Of course there is going to be a movie about January 6 and the knuckleheads who went into the Capitol building. The film, which is not out yet, is called J6 and is written by Billy Ray, who directed Showtime’s 2020 miniseries The Comey Rule, a love letter to FBI clown James Comey. “The goal was to do a ground-level view of a momentous day,” Ray told Indiwire about the project. “It’s about protesters who became rioters and cops who became defenders of democracy. Someone else can tell the story of the chaos at the White House on that day. I wanted to stay in the trenches.”

Hollywood is expert at making conservatives look wild-eyed, ignorant and dangerous — while also ignoring or whitewashing the left’s brutal history of violence. The movie industry and the Stasi who run it are so good at this that they leave would-be conservative rivals in the dust. Conservatives should try and change that, putting some money into film rather than foundations and politics. There are some great ideas already out there.

When Democrats Attack

There will be several films about January 6, but none about James Hodgkinson, a former campaign volunteer for socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who showed up at Republicans’ practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game and shot congressman Steve Scalise (R-LA), a congressional staffer, a lobbyist, and two Capitol Police officers. (Hodgkinson had tried to wipe out the entire GOP leadership.)

Expect no movie about Floyd Lee Corkins, who in August 2012 entered the offices of the Family Research Council in downtown Washington and shot a security guard. Corkins pled guilty in February 2013 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to charges of committing an act of terrorism while armed, assault with intent to kill while armed, and interstate transportation of a firearm and ammunition. Corkins was angry that the Family Research Council is against same-sex marriage. “They endorse Chick-fil-A and also Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage, so I was going to use that as a statement,” prosecutors quoted Corkins as telling investigators.

There won’t a film depicting the acts of Nicholas Roske, who came to Washington in June to attempt to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. If Hollywood even did do such a project, Roske would be portrayed as an innocent kid who got lost one night in Washington, D.C. He’d be played by Chris Evans, who also played Captain America. His parents would be played by Alec Baldwin and Mia Farrow.

Even while Hollywood makes films about pro-Trump protestors taking selfies, they censor left’s own violent past. In 2002 we were treated to The Chicago 7. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame, the movie dramatizes the violent riots that occurred in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention. The activists in the film are likable people who just want peace. There is no mention of Mao, the Viet Cong, the victims of the Black Panthers, or the bombings of the Weather Underground and other left-wing and anarchist groups.

The Left Comes Ready to Fight

In a 2008 article in City Journal, Stream contributor Daniel J. Flynn notes that protestors gathered in Chicago in 1968 were there to cause violence. “Far from political innocents clubbed into reality by sadistic policemen,” Flynn observes, “the activists who squared off with cops were generally movement veterans who went to Chicago looking for a fight.”

Flynn notes that as Jeff Jones and Mike Spiegel of New Left Notes wrote six months before the convention, “to envision non-violent demonstrations at the Convention is to indulge in pleasant fantasying” and that “by 1968, the movement had moved from mere protest to open confrontation. Leaving for Chicago, Terry Robbins — who, 18 months later, would blow himself up while constructing a bomb intended for a soldiers’ dance — told comrades: Let’s go kick some a**.’”

Then there is Tom Hayden, the moral center of Sorkin’s film. Hayden would go on to serve in the California legislature, marry Jane Fonda, and be a leader of Progressives for Obama. Students for a Democratic Society activist Gerry Long once recalled to David Horowitz that Hayden defended firebombing Chicago police cruisers. “I heard Tom Hayden speak, in chillingly cavalier tones, about street actions which would run the risk of getting people killed.” Todd Gitlin remembered in the book The Sixties. Flynn claims that Mike Klonsky, SDS’s national secretary during the convention riots, described how Hayden plotted to scatter nails over a nearby highway.

Our American Stasi Manages Information

Although it dates all the way back to 2006, conservatives still honor the great German film The Lives of Others. It depicts the terror, violations rights, hypocrisy and intrusive abuse of the Stasi, the German secret police under communism. We are right to celebrate this great film, yet it is unfortunate that in the years since its release nothing on the right has emerged to match it.

The rise of the American Stasi in the security agencies, politics and Hollywood since the arrival of Trump in 2016 has made the need to dramatize such a terrible force that much greater. In an academic paper in the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, scholar Gareth Dale examined The Lives of Others and its reception. Dale noted that the kind of heartless, evil bureaucrat the film depicts is not isolated to a particular time or part of the world:

The species of official who is loyal to a structure the rationale of which is nothing but its own power is not indigenous only to Communist Eastern Europe. … A number of reviewers have been struck by the resonances with our world today. In the Observer, Phillip French writes thats The Lives of Others subtly evokes a vindictive society that exists by turning citizens against each other in the interests of national unity and collective security. It serves as a major warning to ourselves and our elected leaders about where overzealousness and a lack of respect for individuals and their liberties can lead.

Indeed, here we are. Where is the American Lives of Others to expose it?

Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C.v