Deep Rigging Freedom Sounds
Getting in on the Ground Floor of Film Flim Flam
Hello Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
I am so grateful to all the new subscribers over the past month, thank you all for your continued support and advocacy for The Hunt for Tom Clancy, the best corner of the internet that you’ve all gotten in on the ground floor of.
I appreciate you. With the “Sound of Freedom” movie’s promoted tweets invading my timeline, my thoughts turned back two years ago, when my nephew and I went to the premiere of a similar production in Arizona.
The Deep Rig, when I was working on a profile of Mike Flynn for The New Republic ultimately titled “What is Michael Flynn’s Long game?”
Ultimately, The Deep Rig premiere was only a small part of that piece, but I generally write Icberg-style; that is, a lot of what I write about a subject never winds up getting published, or having only parts of it make it through the process, but the scene of the Deep Rig was so surreal, so weird, and so interesting to me (still) that I thought it might also be interesting to you.
I hope you’re having a wonderful summer, and I will have a Tom Clancy related dispatch (this time on Op Center Games of State) out by the end of the month, things are a bit in flux here—in a good way, but things have been busy.
Thank you for reading, please tell your friends. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so, every little bit helps.
Thank you,
Matt Farwell
June 26, 2021
The Deep Rig film premiere was at a Mega Church in Arizona called "Dream City." The church sits in between Lookout Mountain and Shadow Mountain and has a weekly attendance of 22,500. It was the same church that rented to Turning Point Action for a Trump rally; the senior Pastor Luke Barnett claimed the ClearAir EXP air-purification units they'd recently installed would kill 99.9% of COVID within 10 minutes.
The day that Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne's samizdat documentary “Deep Rig” premiered marked exactly one year since the Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sent a cease and desist letter to the church demanding they stop making fraudulent statements about preventing COVID-19.
“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world,” Jean-Luc Godard, the French-Swiss filmmaker, once said.
We parked behind a Blue Toyota Tacoma with decals for “Marco’s Crystal Clear maintenance” and a Jesus fish emblem over a personalized license plate reading “GODKNWS”
It was hot outside in Phoenix—104°F—and my nephew, acting as local guide, told me it had gotten up to 118° the previous week. Our tickets were taken by a nice blonde woman and a big man with a cross tattoo'd on his face who wrote down our names and email addresses before handing us each a yellow ticket.
Justin was our usher. "We're very patriotic here," he said, motioning to the car-dealership size flags hanging on the sides of the central auditorium, a venue designed to seat thousands.
The crowd filled nearly the entire stadium.
There's a fringe festival feel to the place—transgressive t-shirts and conservative cosplay. A middle age couple who almost certainly drive a Buick walk around greeting others they recognize from the Maricopa County election audit. They wear matching "Patriot Streetfighter" t-shirts. The font is the same as the font in the Capcom video game. "Call down the thunder" reads the subheadline.
We arrive as doors open, an hour before the film is supposed to start. That gives us time to observe. A tall, rangy man, handsome in an old west kind of way — high cheekbones, bright eyes, Marlboro man cragginess — strides through the auditorium. He wears a "God, Guns, Trump" t-shirt tucked into jeans, a massive dirty harry 6 shooter riding his hip in a fine leather holster.