00:00:04.000We have Jordan Harmon from Angel Studios talking about Cabrini and how they're remaking Hollywood and just in the nick of time and not a moment, not a moment too soon, as they say.
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00:01:34.000I am very excited about this conversation with Jordan Harmon, who is the co-founder of Angel Studios and filmmaker of the new film Cabrini, which is in theaters right now.
00:01:44.000Jordan, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:05.000And so I've seen this industry up close and personal.
00:02:08.000And so, you know, I'm always trying to explain to Charlie just how revolutionary the project that you guys are working on is and the model that you guys have built really is.
00:02:16.000But let's start with the film and then I'll get into the model at Angel Studios.
00:02:32.000Man, this particular film is got a special place in our heart because it is elevating Angel to a level of artistry that we've never done before.
00:02:43.000It is one of the most beautiful films you'll ever see.
00:02:45.000The reviews, I'll be honest, I'm surprised the reviews from critics are even positive.
00:02:50.000And that's just because they never give us positive reviews, but they are even like liking this film.
00:02:55.000So it's getting 91% from critics, 98% from audiences.
00:02:58.000It's one of the highest film-rated films of the year.
00:03:01.000From audiences, it is the highest-rated wide release of the year.
00:03:19.000Angel.com slash Charlie to get your tickets.
00:03:21.000And this particular film is so important for the world because it is literally addressing so many of the things that we are dealing with today.
00:03:56.000Faces at long last faces and at long last wins over until then villainous and sabotaging New York mayor played by John Lithgow, who's obviously a phenomenal actor, who finally agrees to support her mission.
00:04:10.000And then Lithgow looks over at Cabrini and says, you know, it's too bad you're not a man.
00:04:22.000He says cluelessly, in response, Cabrini simply and correctly reminds him that no man, that a man could never do what she and her sisters do, which I thought was, I mean, reading this from Roger Ebert is like, you know, I was like, wow, okay, great.
00:04:41.000Like, it's a very there's a deeper message in there, though, when you think about it, because the reality is, is we're in this really confused world where, you know, the youth coming up are completely confused about gender and all these different things.
00:04:54.000And, you know, people are fighting left and right.
00:04:59.000And we're not just looking at our unique qualities as people.
00:05:02.000Like, my wife, she does things that I can never do.
00:05:14.000But yeah, but that being said, but she has gifts that I can ever achieve.
00:05:21.000And I have gifts that, but they're complementary.
00:05:24.000And so this movie is such a beautiful film because it speaks to so many aspects of the world today, but it does it in a way that's it's not pushing the message first.
00:05:46.000And he said, it's, you know, I love seeing a film that's not just jamming the message down my throat, as the critical drinker says a lot of times on YouTube.
00:05:55.000And so it's one of those things where we're very grateful for all the support and it's such an important film to get out into the world.
00:06:02.000Well, and a lot of people, you know, it's funny.
00:06:04.000We had you on before to talk about this, but a lot of people that aren't Catholic don't know the story of Cabrini.
00:06:10.000I mean, she was an Italian Catholic missionary nun.
00:06:15.000I'm reading from Roger Ebert again here, who founded, who not only founded a peerless orphanage in New York at the turn of the 20th century and gave her name to Hudson Heights Serene Cabrini Boulevard in Manhattan, but also resolutely built a worldwide network of charitable organizations and homes in the decades that followed.
00:06:34.000And then she was, she became a saint, right?
00:06:36.000I mean, Catholics know her as Mother Cabrini.
00:06:42.000But she's really, she's really, she's really an entrepreneur.
00:06:44.000Like, in all intents and purposes, this feels like an entrepreneur's film in that she goes and she starts the hospital system.
00:06:54.000Not the one we see today that's a little bit more crony capitalism where the government's coming into every piece of it, but a system where she wanted to basically have all the wealthy people be serviced on the top.
00:07:05.000And then they would take some of the profits to supply and help some of the less fortunate people.
00:07:10.000But it was in a way that was privatized.
00:07:12.000And she didn't wait for government to come solve her problems.
00:08:28.000So obviously, you know, Angel Studios, our mission is to tell stories that Amplify Light.
00:08:32.000We started with Drybar Comedy, which is now the largest library of stand-up comedy in the world.
00:08:37.000Then we went on to our first original series called The Chosen, which, you know, is now being seen by over 100 million people around the globe.
00:08:45.000We had a breakout success in theaters with his only son, and then Sound of Freedom, which was last year, a huge blockbuster surprise, thanks to people like you, your viewers.
00:08:57.000And then we've got Cabrin that's coming out.
00:09:01.000And so there's many, many, many projects that are not just on the Angel app and on angel.com that you can go watch and actually consume right now, but there's dozens that are in the works that we haven't even announced yet.
00:09:26.000Essentially, if you're an investor into entertainment, you're 80 to 85% certain to lose your money, right?
00:09:35.000So it's a really challenging system that is controlled by a small few in what we call development.
00:09:43.000So they're the ones that read the scripts.
00:09:45.000They sort of grade the scripts and they go up through the ranks of like the staff, the junior staff to the senior staff.
00:09:52.000And then eventually maybe it gets to the decision maker that can write checks.
00:09:56.000And if that script makes it all the way through, maybe you have a chance of getting that script made.
00:10:01.000But it's basically on the opinion of one or two or three people.
00:10:05.000Then once the film starts to get made, it gets made by committee.
00:10:09.000So, you know, you've got studio execs that are constantly hamstringing the directors and the actors and the people with actual vision and creative artistry.
00:10:18.000And what you get is modern Hollywood, where you get this hodgepodge of confusing choices, of lack of artistry, lack of vision.
00:10:32.000And so that's our little tease here, Jordan.
00:10:34.000And then I'm going to explain, and you're going to explain how you guys have flipped the script, quite literally, to make sure that your success rate is just unfathomable in today's Hollywood environment.
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00:12:12.000So tell us about the Angel Studio model and the guild because people listening right now need to join the guild because you can be part of this decision-making process.
00:12:22.000Yeah, it's an incredibly interesting thing that we kind of stumbled into.
00:12:27.000We're obviously, you know, big believers in democracy and our democratic republic that we live in.
00:12:35.000But we're also big believers in that there's a wisdom in the crowds.
00:12:38.000There's actually a book called The Wisdom of Crowds, where it talks about how the community, when given the right sandbox and environment, can actually make better decisions than any executive.
00:12:48.000And so Hollywood doesn't really actually have a talent problem.
00:12:52.000They have the best storytellers in the world.
00:12:57.000And what we mean by that is there's a select view of Hollywood executives who make all the decisions around that entire town and what content and film and TV comes into the world.
00:13:07.000And they believe they know what's best for you, for me.
00:13:12.000And we've decided it's important that we as executives and founders of Angel that we don't have the same hubris as they do or try not to because we probably make just as bad of decisions, but in other ways.
00:13:26.000And so we've turned over the gatekeeper keys to the audience.
00:13:33.000It's the investors in The Chosen and in Drybar and Tunnel Twins and any one of our TV shows and our films, as well as the people who are coming in and they're joining, becoming Angel Guild members.
00:13:54.000But more importantly, you get to see shows and films like Sound of Freedom or Cabrini before they ever come out into the public.
00:14:03.000And you get to vote and decide whether Angel gets to release that or not.
00:14:08.000No matter how much I love a project, as a founder of Angel Studios, I have no ability to greenlight something or get it into the world until the Angel Guild gives us the thumbs up first.
00:14:18.000And so that's a very important part of our model.
00:14:23.000In 2023, we had four theatrical releases, and all four have either paid back their investors a return on their investment or on pace to do so with their revenues from theatrical releases, DVDs, all the different things that we're doing.
00:14:41.000And this is a testament to the audience knowing what they want.
00:17:50.000I mean, I've got a series of questions for you, but in broad terms, what did you guys find when you looked back at what the J6 committee did?
00:17:59.000Well, let me first say that when I was asked to chair this committee, my only requirement was that we get to the truth, not a preconceived narrative or just to counter the January 6th, but seek the truth.
00:18:14.000And whatever the truth was, we would report on it.
00:18:16.000So we did spend the first year pretty much working in the shadows, and some people were upset about that.
00:18:21.000But the reason that we were doing this is, you know, if you're conducting an investigation and you conduct that investigation in the press, you're not going to get anywhere, right?
00:18:31.000So we wanted to do an independent investigation, which we did for a year.
00:18:38.000We released some findings, but a couple of weeks ago, we released our interim report.
00:18:43.000And I think the report speaks for itself.
00:18:46.000But what, in summary, the report shows is that the select committee of January 6th, Pelosi's committee, handpicked committee, by the way, had a predetermined narrative that they wanted to sell to the American people.
00:19:00.000And everything that they did and all the information that they released was designed to support that narrative, even to the extent of suppressing any exculpatory evidence that was contrary to the preconceived narrative that they had, that Donald Trump was the impetus behind the January 6th attacks on the Capitol, that he somehow coordinated it.
00:19:24.000He was behind it, and he even held back National Guard from assisting.
00:19:30.000And any evidence that the select committee uncovered that was contrary to that narrative, they suppressed that evidence.
00:19:38.000And so our report released all of the evidence.
00:19:42.000And quickly, even some of the mainstream media are seeing that this entire select committee was a setup to disparage Donald Trump, to legislatively prosecute him.
00:19:56.000The select committee, one of their taskings, according to the legislation that created the committee, was to look at the security failures of the Capitol on January 6th, regardless of who it was that got into the Capitol.
00:20:09.000They should have never been able to breach the security of this Capitol with our Capitol police, with the defense forces that we have here.
00:20:15.000But they very easily breached the Capitol and got inside.
00:20:20.000There is virtually nothing about the security breach of the Capitol in the select committee's final report.
00:20:26.000In fact, they had a team that was supposed to be dedicated to investigating the security failure.
00:20:34.000We cannot even find any documentation of any evidence that the team did anything.
00:20:41.000And so when you look at the final report, though, Donald Trump's name is mentioned 1,900 times, but pipe bombs are only mentioned five.
00:20:50.000And they're just in passing that there were.
00:20:52.000So they conducted no investigation in the security failures, and all of their focus was on legislatively prosecuting Donald Trump.
00:21:02.000I have a couple rapid fire questions here for you, Representative.
00:21:09.000Did Donald Trump approve National Guard troops on J6?
00:21:19.000In fact, I knew that he did even before the select committee was organized because Vanity Fair, and as you know, Vanity Fair is not a conservative publication.
00:21:31.000They had an article that ran like on January the 15th, just a few days after the January 6th incidents.
00:21:38.000And they reported, as they had a reporter in the Department of Defense at the time, that there was a discussion between Secretary Miller and Donald Trump where he had told them that they needed to get ready 10,000 troops of the National Guard.
00:21:53.000What we released in our report was just one instance of conversations that Trump had a couple of days before January 6th, where he ordered the National Guard to be ready.
00:22:06.000We even found testimony from others to where he was briefed about the intelligence of potential threats against the Capitol a few days before January 6th.
00:22:18.000And in that meeting, according to the logs that we have, it says POTUS, President of the United States, orders National Guard troops to be ready.
00:22:27.000So there were many instances of him before January 6th authorizing the National Guard, even authorizing as much as 10,000 troops.
00:22:36.000They're playing some word games here because even now some of the former members of the select committee are saying he never deployed the troops.
00:23:20.000The president, President Trump offered the mayor of D.C., Bowser, as many troops as she wanted to help because of the threats that the intelligence threats that they had received or the intelligence of threats.
00:23:35.000And she only asked for, I think, 300 and something and did not want them armed nor in riot gear.
00:23:42.000Bowser only wanted them as traffic control.
00:23:48.000The Capitol Police, Chief Sun, the Chief of Capitol Police at the time, had requested on multiple occasions before January 6th, because of just the size of the crowds that they knew were coming, National Guard backup.
00:24:02.000We do have evidence that Democrat leadership, at least at the staff level, turned down the request for National Guard.
00:24:12.000Now, the Capitol Police Board, which is made up of the two sergeant-at-arms and the architect of the Capitol, had to approve any request for National Guard at the time.
00:24:20.000And when Chief Sun requested National Guard on a couple of occasions, the House Sergeant-at-Arms said, quote, let me run this up the chain.
00:24:29.000And when he came back, he said they don't like the optics.
00:24:31.000The only person up the chain is the Speaker of the House, which would have been Pelosi.
00:24:37.000I think it's clear that Pelosi didn't like the optics of requesting the National Guard.
00:24:41.000National Guard was not approved until there were shots fired in the Capitol.
00:24:45.000That's what it took to actually get somebody to move after seven requests.
00:24:51.000She didn't like the optics, sir, but she certainly has made great use of the optics that ended up resulting from that day.
00:24:59.000Not to mention the fact that the J6 committee hired Hollywood producers to, I mean, the contrast between your investigation and the J6 committees could not be more stark.
00:25:10.000You have been, as we said, sort of operating below the radar for the time being, and then you've released this bombshell report.
00:25:17.000But, you know, meanwhile, they've got Hollywood producers doing national broadcasts across network television.
00:25:25.000It's just striking the difference and how they really do understand optics.
00:25:30.000So a couple other questions here, Congressman.
00:25:33.000So did they delete, did the J6 committee delete files?
00:25:40.000We don't know how many for sure because we did a forensics on the hard drives that they gave us because they claimed to have given us four terabytes of digital data as well as boxes full of printed documents.
00:25:54.000So when we received the information that they were supposed to preserve and hand over to us, we started looking through it because it really wasn't cataloged or organized to figure out what we had.
00:26:05.000We realized we didn't have everything.
00:26:07.000We hired the forensics company to come in and do a low-level scrub of the hard drives they provided us.
00:26:13.000They found several thousand documents deleted.
00:26:16.000Now, some of those, you know, and you're working on a computer, you delete documents all the time.
00:27:10.000And can anybody be held accountable, sir?
00:27:13.000Well, that's something that we're going to consider.
00:27:16.000We still have a lot more investigation to go, but it was definitely a violation of House rules and protocol from the clerk's office.
00:27:23.000Probably the biggest violation, most egregious, was the not preserving.
00:27:30.000I don't want to say delete because we don't know what happened to him, but they videotaped every interview, every deposition, every transcribed interview.
00:27:39.000They brought in video cameras and videotaped them.
00:27:42.000They used some segments of those tapes in their nationally publicized and televised hearings.
00:27:51.000We were not given any of those, and they admitted to not preserving them.
00:27:56.000And even Liz Cheney in her book talks about how important it was that they videotaped every interview, but yet they did not preserve those.
00:28:17.000We have since were able to secure some of those, but we still have the Department of Homeland Security is still holding eight of the documents, which are very critical to this investigation.
00:28:28.000The committee sent them to the executive branch to maintain, and in my opinion, it was to keep us from having access to them.
00:28:36.000Well, Congressman, I hope everybody listening to this is as shocked and appalled and angry as I am just hearing you describe this.
00:28:47.000And I hope that when you conclude your investigation, that as this gets written in history, that it be one of the biggest propaganda pieces ever committed by the United States government.
00:28:59.000And, you know, they put Liz Cheney, they put Adam Kinzinger up on there to call it bipartisan.
00:31:28.000They've had to dig through various communication chains and find it, either at the executive branch or elsewhere.
00:31:34.000And then there's this point about Cassidy Hutchinson.
00:31:38.000So this was, if you remember the big bombshell report and everybody took it and ran that Trump lunged at the Secret Service and tried to get out and march with the J Sixers and tried to grab the wheel of the motorcade car.
00:31:54.000And this was actually what you don't know was from Hutchinson's heavily revised fourth interview.
00:32:01.000Yes, there was a fourth interview, meaning there were three previous ones.
00:32:10.000First pass: I don't remember hearing about any weapons at the Capitol.
00:32:15.000Second pass, actually, I definitely remember reports of weapons and Trump knew about it.
00:32:21.000So she went from not knowing or having any knowledge of reports of weapons at the Capitol to, yes, I remember, and Trump knew.
00:32:29.000And so Reps Thompson and Cheney promoted Hutchinson's sensational claim as fact and underplayed the fact that she had three previous interviews where that was not the way her interview went at all.
00:32:42.000So if you take it on its face, she completely perjured herself.
00:32:47.000The J6 committee also hid witness testimony from White House and Secret Service employees with firsthand knowledge that directly contradicted Hutchinson's version of events.
00:32:58.000So they, and Lautermilk's committee has basically determined that her testimony was dramatically and drastically changed in order to be as sensational as possible.
00:33:10.000Another instance, she amended her initial testimony to say that she had overheard that Donald Trump wanted Mike Pence hanged.
00:33:19.000She probably just invented this out of whole cloth.
00:33:24.000And here's one final takeaway that I think is dramatic.
00:33:28.000The select committee concluded, colluded with Fannie Willis.
00:33:32.000So we talk about how this lawfare assault against Trump is actually a coordinated assault.
00:33:38.000Look no further than the J6 committee.
00:33:40.000Fanny Willis, Fulton County District Attorney, wrote to the select committee seeking assistance with her prosecution of President Trump.
00:33:48.000Select committee staff then met with representatives for her office.
00:33:53.000So that's just another fascinating thing.
00:33:55.000And then we already mentioned the pipe bombs.
00:33:57.000It's mentioned like five or six times.
00:33:58.000Donald Trump's name was mentioned 1,900 times in the J6 report.
00:34:03.000So, you know, if you're if the vice president, future vice president, is almost going to be assassinated by a pipe bomb, you'd think you'd make a bigger story about that, but they haven't.
00:34:13.000And that's a very, very interesting detail in all this.
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