The Daily Signal - Dad Starts Media Company to Promote American Values Because Left Is ‘Indoctrinating Our Kids’

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

As the media goes, so goes the nation, to borrow from the old adage.  The cultural influence of media—including movies, TV shows, and YouTube videos—is being felt with greater significance today than arguably any other time in history. James Fitzgerald founded ColdWater Media to promote the values so many Americans hold dear.  The political “left has done a really good job of building business models around indoctrinating our kids,” Fitzgerald says.  Fitzgerald uses film to explore some of the biggest issues and questions facing culture today, covering topics ranging from history and philosophy to education and economics. He joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss the mission of ColdWater Media and some of the company's latest projects, including a series sharing the history of all the American holidays. Today's show also features an interview with John Papola, the CEO, creative director, and cofounder of the media company Emergent Order. Papola explains how he uses rap, humor, and storytelling to communicate American values through film. We also cover these stories: California Attorney General Rob Bonta says the state will no longer fund travel to Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota, or West Virginia, arguing that these states have taken harmful actions against the LGBT community. Los Angeles County asks that people wear masks indoors and in public places due to the spreading of the delta variant of the coronavirus.  Lawmakers criticize U.S. athlete Gwen Berry for turning her back to the American flag during the singing of the National Anthem at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get the yes you've been waiting for at Capital One.ca.ca. slash yes. Terms and conditions apply. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, June 30th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Virginia Allen. The cultural influence of movies, TV shows, and even YouTube videos is being felt with greater significance today than arguably any other time in history. It is for this very reason that James Fitzgerald and John Popola founded media companies to promote the values so many Americans hold dear. Fitzgerald and Popola joined the Daily Signal today for back-to-back interviews discussing the power of storytelling and how their companies are furthering American values. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating

on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now, today's interview was recorded at the Heritage Foundation's Resource Bank Conference, so please excuse any background noise. And now on to our top news. California is restricting state-funded travel to five more states over what California's Attorney General calls anti-LGBQ legislation. The state of California will no longer fund travel to Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota, or West Virginia, arguing that these states have taken harmful actions against the LGBTQ community. In recent months, Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and West Virginia have all passed. legislation that bars transgender athletes from competing on sports teams that don't match their biological sex. And North Dakota recently instituted a free speech law that the LGBTQ community

calls discriminatory. During a press conference Monday, California State Attorney General Rob Bonta said, make no mistake, we're in the midst of an unprecedented wave of bigotry and discrimination in this country, and the state of California is not going to support it. There are now 17 states on the list of states that California restricts state-funded travel to over LGBTQ legislation. Los Angeles County is asking that people wear masks indoors and in public places due to the spreading of the delta variant of the coronavirus. And a press release to the Los Angeles Public Health Department said, public health strongly recommends people wear masks indoors in settings such as grocery or retail stores, theaters and family entertainment centers, and workplaces where you don't know everyone's vaccination status.

Until we better understand how and to who the delta variant is spreading, everyone should focus on maximum protection with minimum interruption to routine as all businesses operate without other restrictions, like physical distancing and capacity limits. California ended its mask mandate on June 15th. The start of the Olympics is only a few weeks away, and debates over the national anthem have begun. Last weekend, Gwen Barry came in third for hammer throwing at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials, qualifying her for Team USA. As Barry stood on the podium to receive her medal, the national anthem began to play.

She turned her back to the American flag and held up a t-shirt that read activist athlete. In an interview afterwards, Barry told the press, that playing the anthem while she was on stage felt like a setup. I felt like they did that on purpose and I was pissed, she said, and added that I really don't want to talk about the anthem because that's not important. The anthem don't speak for me. It never has. Veterans and lawmakers have voiced their opposition about Barry's behavior, questioning why

she is representing America in the Olympics if she doesn't like America. Senator Tom Cotton said on Fox News Monday that if Miss Barry is so embarrassed by America, then there's no reason she needs to compete for our country. She should be removed from the Olympic team. And Representative Dan Crenshaw echoed Cotton saying on Fox that we don't need any more activist athletes. She should be removed from the team. Now stay tuned for my back-to-back interviews with James Fitzgerald and John Popola, both founders of conservative. media platforms that are using storytelling to promote American values. If you're tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger and bigger government,

it's time to partner with the most impactful conservative organization in America. We're the Heritage Foundation, and we're committed to solving the issues America faces. Together, we'll fight back against the rising tide of homegrown socialism, and we'll fight for conservative solutions that are making families more free. and more prosperous, but we can't do it without you. Please join us at heritage.org. I am so pleased to be joined by Jim Fitzgerald, the founder and president of Coldwater Media. Jim, thanks so much for being here.

Oh, you bet. So tell us a little bit about Coldwater Media and what you all do. Coldwater Media got started in 2000, basically because my son came home from Bible class and said he thought it was boring. from his Christian school. And at the time, I had sold my previous company. I was looking for something to do. I'd been involved in the making of a couple of documentaries with a friend that I'd funded.

He had a small production company. And I had learned, you know, a little bit about what the production business is all about. And that was my son's comment combined with my wife had given me a book, Chuck Colson, How Now Shall We Live, which kind of opened my eyes to the concept of Christian worldview for the first time. And the combination of those two things inspired me to start a media company and create excellent media. I was not seeing a lot of excellent, conservative Christian media at the time. Where does the name come from, Coldwater Media? Well, it's a combination of a number of things.

I think my wife was getting a catalog from Coldwater Creek at the time, a clothing store. And I thought, oh, that's kind of an interesting combination of words. And then the idea of throwing cold water on an old idea, you know, was appealing. And then also the Bible verse that talks about, you know, giving a cup of cold water and that you won't lose your salvation in the process. I thought it didn't sound Christian-y and it just sounded like a good idea. So we did it. And we've gotten a lot of compliments since. So apparently it's a good name.

It is a good name. Yeah. It has a refreshing sound to it. Of course, cold water. Yeah, it's already in everybody's brain. Exactly. I love it. I love it.

So your son in many ways was the inspiration for the founding of the company. and obviously you all make media that is often targeted towards a Christian audience. Also, I know American values are very important in the films you make. So talk a little bit about the types of projects that you all have done and the types of projects that you all aspire to do. Well, the first project we dealt with a subject of how Darwinian evolution is taught in school. We did that in working closely with the Discovery Institute in Seattle. and the story at the time was a young teacher getting persecuted because he dared, you know, kind of question some of the orthodoxy.

And he was, they didn't have the term canceled back then, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000. So, but that's what they were doing to him for daring even posing some questions about whether or not these things were true that were being taught. And several of the things that were in the, the books that he was supposed to teach had since been really abandoned by even the most ardent Darwinists. You know, they heckles embryos. They decided that those were fraudulent pictures. So why was he expected to teach that?

That's just one example. Then we, not long after that, started the Drive-Thru History series, which we're still doing, we're going to do our 100th show for the Fourth of July special that we're doing. and drive-through history is an opportunity to reinsert the Christian story and the conservative story back into history and have some fun with it along the way. We wanted to appeal to kids and since it's kind of turned into a complete family program that kids and parents can watch together and both enjoy. And so we've covered many subjects with that. We started with ancient history because we knew that all kids had to study that.

And then we went to American history, and then we went to the Holy Land and the New Testament. And now we're doing all the American holidays and telling the history of each of the holidays. And it's been amazing. When we took that on, we just thought, oh, that'll be nice. And all of a sudden, we realize every single holiday story is under attack, dramatically under attack, from Martin Luther King, which was the first one we did, the 4th of July is really in the gun sites of the left. So we've really been, so what it's turned into is a civics lesson through the telling of our important holidays and days of remembrance.

We're doing 9-11, Mother's Day, Father's Day. We even did Valentine's Day, told the story of that. But all of these things have become highly politicized, and so it's been, interesting exercise to do that. So when you say that you're doing those projects are those, you know, like a 20 minute, you know, short film explaining things, is it an hour and a half? What does the format look like for the? Most of our drive-through history shows are 26 minutes. Okay. The specials that we're doing in the holidays are I think 50, 55 minutes. That's great. and so they're being broadcast on Trinity Broadcast Network.

They've been our partner for, since 2003, wonderful. And then we also turn all of these into curricula because we found out that homeschoolers were using them and they kept saying, why don't you have a curriculum to go with this? And we said, well, we're not really in that business. Well, now we are. Now you are. And so we created curriculum to go with it

and a complete streaming service to offer those. That's excellent. You know, we know that media has a great influence on society, but how much credit do you think we should really give it? How big of a role truly does the media play in impacting what society looks like? Well, I used to, since the advent of the smartphone, I used to every once in a while check in with how many hours a day are people using? these devices. And so I did that again before coming here. And they stopped putting hours to it.

They just go, okay, 95% of American teenagers have a smartphone, and they use it constantly. So it's no longer eight or nine hours a day, which is what it used to be. Now it's just all the time. And so is there a question as to whether conservatives should be involved in trying to connect with through that device. Yeah, that's so, so critical. If we're all going to be on it, we have to be aware of what are our options? What do we actually have to consume? And if there's nothing that's really showing those positive values out there to consume,

what do we expect to happen? That's so, so critical. Yeah, we're not in the game. I mean, other messages will either be neutral or against what we believe. Yeah. You know, I do think that some conservatives are hesitant to enter the media space because it is thought of as being so left-leaning. Were you conservative when you decided, okay, this is something that I really want to pursue?

And, you know, how did you kind of think through, okay, I'm going to bring my values into this space? I've always been conservative. I never had a weird moment where I decided to leave the reservation, which I don't know how that happened, but I had great parents. So I've always been kind of stunned at how little interest conservatives have had in that. You know, I understand the importance of books and classical teaching, and I believe in all of that. But I also believe that we're all using these devices. We're all connected, you know, whether it's we're all consuming huge amounts of media.

and we've missed the boat on so many critical points in the – I won't use the word evolution. In the advancement of technology or the change in the media landscape, I was in the cable TV business before I was – before I created Coldwater Media. and conservatives missed the boat largely there. They could have had an amazing presence for not much money at that time. And the other thing I would say that kind of drives me crazy is the fact that the left has done a really good job of building business models around indoctrinating our kids. And they control the school.

and they control the media and we pay for it on both sides of that. And so I think from day one it was important for us to figure out how to create business models so that we could be self-sustaining and not just rely on charitable efforts. Yeah. So for young people or really anyone who's thinking, okay, I'm conservative, I have a passion for film or TV or just the media space in general, what would be you? your advice to them? It would be to do, try a lot of things because you're going to, it's probably not going to be

obvious what your path is going to be. It's going to be a lot of twists and turns along the way. And so if you really love it, you should be doing something with it every day, whether you're getting paid for it or not. I saw that passion with my own kids, mentioned to you that I've got two sons. that have a media company together. And they were just putting friends together out there, creating photography sessions, making short films,

always trying to figure out how to do it better and to do it creatively, whether they were getting paid to do it or not. And then they figured out how to monetize that later. But I think that's the big indication of whether or not it's your passion is if you're consumed with it. But it's not easy to just say, oh, go here and you'll get a job doing this, you know, because it's still being created in this conservative media landscape. And what are the skill sets that individuals should really be pursuing?

I mean, is there a greater need for people behind the cameras or directing or all the above? I think the tendency has been to be a bit of a, jack of all trades. When we started, it was, and still like in the movie business, feeling in Hollywood, you know, union shop, everybody has their very specific task, and they do large projects, and it's important that everybody knows what they're doing and does it quickly and well. But in the world that I operate in, pretty much everybody does a couple things. and the host of Drive-Thru History, Dave Stotz, was a camera guy first, and then an editor.

And then he was so funny. He just said, you need to be it in front of the camera, you know. But he still edits the shows. And so he's been able to work out a good life where we're out shooting in the field, traveling, having to do all that. But then he can be home a lot. and edit. Yeah. And he long ago got over the weirdness of editing himself.

Yeah, yeah. Just have to get over that. Yeah, exactly. So how can our listeners find all of the wonderful products that you produce, all of the series, how can they discover and follow your work? Well, coldwatermedia.com and drive-through history.com. It would be the two places to go. Very, very simple.

Great. Well, Jim, thank you so much for your time. We really, really appreciate it and appreciate the work that you're doing. Thank you, Virginia. It's so important. Appreciate you having me. Never has it been more important for us to fight for America. Each day we see the penalties of progressive policies across our nation. Our elections are under assault. Our economic freedom is on the decline, and our culture is turning its back on the founding principles that have made us the freest, most prosperous nation in history. That's why the Heritage Foundation developed a plan to take on the left and take back our country. The Citizens Guide to Fight for America provides a series of heritage recommended action items delivered on a regular basis to your inbox.

Make an impact in your community and in our country. Sign up for the Citizens Guide at heritage.org slash citizens guide and join in the fight for America today. I'm joined by John Papola, the CEO, creative director and co-founder of the media company, Emergent Order. John, thanks much for being here. Thanks for inviting me to be on. So tell me a little bit about Emergent Order and the kind of creative projects that you all do and produce. Well, you know, we started Emergent Order, the production company 10 years ago, really with the idea of bringing free market, you know, principles to life through entertainment. My background's in television.

I was a creative director at Spike TV and a producer at Nickelodeon and MTV before that. And I'm probably best known for the Keynes versus Hayek rap videos, which were my first bit of free market activism in 2010. And when those sort of came out and found an audience, I found my muse. And I said, okay, this is what excites me, these ideas. And we started Emerging Order, the name of which is very much inspired by Hayek. the power of markets to create bottom-up solutions to problems. So, you know, that's been our focus for the past 10 years.

And it's been an incredible ride. We've produced an incredible diversity of content. One of the best pieces is a feature documentary with Arthur Brooks called The Pursuit that, you know, talks about how markets lift people up, especially at the margins. And there's a lot more coming, so it's been an exciting ride. So what drove you to say, okay, want to start a media company that specifically produces content around the ideas of, you know,

individual freedom and dignity and civil discourse, you know, these really core American ideals. Well, I've always been interested in debate and discourse, and I've always been fairly conservative. In fact, when I was growing up as a kid, every family get together, I would debate with my uncle Bill, who is a lawyer in Philadelphia. He was actually the chancellor of the Bar Association and I would take the Republican side. I was like, you know, I loved Alex Pete Keaton. And in fact, true story, my most rebellious thing I did in high school was sneak off to see a live taping of Rush Limbaugh with a girl I liked. So you want to talk about conservative kid. There's, I want to find the tape of the pan across the audience with my like 17 year old

head. Just captivated. Yeah. Yeah. But, so I've always been interested in these ideas and thought they were important in that, you know, our institutions matter, our philosophy, our ethics matter. But I also am a creative person. So I wanted to be a Disney animator. I worked in television. You know, this is just a marriage of my two passions.

Well, you had mentioned the rap video, the Keynes versus Hayek. In college, my government professor played. that video for our whole class to really, and it was like a light bulb of like, oh, I get what this difference is. It's so practical. I love that approach of breaking it down in a way that people can really understand. Young people can really understand. So actually, I want to take a minute and just play a clip from that. Let's take a lesson. Sounds great. We've been going back and forth for a century. I want to steer markets. I want them set free. There's a boom and bus cycle and good reason to fear it. It's the animal spirit. It's the animal spirit. The place you should

study isn't the bust. It's the boom that should make you feel leery. That's the thrust of my theory. The capital structure is key. Malinvestments wreck the... With an expansion of credit. The Fed sets rates low. Are you starting to get it? That new money is confused for real loanable funds, but it's just inflation that's driving the ones who invest in new projects like housing construction. The boom plan... John, how do you come up with these kind of creative ideas? You know, I have a fairly simple formula for a lot of the work we've done. And it's because we're talking about these subjects that are so sort of neglected in pop culture.

I like to bring pop culture sort of memes and methods to them. So with that, it was rap music. And like, let's be clear, like really old school 89 beats per minute rap music. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This wasn't like the cutting edge of a brand. But it worked. It worked. You were able to understand it.

It was really, really brilliant. So we've done, we've done, you know, romantic comedies, love gov about the relationship between individuals and government. We've done, you know, dramatic recreations. And so I think there's something fun about sort of marrying different formats and bringing an unexpected. sort of style to a topic that typically isn't treated that way. And I also love parody. I love, you know, pop culture references. So that's been a big part of how we approach things.

What is your, or who is your primary audience? You know, I think at some level, I think anyone that's intellectually curious is in our potential audience. You know, when we created the Keynes versus high rap videos, and most of our work for that matter. You think about the audience, but something that really works tends to transcend narrow audience segmentations.

That being said, I worked at branded networks. Nickelodeon was for kids, MTV was for teens and tweens and young adults. Spike was for guys, men. And so I really understand what it means to build a brand around an audience. But because my unifying interest has been these philosophical concepts,

we've sort of jumped around in terms of the audiences that we focus on. In fact, we're in our new work that we're starting now as Emergent Order Foundation, which is a new organization we've created to speak directly to target our audiences, we're going to be really focusing on dads and on what it means to be a dad

in the role of fatherhood in building and preserving the institutions of a free society that I think is under threat and really in crisis in America. That's critical. How do you do that, practically speaking, in a media format, in videos? How do you communicate those ideas, encourage fatherhood? Well, so I think one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is, you know, what is the point of storytelling?

Like, what is storytelling? Because, you know, I've been working with think tanks and organizations that ask that question of themselves at a fundamental level for a decade. And for the prior 10 years and television, 15 years, you just take it for granted. You're just storytellers

and you're just trying to figure out the best and coolest ways to do it. I think at its heart, a story is a moral mechanism for revealing character. You know, when you think about what is a story, a story is about a character, and that character goes on a journey in which their character is revealed.

And so when we think about what are heroes, heroes are characters that model virtue. That's what they really are. That's why we hold up heroes. That's what a hero is. And so I think the role of storytelling has always been about modeling the good, the true, and the beautiful, modeling heroicism. And I think for dads and for men in general in America, and I think even in the West and the first world more generally, I think we need a reassertion of modern heroes. I think we need to put forward the positive vision of what you as a father and as a man can be and do

for your family, for your society, for your country that is important and that is heroic and that is an identity you should embrace in a positive way. And I think that's what storytelling can do. I think great stories inspire you in that way. Storytelling can't do everything. You have to take action. You have to live in the real world and have experiences. But stories frame those experiences.

It's why we tell our kids' stories at night. It's why we have fairy tales. It's to help us tell right from wrong. And I think that's the role that storytelling plays in for fatherhood, but also just for people in general. Yeah, yeah. No, I know for myself, I think nine times out of ten, you know, I'd rather listen to a story about a subject

than just hear a bunch of facts about it. I mean, it's great to understand the facts within the context of a story. It just makes it way easier to grasp and allows you, I think, to remember it a lot clearer as well. There's a lot of power in that. You know, I think there's a fair amount we don't understand about the brain, but I think we do understand, at least at some, that we are evolved to accept things in narrative form,

that our minds sort of store things narratively, and that that's a powerful, I mean, think about it. What did even the earliest humans do? You know, we were eating, sleeping, having sex, having kids, and doing cave paintings, telling stories, oral tradition. Yeah. It's the way, you know, language, everything about, being a human is tied to story, or even our notions of what time is, is kind of narrative.

And when time, when you get into sort of like theoretical physics and time breaks down, like our understanding, it really blows our mind because we're very linear narrative creatures. We think in terms of this than that. Yeah. And so I think it's fundamental. It's like eating and breathing and just need it. Yeah. So specifically when it comes to really communicate.

communicating, you know, big ideas and principles that we hold dear as Americans. How do you do that well for young people? How important is that to be able to, you know, really break these ideas down in a way that young people can grasp, understand, and even get really passionate and excited about through the medium of media? So when I was in Nickelodeon, we had this little saying. It was almost an internal rule that you never say fun in a spot. you know, you have to be fun. Because if you have to say, this is fun, this is cool,

there's no chance it's fun, and there's certainly you have given up on being cool a long time ago. So when I was there, I actually didn't imagine being at a kids network. It just happened. And so I produced a movie trailer for, it was called the Rocket Power movie. It was their first TV movie.

And I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make this an epic action movie trailer. I'm going to get Don LaFontaine, the guy that did, In a World, you know. And I'm going to use all the tropes of big movie trailers to do this sort of silly TV movie. And at the time, it actually was the highest rated TV movie that Nickelodeon had ever broadcast.

I remember going to my aunts in Ventnor, New Jersey, and there was a little sticky note on the tube television that said February 16th at 9 because one of my nephews had seen my promo for the Rock of Power movie trailer and was like, oh, I got to see that and wrote down the sticky note and put it on the TV. So that's a long-winded way of saying

the way you reach young people is the same way you reach anybody by just doing a good job and being authentic and not trying to reach the kids or pander to other people. You have to find the kid in yourself. You have to treat your audience like they're smart and have fun and be fun and not say fun. Yeah, yeah.

So how can our listeners watch the Dad series that's coming out, watch all of your content, how can they keep up with what you're doing? So I think the first place you can go is to our website, which is eO.com. And you'll see a lot of our stuff sort of embedded there on our work page. And our current YouTube channel is YouTube.com slash emergent order. and we will probably be launching new channels and support of some of these new things but that'll be a great place to start and get connected.

That's great. Well, John, thank you for the work that you're doing. This is so so critical, I think, as we think about the challenges that are before us as a country, media plays a really big role in facing those challenges. So thanks for stepping up to the plate and being willing to promote these big ideas in a way that we can all understand

and that are actually also really enjoyable. Your videos are just fun to watch. So thank you for making them. I appreciate it. And thanks for having me on. It's been a pleasure. And so that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast.

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