We despise the Tech and VC guys not because they use to be Democrats, that's life, people don't always agree. They collaborated with Marxists who tried ruining our lives. I and everyone else in my world sees these guys as enemies. Some have asked me to explain this animosity. Sure.
Business is hard (Reading The Hard Things About Hard Things actually helped me get through some tough times with an e-commerce shop), and I've done a lot of real business things, that's the only reason I didn't go bankrupt. Even so, we had to try starting and running businesses under a completely different set of rules. Rigged ones designed to harm us.
Trump staffers who left the administration couldn't get hired at Microsoft or Facebook. Oracle was the only company, but they couldn't hire everyone. You had top level NSC guys driving Uber and borrowing against their 401K's.
The belief by Tech and VC's was the Trump was done, MAGA people are untouchable, and a whole class of people were totally un-personed.
I woke up every day wondering if I'd be banned from social media. Medium banned me, and Evan Williams, Medium's founder, posted an article saying that anyone who voted from Trump should be completely destroyed. (Not sure if his Tweet is still up, but he said this explicitly. That he and everyone else had a moral duty to bankrupt anyone who voted for Trump.)
YouTube buried my channel. You couldn't even find it by searching my name. Instead you saw every hate video on me when you tried finding my channel. Facebook demonized me. Twitter had me walking on eggshells.
How do you run online businesses these days when you're banned from channels of commerce? Now some would say, "You don't have a right to those platforms." Fine. And you don't right a right to our friendship or allyship. If Luigi or AOC comes for you, why should I care? I mean that sincerely. Why should I care?
In addition to social, there were payment processing concerns. One company had to use a processor that charged a vig and held it over us that he could cancel it anytime. Not because we were doing high risk business. But because of my politics.
One afternoon I saw my movie, which had become the top streaming film on Amazon across all categories, had been banned from Amazon. (Anyone who has seen it can tell you that it would not violate any term of service, this was pure malice.) So let's suss this out.
How can I engage in the business of making films when I can't guarantee to investors that I'll even be allowed to have my films on the duopoly of Amazon and Apple? Raising money for films is hard enough. That comes with the territory. Yet I wouldn't even be allowed to compete with everyone else in a free market due to censorship.
I couldn't in good conscience raise capital for films, so I took a break after Hoaxed, worked on some other businesses to boost cash flow, and now I'm self-funding two other films. Even so, this limits timelines as I'm not made of money. In a normal world I'd have easily raised cash for these films and we'd be in post-production by now.
I went from having a breakthrough film, tons of momentum, to having to completely put this on hold due to the woke running tech and VC.
Ironically, this ended up working out OK for me as I used my brain to build businesses. I had never applied my talents to making money because wealth was never something I valued. I grew up poor, and simply having cash flow and being able to pay bills made - and still does - me feel "successful."
By the way, making a film like Hoaxed is WAY harder than the circular deal flow the Tech and VC guys do using money borrowed in an almost 0 interest rate environment.
Conservative media outlets like The Federalist faced the same business pressures as everyone else, and then there were banned from platforms like Google Advertising and Facebook. Everyone went through something like I did, and often much worse.
So when I see guys like Garry Tan crying about a wealth tax, not only do I not care, I find it funny. You can call this spiteful. You can say it's malice. None of that moralizing and woke scolding works on me. Nobody ever helped me. I read enough Nietzsche in college to know what slave morality looks like.
How can this be fixed? I don't know, but this isn't on me to fix. I didn't make this mess. Those who collaborated with Marxists did.
And of course no one owes anyone anything. That goes two ways. Don't cry about Luigi or Liz Warren or wealth taxes to us. You probably wouldn't like or candid answers.
But if these guys are concerned with wealth taxes and how the political winds are shifting, they should probably find a way to undo the great damage they did. Both reputationally (how we all see them, which generally is that they are worms or as CS Lewis, "men without chests") and pragmatically. In my view, sites like The Federalist are owed restitution. (Nobody asked me to say this and I'm not authorized to speak on their or anyone else's behalf. These are MY words only.)
I took a lot of hits, I'll always be pissed off, but it was only me, not a company, so I was able to absorb them. Others couldn't. Also, we know how Zuck and the rest of Tech and VC gave to far left wing NGO's.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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