The Daily Wire Is Quietly Shooting a Pro-ICE Movie. We Got the Script.

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)BEN SHAPIRO AND THE DAILY WIRE are desperate to crack Hollywood. But Shapiro’s most recent foray into film, the anti-Muslim Run Hide Fight: Infidels, was hardly The Odyssey. Sitting at a meager 20 percent among reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie has inspired Shapiro’s fans to say things like “What’s going on with this movie?!” and “This movie was trash.”The far-from-rapturous reception hasn’t stopped Shapiro and his Run Hide Fight: Infidels collaborator, conservative film producer Dallas Sonnier, from firing up the cameras once again. Since late September, the Daily Wire has quietly been shooting a pro-ICE action film in Montana that dramatizes the raids and protests around last winter’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis—including the fatal shooting of protester Renée Good.I got my hands on a draft of the script, and I’ll say this: I don’t think this movie will be any more of a hit than Shapiro’s last effort.I suppose we should say: Spoilers ahead. But you’re not gonna watch this anyways. So take a second to join Bulwark+ instead.The film, with the working title Pawn Shop, centers on an Antifa siege of a Minneapolis pawn shop amid anti-ICE unrest. On one side: an ICE agent joined by a group of pawn-shop employees and customers. On the other: a rabble of progressive protesters, and eventually a bloodthirsty MS-13 death squad, both intent on rescuing a Hispanic man detained by ICE. It plays out exactly how you’d expect it would.The film’s first minutes will likely get the most attention. As Pawn Shop opens, two ICE agents in Minneapolis arrest the Latino man, later revealed to be an MS-13 boss. Dimwitted liberal activists film and scuffle with the agents as they try to take their suspect away.Then the film’s Renée Good stand-in enters, slamming her Subaru into the ICE van. Described with the subtlety of a brick as “MELANIE (40), a fat blue-hair,” the woman, blasting NPR, revs up again and fatally hits ICE agent “Juan” with her car. Then his ICE partner, “Mike,” shoots her in a justifiable killing.Melanie reacts to the drawn gun with panic...She MASHES on the gas as she throws the car into reverse, accidentally SLAMMING Juan out of the way. He goes flying into the gutter, bleeding...And as the car reverses, Mike FIRES TWICE through thewindshield...The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covidmask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.Blood SPLATTERS on her PASSENGER’s (40s, female, overweight)forehead and matching covid mask.From there, the ICE agent drags his suspect into the pawn shop, with an Antifa mob hot on their heels. The stage is now set for a siege, during which numerous Molotov cocktails will be thrown and shotgun shells will fly. Rest assured that no liberal piety will survive.Inside the pawn shop, we meet its grizzled Hispanic owner and his son, newly back from college and majoring in Chicano studies. Much to his father’s chagrin, the son is dressed in a Che Guevara shirt and “listening to a POP SONG unfitting for a man.” A pawn-shop security guard quips they’re lucky the boy didn’t get a sex change.On location: The pawn shop in Pawn Shop.In case this instance of conservative humor didn’t give it away, there are plenty of other signs that this is a Daily Wire production. An overweight liberal in a mobility scooter “BELLOWS as only one with morbid obesity can.” Posing as an innocent laborer, the MS-13 member begs other characters to protect him.A Korean grocery store adjoining the pawn shop introduces the idea, beloved by very-online conservatives, of a “rooftop Korean” that will figure prominently in the film. In an apparent nod to Shapiro’s ongoing struggles with more bigoted elements on the right, a treacherous heroin addict trapped in the shop is also a racist who calls a more enlightened conservative character a “cuck.”SharePawn Shop’s plot mirrors that of Run Hide Fight: Infidels. In the latter, a disparate group of college students and employees end up tossed together to fight Muslim terrorists taking over a college campus, with a woke mayor preventing actual law enforcement from intervening until our heroes resolve the standoff—call it The Taking of Fordham One Two Three. Here, anti-ICE riots prevent Minneapolis police or other ICE agents from defeating Antifa and MS-13 and saving our thrown-together characters until the climactic shootout.Filming hasn’t gone totally quietly in Livingston, Montana, the small town where Pawn Shop is being shot. Locals got their hands on the script, too, and started honking their car horns and attempting other small-scale disruptions to the shoot.“We want them to know: Don’t come do this shit in our town,” one protester, who asked not to be named for fear of online retaliation, told me.An admirable effort, but I think Shapiro’s film is sufficiently self-sabotaging on its own. If the script is anything to go by, I doubt many people will be watching this one, either.Leave a commentArch-conspiracy theorist Candace Owens has had a busy week. On Monday, a little-known right-wing internet character named “Esoteric Shaggy,” who claims to have recently been released from prison, dropped a mammoth purported exposé—based on hacked email lists from dating sites—meant to prove that Owens had lesbian dating profiles back in college.While the truth of the allegations is unclear, the story has delighted Owens’s opponents in the forever wars over Israel and Charlie Kirk’s murder. On Wednesday, Owens responded on her show with an explanation that didn’t really engage with the specifics of the email accounts, instead suggesting via complex calendar analysis that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was responsible. Owens called the lesbian claims a “schizophrenic, crackhead, 0 percent true narrative.”To give you a sense of all the discourse this has generated, on Wednesday Alex Jones called for Owens to come out of the closet already.While the lesbian allegations are salacious, another development on Monday could spell significantly more trouble for the podcaster: a new lawsuit over her Kirk conspiracy theories. This one was filed by Robert Hild, a young Mormon man whose presence in the crowd at Kirk’s assassination made him a focus of Owens’s “investigation.”After the shooting, Hild took shelter in the nearby home of a friend’s grandmother. Unfortunately for him, that friend is related to Phil Lyman, a Utah politician Owens focused on as somehow tied to Kirk’s murder. Making matters worse for Hild, he walked part of the shooting suspect’s path days later with friends—and his friend posted side-by-side pictures of Hild (shown here on the right) next to surveillance photos of the gunman, all but inviting internet sleuths to think that Hild was the real shooter.(Screenshot from the Hild v. Owens complaint.)Owens glommed onto the Hild theory a few weeks after the shooting, urging her audience to investigate the young man in the picture. On her show, Owens made numerous false claims about Hild—saying he was tied to the far-right Azov Battalion in Ukraine, or that he worked for a “neo-Bolshevik militant tribe.”Owens also seized on a picture of Hild dressed in black eye shadow and a black shirt at a Halloween party to claim that he was a member of the “gothic underground” in Utah. Worse still, the website where Owens found the picture had “bee” in its name—confirming her fears that Kirk was murdered by a Communist cult that used bee symbology.“Owens had stated that a Slavic, communist ‘underground’ that used bee symbols was responsible for Kirk’s assassination, so her references here to bees was [sic] an attempt to link Hild to that conspiracy theory,” the complaint notes.Perhaps the most intriguing part of Hild’s complaint comes from what it reveals about Owens’s reporting process, such as it is.Numerous people, including the man who first found Hild’s Halloween party picture for Owens, contacted her to tell her they knew Hild was a local Utah man, that he wasn’t a member of an Eastern European bee cult, and more. But, according to the complaint, Owens didn’t respond.Leave a comment