{"id":395713,"date":"2026-04-16T19:15:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T19:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/395713\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T19:15:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T19:15:07","slug":"everyones-lying-to-you-for-money-and-speeches-wont-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/395713\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyone’s Lying To You For Money, and speeches won’t help"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Ben McKenzie, star of The O.C<\/a> and the director of the documentary Everyone\u2019s Lying To You For Money, begins testifying before Congress about cryptocurrency, a few senators at the hearing (with hefty digital wallets) look on nervously. McKenzie was invited to this committee meeting because he\u2019s been a vocal critic of crypto\u2014and at the time was in the middle of writing his New York Times bestseller<\/a> on the subject\u2014which had just gone through a dramatic bust after the trading service FTX exploded<\/a> into a thousand blockchain-shaped bits. To the right of McKenzie is his chief opposition: Kevin O\u2019Leary, the Marty Supreme actor, businessman, and pundit known for Shark Tank and for delivering bad crypto investment advice on broadcast news. Despite being burned by FTX\u2019s collapse, the investor still showed up to decry regulating the currency. O\u2019Leary winces as McKenzie describes cryptocurrency as \u201cthe largest Ponzi scheme in history.\u201d It\u2019s a climax right out of a Hollywood melodrama, as wrongdoings are laid bare to the few people who could hypothetically fix them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While McKenzie continues, detailing how cryptocurrency crashes have disproportionately affected ordinary people who were sold false promises, Everyone\u2019s Lying To You For Money cuts to his interview subjects, who lost life-changing money due to these e-scams. Between Martin Crane\u2019s vaguely hopeful score and McKenzie\u2019s confident delivery, it feels like a moment of validation, as if he and all the other crypto skeptics out there are finally revealing a grand ruse in front of the U.S. government, exposing these digital charlatans for what they are. But reality isn\u2019t so simple. Not only is crypto still around and largely unregulated<\/a>, but the White House<\/a> has promised to make America \u201cthe \u201ccrypto capital of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the heat of the moment, though, fans of Frank Capra may have jumped to a familiar place: the climax of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Just like Everyone\u2019s Lying To You For Money, that film ends with a heartfelt plea to the U.S. government. Jefferson Smith\u2014played to earnest perfection by Jimmy Stewart\u2014filibusters for hours to win over the Senate and expose the corrupt party boss Jim Taylor\u2019s misdeeds. While the film portrays a Washington that has grown distorted and warped by greed, Smith still believes in the American project and that his country could become a genuine bastion of egalitarianism, equality, and justice. As he collapses from exhaustion, his words finally get through to the person who can bring the party boss down, Smith\u2019s mentor Senator Paine. This wayward politician admits to his crimes, Smith is exonerated, and the graft is exposed. A well-earned happy ending. Roll credits.<\/p>\n

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington was written by Sidney Buchman, an eventually blacklisted Communist<\/a> who penned the 1939 film in the context of a New Deal America that had begun to bail the country out of the Great Depression. During an era where people witnessed broken economic systems actually improve, the nation was only one good speech away from mending its ways\u2014according to the movie, anyway. When McKenzie finally gets through his own speech in front of the Senate, it\u2019s life imitating art. It isn\u2019t quite as dramatic as Stewart\u2019s desperate plea, but it\u2019s about as close as you can get. The difference is the effect.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While several of the senators in attendance seem won over by McKenzie\u2019s words, his statement doesn\u2019t suddenly send a shock through the system, draining crypto\u2019s speculative bubble and causing the government to implement better safeguards to prevent future crashes. McKenzie is the rare celebrity who didn\u2019t jump on the crypto-peddling bandwagon for a few bucks, but that\u2019s not enough to make up for all the Matt Damons and Tom Bradys who did the opposite.<\/p>\n

By the time Everyone\u2019s Lying To You For Money was put together, McKenzie clearly knew that this is how it all shook out. Immediately after his grand soliloquy, he reveals how the people he was standing up for really felt: Despite their painful stories about the shame and desperation they went through after a particular grift cleaned them out, many still somehow believe in crypto. They remain so desperate\u2014after financial recessions and the chipping away of a Mr. Smith-era social safety net\u2014for the American Dream to be real, that they have to believe in this magical currency that will take them to the Moon. In Capra\u2019s fiction, a speech could cut through the cynicism and despair; in reality, these forces are simply too entrenched, both in a political system won over by lobbyists and in an American people who have a hard time believing in the \u201cegalitarianism, equality, and justice\u201d that Mr. Smith argued for.<\/p>\n

After speaking in front of Congress, McKenzie grapples with this. He looks away from the camera, defeated. \u201cI feel like I was as right as I hoped I would be or more, and yet I had less of an effect,\u201d he says to his wife, Morena Baccarin. \u201cI sort of felt like it would be a movie; [crypto] would just disappear.\u201d But even when structured like a familiar film, reality doesn\u2019t unfold like an optimistic screenplay\u2014the political fantasy of 1939 has only become less tangible in the subsequent 90 years. Yet both films still say something about their country with their ending speeches. Mr. Smith Goes To Washington captured the hope of an America on the upswing, while Everyone\u2019s Lying To You For Money drives home the desperation of the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Ben McKenzie, star of The O.C and the director of the documentary Everyone\u2019s Lying To You For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":{"0":"post-395713","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}