't know what to do.
(14:30):
And so she's a long way from home and she gets a motel room in a seedy area one night, just to sleep and figure out her next step. And it is in this room that the Devil comes to her and begins the wooing process. And it's called A Nefarious Carol, because her favorite book when she was growing up was Dickens's A Christmas Carol. And her grandfather would read it to her, and that's some of her fondest memories. And so he uses that pattern. He goes into her subconscious and shows her what happened, what went wrong in her past. He goes into her subconscious to talk about what's going wrong right now in her present. And then if she agrees, he'll take her to the third phase where now she gets to go into his subconscious and see what his vision is for the future if she joins with him and gives him a son. And at the end of the book, she has to make a decision about whether to join with him or not.
Jenny Beth Martin (15:19):
That sounds pretty serious.
Steve Deace (15:20):
It is. It's written like a Christmas Carol. I wrote it as a novella so you could read it on one plane ride. It only has five chapters. And I wrote this one to be made into a movie. It's very dialogue heavy, because a lot of it is their conversation back and forth. And unlike A Nefarious Plot where it's not a conversation, it's a 200 plus page diatribe.
Jenny Beth Martin (15:45):
And in the film itself, it is dialogue heavy. The film is so much dialogue, and I found... So I've done documentaries. I have never done a fictional movie, so I enjoyed watching it. And I can't imagine all of the work that would go into that because I've never done that. I know it would be a lot. One of the things that I found interesting though is just how much the characters had to pour into... The actors had to pour themselves into the character to really make that come alive on the screen, because the setting was in... A lot of it was very limited. There are more portions of it, but a lot takes place in one specific area. And I just thought the actors did a really fabulous job with that.
Steve Deace (16:42):
To put this all in perspective, I mentioned earlier how difficult of a challenge it was to get this movie made. We started filming the movie in Oklahoma. We used a lot of the same crew that had worked in Oklahoma on Unplanned. And so they knew going in Oklahoma's a Right to Work state, was going to be a non-union production, for the crew, anyway. We worked with SAG to get actors, but it was a non-union production for the crew. We would pay you at or above Union scale, but we don't want to give the communist union a cut of your money, so we're just going to give it all to you.
Jenny Beth Martin (17:14):
Probably you avoided some COVID restrictions...
Steve Deace (17:17):
Yep, and COVID restrictions, too.
Jenny Beth Martin (17:19):
...from the union as well.
Steve Deace (17:19):
And so a lot of these were the same people that knew our directors. It looked like it was going to be kosher. We filmed the first few days at an active prison, Granite Prison in Oklahoma. We're the first movie that's ever filmed at am active prison in Oklahoma history. And we start moving to the interior scenes where we're inside the prison. We had built massive sound stages in downtown Oklahoma City where The Thunder played. And it was those first days that, out of nowhere, our crew goes on strike, and the union said, hey, now that Oklahoma has really upped its film production credit, we're not going to set the president that you can come to Oklahoma and make non-union films. You're going to pay us our money. So here we're in a Right to Work state facing really what amounts to almost an illegal strike, and now we're not sure we can make the movie.
(18:03):
And I think they picked on us because they probably looked at our budget and said, ah, they're making this for a few million dollars. They can't stand up to us. They didn't know who the executive producer of the film was, and that's me. And they didn't know that I had the ability to, within one phone call, get to people like the Governor of Oklahoma, and wage war, pushing back on them in ways that maybe they did not anticipate. So this thing blew up. It gets in the media. I go down there and the Oklahoma government, the Governor, the Attorney General, all went to war on our behalf.
Jenny Beth Martin (18:33):
That's great.
Steve Deace (18:34):
But we were always under a threat that they would find some left wing federal judge to put an injunction on the movie, which we'd probably beat, but that would take how long and how much money, and then we're out, because we can't wait for three to six months while it's adjudicated. So we had to do so many scenes, Jenny Beth, in one take. When our assembly cut was done for the movie, and that's the first version of the film where every version of every scene you shot is all assembled into one movie for the first time, a lot of times those are 6, 7, 8 hours. Ours was barely two hours for an hour and 40 minute film.
(19:10):
And so we thought the performances were great as we're watching them live, but you don't really know. And it wasn't until we got into the editing process, we're like, wow, we really lucked out. Sean and Jordan, Jordan Belfi, who plays the psychiatrist, and Sean Patrick Flannery, who plays Nefarious, that a lot of people probably remember him from Boondock Saints and movies like that. They were at times doing seven... I saw it with my own eyes, 7, 8, 9, 10 pages of dialogue in one take. And it was so good. We were supposed to cut and interrupt. We're like, just keep it going. And because we don't know at any point in time do they find a federal judge in somewhere that says, hey, that's an injunction against that film because you didn't let them unionize. And so we were under the gun and we were hoping that the footage we were collecting was really good, but we really weren't sure. And it really wasn't until we started getting into the editing bay and putting together what we had that we were like, wow, this is actually better than what we had hoped for.
Jenny Beth Martin (20:08):
That's really good. And how long did it take you to film it?
Steve Deace (20:11):
We started filming the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend at Granite State Prison. And then we finished December, the first round of principal photography, December 23rd. Took a three-week break for Christmas, and then we finished it in Texas by the end of January. But in between there, we had both of our directors, who are both in their 60s, got COVID pneumonia. And you know, you went into the hospital for COVID, it was a flip of the coin you were ever coming out. So we were worried about that. They both actually got out and survived, but those were more delays that we had to pay for and everything else. This thing was... I'll tell your audience one story that I think summarizes what making this movie was like, because you mentioned your background with documentaries. So the way the Oklahoma Film Credit Works is, everything you do in Oklahoma is eligible for the credit.
(21:04):
So we're trying to think of can we do literally everything in Oklahoma? Can we set up a casting office there? And we found an editor in Oklahoma, very accomplished documentary editor. So we thought, all right, let's hire him, because while he's editing the movie, the clock is ticking on the film credit. And it is different doing a feature film than a documentary. And he just couldn't get his arms around the material. And we were concerned, maybe the movie's just not that good. And so I'm sitting where you are doing my show one day, and I get an email out of the blue from a guy named Brian Jeremiah Smith, and he says, hey man, you don't know me, big fan of your podcast. Blew my mind listening to you all for the last few months, raving about our show on Netflix, Midnight Mass, and how much he loved it.
(21:50):
I was the editor for that show, and Netflix was about to can me because I'm the only editor here that didn't take the jab. And then the court just threw out the Biden Jab mandate, and so now I'm on indefinite paid leave while they figure out what to do with me. I just got demoted. I was going to be the editor for their big production of Fall of the House of Usher. And so they demoted me off of that. I've got free time. If you need an editor, here's my resume. And so I'm looking at all this during my commercial break, and I look at his resume, and he worked on Get Out and all psychological thriller horror stuff just like our movie. And so I don't know yet what's going on with this other editor. I don't know yet. So right before we come back to break, I'm like, that's an impressive resume.
(22:30):
I write him back, thank you. And I send it off to my directors saying, it's probably too late, but just in case you need somebody, here you go. Well, they're like, well, it's funny you should mention this, because we need somebody. We're in trouble. We need someone who can master our material. They ended up meeting with Brian. We couldn't afford him, but the good news is we didn't have to. He was on paid leave from Netflix. So Netflix paid him to edit our movie. We paid him what we could, and it was enough that he could move his family finally out of California to Georgia where you live. And they bought a ranch there, and so they just had their second baby. But yeah, Netflix paid us this guy, who's a top A-list editor, in order to edit our film because he was on paid leave.
(23:11):
And what he did, and Cary and Chuck will tell you, our writers and directors, he's the Mariano Rivera, if you get the sports analogy, he's the closer. We were ahead in the game, but we were only up by one run, and it was the bottom of the ninth, and they had the bases loaded and nobody out. We couldn't even give up a sack fly. We had to strike out the side. And he came in and he did that, and he saved our movie, and a lot of the little touches and flourishes, he took even things that we shot as test footage and turned them into shots to break up the monotony of the guys in the room. He just did a phenomenal job. He was the frosting to the cake, for sure.
Jenny Beth Martin (23:46):
That's really good. That's amazing. I'm so glad he listened to your show and that he reached out.
Steve Deace (23:52):
We didn't know who the guy was. And there were a lot of stories like that in the making of this movie.
Jenny Beth Martin (23:59):
I think that that is really fascinating. COVID, it's really upended... It's just upended our world. The world as we knew it in January of 2020 or December of 2019, it no longer exists. And the fact that that happened and you are able to have that man edit it, is one of the benefits of COVID. But I'm sure that he has gone through pure misery standing for what he believes. Now you wrote The Nefarious Plot and then Nefarious Carol, you wrote Nefarious Carol since 2020, right?
Steve Deace (24:44):
In 2020. That was publish in 2020.
Jenny Beth Martin (24:46):
And then you have four other books since then as well. I've read a couple of them, but not all of them.
Steve Deace (24:51):
I bore easily, apparently. And why not just write a book? I'm bored. The last one doesn't count. When you write a book with Daniel Horowitz, it's basically like, all right man, I'm just going to get out of your way.
Jenny Beth Martin (25:02):
Yeah, Daniel's amazing.
Steve Deace (25:02):
And I'll just add rhetorical flourishes, because if you left it to Daniel, it would just be a systematic theology book. And maybe it needs a little bit more of a theatrical open and close. And so I added those rhetorical flourishes. But he did the nuts and bolts of Rise of the Fourth Reich. But it's really the interviews we do with those who suffered, where we let them speak for themselves, and whistleblowers as well. From the Department of Defense to the healthcare sector, we knew that it was likely people were friends with Congressman Chip Roy, for example, that would likely be in the majority after this last election.
(25:49):
And so what if we wrote a book and timed it specifically for when a new Congress would come in to say, hey, here's the lists, here's the witnesses, here's who you should be calling, here's who you should be listening to. These people know where the bodies are literally buried. And you know from experience, even with good Republicans, most of the time you have to hold their hand all the way through the process.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:11):
You really do.
Steve Deace (26:12):
Yes. And so that was our intent, was to make this as simple as possible as if to say, we already did the work for you. You guys just got to start subpoenaing people now.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:22):
And you have to hold their hand. I want to be fair to them. You have to hold their hand, not because they're incapable, but they have just so much coming, so much coming at them. We care about one set of issues, and they have a constituency that cares about every set of issues. So being able to hold their hand and say, here, we vetted these people. Here are things you can ask. You can trust their expertise. They have a story to tell that is an example for what has happened in other places around the country. It's very important to do that.
Steve Deace (26:53):
Not to mention, a lot of times the good ones are under, well, almost all the time, constant pressure to not be the good ones anymore. And so the ones that you only vote for because they're not communists, they get wide ranges of latitude. The ones you vote for because they're one of us, they're never allowed to make any mistakes. They have to be tight on lockdown constantly. Or the first time they color outside the lines, first time they do something that's like, well, we're going to get called crazy tonight on a bunch of shows that hate us anyway, the leadership tends to say, all right, we can't do that. And so they almost have to be twice as good at this as the people that you only vote for because they're the lesser of two evils, basically.
Jenny Beth Martin (27:40):
Michelle Bachman told me once that it's death by a thousand cuts, that they just keep coming at you. It's not one strike, but it's just over and over and over. When we think about what happened with COVID, that's something that I wanted to hit on with you because you have The Fourth Reich, and then you have Do What You Believe, which I think COVID influences that book a lot. And then of course, the Faucian Bargain. What do you think are some of the most important lessons that you've learned over the last three years?
Steve Deace (28:25):
I think we have to be able to create... If I could go back, and I'm sure you were, and lots of us, were trying to leverage and influence every relationship within the Trump White House we could to say, you have to stop. You're going to lose. We're not going to recover from this. You have to get out from this narrative. And the mistake that I think... And they were blindsided by this. DeSantis, whom I'm a huge fan of, had the benefit of learning from their mistakes, but give him credit for doing that, because a lot of politicians won't even do that. And the number one mistake that the Trump White House made is it never created its own alternative ecosystem for information. By the time they brought Scott Atlas in after peak shows like mine discovered him and started giving him a platform, we started having him on in April and May, they didn't bring him in until August.
(29:24):
The narrative was almost completely lost. If you go back and read Scott Atlas's book... And then what happens is also egos get involved. Well, I don't want to change course because it just would show that I was wrong. And so you can read Scott Atlas's book, and it's almost as if he is writing a 300-page plea of how I tried to save the Trump presidency, and they would not listen to me, because they just could never create their own alternative ecosystem. So what did DeSantis do? Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, Martin Kulldorff, the person who designed the VAERS system for CDC, for example. He created counter experts. When he had his own Fauci, fired the guy. Brought Joe Ladapo from the Frontline Doctors to be his minister of health, basically.
(30:09):
So he created an alternative ecosystem of information to compete with the demonic narrative, rather than trying to just to run head forth into that narrative and figure out how I'm going to play within it. And I think moving forward, we have to be masters of this, and it's not going to be just on COVID. We're going to have to create our own ecosystem of information comprehensively on virtually every issue, because one of the things we've done on the right, my whole career, Jenny Beth, is we have been the counter to their narrative. We actually have to create now a counter narrative. Because sooner or later, if you're just countering their narrative, you become the Hegelian dialectic, the thesis and antithesis merged together, and you're both saying the same thing, or talking about the same thing, albeit from different perspectives. But it's still their message.
Jenny Beth Martin (31:00):
And usually with their framing, like, illegal immigrants were undocumented...
Steve Deace (31:07):
Correct.
Jenny Beth Martin (31:07):
...undocumented, and now they're migrants rather than illegal immigrants.
Steve Deace (31:11):
Correct. The one issue where I think we are learning this and doing it well is the trans issue. There are still some of our outlets that use terms like trans women and trans men and things like that, but by and large, I've seen more pushback on the narrative and the talking points of the other side on this issue from its dawn than I've ever seen on a singular issue on the right in my career.
Jenny Beth Martin (31:35):
That is partly because you have no idea who they're even talking about. They'll say, this member of Congress's son, it's really a daughter, it's a girl, she was born a girl, did all of these things, and then they refer to the child as a completely opposite sex. And you're sitting there reading this and you're like, you're lying to me. You're lying to me. Stop lying to me. It's such a lie. And they want us to just believe it.
Steve Deace (32:03):
I think of people, a good friend of mine is Julie Kelly at American Greatness. She might be the best, the best much raker the right has ever produced. She was part of our early group of COVID dissenters. But she basically took on the January 6th narrative almost entirely on her own. And the reporting she did on that has now all been vindicated over the last couple of years. And so what did she do? She found facts kept for a counter narrative, not just a counter to their narrative. Here's why they're biased, here's why they're hypocritical, here's why they're wrong.
(32:37):
We're at a point now that there really isn't a great unwashed percentage of people in the middle who don't know what they think and will be moved because you have more integrity and are more honest about your beliefs than the other side. We're in a full-fledged cold civil war now, and so I think of the great prophet George Patton. You don't win a war by dying for your cause, but making the other son of a gun die for his. And in this battle, information are people. That's the casualty. We have to kill their information. We have to kill their false information. We have to kill it. Not counter it, we have to kill it and present an alternative flow of information, a whole different ecosystem of information, as opposed to what they're offering the public.
Jenny Beth Martin (33:21):
So one thing you may not know about me, because we were so severely censored as this happened, our organization in the first 15 days, we gave a lot of grace, because we knew we could not stop the shutdown in the first 15 days. But prior to that, I was warning everyone around me going, we're about to lock down our country like China has locked down. And they didn't even know what was happening in China, and they didn't believe that we were going to do this, and they thought it was crazy. Then we locked down and they saw I wasn't. But after the first 15 days, I was done, because I knew... I went through personal bankruptcy. I lost my house, I lost my cars, I lost everything back in 2007 and eight and nine. It's part of what propelled me to be involved with the Tea Party movement, and I never want that to happen to anyone else.
(34:17):
And I knew if you were stopping cash flow into businesses across the country, that other people were going to suffer the way that I had, and it wouldn't be right away, and we still, I think, we'll see problems from that for eight to 10 years from now. That it will take that long before the people are just like, I should not have done something financially, and I've been doing everything I can to stop the bleeding since the lockdowns in 2020. So when Trump said, we're going to be open by Easter, I'm like, that is right, we are going to be open by Easter. And I started reaching out to doctors and helped, our organization started America's Frontline Doctors, and I interviewed a lot of doctors in April of 2020. I think we interviewed probably 50 or 60 doctors doing interviews like this. We edited them down and made them really short and tried to make them pithy and put them out there. And then we went and did the event in front of the Supreme Court that was a press conference that ultimately wound up being censored within less than 24 hours.
Steve Deace (35:26):
I remember.
Jenny Beth Martin (35:26):
And Dr. Ladapo was there, and Dr. Mark McDonald, and Simone Gold and Stella Emmanuel, and other doctors. And the censorship was unreal. Just absolutely unlike anything I'd ever experienced. And I was targeted by the IRS, and I just was like, oh, we're never going to get out of this. This is no longer the country that it was a few months ago, and I've never stopped doing everything that I can to try to get the country open. After that event, Dr. Peter McCullough reached out to me and I wound up helping set up his listserv, because he was just emailing people, like a group of 200 people, with elected officials or I don't even know, but government email addresses from the European Union. I was like, we had to fix this. You can't just be CCing all of them. We've got to fix it.
(36:21):
So I helped with that, and I've helped continue to connect these doctors and work to get schools reopened. I wound up speaking at President Trump's round table for reopening schools in July of 2020, and there are parts of the country that got it right, mostly, and other parts of the country where I just went... I flew through Minneapolis yesterday, and there's so many masks still inside of that airport. It's just like living in a different world, especially being in Georgia and Florida so much recently, and I worry that you are exactly right. The narrative that we are fed from the mainstream media and from social media, and apparently the government censors, not that the government does, but the people who are the censors within our government who are deeming what we're allowed to say and not allowed to say, completely unconstitutional.
(37:18):
We have to continue to build the narrative and to tell no, these are actually the facts. When I interviewed all those doctors in April of 2020, I had no fear after that whatsoever of getting COVID, or anyone that I love getting COVID. I knew it was deadly, so I didn't downplay that. But I also knew there were treatments available, and there were ways to treat it, and I learned that the way AIDs was treated was different than what I had thought my whole life.
(37:52):
Wow. The discussion with Steve is so amazing. We're going to have to cut this into two different episodes. So we're going to finish the discussion, which goes into culture and politics and news of the day, in the next episode of the Jenny Beth Show. Before we get to that, please make sure you check out Nefarious. You can do that by going to whoisnefarious.com. Again, that's whoisnefarious.com. And be sure to check out the second half in the next episode of the Jenny Beth Show.
Narrator (38:23):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mooneyhan, and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots Action. For more information, visit teapartypatriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (38:45):
If you enjoyed this episode and want to stop freedom thieves from turning our country into a communist nightmare, be sure to subscribe to the podcast.