The Creative Right

Adam asked me to make a post or two while he’s away, so I want to briefly talk about something which I have a particular interest in: the media. All across the country, a change is taking place. At the national level, bastions of the old media like the broadsheets and the broadcast networks are in decline. At the local and regional level, the stocks of companies that own local broadcast TV stations are being driven downwards, as the advertising revenue that feeds them is being slowly drained by new media. Oh, no one’s going to wake up tomorrow and see a test pattern on ABC or find that their New York Times headline reads “FINAL ISSUE”, but the mass media as it existed when we grew up is weakening, and weakening fast.

This isn’t news to anyone — or it shouldn’t be. It’s been going on for years, now. But the opportunity inherent in this monumental shift in the status quo is slipping away from those for whom it holds the greatest potential. How long have conservatives, both religious and secular, lamented that the tools of mass communication were largely inaccessible to them, being hopelessly entangled in the tentacles of the liberal media? How long have conservatives winced or curled a lip in disgust at the hundreds of little jabs against them, the countless ill-informed jokes at their expense, which left wing writers have shoehorned into every script for every TV show and film made since the 1970s? How long have they grumbled against the lack of representation among journalists, the lack of portrayals in entertainment as anything but ignorant, hateful stereotypes, straw men eagerly fashioned by the creative left and just as eagerly knocked down? The left would have you believe that conservatives are rare in the media simply because creative conservatives are rare, or even non-existent. Oh, they will grudgingly acknowledge them in Country and Christian music, though they will be just as quick to label those fields as derivative and banal by comparison to those where liberals dominate. Maybe they’re right — you’d be hard pressed to produce much to contradict them. And before you blame the left-wing establishment, try to remember that we are not meant to blame others for our problems. “Our Job,” as Joel Surnow of ‘24‘ fame puts it, “is not to whine. That’s their job. Our job is succeed despite the adversity.” So, are we? It sure doesn’t look like it. I’d like to be able to tell you that we are. I’d love to tell you that we’re insurgent in every field, and the left-wing ivory towers are coming down. But that’s not what’s happening.

What’s happening now, when the old media that’s been suckling the left-wing message machine since before most of us were born is at it’s weakest, is that we’re still acting like nothing has changed. Young conservatives don’t see themselves as potential actors, producers, directors, animators, artists, or journalists. Those are liberal jobs. Well, the fact of the matter is that because we’re letting those stay as liberal jobs, there are going to be fewer and fewer of those young conservatives every generation. Like it or not, young minds are fed on a steady diet of a media that is still dominated by the left as much as it ever was, no longer because we can’t do anything about it, but because we won’t.

So I’m here to send a message. This message goes out to the people I’m calling The Creative Right. Stop whining. Right now. Stop whining about their music, their movies, their TV, their Internet. And start realizing that none of those things, not one, actually belongs to them. Those things belong to the creators, to the dreamers, to the people who care enough to put themselves out there. We conservatives supposedly believe in hard work and the free market, the power of entrepreneurs and visionaries, and the ability of one person to change things for the better. We’re also supposedly not afraid to put our religion out in the public square, so let me give you a tidbit from mine: “Faith without works is dead.” And because conservatives aren’t acting like they believe those things when it comes to creative fields, our culture is sick, decaying, rotting from the inside with the plague of a creative zeitgeist controlled by our adversaries. We can do better. But we have to prove it.

Here are the important points. One: Realize that everything is open to you. You are not limited to fields where you think conservatives have a foothold. That kind of thinking is why so many people sell out their principles to peer pressure to try and make it, because they mistakenly think that they have to. Two: You will not succeed by being conservative, you will succeed by being good at what you do. Be assured that there are ten thousand failures in Hollywood who are every bit as liberal as Janeane Garofalo and Harvey Weinstein — having the political advantage of being a leftist doesn’t mean as much as you think it does. Learn your craft, even if you have to put up with learning from persistent left wing proselytizers. You’re smart enough to sort out the genuinely essential information from the politics they try to shoehorn into it. If it’s any consolation, rest assured that academic bias is severe and systemic enough that you’d have to listen to almost as much socialist, gender feminist, racist, radical homosexual propaganda in an accounting or engineering class as you will in film or art school. Three: Most importantly, never give up. This will not be easy. It isn’t easy for them, so it sure won’t be easy for you.

The odds may seem long for a conservative who wants a career in a creative field, or anywhere in the media, but the fight here is every bit as crucial as the political fight. We can be as politically clever as we want, but if we give them free reign over the culture, we are ultimately fighting a losing battle. When history looks back on our time, it’ll be the sum total of what we created that tells them who we were. Right now, that picture looks pretty bleak. It’s time someone changed it. That someone is you — I’m talking to you, with the camera. And you, behind the keyboard. You, with the pen, the brush, the digitizer tablet. Their gatekeepers can’t keep you out, and even if they could, there’s a whole wide internet out there that doesn’t even have any friggin’ gates.

I know you’re out there. I’m out there too, working my way up along with you. Get to work, Creative Right. Find your muse, find your voice. And then, find each other. Get a few of you together, and see what you can do. I’ll see you there .