We’d take their money and help them with the technical aspects of making “conservative movies,” but outside that narrow band of conservative audiences, no one else ever saw those productions. It was mostly because they were terrible.
The secret—well, it’s not even a secret—is to make good product from a conservative point of view. If it’s a comedy, be funny before you are conservative. Drama? Be dramatic first. But it was hard to get that message through to people who thought the answer to liberal agitprop was conservative agitprop. The so-called “conservative” stuff was so dull it didn’t even agitate well!
The idea was and is to compete as entertainment. Sure, the industry was largely liberal by default, but we used our quality entertainment as a vehicle to promote our conservative values. Yes, we needed to use popular culture to spread our message and no, it didn’t make us as bad as the liberals. Reinforcing positive values and traditions of a society is one of the roles of art, and has been since the ancient Greeks put on plays in their amphitheaters. Popular culture should teach people about their society and, yes, model positive behaviors.
It used to do that before the 1970s, when the liberals really took over. Remember how old movies showed John Wayne as a hero to be copied? In the Obama years, we had movies featuring Seth Rogan—remember him?—as the perpetual man-child covering up his pathetic emasculation with moderately clever snark. Art was still trying to teach people how to be. It was just that liberal art tried to teach them to be losers.
And putting out our point of view was not somehow foisting our views on the audience. Now, I wouldn’t mind if we did—our views should be foisted on the audience because our views aren’t terrible and socially poisonous like liberal ones.
When we did it to promote constitutional conservatism, it was good. When they did it to promote their liberal fascism, it was bad. There’s no moral equivalence because only our side is moral. I saw how liberalism acts in power—when it wasn’t corrupt or incompetent, it was crushing our freedoms.
Some subsets of conservatives started getting footholds in the industry. Conservative religious-based entertainment was an outlier, but it spoke to a huge audience that was terribly underserved back then. It just needed to stop being mostly terrible. That came with experience and an understanding that it better be entertaining first or no one will watch.
Conservative-themed reality shows were popular. Many had to do with sports like hunting and shooting, and others had to do with that most conservative of activities, working. Oddly, during the Obama years, there were a lot of shows about guys busting their butts crab fishing, driving trucks, farming, and the like. These were kind of the antithesis of liberal entertainment even if they never mentioned the word “conservative.”
But we needed to hit the mainstream. Popular music was full of liberals, but along came some rockers and rappers laying down killer tracks that were thoroughly conservative. I mean, life during the Obama and Clinton administrations was so tough for young people that eventually some of their musical artists were going to have to call out liberalism. When that happened, a bunch of kids started nodding their heads, and it opened a door to them really looking at constitutional conservatives for the first time.
Some popular movies already had subtle conservative elements—if The Dark Knight Rises was any more conservative it would have been Ronald Reagan under the cowl. Of course, Christopher Nolan was reluctant to say so publicly. But then some people did—they came out of the right-wing closet. Again, that opened a door to a whole new audience of potential conservatives who had opted out of pop culture.
I kind of did that. I came out, and I got a deal on cable to make what turned out to be the conservative equivalent—in quality of writing and insight—of HBO’s feminist show Girls. Of course, I made sure we had better nudity. Conservative women are always hotter.
Remember that the value of a pop culture presence is not only (or even mostly) based on the content itself, but what I think of as the normalization factor. The increased conservative presence made conservatives familiar and unthreatening. We stopped being pictured as uterus-obsessed Bible thumpers, and the loss of that caricature was a big blow to our opponents.
Popular culture made constitutional conservatives, if not cool, at least not the face of evil. Conservative normalization was huge.
Drew Johnson (TV Producer)
I met up with veteran situation comedy producer Drew Jordan at the Manhattan Beach Studios soundstage, where he is overseeing production on a new comedy series. The man who helped lead the rise of young, conservative—or at least libertarian—artists is now an elder statesman. He stands back, keeping a close eye on the director and stepping in to add his advice when things get difficult. He is now clearly part of the Hollywood establishment, and it is hard to imagine just how much of a departure his first hit show, Legal Aid, represented when it premiered in 2019.
Legal Aid was a show about some attractive young lawyers just out of law school working at a legal aid clinic. Now you’d expect it to be some sort of liberal fantasy about earnest kids helping poor, oppressed victims fight the system. At least that’s what we told the network it would be, but instead we took it in a much funnier direction, and one I happened to agree with.
The hero, Baxter, has no patience for losers and in the first scene on the first show this client is whining about how his landlord was evicting him and blah blah blah, and Baxter listens and nods and finally says “Well, here’s my legal opinion. Maybe you ought to get your lazy ass a job and pay your rent.” And the studio audience loved it.
They’d never heard that before. See, we didn’t make Baxter a jerk—we made him a stand-in for every American who had ever worked hard but watched other people game the system and never get held to account. The network panicked, and the critics were furious, but the ratings went through the roof.
Legal Aid helped mainstream conservative characters who weren’t caricatures or villains, and the culture responded. Conservatives stopped being thought of as outside the mainstream because they now were mainstream. A show called Will & Grace did that to mainstream gays in the 1990s by showing regular gay folks as normal and nonthreatening. We did that with conservatives. And we stopped making every liberal do-gooder a hero and started showing them as they usually are—bossy, snobby, and under the mistaken impression that they know best how everyone else should live their lives.
Dan Stringer (Billionaire CEO/Activist)
We noticed that there were a ton of really smart, talented people out there trying to use the web to make an impact using the visual arts. And they never had any money, yet they were having an impact.
I set up an organization that would provide microgrants—sometimes a grand or so—or would provide help on web technology to set up sites and stuff. They made films, web series, and all sorts of things. Today, some of them have careers in the industry after getting a start with a microgrant from us.
One bunch of my guys did a web video campaign combined with street art for marijuana decriminalization designed to undercut the liberals with, well, the dope-smoking demographic. This burnout who called himself Puff was the star—he’d say something like, “Getting arrested harshes my buzz, dude!”