HBO empowers the entitled in worshipful documentaries made by the daughter of the former speaker.
Alexandra Pelosi is the second-to-last person you’d trust to do a documentary about the January 6 demonstration and its chilling, weaponized aftereffects — including political prisoners and the misuse of the word “insurrection.” As the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, who was Speaker of the House of Representatives during the J6 turmoil, Alexandra has an obvious conflict of interest in directing the new HBO doc The Insurrectionist Next Door. But she’s done it before, in HBO’s Pelosi in the House last year.
These cable-TV commissions show the bias of corporate media. HBO hasn’t contracted Amanda Milius, daughter of legendary director John Milius, who displayed her own filmmaking smarts with the savvy political inquiry The Plot Against the President in 2021. HBO’s combination of favoritism and nepotism epitomizes the media’s elite privilege and injustice.
In The Insurrectionist Next Door, Alexandra prejudges the motivations of several J6 defendants, then taunts them further in a series of humiliating interviews. Using infamy and persecution, Alexandra’s method becomes a new version of hostage videos. This torture serves the purpose of threatening any free speech that petitions the government. That’s why the leftist Rolling Stone praised the doc, calling it “an exercise in radical open-mindedness.” The communist buzzword “radical” (as in “the radical imagination”) buys into Democratic Party show-trial fantasy.
This is how liberals disguise their own intolerance, hiding it from themselves. RS reviewer Chris Vogner snipes about the defendants: “They really didn’t comprehend the severity of their crimes.” But he doesn’t consider the obvious overreach of the corrupt overzealous judges. Most defendants face biased D.C. jurors and jurists, which explains the high rate of convictions in a city that is almost uniformly anti-Trump. Still, Vogner praises the doc as “both comedy, thanks largely to the fact that Pelosi has no interest in hiding her incredulity, and tragedy, in that she locates the humanity in these people who made some horrible decisions on the basis of a loudly propagated fiction, and will be paying for the rest of their lives.” (It’s the same scheme used in the book Sedition Hunters, by NBC “justice reporter” Ryan Reilly.) This Stasi-worthy logrolling is how the media propagandize for the propagandist.
Alexandra’s unserious tactics step over the line of journalistic objectivity, smudging it like hopscotch chalk marks. She trivializes the seriousness of her subject via the same disingenuousness that mars her previous docs (including her 2002 bipartisan lovefest Journeys with George, about Bush 43). It is perhaps the worst case of entitled empowerment since Benito Mussolini sent his son Vittorio to the film studio Cinecittà when the Fascists ruled Italy.
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“Am I a bitch, or what?” Nancy Pelosi asks, smiling at her daughter in Pelosi in the House. It’s an admiring, exculpatory look at power-mad hypocrisy. “You don’t crack,” Alexandra giggles off-camera in between scenes of Pelosi mère running Congress, largely by telephone (“So we’re ready for hardball on that”), and being adored by grandchildren who call her Mimi. Alexandra repeats Mimi’s own narrative. Pelosi in the House was where Alexandra first used show-trial video, making J6 the central illustration of feminist power, yet gainsaying her mother’s involvement in events of that day. Alexandra’s behind-the-scenes stunt is the usual reality-TV dodge.
Dearest Daughter shows no nose for news, and she has no political curiosity. During the J6 fracas, Alexandra got special permission to follow (actually lead, camera in front) Mimi down secret corridors, fleeing the Capitol. First, the elder Pelosi admits that “these people have no weapons.” Then she changes to concern: “If they stop the proceedings we will have totally failed. We have got to get them [Congress] to finish the proceedings or else they [protestors] will have a complete victory. They will have succeeded.” Talking to her staff like a Scoutmaster heading a trek, she’s performing for the camera. It’s acting. And the entire doc is a campaign ad.
Alexandra deliberately overlooks and elides Mimi’s controversial refusal to call for National Guard protection. Hustling selected footage of the day’s disorder (including suspicious hand-held close-ups of protestors ransacking the Speaker’s office, rifling through jackets, pilfering) creates a frightening, implausible narrative. It all hinges on Speaker Pelosi’s hollow vow, “We will respect our responsibility to the Constitution and the American people.” Yet Alexandra hides from events that clearly precipitated all parties’ actions. She presents the infamous moment of her mother ripping up multiple copies of President Trump’s State of the Union address — the most brazenly egregious act in the history of public service — matter-of-factly. Backstage, Speaker Pelosi is shown defending her hostility in a post-vandalism snit.
The mix of public and exclusive video inadvertently captures Pelosi’s infamous “I’m a Catholic!” tantrum followed by her J6 threat against Trump: “I’d like to punch him.” But where’s the footage of her draped in a kente cloth while heretically bending the knee for George Floyd? Where’s her sneak visit to a hair salon that was officially shuttered during the Covid lockdown but opened exclusively for her? (Pelosi’s impeachment strategy distracted her attention from the impending Covid disaster.) These contradictions would matter to an outsider, but Pelosi in the House moves past inconsistencies with loving, untrustworthy dedication to its subject. (Surprisingly, the best image in the entire film reveals the small crowd at Biden’s inauguration contrasted with the enormous outdoor teleprompter.)
Regime media play their part in brainwashing Americans, which means HBO sides with the political warfare that Speaker Pelosi had arranged. The “radical imagination” in Alexandra’s two docs broadcasts the purpose behind the multiple J6 show trials, attempting to make up for the failure of these TV productions to convince anyone outside the media bubble. Does Alexandra Pelosi know nothing about propaganda, or has she mastered it? “Am I bitch, or what?” is the family’s inside joke.