It’s plain to see that the carnival of horror clowns squatting in the United States government are attempting some kind of top-down cultural revolution by force, to replace the dominant western culture with nebulous “anti-woke” and thinly veiled white supremacist sensibilities.
And they’ve actually had a pretty good run of it so far. A handful of filthy rich, far-right oligarchs—Musk, the Ellisons, Bezos, to name the worst—are simply using the brute force of capital to buy the mainstream media and the cultural institutions and poison it from the executive level. Everything else, the corporations and the educational institutions, can be intimidated by the president directly to cut out any and all public behavior that’s too diverse or feminist or gay.
Given this, something has stood out to me: Where is all the right-wing entertainment?
You would expect it to be creeping into our lives by now, right? While media warlords are gobbling up studios and replacing managers with people like Bari Weiss, you’d expect reactionary and “anti-woke” programming to start popping up on streaming services. And maybe I’m speaking too soon, maybe they’re still coming down the pipeline, but I haven’t really seen anything announced.
The Oscars this year are still woke as hell, packed full of movies with big Leftie Themes like Train Dreams and One Battle After Another. Sinners is pegged to scoop up a bunch of awards. Have you fucking seen Sinners?
It’s got me thinking, what would a right-wing pivot for entertainment culture look like? The narrative has always been that there are a whole bunch of right-wing writers, filmmakers and entertainers out there who you’ve never seen because they’re shut out of the industry, but that’s going to change now.
Okay, so, where are they?
It’s become a pretty well weathered joke by now that literally the only successful mainstream musicians on Team MAGA are Kid Rock and guy who sang once about raping underage girls.
Oh wait, that’s also Kid Rock. I was trying to allude to Ted Nugent.
Country music is broadly seen as the only popular mainstream genre that is largely right-coded, but the charts aren’t exactly dominated by country music, especially not the explicitly political songs. It has me wondering, through an Overton window that’s moving to the right, could a right-wing entertainment culture organically dominate?
The right of my generation and younger like to complain that they don’t enjoy most film, television, music, print narrative, or video game entertainment nowerdays because it’s all woke. But is the problem really that they don’t enjoy entertainment media because of its politics, or is the problem that they can’t enjoy entertainment media because of their politics?
My theory is that entertainment media is innately and organically left-leaning, and maybe even drives culture leftward, which is why right-wing authoritarians like the Trump administration and western populist right surge, which I hope is an anomalous blip in the history of liberal democracy, try to correct it from the top-down.
This is why the government has to threaten networks to take people like Kimmel and Colbert off the air to “balance the media” because the right only has one late night comedian, and he’s so bad at jokes that they have to fill out his show with a segment about how bad at jokes he is, which might be a funny idea if he told edgy but clever politically incorrect jokes, but it’s actually just 15 minutes of shit jokes that nobody, including the audience, laughs at.
Seriously, I have a clip for you here and it even features a brief cameo from the C-list morning show host who is currently starting World War III, which is a sentence I am somehow typing. Here’s a challenge, let’s get a leaderboard going, how long can you last through this? Even if you lean right? This is legitimate programming that was broadcast on Fox. I had to sit through the whole goddamn thing and now I’m 8 minutes closer to death, how far do you get?
This is the material that the right is trying to supplant organic western media with, through top-down regulation. Notably, this is just how they believe media and culture work. The popular conspiracy theory of “cultural Marxism” holds that the too-woke state of western culture that drives them so bonkers is the result of a deliberate scheme cooked up by Marxist professors at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s to steer the culture to the left by infecting popular entertainment media with feminism and queer themes and civil rights and other odious concepts.
Here’s a brief bit of philosophy for you: Karl Marx did not think culture worked like that. Anyone who called themselves a Marxist wouldn’t come up with a plan to make people into socialists by reducing the size of Lara Croft’s breasts and casting a black woman to play Helen of Troy. He was a strict materialist, he thought all of this stuff was downstream from economics. If this conspiracy did exist, and it didn’t, then its plotters would have been cultural Hegelians. But I digress.
There have been explicitly right-wing studios that have tried to set up competition in Hollywood to compete with it directly, the most prominent being Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. The supposition was, I guess, that people would see the superiority of right-wing movies and leave the major studios in droves. Their studio has been running for five years now with very little cultural impact. Besides a school shooting siege thriller called Run Hide Fight which is, to their credit, surprisingly good, their output is mostly really bad comedies, often Matt Walsh-driven anti-transgender slop.
The only filmmaker who I can think of who I would call far-right, and has achieved considerable mainstream success, is Mel Gibson. He’s a competent filmmaker who has thus far managed to keep to keep his politics confined to stories that manage to touch aspects of the American zeitgeist that are shared by liberals. Braveheart is a Hollywood classic that, although it takes place in medieval Britain, it’s essentially an American revolution movie. Peasants rising up against a king. Everyone loves that shit. It got best picture. And I was going to mention The Patriot here because I was one hundred percent certain that Gibson directed that until I looked it up and apparently it was an Emmerich movie. But it’s very Mel Gibson, for the same reasons.
The Passion of the Christ kind of speaks for itself, it was a very novel idea that paid off. Hacksw Ridge is a World War II movie. Again, a safe bet, particularly as it’s set in the Pacific Theater, because Mel Gibson making a movie true to his beliefs featuring the other main villain in that war would not have been so highly praised.
The only one of his movies that display his beliefs in a really grating way is Apocalypto, which is a story about the popular White Liberator trope of the barbaric, bloodthirsty, human-sacrifice cults of native Middle America who were liberated from their evil culture by the heroic Christian Conquistadors.
I haven’t seen The Man Without a Face and didn’t watch to research for this so I won’t comment on it. From screenshots it appears that Gibson does actually have a face but it’s fucked up.
Gibson is an anomaly, but he also hasn’t made many movies. I don’t think he has many in him. Here you can see the heart of right-wing entertainment media is that it’s mostly rooted in nationalist mythology. This works now and then, but it’s very limited in scope. There’s not a lot of space in Hollywood for right-wing movies because you can’t just keep cranking out nothing but movies about the Alamo and Pearl Harbor and stories from the Bible.
When the far-right try to make something that isn’t rooted in this mythology, it just doesn’t reach people. Sound of Freedom is a recent attempt by the MAGA crowd to put out a mainstream blockbuster and they had to run a fake ticket scheme to pad the sales numbers because nobody was going to see it.
Frankly I think the problem is that I just don’t think the right are very capable of coming up with new stories or innovating in entertainment because it’s antithetical to their philosophy. They’re backward-facing. New ideas are progressive, they want to go back to the old ideas. They want Star Wars again. Not the new Disney Star Wars with woke new themes, just regular Star Wars. Again and again and again. They want the past, but it’s mostly a past that they falsely remember.
One of the core tenets of far-right ideologies is fake history and misremembered nostalgia. Don’t get me wrong, nostalgia and lack of creativity is already a big problem in Hollywood. It’s sequel after sequel, remake after remake, reboot after reboot. There are, however, creative people working who can do innovative and fresh things even if the studios constrain them to existing IP for risk aversion. The difference with the far-right is that they are chasing something that never existed in the first place.
For example, the masses writhing in the groyper kettle formerly known as Twitter were recently blowing up about this image:
That’s the new Star Trek, and it’s unacceptably woke. Look, you’ve got three women, two of them are overweight, the thin one is wearing glasses so she’s probably a feminist, it just spits on the legacy of the show.
The bizarre thing is that Star Trek has always, from the outset, been one of the most progressive shows on television. This is something that they don’t remember about it. They remember liking it, but they have somehow erased everything from their minds that they would currently find objectionable. Original Star Trek was woke as shit.
They’re pissed off about the new Star Wars because it has a woman main character and a black main character, which is not something they ever had to put up with before, in their minds.
That’s what kills right-wing entertainment media—first, that it’s devoid of new ideas, and second, that it’s chasing old ideas it can never catch because they never existed. Their nostalgia holds up a foggy mirror to already existing pop culture. With a backward-facing ideology they can only ever react to what already exists and create an inferior simulacrum of it.
If the right took Star Trek and stripped all the themes out of it, you’d get a hollow, vaguely Trek-shaped thing that would not in any way inspire or recapture the original.
When Daily Wire tried to make a children’s cartoon to counter what they saw as an indoctrinating monopoly of leftist children’s media. So they wracked their brains and eventually just made Bluey. But it’s a conservative Bluey, where the children are homeschooled, everyone has strictly traditional gender and family roles, and nobody ever says or does anything interesting.
When they tried to make an adult animation to counter the, I guess, wokeness of Family Guy, all they did was make King of the Hill again, except it sucks, and the main character’s whole thing is dunking on liberals without any real character or flaws or self-reflection or nuance.
Their next project is that they have recruited cancelled woman-beater Jonathan Majors in a project they’re describing as the “anti-woke Sinners.”
Again… have you fucking seen Sinners? The only analogy I can think of for “anti-woke Sinners” is this:
Hell, Kid Rock’s most famous song is literally just him combining Werewolves of London with Sweet Home Alabama and rewriting the lyrics to make it about him having sex with a 17 year old.
The right’s whole thing is that they can’t really do anything culturally that isn’t rooted in reacting to the left. It doesn’t build or innovate creatively. It can’t look forward and add to culture, it can only look backward and subtract from it. It strips away to bare bones. They can’t grasp even the fundamentals of design. When Elon Musk designed a vehicle, after brainstorming for god-knows how long, he finally drew a pentagon and added wheels to it, somehow coming up with the world’s first brutalist car.
Donald Trump renaming the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself isn’t somehow magically going to pave the way for a grand new era of fascist theatre. After purging the upcoming season of any “woke” acts and having only a screening of serial rapist Brett Ratner’s bribe-documentary about his wife remaining on the schedule, Trump just said fuck it and shut the Center down.
Barring some kind of North Korea-scale crackdown on entertainment media, which is really only feasible in a country the size of North Korea, I don’t think we’re going to ever see the western domination of right-wing entertainment. Not entertainment in the way that they intend, anyway—I’ll probably get some laughs out of whatever they come out with, unless it involves Greg Gutfeld.
I'm writing a book about how the development of the internet sent our culture on a sharp-right spiral within 25 years. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
I guess it's all inherent in the names, really?
A "conservative" wants to "conserve the way things are" (ie embedded power structures with them on top) so expecting them to innovate or create new things really isn't on brand for them, is it?
Or if you prefer the term "reactionary", the clue is in the first 5 letters - it's about reacting, and opposing, any change. It's not about taking action to create change, only reacting against it.
But as humans, our overgrown monkey brains crave stimulation, seek out novelty, and pay more attention to what changes than what stays the same. All great art is about creating something new, or forcing us to see the old through a new lens. If you can't do that, and all you do is just tired remakes of what was before, it's no surprise no-one pays attention.
The country music part of this is pretty tragic because country/western's roots are in lawlessness. The more political country music since 9/11 is most boot-lickingest shit imaginable, just pissing all over the legacy of Johnny Cash, Willy Nelson and Hank Williams.