Was Lincoln gay? New doc conscripts American icon to LGBT cause



Abraham Lincoln holds a mythic position in the American consciousness. He’s respected across the political spectrum. He redrew America’s social contract and self-image. And because he led the country through the Civil War and abolition, he’s now accorded a status befitting a Greek god, cast in bronze and marble.

Lincoln is essential to the American social contract, which makes him essential to any political cause seeking to reframe the national project. He’s criticized by “woke” leftists and alt-righters as a symbol of the neo-liberal consensus and used as a symbol of equality and unity by those in power.

One of the saddest things about the modern world is that the concept of close male friendship has functionally been destroyed.

It’s no surprise, then, that the LGBT movement would come to claim him as well. While no American presidents have ever been openly "gay" as such, a handful have attracted questions concerning their sexual proclivities. Lincoln’s predecessor James Buchanan, for example, was America’s only bachelor president, a pink flag for certain historians looking to "out" him.

Lincoln's outsized stature naturally makes him a far more tempting catch. As transgender and gay issues increasingly dominate the discourse, there have been more than a few attempts to use speculation about Lincoln’s private life and vague comments in his letters to canonize our 16th president as an official "queer" icon.

A deliberate provocation

A recent documentary boldly announces its intention in its blunt title: "Lover of Men: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln."

The film was released this fall to general praise from the press and backlash from conservative media. The filmmakers mostly laughed off said backlash, telling the Hollywood Reporter that they were “thrilled” that Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones, and Elon Musk were furious about it. “The reason that they notice the film is because it is compelling. This story is provocative,” said director Shaun Peterson.

The case "Lover of Men" makes goes roughly like this: Lincoln had very close relationships with multiple men throughout his adult life, relationships that were arguably more intimate than traditional friendships. He shared beds with men for months or years at a time, revealed details of his sex life to them in letters, and openly expressed his deep emotional connection to them.

The film essentially argues that Lincoln was LGBT avant la lettre, living an identity that would today be recognized as "queer," "fluid," or "non-conforming." Whether Lincoln actually had sex with any of these men is largely immaterial.

Strange bedfellows

"Lover of Men" dismisses most of the immediate rebuttals with a shrug; the first among them being that beds in the 19th century were expensive and scarce, and it wasn’t uncommon for inns to assign multiple men to a bed or for male friends to share beds.

Peterson's argument relies upon the common modern assumption that intimacy and sexuality are deeply entwined things. The possibility that two men would share deep affection without any hint of the erotic is mostly overlooked because the alternative soundbite — Lincoln was gay! — proves irresistible.

Ironically, Peterson's eagerness to reach this conclusion tells us more about the America of today than it does about Lincoln's era. One of the saddest things about the modern world is that the concept of close male friendship has functionally been destroyed. Even progressive feminists will admit that one of the privileges women enjoy is the ability to form intimate, non-sexual relationships without any hint of Eros.

Men consequently tend to be lonelier than women and have more trouble intimately bonding.

Part of this can be attributed to a decline in fraternal organizations, with most male-only organizations now admitting women. Part of it is also the growing masculine insecurity with being perceived as unmasculine.

The erosion of male friendship

Still, the pernicious influence of the LGBT lobby's tendency to cast public male intimacy as gay should not be underestimated. One needs only recall the particularly fanciful attempts to affirm the secret, sexual passion between "Lord of the Rings" protagonists Frodo and Sam, despite all evidence to the contrary, not least of which is author J.R.R. Tolkien's devout Catholicism.

The result is a negative feedback loop. Men have fewer and fewer opportunities to express themselves. They are criticized for not being emotional; at the same time, any emotional expression is seized upon as evidence of homosexuality.

Tolkien's close friend C.S. Lewis, himself a target of LGBT revisionists, diagnosed the problem more than 60 years ago in his book "The Four Loves": “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love affair.”

Was Lincoln "closeted"? It's certainly possible — but it seems likely that the claim is beyond proving. "Lover of Men" takes this as reason enough to indulge its speculation. As one interviewee argues, “If the naysayers had their way, there wouldn’t be a gay history because you couldn’t prove it.”

And yet "Lover of Men" is not content to settle for the past. Appropriating Lincoln’s life as a story of repressed homosexuality is a means to entrenching the LGBT movement's power in the present; one commentator goes so far as to say the 14th Amendment should be extended to Americans identifying as transgender.

Whatever one's personal opinions on the matter, using Lincoln as a vehicle for modern-day activism in this way is bad history. We don’t know the secrets of Lincoln’s cloistered heart, and neither do the historians Peterson has assembled. We should be happy to admit our ignorance; some things are meant to remain a mystery.

Getting on a plane for Thanksgiving? You might want to read this first



Last week, a new Blaze Originals dropped. Titled “Countdown to the Next Aviation Disaster,” the documentary exposes the internal rot of America’s aviation industry. The reality is, our skies aren’t as safe as they used to be. In the last year alone, the number of “close calls” — meaning that planes narrowly avoided crashing into each other — surged to three per week.

What happened?

While there are numerous factors contributing to this decline, there’s one issue that stands out among the rest — the Federal Aviation Administration has infused DEI into its hiring system.

Stu Burguiere tells Glenn Beck just how insane the policies are.

Because of DEI policies that unfairly weed out qualified would-be air traffic controllers, our current air traffic controllers are “overworked” because nearly every control tower in the country is severely “understaffed,” Stu explains.

Further, these policies are specifically “blocking white males from getting these jobs,” he tells Glenn.

Flying an aircraft “is a matter of life and death,” says Glenn. “This DEI stuff ... it's death! It should be [spelled] DIE.”

“In the end, [death] is what happens when you have unqualified people building bridges, flying planes, being your eyes in the sky,” he adds.

“I talked to a guy in the documentary who took the merit-based test to become an air traffic controller and got a 100 on it — a perfect score. Then they added another test called the biographical exam,” says Stu.

“It had really weird questions,” like, “Did you perform well in science in high school?” and, “If you say, ‘Yes, I did well in science in high school,’ you get penalized,” he explains. “To [the FAA], you're less likely to be a minority if you did well in science in high school, so you get punished for doing well in a subject that obviously would relate to what you’re doing.”

The man who made a perfect score on the merit-based test ended up “not getting the job,” likely because the biographical exam pinned him as a white male.

“Now [he’s] suing the government over it,” says Stu.

Glenn is horrified but not surprised by all of this. In fact, he was just on a flight that nearly crashed into another plane. To hear the harrowing story of how his plane suddenly “rocketed up” unexpectedly, watch the clip above.

“Blaze Originals: Countdown to the Next Aviation Disaster” is available now on BlazeTV. If you’re not already a subscriber, go to BlazeOriginals.com and start a seven-day free trial. Use code DEI for $30 off your first year of BlazeTV+.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Moviegoer went to see documentary showing positive side of Trump — then things got weird



Filmmaker Christopher Martini set out to help show Americans a different side of President Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election with a documentary titled "The Man You Don't Know." Hawaii resident Kathy Forti was among the moviegoers around the country who joined the Republican president in checking out the film in its opening week.

Forti later notified Martini that while the film was informative, the moviegoing experience was altogether puzzling.

Forti, a psychologist, alleged that upon arriving at the Regal Maui Mall 30 minutes prior to the 12:15 p.m. showing on Oct. 26, she was informed that all of the seats in the theater save for those in the front row had been sold — a claim apparently reinforced by a digital seating chart that a theater employee showed.

'From their coordinated efforts, it felt planned.'

"We reluctantly purchased the two unsold seats in the front row, consoling ourselves that at least the seats were recliners and it couldn't be that bad," Forti wrote to Martini in a statement obtained by Blaze News. "However, upon entering the show close to starting time, we found the theater was completely empty."

It wasn't empty for long, though.

"Two women entered after us and sat further back," Forti's statement continued. "We wondered if perhaps a group had bought all the tickets and they were late arriving."

According to the psychologist, the two other women in the theater did their best to disrupt the showing, "hissing, laughing, and shouting such things as 'liar,' 'not true,' and other derogatory comments." The provocateurs allegedly stood in front of the screen at one point, then later sprayed an unidentified aerosol in another apparent provocation.

Despite the intervention of an usher, Forti indicated that the provocateurs remained until the end of the film.

Forti told Blaze News, "I believe the two women intentionally tried to intimidate us and drive us out of the theater. From their coordinated efforts, it felt planned."

Afterward, Forti claimed that she pressed the ticket desk for answers about the seating arrangements, only to discover that only four tickets had ultimately been purchased, which dispelled her previous suspicion that the seats had been bought up to preclude people from seeing the film but left her with even more questions.

'It feels like somebody is deciding for the country what they see and what they cannot see.'

"They never explained the sold-out vs. non-sold-out ticket screen we saw," said Forti. "Had we not gone back after the documentary to say something, we would never have known about the change in ticket screen seating chart."

"My friend and I turned to each other, wondering if we had just entered the Twilight Zone," the psychologist wrote to Martini.

Blaze News reached out to Regal Cinemas for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

When speaking about Forti's theater experience, Martini told Blaze News that his producer and co-writer, Joshua Macciello, has "been getting a lot of similar stories."

"This film could actually influence the election," said Martini. "I have a lot of people coming to me with similar stories to Kathy's. ... It makes one wonder if there's some sort of concerted effort on somebody's part to suppress this movie about Trump, which is being released right before an election across the country."

Martini's suspicions are heightened on account of "awful locations and screening times."

Macciello, the president of Global Ascension Studios, recently expressed his frustration to Dan Ball of "Real America" over the apparent refusal by certain theater circuits to screen the film.

"I mean, what's going on there?" said Macciello. "This is not a political movie. ... This is a movie about a man. It gives you an insight into him. And he happens to be in politics and running for president."

"In the present-day United States of America, it's very bizarre. It feels like somebody is deciding for the country what they see and what they cannot see. And clearly, somebody does not want [them] to see a film about President Trump right before the election," said Martini.

The documentary — billed as a "balanced, deeper portrayal of Trump as a scholar, successful entrepreneur, man of faith, and devoted family man" — features interviews with various people in Trump's orbit, including Lara Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric Trump, his granddaughter Kai Trump, Hulk Hogan, and Kyle Forgeard of the Nelk Boys.

Trump attended the premiere on Saturday with friends and members of his family.

When asked about his objective with the film, Martini indicated that the media has almost exclusively advanced negative depictions and narratives about Trump, which is troubling because "the truth always lies somewhere in the middle."

"Our goal with this was to show the other side," said the director, "coming from the people that he made a positive impact on."

Despite the apparent desire by leftist organizations and activists to keep the film content in theaters ideologically uniform, Martini indicated that intellectual diversity is ascendant.

"I think that there's very few people making the kinds of movies that right-leaning people, conservative-leaning people, you know, God-fearing people want to see," said Martini. "But all of that's changing."

The documentary is set to launch on Elon Musk's X ahead of Election Day.

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Can The 25th Amendment Withstand A Weaponized Justice System?

A new documentary on the vice presidency gives a fresh perspective on the complications of American governance.

New doc 'Get the Jew' confronts anti-Semitism, media bias



The New York Times, the Atlantic, and CNN have all gone Hollywood, creating documentary divisions that align with their progressive worldviews.

Why not the Wall Street Journal?

'It’s incredible that the New York Times, managed and run by Jews, chose to report it that way. Why is there that bias?'

“We feel there should be something on our side,” says veteran filmmaker Michael Pack, the writer/director/producer of “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.”

It’s why he joined forces with the WSJ’s opinion section to create docu-shorts on topics progressive filmmakers won’t touch. First up? The Crown Heights riots.

Tragic story

On August 19, 1991, a Jewish man accidentally drove into two black children, killing young Gavin Cato. Riots broke out across the New York City neighborhood, spiking already tense relations between black and Jewish residents. Lemrick Nelson, who is black, stabbed Jewish scholar Yankel Rosenbaum to death during the three-day melee.

Then-Mayor David Dinkins did little to stop the chaos targeting the Jewish community. Sound familiar?

“’Get the Jew’: The Crown Heights Riot Revisited” takes us back to those tumultuous days. The featurette, available for free Oct. 7 via YouTube and outside the WSJ’s paywall, lets key figures from the era recall that tragic New York story.

Horribly prescient

Pack says the Crown Heights riots offered a “timely” tale for the first short out of the gate, but the project proved horribly prescient.

“We didn’t know that another Jew would be stabbed in Crown Heights weeks before we finished the film,” Pack says. “[The attacker] was shouting, ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Do you want to die?’ The issue is different, but the anti-Semitism remains.”

“Get the Jew” recalls how the Rev. Al Sharpton played a consequential role in the riots, with critics suggesting he doused the city’s fires with rhetorical gasoline. Sharpton appears in the docu-short to explain his presence in the saga.

“He does a very good job defending his position. … He knows how to handle difficult questions,” Pack says of the MSNBC host. “It’s a cornerstone of these films. We give everybody a chance to make their case.”

The docuseries hopes to “tell stories in a straightforward manner, not to preach or advocate,” he adds.

Both sides?

Part of that story is media bias, another element that speaks to modern times. A New York Times reporter recalls the shock of learning that his employer said both sides were culpable in the chaos.

That’s not what he saw over that three-day period.

“It’s a very key part of the narrative, and it is surprising,” Pack says of the media’s coverage at the time. “In those days you would get to a phone booth and call your editor, read the story to him over the phone. [The reporter] was watching this anti-Semitic riot and the New York Times reports it as if there were both sides fighting. That’s not what was happening, as Ari Goldman, then reporter, recognized.”

“It’s incredible that The New York Times, managed and run by Jews, chose to report it that way,” he adds. “Why is there that bias? You can see that today in how they report on what Israel does versus what Hamas or Iran does.”

Another chilling note in the film? How Mayor Dinkins let the chaos rage without attempting to restore law and order, echoing the inaction by Gov. Tim Walz during the 2020 George Floyd riots.

“[Dinkins] himself isn’t anti-Semitic, but he felt, in my opinion, that politically he couldn’t act,” Pack says. The mayor eventually called in police to quell the riots, but it happened only after protesters hurled debris at both him and the chief of police during a press conference.

'An easy sell'

Actor Tim Blake Nelson of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” fame narrates “Get the Jew.” Nelson portrayed the title character in dramatic re-enactments in Pack’s “Rickover: The Birth of Nuclear Power,” originally on PBS, now streaming on Amazon

The filmmaker thought the actor matched the material well.

“He’s very interested in politics and is an open-minded person,” Pack says of the versatile actor. “He’s been involved in causes like stopping anti-Semitism. This was an easy sell for him.

Pack says the current plan is to produce from three to six WSJ docu-shorts a year. That’s in addition to his work as head of Palladium Pictures. That new enterprise finds Pack and his son, Thomas Pack, producing feature-length documentaries that aren’t likely to come from Hollywood Inc.

The company’s WSJ alliance is only part of the big picture. The company is producing feature-length documentaries and serving as an “incubator” for “right-of-center, non-woke filmmakers.” It’s all about stories that won’t be told by mainstream filmmakers.

“The goal is to reach the center,” he adds.

Abraham Lincoln targeted for theatrical character assassination; filmmaker suggests he was a philandering homosexual



Activists' so-called "Pride Month" is over, but their campaign to queer America is clearly a perennial undertaking. While American youth are a popular target, long-dead American greats are apparently also fair game.

Shaun Peterson, a self-described "director/preditor" from California who has previously worked on multiple Disney projects, is set to debut a so-called documentary film in September that accuses Abraham Lincoln of having extramarital affairs with men.

"As told by preeminent Lincoln scholars, historical recreations and never before seen photographs and letters, the film details Lincoln's romantic relationships with men," says the website for the film. "Lover of Men widens its lens into the history of human sexual fluidity and focuses on the profound differences between sexual mores of the nineteenth century and those we hold today."

The filmmakers made sure there was no mistaking the agitprop nature of the film, stating, "Lover of Men is not only an exploration of gender roles and sexual identity, but also serves as an examination of American intolerance."

According to the trailer for the film, sexuality "through the mid-19th century was far more fluid, but for someone who wanted a political career, it was mandatory that you have a wife."

"If you can accept a queer Lincoln, you can accept queer people overall," says the trailer. "He should inspire us to achieve a true democracy for everyone."

Whereas the new Broadway show "Oh, Mary!" similarly accuses Lincoln of being gay, the LGBT publication Queerty indicated its transvestic playwright Cole Escola readily admits that his play is utterly baseless. The trailer for Peterson's film, on the other hand, adopts a pretense of seriousness about its projection of faddish contemporary notions about sex onto a revered 19th-century statesman.

'I've seen those letters, and they have no homoerotic overtones.'

Lincoln married Mary Anne Todd, a Kentucky woman, on Nov. 4, 1842. Together, they had four children, only one of whom — Robert Todd Lincoln — lived past the age of 18.

While there have been various efforts over the years to paint the American father and husband who issued the Emancipation Proclamation as gay or a "bisexual" — especially by the late gay activist Larry Kramer, who made no secret of his political aim to the New York Times — these appear to have consisted largely of projections, inventions, speculations, and misinterpretations.

One reason people have concluded Lincoln was gay was that he shared a bed with a man on more than one occasion. It's clear from the trailer for Peterson's film that it similarly will lean into the suggestion embraced by other revisionists that Lincoln had a romantic relationship with Joshua Speed, a man whose marriage to Fanny Henning lasted 40 years.

Michael Burlingame, the Naomi B. Lynn distinguished chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, told the Hartford Courant in 2021 that the supposedly controversial aspects of Lincoln's relationship with Speed seized upon by the likes of Larry Kramer would "be a footnote" in his multi-volume biography of the Republican president.

"The evidence I've seen seems insignificant to justify its inclusion," said the Lincoln expert. "I've seen those letters, and they have no homoerotic overtones."

Burlingame suggested, instead, that he had found evidence that Lincoln was infatuated with women besides Todd prior to their marriage.

Charles Strozier, a psychoanalyst and history professor who addressed the false narrative in his 2016 book "Your Friends Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed," told the Daily Beast that it was very common for men to share a bed in Lincoln's time.

"Inns at the time were really just homes where they finished the loft. They weren't hotels like we have now. They were just hostels, where you have the men over here and the women over there," said Strozier.

According to the Daily Mail, Lincoln originally shared a bed with Speed because when he moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1837, he didn't have enough money to acquire his own bed and bedding.

The Mail noted further that Lincoln would also sleep in the same bed as other lawyers — a common practice for the traveling "circuits" of his time, where up to 20 would share one room.

Doris Kearns Goodwin was another award-winning historian who reportedly poked holes in the gay Lincoln narrative in her biography on the Republican, noting, "Their intimacy is more an index to an era when close male friendships, accompanied by open expressions of affection and passion, were familiar and socially acceptable."

"Nor can sharing a bed be considered evidence of an erotic involvement. It was common practice in an era when private quarters were a rare luxury," continued Goodwin. "The attorneys of the Eighth Circuit in Illinois where Lincoln would travel regularly shared beds."

The late Harvard professor David Herbert Donald, long regarded to be the definitive biographer of Lincoln, also disputed the suggestion — by C.A. Tripp, a gay researcher for Alfred C. Kinsey — that the 16th president was gay. The New York Times indicated that no one at the time had ever suggested Lincoln and Speed were sexual partners — not even his enemies in the yellow press. Donald, like Strozier, emphasized that in frontier times, space was tight and men shared beds. It was not out preference but necessity.

In response to a similar effort — again by Kramer — to paint Alexander Hamilton as non-straight, Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow warned against "ransacking history in service of a political agenda."

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I shot Cody Wilson: 'Death Athletic' director Jessica Solce



It's fair to say that Cody Wilson, the creator of the first 3D-printed gun, is an accommodating documentary subject.

The company Wilson founded, Defense Distributed, has always taken a build-in-public approach, both as a practical matter of fundraising and to frame its project — the free distribution of blueprints for personal, at-home gun manufacturing — as a fundamentally political one.

'I think people want an intellectually rigorous experience that's cinematic and beautiful at the same time. But they're scared of the political ramifications of the feelings that they might encounter.'

Wilson is an articulate and charismatic spokesperson for this project. While he can fluently cite post-Marxist theorists to justify his anti-state provocations, there's a certain mischievous swagger behind the Baudrillard quotes. He doesn't mind playing the villain a bit.

Early in "Death Athletic: A Dissident Architecture," filmmaker Jessica Solce's intimate portrait of an eight-year span in the techno-gadfly's life, Wilson even pulls a classic villain move — explaining his devious plan:

To a certain level, all this is theater. If Google's motto is "don't be evil" — and we all know how good Google is at doing that — Defense Distributed's motto is "be evil," or at least "think evil." I've always been up front about how it's going to go, what I plan to do before I do it. And really, only when people reach out and try to stop it does that seal the deal and make it happen.

In other words, when various federal, state, and corporate forces single out Defense Distributed and do their best to thwart it, they're playing right into Wilson's hands. At the same time, as much as Wilson seems to thrive in the spotlight, it's also clearly taken its toll.

At home with ambiguity

About 15 minutes into "Death Athletic," Solce gives us our first look at this more vulnerable side of Wilson. Having been dropped by his second payments processor, he makes a confession: "I'm telling you, I can't handle it, emotionally, mentally ... I'm gonna be screwed up because of the highs and lows." He stews on the "the insult, the humiliation" of "malicious bureaucrats" making him a target, "the constant ... dread and fear" they've instilled in him.

As if to illustrate his mood swings, Wilson suddenly becomes defiant. "They can all go to hell. They can all go to hell. They can go to hell."

Taking a big swig from gallon plastic jug of spring water, he turns from his computer to the camera: "Live with the federal monkey on your back for years. Live with it and do what I do. Live with it and build a multimillion-dollar company despite what they want to do to you. And sue the f*** out of your enemy."

Then Wilson gets up from his desk and walks abruptly out of frame, continuing to talk as the camera finds him again. He looks directly at us, his agitated movement bringing him in and out of focus

"I can't ... this is ... this is turning me into a cartoon character, a strange zealot ... bizarre monkish figure who lives only for revenge," he says, and for a split second, he seems to be speaking of Solce and the very film we're watching. Is he about to walk off?

It's a thrilling moment, and it testifies to Solce's talent and taste as a director, especially given the moribund state of the documentary today. In a genre in which most directors aim for worldview-affirming propaganda or quirky, undemanding crowd-pleasers, Solce is at home with ambiguity.

DEATH ATHLETIC - A DISSIDENT ARCHITECTURE - TRAILER www.youtube.com

Irrational commitment

"Death Athletic" opens with artful close-ups of 3D-printed guns, dappled in shifting, geometric patterns of light, as slow piano chords play. The weapons look beautiful and mysterious, setting a mood that evokes one of those old James Bond opening credit sequences. Solce then pulls back to reveal that we're observing a photo shoot orchestrated by Wilson himself. He fiddles with the camera as he continues the first of his many eloquent politico-philosophical monologues in the film.

To what extent are we observing Wilson objectively? And to what extent are we already seeing things through his point of view? From the start, Solce makes it unclear. So it is with the of atmosphere of paranoia that Solce creates this film with surveillance footage-esque long shots and sinister synths. How much of this sense of persecution is real — and how much is of Wilson's own creation?

For his part, Wilson seems to agree. In an interview late last year with Compact, Wilson said that Solce's film “captures something true about being committed to your work to the point it may become irrational. There’s a Freudian death drive or something.”

The result is that "Death Athletic" succeeds in being as unsettlingly confrontational and contradictory as Wilson himself.

Embracing 'No Control'

While the reception for "Death Athletic" has been enthusiastic, it was never a forgone conclusion that it would ever be seen at all. Once she'd assembled enough of a rough cut, Solce worked with an industry PR person she knew to try to sell it to get funds for post-production.

"Streaming services basically said, 'We will not touch this film,'" Solce tells Align. "And one even said it was on the wrong side of history because I was profiling [Wilson]."

According to Solce, her let-the-viewer-decide approach would not have been such a hard sell 10 or 15 years ago. "But if you touch the gun world right now and you want it to be mainstream, it has to be anti-gun. It just has to."

If Solce came to the subject without an agenda, in part it's because she came to it — and documentary filmmaking in general — by accident.

Solce's background is in acting, writing, and theater directing — she mounted a small but well-regarded New York City production of "The Crucible" some years back. "I never thought I was going to make documentaries," she says. "I literally never thought about documentaries at all, other than to sometimes watch one and enjoy it."

A chance meeting in 2013 with a family friend named Greg Bokor changed that. When Bokor casually mentioned that he was about to debut an art installation in reaction to the Sandy Hook shootings (which had happened the previous December) something clicked.

"That was moment in my life where I had finally [started to realize] how media worked and how every time you saw this issue, there was nothing really important being discussed," says Solce. "Just fear and the imagery of terror to get this emotional response."

Solce called up a director of photography she knew, and five days later, she was filming. Originally, she had only planned to cover the installation, "but within two weeks, I realized I was making a feature."

That feature was Solce's self-funded 2014 debut, "No Control," a notably even-handed examination of the gun debate that features interviews with figures across the political spectrum. Among the gun rights advocates Solce spoke to was Wilson.

In fact, "No Control" ends with Wilson prophetically announcing the inevitability of the new freedom promised by 3D-printed guns. The moment all but demands a follow-up; Solce soon began working on one. Solce threw herself in to making what would become "Death Athletic" the same way she started her first film: "impulsively."

An unfinished story

"I wasn't done with the story. I was tired of seeing people making ineffectual, small, biased shorts on what Cody was doing," Solce says. "I realized that this gun issue wasn't really about guns. It was about the First Amendment. It was about sharing information online. It was about the digital era. It encapsulates and incorporates everything that's happening in the Bitcoin space." Solce contacted Wilson, and he got on board.

Like its predecessor, "Death Athletic" was paid for out of Solce's pocket. Despite the obvious limitation of this approach, Solce says it can be motivating. "Nobody can tell you not to do it. You don't have to wait for permission. You don't have to pitch for six to eight months. [If I'd had to] do that with either of those films, neither of them would have happened."

Forging a career

Getting the movie noticed is its own struggle. "Right now, it's a lovely trickle [of viewers] and I appreciate every single person who watches it," says Solce. "But it's still kind of lost in this niche world. Breaking out into any kind of mainstream has been a process of talking to people, trying to get on podcasts," Solce says.

And Solce remains optimistic that "Death Athletic" will slowly find a bigger audience. "There's something evergreen about it. Everybody [who sees it] has these incredibly visceral reactions and they want to discuss it."

Solce recalls the surprising reactions of some longtime acquaintances when they finally saw "Death Athletic" at the New York City premiere. "Throughout the eight years of me doing this film, they were aggressively against it. Oddly enough, they ended up being extremely moved by it."

Solce's next project is "Forging a Country," a short film about the recent re-election of El Salvador's populist president, Nayib Bukele. Solce will premiere "Forging a Country" this August at the Palestra Bureau conference in San Salvador.

While Bukele is another potentially divisive subject, Solce says she doesn't court controversy for its own sake. She merely asks that audiences watch her work with an open mind.

"I think people want an intellectually rigorous experience that's cinematic and beautiful at the same time," Solce says. "But they're scared of the political ramifications of the feelings that they might encounter."

"Death Athletic" can be streamed on Amazon and Apple TV. Both "Death Athletic" and "No Control" can also be bought directly from the filmmaker.

Why does Michigan have MORE registered voters than citizens?!



After Biden’s supposed victory in 2020, Americans’ faith in our election system has waned significantly. With November 5 just around the corner, people across the country are skeptical about whether or not we will have a fair election this time around.

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales along with the Blaze Originals team recently headed to Michigan to investigate the state’s voting system, granted the swing state heavily altered its voting laws after Trump’s victory in 2016.

What they uncovered suggests that a fair 2024 election is highly unlikely.

For starters, “In 2018 Jocelyn Benson replaced Ruth Johnson as Michigan’s secretary of state.“

Johnson, a Republican, “was interested in doing the right thing when it came to protecting the voter roles and keeping them secure and fresh and ... not outdated,” Sara tells Glenn Beck.

However, Benson, who’s “Soros funded” and formerly worked for the Southern Poverty Law Center investigating hate crimes, was “part of the Secretary of State Project that George Soros is funding.” Benson attempted to “allow Michigan to count ballots that were received after Election Day,” and although she was unsuccessful in this endeavor as a result of being sued, she did manage to enact “same-day registration” and “[registering] without showing a photo ID" policies.

Glenn is shocked.

“You need a photo ID for anything — everything! — except for the most important thing a citizen can do?” he asks in disbelief, noting that he recently had to present his ID in order to obtain a simple fishing license.

“If you did care about democracy and you did care about the state of your country, you would want election integrity and security,” says Sara, referencing the Democrats behind these loose voting laws.

“In the state of Michigan, they now have a constitutional right to vote by mail,” despite the fact that “all of these other first-world countries ... have decided that mail-in voting is a horrible way of doing things,” she criticizes.

There is some good news, however. Organizations, such as Public Interest Legal Foundation and the RNC, are “suing the crap out of these states and out of these secretaries of states” who are behind these new corrupt voting laws. They also address issues such as the long list of “dead people on the voter roles in the state of Michigan” and the fact that “105% of Michigan’s population [is] currently registered to vote.”

To learn more about the corruption in our voting system and what you can do to fight back, watch the clip below.


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NEW Blaze Originals documentary 'Voter Fraud Exposed: How Elections Can Be Stolen' premieres TOMORROW



Since the founding, America’s government has been a beacon of success to the rest of the world. Many other countries have modeled their government after the principles instilled in the United States’ Constitution. The American system is based on representative democracy where one person gets one vote.

But the tides have turned.

Not only is the rest of the world watching America teeter on the precipice of collapse, but Americans themselves are rapidly losing faith in our system — especially when it comes to elections.

But this waning trust isn’t due to a flawed system but rather to the flawed people who are abusing and undermining it.

Many Americans believe the 2020 election was rife with fraud and suspect the 2024 election will be, too. But it’s not just Republicans that have called into question past elections. From Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, politicians on both sides of the aisle have claimed stolen elections and voter fraud time and time again.

That’s why Sara Gonzales and the Blaze Originals team headed to Michigan — the highly crucial swing state that completely transformed its election laws after Trump won the 2016 presidential election — to find out what’s going on behind the scenes.

The crew exposes how figures like George Soros are funding secretary of state campaigns and then wealthy nonprofit groups are embedding liberal activists in these offices to facilitate bad policies, such as voting in multiple states, voting without a valid signature or permanent address, and leaving dead voters on the rolls, among others.

Watch “Voter Fraud Exposed: How Elections Can Be Stolen” this Thursday – only on BlazeTV. Subscribe today using the code VOTERFRAUD for $30 off an annual subscription!


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Dr. Fauci's Lies EXPOSED | ***Must-See New Documentary***

Dr. Fauci's Lies EXPOSED | ***Must-See New Documentary***