At a moment when the release of files relating to Jeffrey Epstein lays bare the proximity of child trafficking to the rich and powerful, this bracing documentary chronicles how nefarious forces can capitalise on justified mistrust.
Mike Sheridan’s plucky first feature assembles a formidable roster of political insiders, historians, and commentators – including former and current US presidential advisers – to trace the global fallout from one of America’s most potent exports: weaponised rhetoric.
It may be the only film this year to feature engaging contributions from both politician Paul Murphy and former CIA director John Brennan.
Irish historian Brian Hanley voices weary frustration that the scepticism routinely aimed at mainstream media is rarely directed at the alternative ecosystems, a subculture that, as Web of Lies author Aoife Gallagher notes, blossomed during lockdown.
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Psychologist Louize Carroll supplies lucid commentary on stan culture and the mechanics of group polarisation, anatomising how online tribes harden belief into identity. The story, however, stretches back long before hashtags. A deft historical through line connects Charles Coughlin – whose rapture-soaked sermons during the first World War, the Spanish flu and the Depression fused anti-communism with anti-Semitic talk of “international bankers” – to Jerry Falwell’s anti-LGBTQ evangelicalism and nativism. From there, the thread runs through Pat Buchanan and into the evangelical energies that would animate the Maga movement and influence such contemporary players as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Michael Flynn.
Talking heads from the other side of the spectrum are resolute. Beto O’Rourke condemns modern political grifters and their calculated “othering” of minorities. Eric Swalwell recounts a telling encounter with Ted Cruz, realising that for Cruz, politics resembles professional wrestling, and he’s Hulk Hogan.
Working with editor Eamonn Cleary, Sheridan has produced a cool, disquieting study of how legitimate grievance can curdle into conspiracism, and how easily performance, paranoia, and power intertwine. But what begins as a study of toxic discourse in the United States expands into a sobering excavation of recent unrest in Dublin. The riots of November 2023, along with the persistence of aggressive anti-immigrant demonstrations, are presented as symptoms of a transnational malaise.
[ ‘It was just carnage’: Eyewitnesses and workers on the Dublin riots, two years onOpens in new window ]
The result is a feedback loop in which imported misinformation coalesces into extremism and wilful misreporting. As the doc records, more social media users in the United States amplified the hashtag “Ireland Is Full” than users actually based in Ireland itself.
There are no easy answers. Rather, Amplified insists, with a brisk and accessible bedside manner, on confronting the diagnosis.
Amplified: The Exportation of the Culture Wars is available to rent on digital platforms
