David McElroy

I don’t have any interest in starting a political movement. I just want to live life and be left alone as long as I’m peaceful with others. I’m trying to figure out how to do that. If you’re interested in doing the same — and if you want to do it without the shrill and angry confrontations of politics — I hope you’ll join me in a conversation that might lead to better lives for all of us.

My own political evolution is a long and twisting story. I grew up in a generally conservative household, but I was taught to be a political independent. I also learned — from school and from my own reading — to be an intensely patriotic kid. I believed in our political leaders. I believed in the political system. I believed in the morality of this country’s role in the world.

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If you just want to see a piece of libertarian-oriented political propaganda, you might like the new “Atlas Shrugged” movie. But if you want a film that does artistic justice to Rand’s book, this isn’t it. It’s a bad film.

I’m glad I saw it, because it reinforces my conviction that some books just don’t make good movies. But in the hands of these particular filmmakers, this book never had a chance to become a good movie. It’s a paint-by-numbers production that you might expect from an indie movie at a small film festival or maybe from a soap opera. It’s not good art.

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When I made this short film six years ago, I would have been happy to have it seen by a thousand people and have it make it into a film festival or two. After all this time, though, it’s been seen by close to 300,000 times on YouTube and it made it into 20 film festivals. It was a very flawed first effort by someone who was clueless about what he was doing, but the efforts of some talented people working with me saved it. The film is a parody of what the U.S. government might release today to teach Americans how to be good citizens. It’s interesting that the same general ideas that applied to a Republican administration six years ago still apply to a Democratic administration today.

“We’re the Government — and You’re Not” from David McElroy on Vimeo.