Success against the current - Interview with Ilan Srulovicz, CEO of Égard Watches
„If you can get people to ignore that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, you can get them to believe anything”
Success against the current - Interview with Ilan Srulovicz, CEO of Égard Watches

Fotó: Égard Waches

2022. 05. 09.
While corporate giants like Nike or Adidas do not miss any opportunity to promote genter-identity ideology and transgenderism in their ads, one Florida-based company, Égard Watches did the opposite: stood for women, claiming, womanhood is a birthright. We asked Ilan Srulovicz, the CEO of the company, about the story behind the “What Is a Woman” ad, the threats of dehumanization and moral relativism.

I know that you've been a Hollywood actor as well and you also work in the watch business and I was wondering, were you always standing up for the values you set up nowadays. When you were in Hollywood, have you had a different worldview? How did you get into making videos about social issues?

- Well, it's not so much that it changed. It's more than I got to a point where I felt I needed to start speaking up. I always believed what I believe. I'm not stuck in them, but I've had pretty consistent beliefs in my whole life. And I noticed there was a trend not only in Hollywood but across media, in the news, big tech, everything coming out all the messages on one side of the equation. 

There was a decay of gender rules that I started noticing happening.

The first time I spoke out, was because I felt like if we're going to destroy the concept of masculinity, we're going to disperse society. We need strong men in society. We need men who are proud of what they are, who they are. There was this one message, men or toxic, men or rapists, men are villains, men are criminals, to the point of Gillette, a huge company that has historically supported men, made a video accusing almost all men with being toxic. I had to respond.

And then the last one was what is a woman, which is obviously a video trying to bring attention to the fact that we live in a time where a Supreme Court justice in the United States cannot define what a woman is. We have men in the United States just two weeks ago in New Jersey I believe, there were seven inmates assaulted by a male prisoner and a female prisoner because the male prisoner identifies as female. And that's happening often, it is happening in the UK as well, where 24 women were sexually assaulted in prison because they put a male rapist who identifies this female in there. 

So it just gets to a point where common sense is completely off the table. No one's willing to talk about it. There's only one ideology pushed. And so

I felt it necessary to start kind of putting out the opposite point of view to show that there is still common sense in the world. 

Each video has a different starting point of why I do it. The main consistent throughline is all the messages on the other side are dehumanizing. So I'm always trying to put out humanizing messages.

Since we posted an article about your latest video, What is a woman? it got overwhelmingly positive feedbacks in Hungary. People often are scared to speak up because they think that their voice is not enough, or they fear the backlash. What reactions the videos get in the US?

- So it's completely dependent on the video, the what is a woman video had the most positive, like 90% positive. I think deep down people know that a lot of this stuff going on right now is unethical. 
And so again, like you said, they're just scared to speak up.

The police video had a polarizing response because there's such a polarizing position in the United States about that, but we still had a tremendous amount of support. Deep down again, most people realize the value of police.

These are things that the silent majority of the country believes in, but it's scared to speak on.

And the what is a man also, we got an international positive response from that. We always get hate mail, but it doesn't really bother me. It doesn't overshadow all the positive. I’d rather be the type of person who has people who hate me, but I'm standing up for what I believe in, and then people who need to hear that message are hearing it, than be the type of person who just sits at home quietly hoping that the world changes.

Does it have any effect on your sales?

- Yeah, we saw of increase in sales for sure when the video was peaking. Obviously with all things it normalizes very quickly, that's how press works. But I definitely want to show other companies that you can put out messages like this and they can be profitable. It doesn't have to hurt your bottom line. You can put out messages supporting the things you believe in on this side of the equation, and you can have positive results from it from a sales point of view for sure.

The 'What is a woman' video with Hungarian subtitles was banned from Youtube for „hate speech”. Were any of your videos banned or canceled on social media platforms? 

- All the videos get restricted at a minimum and we can’t advertise them. They're considered political advertising, election advertising, they all have something that comes out, that kind of limits how we can advertise them, they get shadow banned. I didn't believe in shadow bending until it started happening to my videos. But it's real. I can promise you. I've seen it happen in real time on the metrics on my videos. The views actually go down, not up. I contacted Youtube one time about this. They said, all those weren't real views, so we removed them. I'm like, OK. And then no one could find it in their search. They just did everything they can to limit the exposure of the video, which is almost worse than banning it.

Because if it's banned, then it's clear they're sensoring you. But if they just shadow banned it, they can be like, no, we didn't do anything. It's on you.

It's very odd that they do that considering some of the other content that they have no problem with. But obviously there's a bias there. But again, I think even that's starting to change, because you see guys like Elon Musk now buying Twitter. 

Do you think it will start a chain reaction for the better?

- I hope so. I think that it's necessary again. He has the ability to have major cultural impact. He's the exact kind of person you want doing exactly what he's doing. So many people on the left are so scared. They're not scared of the fact that he might censor. They're scared of the fact that he won't censor. What they're really worried about is that they don't have control over the narrative. That's all they care about. They don't care about freedom of speech and they don't care about censorship. 

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Photo: Égard Watches

Right now they control every institution, they control education. I'll tell you a story that's very sad. This is one of the big things that really got me upset about what is a woman video that motivated me to make it. My niece and nephews range between the age of 8 to 15.

I remember as the youngest one Luke came home and he's being taught in school about transgenderism,

and all this stuff, to the point where they brought in a guy to teach them who has two identities, one of them is like Mr. Muffmuff or something like that. He's a transgender person with two identities and he's also gay and he's also this and he's also that and major intersection. The guy, not to be rude, it's not in a healthy state of mind to be teaching kids from six to eight. I mean, go let them teach adults, that's fine, but six to eight? It's not healthy, that's up to the families and the parents. 

Which is why De Santis passed a bill here in Florida saying people who are eight years old and under should not be indoctrinated by teachers. What parent is not okay with that?

What they're telling you is that you at home do not have the authority to teach your young baby child what he should believe.

We, the government, we, the education system, all of us know what is best for your kids, and that's really what they believe. They believe that they know its best, their future world is the best world, and they will impose it. They will control everything to get to that endpoint. 

We had a similar law passed in Hungary, and the government was accused of denying the basic rights of LGBT-people, and they said the bill will lead to increased suicide numbers.

If you make something saying you shouldn't teach an eight-year-old or seven-year-old about transgenderism. Then they claim, trying to get transgender people to commit suicide. They just take whatever position you took and they make it the most extreme thing in the world and the language they use around it is very effective also because they're basically always say you're trying to deny human rights. 

What about the human rights of the women being raped in prison right now because you're putting men in prison with women. What about their human rights? Nobody wants to talk about them, because they don't actually care about human rights. They care about an ideology. When someone is driven by an ideological standpoint, to the point where they're willing to ignore empathy, ethics, logic, common sense, they're willing to change their position on a dime, right? 

They don't care about reality. It's like a new religion. They have the ultimate faith to the ultimate authority within that religion. People are ignoring basic biological facts. If you can get people to ignore that basic binary, that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, you can get them to believe anything.

But how can people live in a world where everything is fluid? It is very hard for me to imagine not to have eternal truths and eternal values, but everything is constantly changing and how can you follow that?

- It's moral relativism. So essentially what you were talking about, absolute truths, universal truths. Every society, human beings were designed to worship something. That's just how we're built. If you're not going to worship God, people worship drugs, they worship alcohol, they worship their phone. Every human being has the thing they worship, right? And so

you're either going to worship something that's coming from man or you're going to worship something that's coming from some kind of absolute truth.

Those are the only two directions you can go, because consumer nature will make you inevitably worship something. 

It's interesting to see that when you go this direction, the direction of man. Number one, whatever man builds will be influenced by bias. And so it's also what created identity politics. If you look at identity politics, it is heavily driven by the need to worship groups made by man, hierarchies because we don't have some kind of absolute truth to believe in. So you have no value, right? So if you are born, there's no absolute truth, there's just the material world, you are nihilistic. You need to create value for yourself. How are you going to do it?

Well, if you as an individual and are not unique, because you were not created by God, nor by anything universal, you just exist by randomness.

That's a very depressing way to see yourself. How can you love yourself if you're just some random thing that's completely materialistic? When you die you’re gone, you have no actual inherent value. Nothing by nature has inherent value. 

Because if you can't feel that way about myself, how can you feel that way about others? And so what you seek out is groups, that you become loyal to, tribal with, because then you have some kind of sense of value. Now you have a group identity. Now you matter and then you'll fight for the ideology of that group even if it makes no sense, because it's the only thing you actually have that gives you value. 

Whereas if you do believe in absolute truths, you do believe that you are designed, you start off in the position of thinking you are important.

You do have value, and then you can love yourself. And by nature you can love yourself and see yourself as something truly unique. Then you have to look at other people and see them that way. You don't need a group because everyone, it's actually the opposite. Every individual has value. And then you just you can be an awe every person. And so that's the actual path of absolute truth. 

Do you plan on doing some new projects, new videos about important social issues? 

Yes, we do videos and messages planned that just bring light to the connections between a father and a son, and masculinity, a father and a daughter trying to restrengthen these bonds in America. I don't know how it is in the rest of the world. But the rate of homes that don't have fathers went up in the 60s.

If you look at it in any community, five times higher of fatherless homes.

It was 5% in the white community, it went up to 25, now maybe 30%. In the black community, it went from 25% to 75%. It has a massive impact on society. One of the biggest problems in society in my opinion is that fathers, number one they don't see themselves as valuable, so they just have a kid and they leave. 

And number two is that we as society don't treat them as valuable, so they have no reason to feel valuable. So a lot of the cultural messages I'm trying to put out are trying to bring that idea back: the nuclear family, two parent households. It's very important. And so I'm always putting out messages in that regard. 

As for everything else, I mean, I would love to put when there's something that just happened in California that's really ridiculous where it's not even late term abortion anymore. They're trying to pass or they did pass some kind of bill where there's no liability for the mother even a week after the child's born. 
 

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