For many years, conservatives have been complaining about the left-wing bias of both the mainstream media and popular culture. The two are intimately connected because, over and above commercial success, the culture and the artists who create it are empowered by reviews, prestige and awards that the mainstream media bestow, facilitate and publicize.

But it’s now become clear that conservatives are wrong. The media are not biased against the right. They are openly hostile towards us. They are openly attempting to crush one point of view and elevate another. This is not a conspiracy. It is simply the result of a poisonous conformity, a climate of opinion which the MSM, populated almost exclusively by liberals, barely even realize they inhabit.

But in allowing themselves to become immersed in this climate, the bulk of the American media have now become the toadies of the state and the enemies of the people.

The MSM support the left-wing ideal of a powerful government run by elites such as themselves, imposing equality of outcome on everyone but themselves. Their state will decide how to spend our money for us, how our labor should be directed and how human nature will be curtailed in order to get the outcomes the state finds good. The media oppose our founders’ revolutionary idea of a nation governed by its people, with the state empowered just enough to protect each individual’s God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The media are offended by our founders’ understanding that these rights are inseparable from the right to private property and their belief that government attempts to redistribute property equally are wicked (James Madison’s word, not mine). The media stand in opposition to the belief in a Creator who endowed us with these rights and whose presence makes these rights absolute and non-negotiable.

Examples of the media’s hostility to the American ideal abound, but two have stood out to me in the past several weeks and illustrate the relationship between the media and the culture. The first example was the media’s attempt to ignore, then dismiss and ridicule, the tax day tea party protests that brought hundreds of thousands of ordinary people out in demonstrations across the country. Compare the media’s small, low and dishonest coverage of these protests with their hysterically magnified and hagiographical coverage of Cindy Sheehan’s minor and largely meaningless anti-war protests a few years before. When challenged, the media always have excuses for this sort of hostility toward the right, but they never need excuses for hostility toward the left because they never show any.

The second example was the reception of HBO’s beautiful little film Taking Chance. After some dozen or more bad leftist films attacking our soldiers and our wars against Islamic terror—all of which bombed and many of which won mainstream review praise—this hour and fifteen minute movie simply followed the coffin of a dead marine on its journey home. It neither supported nor attacked the war effort, merely showed the respect Americans give to our servicemen and their sacrifice. It was stark, unsentimental and heartbreaking. And it got more viewers than any HBO film in five years. As for the mainstream media reviews, Kyle Smith ^[1]of the New York Post brilliantly smacked them down for the same sneering, snarky, low and dismissive tone that the MSM brought to the coverage of the tea party protests.

This is important. The people who tell you Hollywood—and pop culture generally—are governed by money alone simply do not know what they are talking about. Bad reviews such as those directed at Taking Chance have a powerful effect. They’re meant to. They’re meant to string barbed wire around the culture and protect the left’s monopoly of it. They’re meant to make the film makers consider their next project with an eye to getting better reviews. They’re meant to make Kevin Bacon (an outspoken liberal who did a terrific job in the Chance lead) think twice before he makes such a choice of role again. And in general—if you follow the careers of stars like Sally Field and Bruce Willis who have received such left-wing review discipline for straying from the party line and have not made the mistake again—you will see that these attacks do exactly what they’re meant to do.

So all right, now we know. The media are the enemies of the people and they are protecting the culture for the proponents of the state. And now that we do know, it’s time for us to fight back. By us, I mean artists, journalists, thinkers, foundations, investors—anyone who tells stories, makes music or pictures or reacts to them with criticism, ideas, money and praise.

We need to build a New American Culture, and turn our backs on the culture of the state. We need to stop according respect or credence to reviews and awards that are used as social engineering tools to force the culture into anti-American state worship. We need to build an infra-structure of funding, review attention and awards to give praise, purpose and prestige to those artists who stand outside the MSM’s climate of opinion.

It would be wrong to say too much about what such a New American Culture would look like. Individualism is the very essence of both conservatism and art. But I think we can say that such a culture would reflect and uplift the values and perspectives that made the west and America the greatest and freest places on the globe; it would put forward an image of man as our founders knew him to be, flawed and sinful yet capable of striving toward dignity and salvation through self-reliance and sacrifice. It need not be—it should not be, in my view—squeaky clean or restrained by some new Hays Office production code of what the audience should be allowed to see. Sensationalism, sex and violence have been part of the arts since art began. Artists are entertainers, after all, not policy wonks.

In truth, there is only one essential principle our new culture needs to remember and embody and it’s this: liberty is better than slavery. This principle alone implies a moral order and a human purpose. It makes a small state better than a big one. It makes America better than, say, Saudi Arabia. It makes a religion based on “love thy neighbor,” better than one based on submission. This principle alone will guide us away from mealy-mouthed self-abasement to balanced self-criticism and praise amidst our search for the dignity, strength and morality befitting free men and women.

If artists guided by this principle begin to create, if reviewers guided by it write reviews, if foundations give us grants and awards, if investors give us the funding we need, then the cultural infra-structure of the left will collapse of the rot and corruption of its bad ideas. We will take back the culture and if we take back the culture, we will take back the country too.

Which is not to say it will be easy. Our work is going to get ignored, attacked and mocked by the mainstream media who will see it for what it is: an assault on their monopoly over the vehicles that shape our countrymen’s vision and opinions. But liberty has always required courage and sacrifice and time is on our side. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. Then you win.”

AND…
I’m proud to announce today’s publication of my first thriller novel for young adults, THE LAST THING I REMEMBER ^[2]. It’s the first installment in my Homelanders series and is published by Thomas Nelson. Please hit the link to pick up a copy.