The Grifter Complex

A new censorship documentary may have paid its on-camera experts

Last Thursday, the glitterati of America’s Make Believe Movement¹ gathered in Washington, DC for the premiere of a new documentary, God Complex, which alleges a vast censorship regime is “deciding what Americans are allowed to see, say, and even think.”

You might think the film is about the Trump Administration’s ongoing assault on the First Amendment. Nope! These folks live in a fictional universe in which the Biden administration coerced social media platforms to remove conservative content, and in which the intelligence community is in cahoots with disinformation researchers to suppress conservative speech, even today.

The film’s trailer contains outright factual errors and ignores important evidence that undermines its allegations, including Supreme Court decisions and reams of Congressional reports, just like the so-called Twitter Files and other tinfoil hat conspiracy theorizing disguised as investigative journalism before it.

But the film’s total lack of integrity is most exemplified by the fact that the “experts” who were consulted for on-camera interviews were seemingly offered payment for their participation.

I know, because for some reason, the producers invited me to take part in the film.

In May, I got the following email via my website’s contact form:

It’s possible the producer was trying to get someone from “the other side” of the so-called censorship industrial complex on record; this is standard journalistic practice. (If this were the case, though, you’d think the producer would not have lauded my expertise as “invaluable in explaining the academic and intellectual turn that fostered the mindset behind today’s suppression of dissenting voices,” given that the other “experts” featured in the film have falsely accused me of being involved in censorship activity.)

Not much else about the outreach was standard, though. I’ve participated in many documentaries in the past several years. I’ve sat in front of the cameras of Emmy-award winning teams and journalists from around the world, and I have never been offered compensation like this. On the very rare occasions experts are compensated for on-camera interviews, it is usually a token honorarium arranged after the fact, not an open question about “fees and requirements” in a producer’s initial outreach.

In short: the outreach I received in May raises serious ethical questions about this documentary and the production company behind it.

I told the producer exactly that:

Brasil Paralelo, which produced the film, has a history of shady practices; it was prohibited from distributing one of its documentaries during the 2022 Brazilian presidential election due to its “repeated” use of disinformation to bolster Bolsonaro’s candidacy. In its decision, the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court noted that the company’s work generated “significant financial resources” through subscriptions and content monetization.

Beyond Brazil Paralelo’s unscrupulous practices at home, its foray into the American market relies on individuals with spotty records at best. Several of the film’s “experts” are known liars, including Mike Benz (a ‘key voice’ behind lies about USAID that caused Elon Musk to dismantle the agency, who also apparently does not know which finger is his pinky), John Solomon (whose conflicts of interest and distortions about Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine caused Solomon’s own employer to publish a scathing’ review of his work), and Chanel Rion (who settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over her lies about the election tech provider).

Brasil Paralelo’s offer to compensate its on-camera experts underlines something I’ve covered again and again and again: Those that have built their careers on the censorship lie are not doing so in dogged pursuit of the truth, or to preserve Americans’ rights. They’re doing it because it’s profitable for them. I wonder how much they were paid for their participation in God Complex.

The “documentary,” which will be available to stream on Thursday, would only be groundbreaking if it featured Benz, Solomon, and Rion apologizing.

I won’t hold my breath.

1. This is not a real movement, of course, but it is an apt name for those who traffic in stories so spectacularly false they’d make my three-year-old—who gets to be the star of his very own dinosaur adventure every night—blush.