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‘We’re Still Living in the Coup’—Amanda Milius Talks New Film “The Plot Against the President”

In this episode, we sit down with Amanda Milius, director of the documentary film “The Plot Against the President.” It details how the U.S. intelligence community surveilled the Trump campaign on the basis of fabricated allegations and worked with corporate media to propagate a false narrative of “Russia-collusion.” The film makes the case this was all part of an operation to bring down the President of the United States.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Jan Jekielek: Amanda Milius, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Amanda Milius: Hi, thank you so much for having me. This is great.

Mr. Jekielek: So Amanda, I’m ashamed to say that I only saw your film, “The Plot Against the President” just a few days ago on Thanksgiving. What actually prompted me to do it was Twitter suspending your account, and I thought, “Oh my goodness, now I have to see this thing.” And I also happened to notice it was the same day that President Trump pardoned Lieutenant General Michael Flynn—all of this happening on the same day, on Thanksgiving. Tell me your thoughts about what happened.

Ms. Milius: Yeah, what do you think about that kind of a coincidence, huh? I woke up fairly early on Thanksgiving—I’m out here in Nevada, so obviously, the East Coast was awake well before me. And it was Thanksgiving, so I was being late anyways—and my phone was just going completely insane. Everyone was like, “Oh my gosh, your account is gone. What happened?”

I’m on a group chat with everybody from the film, my whole crew and everybody that was involved, and they were just like, “I can’t find the account. This is crazy. What happened? What could they have—why would they have banned you? You would think that you would have known, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to put out this somewhat edgy tweet, or I’m doing something and maybe I could get banned.” Most people kind of know if they’re doing something that’s—whether it’s appropriate or not, or whether it’s the way this social media world should work or not, people kind of have an idea of if there [is a risk].

We had no idea. There was nothing. There was nothing! I mean, there’s plenty of things that I would have said that could have been close to getting me banned that I never said because we’re taking care of the account. The most important thing is not my opinions but making sure that people know about the movie and know where they can see it, because we need to get the word out.

And like you said, especially because of things like making sure that Michael Flynn’s story is told when he pops up in the news. I think that our movie does a pretty good job of summing up why this is such an important story for people to hear. And so, conveniently on the day that he is at the top of the headlines again, and the left-wing press is doing what they do—which is attack this man for no reason, say all the most horrible things you could say about an American—that the movie disappears off the internet.

I don’t know if it was that. I don’t know if it was because we had been very supportive of Sidney Powell’s efforts—because we love Sidney Powell and she’s [inaudible], and I really support her efforts. I don’t know if it was because we had been retweeting a lot of her work, but who knows. Who knows why, but we were down Thanksgiving morning.

Mr. Jekielek: But just to be clear, you are back, and it wasn’t any of the actual services that went down. It was just the Twitter account. Is that right?

Ms. Milius: Right. It hadn’t been taken off of Amazon or anything like that. We didn’t know what was going to happen because as far as—we know that we get attacked a lot by left-wing bots and by the mob because when the president retweeted the Twitter account of the movie, all of a sudden, the Amazon reviews, which are supposed to be only people who have purchased the film or watched the film can leave a review. That’s really not the case.

Anybody, it seems like anybody can leave a review because as soon as the president tweeted the movie, we got totally review bombed. But it doesn’t really matter because our viewers are so enthusiastic about the movie that they couldn’t really put a dent in our star rating anyways. But yeah, we didn’t know if we were being mass attacked by bots or something and there was lots of flagging of it.

Nobody really knows what happened. It was just Twitter itself, pulled it down. Nothing else was attacked. Nothing else had a problem. It was very weird because there was no warning, and it wasn’t a temporary suspension. It was full-on suspended. There was no, “This is for 12 hours. This is for whatever.”

All we could do was appeal it, which we did. I also shot an email to their government relations department, which might have helped us get back up, but I don’t know. I never heard back from them. And I did that because I happened to have that email address, and I had no one. I didn’t know what else to do. Maybe I’ll hear something about doing that.

But I feel bad for the people who get banned out of nowhere for no reason and don’t happen to be able to kick and scream and make a big point about it in the press like I did, or to furiously call everyone you’ve ever met and scream into the phone, “My account has been pulled down for no reason. I’m throwing a fit.” There’s so many people that are still banned that shouldn’t be banned. I’ve always been pretty vocal about that.

And I think it’s really, really ridiculous the way a lot of conservatives don’t stick together on this. They’re like, “Oh, well, that person was banned because they’re crazy. Or they’re a conspiracy theorist or this, that or the other.” I think that’s just one of the dumbest things that we do.

The fact that Laura Loomer is still without an account, and people like Alex Jones and accounts that might be a little bit more edgy than The National Review, they have a place in the public square. The moment we allow things like that to happen is when we all go down the drain. And I think that’s just ridiculous.

Anyway, so I was just shocked when this happened to us. But a lot of people that have really big audiences, like Scott Adams, and all the people that were in the film—Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Tom Fitton—a lot of people that were in the film were tweeting about it and talking about it, and I think that Twitter got so, I don’t know, maybe they just got shamed into letting us back on.

have no idea what happened but I was, the next morning, just walking—I was actually buying clothes because I have no clothes out here in Nevada because I wasn’t expecting to be here this long—then somebody, Jack Langer, texted me and said, “The account looks like it’s back up.” And I was like, “Wow, I guess it is. There it goes.” We had 10,000 more followers, and a lot of people like yourself are saying that they watched the movie because they heard it was banned. So maybe Twitter made a mistake there.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, so one thing I’ve learned: next time I’m going to make a film, I’m going to make sure to include a whole number of social media influencers in the film to help in situations like this. I actually do want to talk a little bit more about the censorship. I want to get back to that. But just for those few people out there that don’t know, what is this film about? What is “The Plot Against the President” about?

Ms. Milius: Well, somebody said it best the other day where they said it sums up the Russiagate corruption, lies, and disinformation that took place over four years in 90 minutes—which is the point, not just because people have been forced by the media to believe something that isn’t true, and then to forget that they were told to believe that.

That’s the other thing that’s happening: the media is telling us, they’re pretending that they didn’t just engulf the country in a fake story for four years, which is amazing. We are a victim of our own intelligence community’s disinformation tactics. And I don’t think people have really recognized that or talked about that. And it’s a very dark day for America. It’s basically like being bombed by our own aircraft carriers. That’s what happened.

So I think it’s a very important thing to note and to be conscious of. That’s why I made it. But the other thing that’s interesting about having it be, the other point to having it be a 90 minute movie that’s digestible in one sitting, is because when you take that 30,000 foot step back, and you can see all the moves at once, you see the chess moves.

When you’re in the war, when you’re in the trenches, and the media is coming at you every day with one story or another, and then the counter story is coming out—”Oh, there’s a declassified document that says this wasn’t true”—the only person tracking it is like a Catherine Herridge, who’s sitting there with the highlighter and able to have a flow chart on the living room wall telling you what’s true, what’s not, what happened.

The average person needs to be able to take a step back and see the whole thing. And when you see the whole thing, you see the intent of certain characters, you see the results of certain stories and certain events, and you see the importance of things in a larger map. It’s kind of you see the grand chessboard if you take a step and watch it all at once like that.

Mr. Jekielek: At The Epoch Times, we’ve tried to kind of create that picture with some of these posters.

Ms. Milius: You guys understand how important that is. And a lot of people say that it’s similar, you come away with a very similar sense from looking at the great work that you guys have done to map out the characters and the motivations and the events. It’s very, very similar to what we tried to do in a narrative format, in a narrative film format.

Mr. Jekielek: This is actually quite interesting. With this pardon of General Flynn, there was this, like you said, his name kind of came out into the surface, into the headlines again. But the headlines weren’t exactly very positive, and so a number of us were wondering, is there going to be some point at which these media that have been basically spinning the story would reflect and say, “Okay, maybe we should actually tell the truth here, finally.”

Ms. Milius: No, they’re horrible; they’re shameless. I don’t know how they sleep at night. The man is—I can’t think of a better person who’s in any way at all involved in politics. I cannot believe the shamelessness of the media to continue to drag his name through the mud. And then you see these little uninformed, idiotic trolls on social media—and even frankly, a lot of them have their own television shows—saying things like calling this man a traitor and saying things that they don’t even know what they’re saying or what they’re referring to. They’re just repeating it.

That’s scary because that is how, if we’ve ever wondered how countrywide horrific situations happen, like Stalin, Hitler, things like that. You see these situations, and every high school student has sat there and asked themselves, “Oh, well, what would I do in that situation? Would I believe the mob and go along with this horrible thing and persecute people who are not guilty? Or would I stand up and do something or think for myself?”

And everyone thinks they’re going to stand up and think for themselves, and then you look at this and these people just repeat what they hear on television. And they’re saying horrific, horrific things about a man that are not true, and that are provably untrue. It’s really unbelievable to watch.

And for someone like myself, who’s very skeptical of—I’m friends with a lot of lawyers, my brother is an attorney. He’s actually a district attorney. And I’m friends with lots of lawyers, but I’ve always been very skeptical of the justice system in our country and very suspicious of obviously the intelligence community and the FBI and things like that.

And so to see this happen in the last four years, I was already pretty, I had a pretty solid tinfoil hat back in 2015 and 2016, and it’s only grown. My tinfoil hat is very large now. So I don’t understand how anybody could trust these institutions. I don’t trust them at all. And that’s not on me. That’s what they’ve done in the last four years. So yes, it’s really terrible.

There’s this critical moment in the film, and this is, of course, in Lee Smith’s book that forms the basis of the film in the first place. You have one of the heroes of the story, Kash Patel, this Justice Department guy who knows how the system works. And he figures out that he can subpoena all these people that are saying, “Russia collusion definitely happened. I’ve got the evidence,” all this kind of stuff, puts them under oath basically and asks them very, very concrete questions.

“What evidence do you have? Do you have any evidence?” I think there’s three questions in there, and 65 out of 65 come up with nothing, even though in public and on the air, like you mentioned in the media, they’re saying all sorts of things, all sorts of sometimes very terrible things. But then when it comes down to it under oath, nada.

Yeah. And the interesting thing about that is that it’s not just that they said it in public, and who said it in public. These are the heads of the agencies that would know that. If any American in government had that information and had any provable information about the Trump campaign or the Trump administration being connected to Russia, these are the agencies and the people who would have it.

It’s not even just that they were out on television saying it. If they didn’t have it, no one had it. And they were also the people that were going out on television every night and saying, “The Trump campaign is compromised by the Russians. The Trump administration is compromised by Russians,” which is the craziest thing that anyone’s ever tried to [say].

Everybody knew it was crazy. When it first came out, everyone looked around and then was like, “What? Wait, what? Where did you get Russia from? Russia? What are you talking about?” And it remains just as crazy.

I wonder sometimes if it was a test, if it was similar to maybe this mask thing, where it’s like, “How can we test to see how many people will believe something if we just put it on television?” It’s one of the most unbelievable things to just convince an entire country of something out of whole cloth.

But anyways, sorry I interrupted you, but that was the other thing: that they were the heads of the agencies. But yes, Kash absolutely did the right thing by pulling all of those people in and making them say under oath what they actually believed, asking them for the information they actually had. And as he said, they couldn’t answer a simple question, and that was, “Where’s the dirt?”

Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned earlier how you’re in the middle of it, and it’s very hard to see the broader picture that the film shows, perhaps our Spygate poster and some of the other FISA abuse things that we’ve done show, tried to show in a broader way. You were with the Trump campaign back in 2016. Then you were actually in the State Department. I think you were in the White House, and then you left. You made this film, and you’re still associated with this whole battle. First of all, what motivated you to join the whole Trump movement?

Ms. Milius: It’s a movement. Well, I had been very obsessed with politics, foreign policy, immigration policy, and various issues. Iran is a really big issue that I pay a lot of attention to. Israel. I’m Jewish, and I studied a bit, not anything formal. I’m interested in foreign policy issues as sort of a hobby for the last 10 years while I was doing film stuff, photography stuff.

I was always involved in the arts in some way or another. I have a master’s degree from USC School of Cinematic Arts, which I can guarantee you I’m the only person that works at the State Department that had a film school degree, and I’m sure that some folks didn’t like that very much, but a lot of people on my team actually were fine with me.

In 2016, I was touring my thesis film to graduate from—you know, you have to make a thesis film to graduate from the master’s program in directing. And it happened to do really well. It was in a lot of film festivals. And so I was running around, and I had time off because I didn’t have a consistent job at the time because I was traveling a lot with the movie. And so I would take my spare time and go volunteer for the campaign because I was just so interested in what was going on.

The President was appealing, from the moment of the escalator speech and even before. My dad is really fond of the President, and he is retired now. And we spend a lot of time watching the news and talking about the news and talking about what’s going on, and we both were actually very, very interested in Trump as a political figure.

And I like to remind people that the President didn’t just come out of nowhere. He had been making political speeches for several years. One of them was at the signing of the Iran deal. He went to Ted Cruz’s event—I think it was a Tea Party event—in front of the Capitol building to criticize the signing of the Iran deal and to critique it. And he was great. It was a great speech, and he was awesome.

I was like, “This guy is great.” And then when he focused on immigration, that’s my number one issue, actually, more than foreign policy, of course, is immigration. And so I just really, I loved the way he shook up the Republican Party. I’d say the primary season leading up to 2016 was the most entertaining and wonderful time of my life.

I think the content on the internet reached a new high. It was the funniest and most entertaining things I had ever seen. And it was energizing, and it was fun, and it was edgy, and it was counterculture, and it was cool. That was actually where all the energy was. I was super, super into it, and just drawn to it. And so I started volunteering for the campaign.

It was just such a relief to be hanging out with people that were like-minded. I’d spent all this time in Hollywood and in the fashion industry and the music industry and whatever, in the film industry, and it was all good in its own way, but it was not somewhere where you can talk politics or talk anything that’s very in-depth.

So it was a lot of fun to be around the good people of Nevada, which is actually where I am now, and I was volunteering in the closest swing state, which of course was Nevada. I spent a lot of time here, and it was just too addicting. I just liked the people I met too much, and it was just too exciting to leave. So I was offered a position when we won just to work on the Inaugural Committee, which is something that a lot of more junior folks do to get into DC and to kind of get your feet wet. I did that, and then I got hired at the State Department and I just never looked back. It’s just been my life since 2016.

Mr. Jekielek: What was the inspiration to jump in? You made this film in absolutely record time. I think it’s kind of the speed that we made our coronavirus documentary, it’s kind of analogous, which we thought was a miracle. So when I saw you made this film in, what was it, 90 days, two months? I couldn’t even believe that was possible. Did you leave to do this? How did this happen?

Ms. Milius: Well, I knew I was going to do it. I had optioned the book before it came out, and it came out in October of 2019. So I had been thinking about it and talking about it with people for a little while. And then certain things just came together. Like you said, I worked at the State Department. I took a detail over to the White House for six months, which was great. Then I went back to the State Department.

And I was just starting to, I was trying to decide if I was going to leave and go form my own company and make this movie, which is a really big decision because you get kind of used to your government job where you just show up every day, fight with people, and then go home, or leave, go to the restaurant, fight with other people, and then go home, and go to bed.

But a friend of mine said to me, “What do you want to do? You want to stay at State Department and beat your head against the wall for another year and try to get a couple phrases changed in some kind of UN declaration and kill yourself over these details and fight this uphill battle?” because working in the government is a very, very, very tough thing to do.

You’re fighting ingrained policies that maybe are not in the same direction as the policies of the president. You’re fighting bad politicals a lot of the time, by the way. You’re fighting a lot of people who claim to work for the president who are 100% out for themselves and working against the president’s agenda—that’s always fun. Especially when they get promoted, that’s excellent. So that gets annoying.

And then you’re also getting attacked by the press every day. You’ve got friends dropping like flies who are having their lives ruined and then reporters going after them, making things up, and then the administration fires them anyway. So it’s a little bit like a battlefield, it’s quite exhausting.

And then at the end of the day, it sometimes feels like what you’ve done is written new policy in sand because this administration is so different from every other Republican or Democrat administration, that it is the beginning of a movement. It is not the whole thing, and this is a 20 year fight. This is a 50 year fight. It’s a 100 year fight, and four years can really seem kind of rough.

So my friend said to me, “Are you going to keep doing this and hammering away at this? You’re good at it, but is this what you want to do? Or do you want to leave and go make a movie that could change everything and that could expose this, help expose and tell the story of this very important moment in our history?”

And I figured I should at least try, and that my skill set would be better used doing that. There’s plenty of people who can work in the government and hit their head against a wall and do communications in government. There’s not that many people on our team that can make films. So I decided to do that.

Mr. Jekielek: So briefly tell me, okay, what is this 10 year, 20 year, 50 year, 100 year movement that you’re describing? Because obviously, this is something, in your mind, that transcends Trump or this administration.

Ms. Milius: Well, he is vitally important. He’s the one that just thought, that spoke clearly and thought clearly, about the issues that actually matter to the country. And it’s almost like we’ve been in this sleep for generations and gone off-track for so long—maybe not generations, but maybe since the Second World War, you could debate when it really started—but something has gone terribly awry with the institutions in our country, and it is going to take a lot to get them back.

They’re not working for the benefit of the United States anymore, and the fact that it took—at least in this administration, at least we’re saying that now, whereas before, we were pretending that the FBI worked for us, we were pretending that the intelligence community still had some value, and we were pretending that all of these institutions, like for example, even the State Department.

The State Department at the moment thinks its mission is to make other countries happy so that they take our phone calls. We’re basically doing diplomacy by blackmail, in a sense, where it’s like, we have to give them money and resources and do what they want so that we can call on them again. It’s the relationship for the relationship’s sake, and it’s not really benefiting the United States.

Diplomacy has fallen apart in that way, and it’s because of the culture of Washington, DC, because there’s never anything new injected into the bloodstream. It’s just the same corrupt cycle, this revolving door of the diplomacy industry, the defense industry, the industry of politics. And the President and this administration was an injection of something new.

So of course they were going to resist this. And of course, every single institution would turn against us, every single agency that we went to work in would hate us and would think that we were against the mission of the agency, when actually, we are probably the best thing for the mission of the agency, in its original sense.

But when I say that diplomacy, it’s like diplomacy of being held over a barrel. We don’t act like we are the superpower of the world, and we don’t act like we’re even acting in our own interest. Even on things in an immigration sense. “Oh, we can’t demand that these countries take their criminals back because they don’t want to.” And we can’t make that phone call because we have to maintain a good relationship with the ambassador and lalala.

And you’re like, “What’s the point of the relationship if you can’t pick up the phone and tell them to do what we want?” So there are very simple thoughts that haven’t been pondered in DC for a long time. And I think the President brought a lot of people to DC who asked those questions and thought about things differently.

That is the direction of the movement. I would say that needs to happen more. We cannot go back to business as usual. We just won’t have a country anymore. I don’t think people even understand how bad it is. I think they’re starting to. It’s the fact that they’ve tried to make it out of polite society and uncouth to talk about “America First,” and the United States as being sort of in this position that needs to be saved, and that Trump is good for the country.

That was considered an impolite position is crazy. And the faster that we can normalize taking care of ourselves and saving the country is, the faster we can do that, the better.

Mr. Jekielek: Amanda, just super briefly, you mentioned that immigration for you is a critical issue. This administration, and I don’t know, perhaps you even by extension by saying it’s important and that you align with its position, it’s portrayed as being anti-immigration. If you could briefly speak to what you mean by saying immigration is important to you, and how you think this policy is different?

Ms. Milius: Well, if you remember back to 2016, when that was the topic of the election—I’m not sure how and why it sort of faded out of discussion in 2020. I have a couple ideas, but there’s people that have different theories. But part of the reason is that the President actually did an incredible amount to fix the problem. It’s the same reason why terrorism wasn’t brought up, along with foreign policy, at all during the 2020 debates: because the President actually has succeeded in so many ways on the foreign stage.

But immigration, in 2015 and 2016, it was just disgustingly broken. You could not claim that we had a sane immigration policy in the United States. It was simply preference by proximity. If you can make it over the border, that’s the way we’re going to choose the people that will populate the next generations of our country. That doesn’t make any sense. No other country does that.

The idea of emulating a points-based immigration system, where we look at our economy and we look at our country and we decide, we as citizens decide, what the population should look like and be like, that builds the next generation of America, it’s not racist, and it’s not unusual. Most countries do that. A lot of very successful countries do that.

And the fact that it wasn’t even allowed to be talked about is how you know it’s important, it’s probably a good idea, and it probably will benefit regular Americans and not the elites in Washington, DC. I thought that the fact that building a border wall was even questioned as a good idea was outrageous. I mean, of course, it’s absolutely necessary.

No country—again, remember, I really like Israel. And I really study its creation and progression in the world. Israel is really good at building walls and for very good reason. Every country has those exact same reasons. There’s no reason why safety and national security shouldn’t be at the forefront of our immigration policy. And it’s not. There’s things, having worked on immigration with some of the best people in our administration on the issue—like the very best, I was lucky enough to work with—the things that I’ve learned are just shocking.

The amount of scrutiny that people and more importantly, in some senses, packages and things that come into our country are not screened is unbelievable when you actually look at it. Some of that’s actually classified because it’s so outrageous, but it’s really, really incredible, and it’s a very, very huge national security issue that isn’t talked about very much. So that issue in general, I think, is of the utmost importance.

Who our country is, is the country. So deciding, and it’s not that I would say, “Oh, well, it should be one type of person or another,” but making the argument that we as citizens should decide, as opposed to just whoever happens to cross the border and whatever country is having a conflict at the moment, that that’s just who our immigrants are is nonsense. That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Mr. Jekielek: So let’s talk about the censorship question. You’ve actually been in the middle of it now, having had your film account suspended. I think the film came out—and correct me if I’m wrong—somewhere around the time when the Hunter Biden laptop story dropped. Of course, it was kind of like an October surprise. I don’t think anyone doubts that. But what happened was in some ways shocking to many, which was that in social media with Twitter—Facebook suppressed the story. Twitter actually prevented the account of The New York Post from posting any further, and there seemed to be a near total corporate media blackout around the story. So now, kind of looking back at that, what do you make of it?

Ms. Milius: It was the same, about the same time period. It feels like 100 years ago, but it was about the same time period that we released it that the Hunter Biden thing came out. I know because I kept getting bumped off of my news hits for Hunter Biden stories. And I was like, “… The guy got me again.” It’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about.

Who says it? Michael Anton says it in the movie, “We don’t live in America the way that we thought we did.” And that really is the thesis of the film: it’s not the most uplifting thing because it’s not another one of these movies saying, “Oh, we better act now because we could lose our freedoms and we could lose all these things.”

The water is already hot, like we’re already boiling. We don’t have a justice system. We don’t have, like I said, we don’t have an intelligence community that works for us. They work against us and they just punish us if we have the wrong ideas and scare people and operate on fear, like the secret police that they are.

But the thing about the Hunter Biden laptop is that none of them—the intelligence community, the FBI, etc., all of the bad actors, the DNC, the corrupt firms in DC, all of that—they wouldn’t have been so successful if it wasn’t for the cooperation of the media. And the media, I think people don’t really recognize how much of an arm of the IC [intelligence community] that they are. Again, snugly fitting on my tinfoil hat as people would have said five years ago, but I think it’s pretty clear that this is actually the case when CNN is giving contracts.

The moment somebody walks out of CIA or FBI, they get a contract with CNN, you start to ask if that’s a coincidence, or if they’d really always had this pretty friendly relationship. I think that the media doing what they did with Hunter Biden and the laptop story, is the test run for, in a lot of ways, the election. They will not report on evidence.

They change the phrasing. When it began, it was, “We don’t have any evidence.” Then it was, “There’s no widespread, there’s no evidence of widespread fraud.” Then it’s, “Oh, who the heck cares anyways. Biden has invented a backdrop with something called the Office of the President-elect that doesn’t exist, so we’re just going to go with it.”

We’re still living in the coup. I mean, we really are. And the media is always the first thing, when there’s a coup in a third world country. You know who spoke about this well in the movie is Dr. Luttwak. He wrote the book, “Coup d’Etat” and is very well-spoken on the issue. And he talked about how in a third world country, what happens is the coup takes place by the opposing group taking hold of the palace, or whatever the location of the building of the seat of power.

And then the next thing they do is they take over the television station and the radio. They broadcast, “Oh, we have found that the previous ruling party was corrupt, and they were working for a foreign enemy, and so now we’re here to save the country.” I don’t see how that’s very different from what they tried to do with Russiagate and what they’re doing now.

They have taken over the media, slowly but surely over I don’t know how many years, and we live in a disinformation world. Another really important piece that spoke about that is actually Mike Cernovich’s movie, “Hoaxed” that he did with the two directors. I think that movie opened up a lot of people’s eyes about what the media was really doing and how little we can trust it. If it wasn’t for smaller organizations and citizen journalists and the non-mainstream media journalists, we wouldn’t know any of this. We wouldn’t know anything that is going on right now.

Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to give you a chance as we finish up here to end on a more positive note, what hope you see, because you said some of these things are very dark. But I know, having spoken to you before and so forth, that you’re actually quite a hopeful and optimistic person. So why don’t we finish there?

Ms. Milius: Well, I suppose the fact that this whole administration and that the President and Michael Flynn and the people that have spoken up, the fact that they exist at all is what is hopeful, and they give me a ton of inspiration. I’m inspired by Michael Flynn’s story, the fact that he still has hope, and Sidney Powell, and all of these wonderful people. I have hope when I see Lee Smith, the brilliant author of this book, who framed this the way he did. He and his lovely wife just had a new baby.

Things like that are just beautiful miracles that are a reminder that great people really have something to fight for, and they need to be brave, and everybody needs to be brave right now. Again, the Devin Nuneses of the world who stood up and told the truth, I think it’s really that. It’s that each of us individually have to stand up and do what we can to tell the truth and to have the truth be told because—and to spread the word in whatever way we can—because it’s the only thing that has a huge impact.

Each person telling the truth has a huge impact. Devin Nunez, telling the truth about what he saw and what was real and what wasn’t about Russiagate, that had a huge impact on what ended up happening with people like Michael Flynn who were unfairly impacted by that.

It exposed the truth for him. And then people like Lee Smith see this story, he tells the truth, he researches everything and tells the truth in his book and has the bravery to stand up and do that. And then I see Lee Smith’s book, I make the movie, millions of people see it, and they learn the truth of all of this, they tell their neighbors. Every person has the obligation to tell the truth and tell it loudly because that’s how a movement starts. And each of them had to have the bravery and the clarity of mind to do that. … That to me, I think is really inspiring.

Mr. Jekielek: So tell us quickly, where can we see the film?

Ms. Milius: We can see the film on Amazon Prime for free. And if you have Amazon Prime, it’s also available for rent and to purchase on Amazon. It’s on Vimeo on demand if you’re not fond of Amazon. It is also on two free speech friendly platforms for subscription where we will also be putting other sneak peek extra footage, extra interviews, extra content on these two subscription platforms. One of them is called Movies Plus [www.mymoviesplus.com] and the other one’s called specialproject.io.

All of them can be found on our website, which is www.patpmovie.com, which is “Plot Against the President” movie. It’s still playing in theaters in a very small, select group of towns across America, for which you can also find and buy tickets on the website. And it is now available for pre-order DVDs at walmart.com, Walmart stores, target.com, Target stores, and soon on Amazon, and it will make a very wonderful holiday gift for your family and anybody who you want to see it. So it’s widely available.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, Amanda Milius, such a pleasure to have you on.

Ms. Milius: Thank you so much for having me. This was wonderful. I’m a big fan.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

American Thought Leaders is an Epoch Times show available on YouTube, Facebook, and The Epoch Times website. It airs on Verizon Fios TV and Frontier Fios on NTD America (Channel 158).
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