Documentary filmmaker Andrew Goldberg sat down to discuss his new documentary, White with Fear, along with the post-October 7 surge in antisemitism.

Our conversation took place back in October, days before White with Fear premiered at the 2024 Chelsea Film Festival and New York theatrical run at the Cinema Village. Its LA release didn’t come until April 25. It is currently available to watch digitally as of a few days ago.

I don’t usually publish a combo interview/film review but I’m making an exception for White with Fear:

In White with Fear, Andrew Goldberg explores how both politicians and media outlets–mainly the conservative types–amplified both racial divisions and white victimization narratives for power and profit. It’s part of the reason why we are in the place we are today–the man in the Oval Office capitalized on the division and it took him all the way to the White House…twice. It’s not an understatement to say that the rhetoric has real-world consequences. It leads to people getting harassed, intimidated, and possibly even killed.

Former Virginia governor and DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe discusses Trump and their phone conversation after Charlottesville happened. McAuliffe said that Trump asked him if there was anything he could do, and the governor told him what to do. What ended up happening is Trump told McAuliffe he would do one thing and he ended up doing the complete opposite. Nothing about this is presidential. It shows that someone got to him, so as to not offend the far-right members of their base. That’s the sort of thing that was at stake in 2020 and again during the 2024 election. McAuliffe shined a light on something that I don’t think I had ever heard before.

The comments about Charlottesville themselves are eye-opening. Which of the advisors really had the power? But it goes far beyond that. We’ve seen how media outlets and politicians are able to capitalize on the racial division. It’s scary. I fear for American democracy in as much as I currently worry about the post-October 7 surge in antisemitism. Even then, we’re currently seeing how the White House is weaponizing antisemitism while welcoming right-wing antisemites into the administration. How can you call yourself an ally to the Jewish community while actively hiring people who are against us?!?

It isn’t just that Goldberg is unearthing the conservatives’ political playbook, but he’s able to get a number of key political operatives on the record in front of the camera. Most surprisingly, this includes Steve Bannon. Goldberg shared an anecdote during a recent post-premiere Q&A about how he able to secure Bannon’s participation in the film. It goes more or less as one might imagine.

Film participants include former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Steve Bannon, Rep. Jamie Raskin, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former Fox News reporter Carl Cameron, The Lincoln Project co-founder Stuart Stevens, Brian Stelter, Tim Miller and more.

The film received a very limited theatrical release–a one-week run in NY last year and one-week run in LA in April. Since then, it played a number of one-off screenings. Most audiences haven’t been able to watch the film until its VOD release this past week. White with Fear is an important documentary when it comes to showing how conservatives are using racism to hurt American democracy.

What was the genesis behind making White with Fear?

Andrew Goldberg: I was looking at the division in our country and I was trying to reconcile how we got so far apart. As I did some research and started to look into it, what I kept coming into was this idea that the bigotries that exist. To simplify it, the goal is to scare white people against People of Color. It extends to LGBTQ people, it extends to Jews, people who might not necessarily be People of Color, but people who are marginalized because the political system has a vested interest in maintaining a grip on power.

To the degree that they can strategically choose—in other words, it isn’t necessarily we talk about X, Y, Z politician, this person must be a racist, listen to what they say. They might not even hold a lot of those views, but when they recognize that it serves them strategically—and this is something that we spent a lot of time talking to the guys that worked on Trump’s campaign—when it serves them strategically, how they feel personally isn’t important. It’s what wins votes.

I was looking at the division. I realized these are not a result of Donald Trump’s opinions necessarily. They’re a result of a calculated methodology that’s put into place by a machine.

As I dug into this, I learned that it’s gone all the way back to the Nixon administration. Now people had always used race to divide in politics, but it was never such a formalized strategy. You start to see it happen a little bit before the Nixon administration with people like George Wallace. George Wallace had famously felt that he had been sort of out racisted—racisted, is that a verb—by another politician who had won a campaign earlier. This is back in the 50s and 60s when these guys are running.

By the time you get to Nixon, he hires people on his staff. Nixon hires people who come up with very calculated strategies about how to divide the country along racial lines. In that sense, I realized we would probably be a much better country, much more healed racially, if it had not served the political interests and ultimately the financial interests of groups like Fox News to divide us.

I had assumed our divisions were more naturally occurring. They’re fomented and created, and that’s a scary thought. That’s what made us want to make the film.

What led to giving it a Fyre Festival approach?

Andrew Goldberg: Well, that’s a PR phrase. The idea being though that the Fyre Festival was kind of sort of like, look at this train wreck. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s a train wreck in its results. It’s very strategic in its planning.

As one person that I interviewed in the film, Ian Haney Lopez, says this is strategic racism. Racism as strategy. It’s a very interesting thing. We think of racism as just the result of hate and ignorance. It isn’t. Sometimes, it’s very planned and calculated.

No differently from when a company markets a shampoo product and says, oh, our shampoo is really good for people with oily hair, or our shampoo is good for people with dry hair. You just look at the numbers, you look at the data, you come up with a marketing strategy.

Oh, here’s a great marketing strategy. Let’s win over white voters.

By the time you get to the Trump administration, what the Trump administration is doing makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs.

What was the most surprising thing that you learned throughout the making of the documentary?

Andrew Goldberg: I think the two most surprising things were, one, learning that Richard Nixon had hired Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan, who we mentioned in the film. There’s a whole memo about it. It was too complicated to get into the film because it’s a whole long, stretched out, strategic document about how to divide the Democrats—strategies they’re going to use to try and get an African American on the Democratic ticket, because if they could do that back in the 1960s and early 70s, it would scare Democrats who were sort of sympathetic to racist issues, but weren’t necessarily willing to vote for a Black candidate. It would scare them into the Republican hands. To realize that it had started in such a formalized way.

The other part that really surprised me was reading the story about Sean Trendy’s work, The Missing White Voter. That was really surprising that it was such a specific calculated strategy. And then, to hear Steve Bannon just come totally open and clean about the whole thing. I thought that was pretty remarkable. That was really a catalyst for the shaping of the film was The Missing White Voter, Sean Trendy, Stephen Miller, and how they did all that work.

The other part, I think, was just hearing how a lot of these people were so willing to talk openly about it, whether it was Rick Gates or the woman that used to work for Breitbart.

Is there someone you wanted to interview but were unable to get for the film?

Andrew Goldberg: Pat Buchanan. I pleaded with Pat Buchanan. I wrote him so many emails. I think I could have interviewed Stephen Miller, but I don’t know what he would have said. Stephen Miller turned us down. I don’t know what Stephen Miller would have said that would have been that revelatory. But Pat Buchanan, he would send me these short little notes, Yes, we did that to crack and splinter the Democratic Party–words to those effect. But he wouldn’t come on camera despite me trying.

The other guy who was hired also by Nixon was this guy, Kevin Phillips, and he recently passed away. He had written a whole book about this. I was told that he was very ill and so he wouldn’t be doing any more interviews. I said, what about when he gets better? His wife said—it was very sad. She said, I don’t think he’s going to get better.

I’m told that years later, he wasn’t happy that his work had been used the way it had been. He had been more strategic and hadn’t hoped to be so focused on racial divisions and that there was a mea culpa. I couldn’t find it, but I’d been told by insiders about it.

Not the case with Pat Buchanan. But no, if I could have interviewed anybody, it would have been Buchanan, because he’s very open about hills. He’ll tell you what he does and it’s very interesting.

What was the most challenging aspect of making the documentary?

Andrew Goldberg: It was not a documentary that a lot of people on the Republican side of the aisle were willing to talk about. It took a lot of work to get people to come clean and open up honestly about things. We would sit down with people who would—not necessarily sit down with—but we talked on the phone with people who were forthcoming on the phone, but then wouldn’t agree to appear on camera. That was always kind of a challenge for me.

The other part I will say is that I wish that it was much longer. One of the biggest challenges was not including a lot of the history. When you look at the history, going back to when I was a kid, you have the Nixon administration that does a lot of this, then you get into things like the war on crime, that Reagan really amplifies. There was a lot that happened under the Bush administration—the older Bush. For example, the famous Willie Horton ad. There have been a lot of concerning periods in history where we’ve seen this.

And unfortunately, a documentary just doesn’t lend itself to the three to four hours or maybe series that this whole story would have encompassed.

For example, there’s the famous Willie Horton ad where they talk about an African American man who raped a white woman. This was used by a PAC that was working on behalf of the Bush administration. It was a famously racist ad and we just didn’t have the time to include that in a standard feature length doc.

How long was the initial edit?

Andrew Goldberg: More than two hours. We realized that we couldn’t just sort of chop the history down. We had to basically take most of it out. Otherwise, it would have become a history doc. It became very history-focused, which I would have loved to have done. It’s just, there’s no real viewership for those old black and whites. There’s some, but we wouldn’t have been able to get it out there.

I want to talk about another film. A few years ago, you released Viral: Antisemitism in For Mutations. Would you have ever believed that antisemitism would skyrocket as it did just over three years later?

Andrew Goldberg: No. Listen, what is really coming from the left side of the aisle where this anti-Israel criticism morphs into antisemitism—this was something that a couple of people had brought to my attention. The Wall Street Journal mentioned it when they reviewed the film.

The film doesn’t cover much about the antisemitism of the left. It ran in theaters in 2020 and then it aired on PBS later. When I made that film, if anything, I thought antisemitism that is coming from the right side of the conversation—white supremacist groups, KKK affiliated groups, that kind of traditional American space where you would see antisemitism come. Crude, swastika ideology, the kind of people that would evoke Hitler and things like that.

You think about a guy like the guy who shot the innocent Jewish victims at the Tree of Life synagogue talked about the migrant caravan. He was afraid of immigrants coming into the country. It was kind of a xenophobia. All kind of things that you don’t traditionally associate with Democratic or leftist causes.

I thought that antisemitism would get worse, but it would get worse in that space and only a little bit. It never occurred to me that we would see such an eruption come from people who are much more associated with the progressive space. This is the scary part.

I look around and I talk to a lot of Jews and a lot of Jews are saying to me—when I say a lot, I mean more than half the Jews I know and I know a lot. I would say more than half of them are saying they feel like they don’t have a political party, that they’ve historically been Democrats, and they looked at the Democratic Party and they like—also, things like diversity, equity and inclusion.

Diversity, equity, inclusion—DEI—which has incredible, powerful interests in terms of helping people who have been mistreated and disenfranchised in this country for years. Whether they’re African American, Hispanic, LGBTQ, Muslim, immigrants, other communities that I’ve maybe overlooked, DEI is a space for helping them and caring about them.

But the opposite side of the DEI argument is that there is a oppressor. There’s the oppressed and the oppressor. It’s a binary model.

Somehow, the Jew has been cast as a white, colonialist, capitalist oppressor for bad ideas, all put into one, all put on the Jew and the Jew is put in that box.

When the Jew is mistreated in a school, at a workplace, in public, in politics, the sympathies and the concerns for the Jew, they’re non-existent. Why would I help the Jew? The Jew is the oppressor. The Jew is the colonialist. The Jew is the capitalist.

What is this Jew? What is this 10-year-old kid who I just mistreated and bullied at school have to do with Israel? Absolutely nothing. But I’m going to associate this kid with all these ideas in my mind. I know nothing of history, mind you. I’ve just only been doing this for a few weeks since other kids on my college campus told me about it. But that’s it.

That kid’s bad and the jury has already reached its verdict.

This is a scary, scary idea. There’s a line in Viral where a guy, Harris says—I said, what do you think is gonna happen? He says, I think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

Boy, I didn’t think it would get this much worse, but he was prescient in that regard, very prescient.

How about you? What did you think? Did you expect this?

I definitely did not expect to unfriend, unfollow, or block as many people as I did over the last year, unless those colleagues did it to me first. Bluesky is supposed to be this Twitter that’s not supposed to have the racism feature and yet, I am blocking antisemites there on a daily basis. (Note: this interview was conducted in October. The antisemitism on Bluesky has gotten way worse.)

Andrew Goldberg: Right. It’s unbelievable. I saw a little girl, maybe she was seven years old, posted a TikTok video about going camping when you’re kosher. I mean, she was like eight or seven. She’s like, we have to carry this can to eat our food. On Shabbat, we don’t drive to the campsite, that kind of thing.

It was the most benign little kid. All the comments—there were zillions of comments—were the most foul, vile antisemitism in the world on a little kid talking about camping.

There was no Israel flag. There was no sort of suggestion of Israel. It was pure, just concentrated antisemitism and so much of it was focused on the Middle East.

These were not the Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us” types. It’s terrifying and it’s heartbreaking.

That’s my new film. It’s about antisemitism from progressive spaces. It’s a film that I need to make.

Yeah, it’s a film we need.

Andrew Goldberg: I worry about distribution.

What do you hope people take away from watching the film?

Andrew Goldberg: I think it’s important that people be educated so that they can make an informed decision. One thing that I don’t do as a journalist is ever try to tell people what to do, what to think. I don’t try to influence policy or decision.

What I believe is that an informed populace can make good choices, but the only way they’re going to be informed is if my community—the press and the media, the journalists, the filmmakers, the artists, too, if we do our job, and our job is to bring the truth to the greater public.

That is what I’ve always sort of aspired to do. My mother was a journalist. She wrote for the Chicago Tribune for many, many years.

The hope is that we get to a better place by having an informed and educated population. Right now, I worry that we have a very misinformed population who’s being manipulated. I don’t think that that manipulation is in everyone’s best interest.

Thank you so much. It was so nice to meet you.

Andrew Goldberg: Thank you. It was nice to finally meet you. Definitely.

Area 23A released White with Fear in theaters for its theatrical run and on-off screenings and digitally on June 3, 2025.

Please subscribe to Solzy on Buttondown and visit Dugout Dirt.